Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (124 page)

Yet the blame heaped on Kennedy for involving America in Vietnam is only partly merited. He inherited a crisis. Immediately after his Inauguration, he was handed a report written by Edward
Lansdale (the
CIA
agent portrayed by Graham Greene in his 1956 novel,
The Quiet American)
advising him that the situation in Saigon was deteriorating fast. He commented, ‘This is the worst one we’ve got, isn’t it?’
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The Indo-China War, which began soon after the collapse of the Japanese occupation and continued into the 1980s, has been surrounded by more mythology than any other post-war event. It was complicated enough to baffle any western statesman, as it eventually baffled the Chinese. Every American president contributed his quota of error. Roosevelt, knowing nothing about it, offered the country to China. Immediately after his death, the fervent anti-colonialists of his Office of Strategic Services (the precursor of the cia) worked hard to set up a left-wing nationalist regime. Three weeks after the Japanese surrender, the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh, sponsored by the oss, staged a
putsch
, known as the ‘August Revolution’, which ousted the abdicating Emperor of Vietnam. The man who, in effect, crowned Ho as the new ruler was an oss agent, Archimedes Patti.
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It is important to grasp that America never had any territorial ambitions in Indo-China, either as a base or in any other capacity. But its policy was usually muddled and invariably indecisive. In the first phase it was entirely Europe-oriented. Truman, on taking office, was advised that Indo-China was secondary to the absolute necessity to bolster France as a stabilizing power in Europe and assist her ‘morally as well as physically, to regain her strength and influence’.
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To feel confident again, France needed to get back her Indo-China empire (or so it was argued); and in December 1946 the French drove Ho into the jungle and brought the Emperor Bao Dai back from Hong-Kong. Reluctantly the Americans acquiesced in the French creation of three puppet nations, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, and gave them recognition as independent states within the French Union on 7 February 1950. At the same time Russia and China recognized Ho’s regime. It was at this point that the struggle became an international one. Russia and China poured in arms. In May America did the same, and with the outbreak of the Korean War the next month the US aid programme accelerated fast. In 1951 it was $21.8 million in economic and $425.7 in military assistance. By next year the military aid had risen to over half a billion dollars: 40 per cent of France’s costs. Dean Acheson was warned by State Department officials that America was ‘moving into a position in Indo-China’ in which ‘our responsibilities tend to supplant rather than complement those of the French’. But he decided that ‘having put our hand to the plough, we would not look back’. He argued that the situation in Europe was too dangerous for America to think of deserting the French in the east.
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By 1953–4, America was paying for 80 per cent of the French war effort.

Then, on 8 May 1954, the French fortress at Dien Bien Phu surrendered. The defeat was made possible by the unexpected scale of the arms assistance now being provided by Russia and China to Ho’s forces. The French asked for direct participation by American air-power, and when this was refused they formed a new government under Pierre Mendès-France to negotiate a French withdrawal and a political settlement. The cease-fire agreement, signed at Geneva in July, provided for a division of the country along the 17th parallel, the Communists keeping the North, the West the rest, unity to be brought about by elections in two years’ time under an International Control Commission.

It was at this point that Eisenhower’s customary good sense failed him: indeed, it can be argued that he was more responsible for the eventual mess in Vietnam than any other American. He should have signed the accords and compelled the premier of the South, Ngo Dinh Diem, to abide by them. It is possible Ho would have won free elections and become ruler of a united Communist country. Would that have been a disaster for America? Even Acheson, in his famous ‘perimeter’ speech of January 1950, had not considered a non-Communist government in Indo-China essential to American security.
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George Kennan, in a memo dated 21 August 1950, argued that it was ‘preferable to permit the turbulent political currents of that country to find their own level … even at the probable cost of an eventual deal between Vietnam and Vietminh, and the spreading over the whole country of Vietminh authority.’
⁶⁹
This was Eisenhower’s own feeling. He said he could not ‘conceive of a greater tragedy for America than to get heavily involved’. ‘There is going to be no involvement,’ he repeated. If America did go in, it would only be in agreement with her principal Allies and with explicit constitutional approval from Congress. He worked on the Chiefs of Staff and got from them the assurance (May 1954) that Indo-China is devoid of decisive military objectives and the allocation of more than token US armed forces to that area would be a serious diversion of limited US capabilities.’
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But Eisenhower was in two minds. He popularized the theory that, if Vietnam was ‘lost’, the whole of Indo-China would vanish into Communist hands; and that if Indo-China was swallowed, other countries in South-East Asia must follow. He spoke of ‘a cork in a bottle’, a ‘chain-reaction’ and ‘falling dominoes’.
⁷¹
Not only did he refuse to sign the Geneva Accords himself, but he acquiesced in Diem’s refusal to submit to the test of free elections. That was a fundamental departure from American global policy in the Cold War, which had always rested on the contention that conflict between East and West should be decided not by force of arms but by
the test of an honest poll. Diem was permitted to evade this basic principle and, indeed, was rewarded by American military and economic assistance, for the first time direct and not through a French intermediary. Thus it was Eisenhower who committed America’s original sin in Vietnam. In default of unitary elections, the Vietcong emerged in 1957 and a new war started up in the South. Eisenhower made America a party to that war, claiming, in his last major statement on the subject (4 April 1959): ‘The loss of South Vietnam would set in motion a crumbling process that could, as it progressed, have grave consequences for us and for freedom.’
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When Kennedy reached the White House, Vietnam was already one of America’s largest and costliest commitments anywhere in the world. It is hard to understand why he made no attempt to get back to the Geneva Accords and hold unified free elections. In Paris on 31 May 1961, de Gaulle urged him urgently to disengage: ‘I predict you will sink step by step into a bottomless military and political quagmire.’
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Nevertheless, in November that year Kennedy authorized the despatch to Vietnam of the first 7,000 American troops, for ‘base security’. General Maxwell Taylor, who recommended the step, warned him that, if things got worse, ‘it will be difficult to resist the pressure to reinforce’ and that ‘there is no limit to our possible commitment’.
⁷⁴
Kennedy himself shared the unease. He told his colleague Arthur Schlesinger: ‘The troops will march in; the bands will play; the crowds will cheer; and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told to send in more troops. It’s like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another.’
⁷⁵
That was an accurate prediction. Kennedy’s instinct was either to stay out or bring things to a head by a direct American attack on Hanoi. An American invasion of the North, which would have been successful at this stage, would at least have had the merit of putting the clock back to 1954 and the Geneva Accords. There could be no fundamental moral objection to such a course, since by 1961 the North had effectively invaded the South. It must always be borne in mind, when analysing the long tragedy of Indo-China, that it was the determination of Ho, his colleagues and successors, to dominate the entire country, including Laos and Cambodia, which was, from 1945 onwards, the principal dynamic of the struggle and the ultimate cause of all the bloodshed. America’s errors were merely a contributory factor. Nevertheless they were serious. Unwilling to leave the country to its fate, or to carry the land-war to the North, Kennedy settled for a hopeless compromise, in which military aid, in ever-growing but never decisive quantities, was given to a client-government he could not control. Diem was by far the ablest of the
Vietnam leaders and he had the great merit of being a civilian. Lyndon Johnson, then Vice-President, termed him with some exaggeration ‘the Churchill of South-East Asia’, and told a journalist, ‘Shit, man, he’s the only boy we got out there.’
⁷⁶
But Kennedy, exasperated by his failure to pull a resounding success out of Vietnam, blamed the agent rather than the policy. In the autumn of 1963 he secretly authorized American support for an anti-Diem
coup.
It duly took place on 1 November, Diem being murdered and the
CIA
providing $42,000 in bribes for the soldiers who set up a military junta. This was America’s second great sin: ‘the worst mistake we ever made’, as Lyndon Johnson put it.
⁷⁷
Three weeks later Kennedy himself was murdered and Johnson was president.

Johnson was no more decisive than Kennedy, whose compromise policy he continued in irresolute fashion until August 1964, when North Vietnam attacked American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. There is no evidence, as was later alleged, that the incident was contrived, to get America deeper into the war.
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In fact Johnson was very reluctant to escalate: he was entering a presidential campaign on a peace platform against the Republican Barry Gold-water, who wanted to use nuclear weapons, if necessary, to win the war. But Congress, by an overwhelming majority (out of 535 members of both houses, only Senators Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening voted against), passed what became known as the ‘Tonkin Gulf Resolution’ authorizing the President to take vigorous measures to protect US forces. Senator William Fulbright, then a supporter of the war, who steered the motion through the Senate, said it effectively gave Johnson the right to go to war without further authorization. Johnson made no use of it for nearly six months. Then, having won an overwhelming electoral victory on an anti-escalation platform, he behaved like Wilson and Roosevelt before him, and proceeded to do the opposite. In February 1965, following heavy US casualties in a Vietcong attack on a barracks, he ordered the bombing of the North.
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This was the third critical American mistake. Having involved itself, America should have followed the logic of its position and responded to aggression by occupying the North. To bomb was a weak compromise, absolutely characteristic of the irresolution which dogged American policy throughout the tragedy. Once aircraft from Da Nang began to bomb the North, security had to be provided for the base: so on 8 March 3,500 marines were landed at Da Nang. The troop level rose to 82,000 in April. In June a demand came for forty-four more battalions. On 28 July Johnson announced: ‘I have today ordered to Vietnam the Airmobile Division and certain other
forces which will raise our fighting strength … to 125,000 men almost immediately. Additional forces will be needed later and they will be sent as requested.’
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There was no attempt by the military to deceive the politicians (as Kennedy had suspected). The Joint Chiefs reported on 14 July: ‘There seems to be no reason we cannot win if such is our will – and
if that will is manifested in strategy and tactical operations.’
The underlining was in the original.
⁸¹
When Johnson asked General Wheeler of the jcs, ‘Bus, what do you think it will take to do the job?’, the answer was 700,000 to a million men and seven years.
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Johnson went into the war with his eyes open. He whistled to keep his courage up: ‘After the Alamo,’ he said, ‘no one thought Sam Houston would wind it up so quick.’
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But Johnson was no Sam Houston. Even as a bomber he was indecisive. The Air Force told him they could promise results if the offensive was heavy, swift, repeated endlessly and without restraint. That was the whole lesson of the Second World War. They promised nothing if it was slowed and restricted.
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Yet that was precisely what Johnson did. From start to finish, the bombing was limited by restrictions which were entirely political. Every Tuesday Johnson held a lunch at which he determined targets and bomb-weights: it was Eden and Suez all over again. Johnson was not the ruthless man he liked to impersonate: he was paralysed by moral restraints. As his biographer, Doris Kearns, shrewdly observed, to him ‘limited bombing was seduction, not rape, and seduction was controllable, even reversible’.
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Thus the bombing intensified very slowly and the Vietminh had time to build shelters and adjust. When Soviet Russia moved in defensive missiles, American bombers were not allowed to attack while the sites were under construction. There were, in addition, sixteen ‘bombing pauses’, none of which evoked the slightest response, and seventy-two American ‘peace initiatives’, which fell on deaf ears.
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Unlike the Americans, the North Vietnamese leaders never once wavered in their determination to secure their political aim – total domination of the entire country – at any cost. They do not seem to have been influenced in the smallest degree by the casualties their subjects suffered or inflicted. There was thus a bitter irony in the accusations of genocide hurled at the Americans. An examination of classified material in the Pentagon archives revealed that all the charges made against US forces at the 1967 Stockholm international War Crimes tribunal’ were baseless. Evacuation of civilians from war zones to create ‘free fire’ fields not only saved civilian lives but was actually required by the 1949 Geneva Convention. The heavy incidence of combat in civilian areas was the direct result of Vietcong tactics in converting villages into fortified strongholds, itself a violation of the Geneva agreement. It was the
restrictions on American bombing to protect civilian lives and property which made it so ineffective. The proportion of civilians killed, about 45 per cent of all war-deaths, was about average for twentieth-century wars. In fact the population increased steadily during the war, not least because of US medical programmes. In the South, the standard of living rose quite fast.
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