Those Who Have Borne the Battle (27 page)

There was ambivalence on the part of most American leaders as the United States considered the country's obligations and options in Vietnam. President Dwight Eisenhower resisted pressure to intervene when the French withdrew in 1955—except that under Eisenhower the United States did commit to support the anticommunist Diem government. This support included American military advisers—the first two of whom were killed in July 1959 at Bienhoa when their detachment was attacked by a Vietcong unit. In 1960 there were some 700 advisers in Vietnam.

Early on in his presidency, John Kennedy sent a group to assess the situation in Vietnam. General Maxwell Taylor reported back that he did not believe the United States could succeed in Vietnam unless the president approved increasing the number of advisers and supporters to 8,000 men. At the time of President Kennedy's death in November 1963, there were around 16,000 troops in Vietnam, and they were now in uniform. They served directly training and advising South Vietnamese forces. By the end of 1963, 195 Americans had died in Vietnam.

The weekend following the Kennedy assassination, a small group of senior Kennedy advisers recommended that now-president Johnson increase the American military presence in Vietnam. The situation had clearly deteriorated there, worsened perhaps by the instability caused by the recent military coup against President Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu and their subsequent execution. The United States had agreed with the coup, but the murder had apparently not been expected, at least at the White
House. Lyndon Johnson insisted that he would honor the Eisenhower-Kennedy commitment to South Vietnam and that Ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge could report back to Saigon “that Lyndon Johnson intends to stand by our word.”
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In 1964 Lyndon Johnson worked hard to assert control over the Democratic Party and establish the identity of his own presidency. He demonstrated to Democrats his loyalty to the Kennedy agenda—and he expanded that agenda with a strong commitment to civil rights and to comprehensive domestic programs. He ran a presidential campaign against Barry Goldwater, whom he identified as a conservative warmonger. Lyndon Johnson insisted that he had no intention of sending “American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”
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In August 1964 following an attack on the USS
Maddox
off the coast of Vietnam, likely by the North Vietnamese, and the unproved allegation of subsequent attacks on naval vessels the
Maddox
and the
C. Turner Joy
, President Johnson ordered major retaliation against North Vietnamese port facilities and oil-storage depots. Moreover, he secured overwhelming congressional approval of a joint resolution affirming American commitment “to Promote the Maintenance of International Peace and Security in Southeast Asia.” It authorized the president to “take all necessary steps to repel an armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” An additional authorization provided that the president was empowered to “take all necessary steps, including the use of armed forces to protect any [Southeast Asia Treaty Organization] member or protocol state . . . requesting assistance in defense of its freedom.”

The resolution was approved unanimously in the House and by a vote of eighty-eight to two in the Senate. The two senators who opposed this action were Wayne Morse of Oregon, who believed it was a “historic mistake” to allow the president to wage war without a congressional declaration, and Ernest Gruening of Alaska, who argued, “I am opposed to sacrificing a single American boy in the venture.”

The administration's response was very popular in 1964. In the Introduction, I noted that the miners with whom I worked applauded this
action. So did 85 percent of Americans. President Johnson's popularity jumped to 72 percent, and Barry Goldwater's campaign was finished. Many believed that the Republican was “trigger happy,” while Johnson was firm and measured.
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Immediately following Johnson's landslide election in 1964, he and his advisers began to consider options in Vietnam. The situation was not improving. Two hundred six Americans died in Vietnam in 1964. In December 1964 President Johnson confidentially raised the possibility of sending ground combat troops to Vietnam. He insisted, “We don't want to send a widow woman to slap Jack Dempsey.”
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Many in his inner circle were surprised, and military officers especially wondered if the president was prepared for the level of involvement that would be required. Maxwell Taylor, a retired general and then the US ambassador to Vietnam, was startled. He pointed out that a successful antiguerrilla campaign would require significant numerical superiority, perhaps ten to one, and the elimination of all outside support for the guerrillas. He suggested instead a major bombing campaign against the North, but LBJ was not convinced that bombing would be sufficient.

In February 1965 Vietcong units attacked the US barracks at Pleiku, killing nine US soldiers and destroying five American aircraft. Johnson was furious. He told his National Security Council, “We have kept our gun over the mantel and our shells in the cupboard for a long time now, and what was the result? They are killing our boys while they sleep in the night.”
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He ordered a major increase in bombing and authorized sending American combat troops to Da Nang in order to protect American facilities. It was this set of decisions that resulted in Lieutenant Caputo and then Private First Class Beauchemin being ordered to Vietnam.

Lyndon Johnson would insist in a speech in the summer of 1965 as he announced an increase in troops in Vietnam that this was America's historical responsibility: “We did not choose to be the guardians at the gate, but there is no one else. Nor would surrender in Vietnam bring peace, because we learned from Hitler that success only feeds the appetite of aggression.” Walking away now would only encourage further aggression, “as we have learned from the lessons of history.”
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The Cold War of the 1960s seemed even more ominous than the threats of the 1930s. And the
United States had learned that it must join and, in fact, lead in deterring and containing threats. Americans were confident. Historian Jeffrey Record notes of this generation, “These were men for whom the glorious and total victory of World War II was the great referent experience for judging the likely outcomes of subsequent conflicts.”
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Yet despite their explicit and proud “sense of history,” ironically and tragically, the policy makers were not in fact students of history. They did not really study the history of the post–World War II years. Korea was far more complicated than simply a successful case study of standing up to aggression. And the French war against the Vietnamese rebels, ending in the embarrassing defeat at Dien Bien Phu and the French withdrawal, deserved to be understood with more than a dismissive wave. Americans insisted that the difference was that the French were fighting to preserve a colony and that we would fight to preserve liberty. For many Americans of this generation, ideological construct, moral intent, was adequate not only to rationalize military engagement but also to ensure a different outcome. If attitudes were selfless, then actions on behalf of these must be as well. And they would prevail.

Vice President Hubert Humphrey did challenge some of the assumptions and especially the memory of Korea. He reminded the president that Korea had been a UN effort against a conventional aggression across the border. And even so, Americans had not been able to sustain support for it. Undersecretary of State George Ball was likewise insistent that escalation in Vietnam was a mistake, arguing that the Korean analogy was flawed and that in fact the real lesson of Korea was to be cautious about limited wars.

Some military officers were uneasy over the assumptions about the nature and the projected ease of the war. General Matthew Ridgway, who had succeeded General MacArthur as commander of the UN forces in Korea and then served as chief of staff of the army under President Eisenhower, had regularly argued that Americans were not prepared to fight the type of war that Indochina would require. Although President Eisenhower had finally declined to send American troops to Indochina in the middle 1950s, he did urge President Johnson to do so and to be aggressive. And Johnson's chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Earle
Wheeler, urged LBJ to “take the fight to the enemy.” He argued, “No one ever won a battle sitting on his ass.”
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There is little doubt that President Johnson was uncomfortable with the direction of the Vietnam involvement—and there is even less doubt that he was afraid to pull back from it. As he wrote to McGeorge Bundy in the spring of 1964, it “looks like to me that we're getting into another Korea. It just worries the hell out of me. I don't see what we can ever hope to get out of this.” He pointed out, “It's damn easy to get into a war, but . . . it's going to be harder to ever extricate yourself if you get in.”
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In so many ways Lyndon Johnson was a tragic figure, caught up in his generation's sense of history and of American responsibility, trying to establish that he deserved the Kennedy mantle—and believing he had every right to claim his own mantle. He was sensitive to conservative criticism for not being firm with communists and committed not to allow distractions to encumber his domestic “Great Society” agenda.

Despite these intense pressures, it is hard to feel sympathy for Johnson's place on history's stage because of his own role in deceiving the public about the purpose and the level of American involvement in Vietnam, for his systematic disregard of any conflicting advice or even troubling facts, and for his cynicism about the costs and consequences of war. He regularly reminded everyone that he was in charge: in discussing the bombing campaign against the North Vietnamese he boasted, “They can't hit an outhouse without my permission.”
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He who exaggerates his control must finally be accountable for the results, including matters that run out of control.

In the spring of 1965, within four months, US combat troops increased from thirty-five hundred to eighty-two thousand. The mission quickly evolved from defending American forces and installations, to working with South Vietnamese forces on their operations, to engaging enemy forces as independent combat units.

In the summer of 1965, the Joint Chiefs endorsed the request of General William Westmoreland, the commander of the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), for ninety-three thousand more troops. Lyndon Johnson complained that the United States had no “plan for victory
militarily or diplomatically,” yet could not pull back because of commitments there. President Eisenhower urged him, “You have to go all out.”
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The United States never did go “all out” in Vietnam—at least not in standard military understandings of that phrase. The ground forces never reached the magnitude that conventional wisdom prescribed for a guerrilla war of this scale; the American use of airpower, while deadly and consequential, in fact greater than that used in all of World War II, was never unfettered. And following the Korean experience, American policy makers were always cautious about carrying the air war too close to the border with China.

American ambivalence about how to engage the war led to public uncertainty about purpose and strategy. There was a remarkable juggling of assertions of strength and will, on the one hand, with assurances of restraint, on the other. It was an impossible intellectual assignment: reassuring the South Vietnamese government and assuring the people of South Vietnam of the firmness of the US commitment; promising the American people that this commitment was limited and that all could be confident of the outcome—and without any sacrifice in national priorities or in personal treasure; intimidating the Vietcong and North Vietnamese with the overwhelming strength of the commitment without making the Chinese nervous about the level of American engagement; winning support from allies by insisting upon the historic importance of this fight even as the United States promised not to escalate it. And the Johnson administration did all of this with a measured, incremental, military engagement that was never quite disclosed, but one that had the clumsy impact of not being adequate for a military escalation while being too high for the reassurances of American domestic politics.

There is a fine line between designed ambiguity and intentional deceit in a situation like this. Lyndon Johnson understood politics, but it was an understanding framed by the politics of Texas and of Washington. He was a deal maker, but there was no one with whom he could deal in Vietnam. In order to be able to proclaim British support for the war, he begged British prime minister Harold Wilson to send some military presence to Vietnam: “A platoon of bagpipers would be sufficient.”
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Wilson
declined the invitation, and finally only Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand provided military support.

H. R. McMaster, a student of American military leadership in the early years of the war, believed that military and civilian leadership was responsible for the war that we could not win: “It was lost in Washington, D.C., even before Americans assumed sole responsibility for the fighting in 1965 and before they realized the country was at war; indeed, even before the first American units were deployed.”
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There is little doubt that political calculations and military misjudgments in the White House and the Pentagon, as well as the overall increase in political opposition to the war, complicated the operation negatively. But the prior and determinative question has to do with American objectives there.

Some continue to debate whether the United States could have “won” militarily at the beginning of the war in Vietnam.
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Before considering these arguments, it is important to think of the necessary political decisions. It is not clear that Americans were prepared to pay the political and economic price to ensure military success. They would not have supported maintaining a million or more men in Vietnam in a sustained, costly guerrilla war; they would not have supported extended land wars in North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia as well as South Vietnam; they would not have supported a bombing campaign aimed at wiping out population centers; few Americans would have thought that Vietnam was strategically worth a major war with China—or the Soviet Union.