Читать книгу "There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War - Tom Burns - Страница 6

With the end of World War II, the economically developed and politically stable democracies, the so-called First World nations, led by the United States, engaged in the global struggle known as the Cold War with the Second World or socialist states in Eastern Europe, which were unified and controlled by the Soviet Union. The conflict had actually begun before the war was over, with the “Big Three”—the US, the USSR, and Great Britain—planning to divide up the globe among them, but the opening salvo of the Cold War, at least symbolically, was fired by Winston Churchill in a speech of March 1946 in the United States, when he declared that “an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” a warning about what he regarded as the danger to the “Free World” of Soviet expansionism and the lack of the necessary western military strength to counteract it. While President Truman apparently approved of the content of this speech, which took place in his home state of Missouri and pointedly referred to the “special relationship” of the US and Great Britain, US officials feared that what Churchill really wanted was to enlist their country in propping up the crumbling British Empire. For his part, Josef Stalin predictably referred to the speech as imperialistic “war mongering.”1

The Cold War was waged for the hearts and minds, as well as the material wealth, of the rest of the planet, inevitably grouped together as the “Third World.” This was a geographically, politically, and culturally diverse group of countries that could only be perceived as a cluster of states by their common condition of instability, because, as Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out, they formed what was, in effect, “a worldwide zone of revolution—whether just achieved, impending or possible.”2 Attempting to suppress it, the United States identified this revolutionary instability with the Soviet Union, which in turn attempted to exploit it, for the postwar Pax Americana reigned only over the First World and could not for the time being reach or affect the Second World, which remained under the control of the Warsaw Pact. The fear engendered on both sides by the prospect of global thermonuclear war between the two superpowers actually contributed to the military stability even while the maneuvering of propaganda and espionage contributed to the political instability of the Cold War. According to Hobsbawm,

Almost from the start of the Cold War, the U.S.A. set out to combat this danger [i.e. revolution] by all means, from economic aid and ideological propaganda through official and unofficial military subversion to major war; preferably in alliance with a friendly or bought local regime, but if need be without local support.3

The many wars waged against perceived global Communist expansion, numbering over a hundred between the end of World War II and the demise of the Soviet Union and other Communist states in the late 1980s, were all fought in the Third World. The most extensive of these wars, and the only one, besides the Korean War of 1950-1953, in which American troops fought, was the war in Vietnam. This conflict may be described from a longer historical perspective as the “Vietnam Wars,”4 since Vietnam’s anti-colonial war against the French (1945-1954) was taken up again right after World War II once the Japanese had been driven out of the region by the Allied forces and the Vietnamese. The war(s) in Vietnam did not even end with the withdrawal of the American interventionist forces in 1973 and the subsequent fall of South Vietnam in 1975. The unified north and south, now officially called the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, suppressed continued opposition in the south of the country, invaded Cambodia to overthrow the US-supported regime of Pol Pot, and resisted a Chinese incursion that was only the most recent one of centuries of attempted Chinese expansionism southward into Vietnam.

What is generally thought of as the Vietnam War is more narrowly defined as the ten year hot war (1965-1975) waged between the South Vietnamese government supported by the US, and the revolutionary forces of the National Liberation Front (NLF), the official name of the Communist guerrilla insurgents in South Vietnam—known by the anti-Communist southern regime derogatively as “Vietcong,” or Vietnamese Communists—which was encouraged and later supported, but crucially not controlled, by the government of North Vietnam.5

One might contest, however, this ten year period of the American War in Vietnam as too brief to comprehend (in both senses) the conflict, especially since American intervention in colonial Indochina began as early as the 1950s, with the US taking over the conflict after the decisive military defeat of the French by General Vo Nguyen Giap’s forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.6 Simply put, the American war in Vietnam was waged based on the goal of a South Vietnam free of Communism, but how that goal was established is worth examining. Fortunately, the process has been described in detail by the US government itself in the collection of documents that came to be known as the “Pentagon Papers.”

The Pentagon Papers were based on “investigative reporting by Neil Sheehan, written by Sheehan, Hedrick Smith, E.W. Kensworthy and Fox Butterfield,” from the collected papers and documents of the secret Pentagon study of the Vietnam War, originally commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. They consisted of a “massive top-secret history of the United States role in Indochina,” which took a year and a half to write, was written by anonymous government historians—including officials from the State department, intellectuals from government financed institutes, and military career officers—and incorporated material from the White House, the CIA and the military Joint Chiefs of Staff. There were some 3000 pages of narrative history and more than 4000 pages of documents appended to the narrative, all collected in 47 volumes. Daniel Ellsberg, an analyst for the Rand Corporation, illegally copied the collection of secret documents.7 The New York Times obtained most of the collection and began publishing a series of articles based on them in June 1971. The US Justice Department tried to suppress publication, alleging a breach of “national defense interests,” but, in June of the same year, the Supreme Court upheld the right to publish under the First Amendment to the Constitution.8

The narrative leading up to the ten year war may be summarized as follows. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s original plan for placing French Indochina under international trusteeship to prepare it for independence was diluted at the 1945 Yalta Conference in the interests of European colonialism. The British, fearing for their own overseas colonies and aided by President Truman’s administration, which, for its part, feared postwar Communist gains, supported the restoration of French sovereignty after the war, ignoring the North Vietnam leader Ho Chi Minh’s plea for the help of the US in preventing that outcome. The Eisenhower administration also gave the French material support in their ultimately unsuccessful attempt to suppress the Viet Minh, the anti-colonialist forces in the north, who had fought for independence against Japan before finally defeating the French.9

The Truman Doctrine (1947) had pledged American resistance to Communism wherever it should emerge. The succeeding president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. believed that Ho Chi Minh, who had repeatedly, unsuccessfully, and—as it would turn out, tragically—sued for US support against French colonialism, even citing the values stated in the American Declaration of Independence, was initially ignored and eventually deemed “an instrument of international Communism.”10 With the end of World War II and throughout the following decades, however, Ho Chi Minh was more concerned with keeping his country independent of all foreign forces, including Communist China on his northern border. The Americans, however, believed that the Chinese (and the Soviets) were dictating strategy and supplying arms to North Vietnam. Ho accepted the aid of weapons and supplies from both Moscow and Beijing but there is no hard evidence that he allowed these politically allied nations to impose their strategies of defense on North Vietnam.11

According to Fox Butterfield, the “watershed decision” to intervene in Indochina first came after the fall of Nationalist China to the Communists (1949) under Mao Zedong. At this development, Washington, fearing further Communist advances in Asia, abruptly ended its wavering about whether or not to support French colonial interests by offering financial aid to the Vietnamese Emperor Bao Dai, a puppet of French colonialism, and to the French military forces, to fight against the anti-colonial, Communist-led Viet Minh (eventually, the US would pay $1.1 billion in 1954, or 78% of the French war effort).12 With this decision, the US committed itself inexorably to blocking further Communist expansion in Asia. The justification for this came to be called the “Domino Theory,” first enunciated by the National Security Council (NSC) in February 1950. Never seriously questioned, the Domino Theory supposed that the “loss” of a single country to Communism would endanger all the neighboring countries and eventually all of Asia and even beyond.13 The principal justification for the war in Vietnam therefore was the strategic need to “hold the line,” or, in the language of the controlling metaphor, to prevent the dominoes (states) from tumbling one after another.

David Halberstam claims that it was Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, the ultimate cold warrior, who believed in “our cause, our innocence and our worthiness”—as well as our political advantage—for Dulles was convinced that the US could go into Vietnam without the taint of French colonialism: “We could start in South Vietnam,” Dulles decided, “by sending a couple of hundred American advisors there” (curiously, however, Dulles also thought that American chances for success in Vietnam were no more than one in ten).14 As stated above, by 1950, the official policy of the US government on Indochina, as stated in NSC 64, declared that the Communists’ war was “one phase of anticipated plans to seize all of Southeast Asia,” and recommended that all practicable measures be taken to prevent further expansion.15 As a response to the French military defeat by the Viet Minh forces at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Eisenhower publicly invoked the Domino Theory, which would be cited then and thereafter as signifying the global danger of other countries falling to Communism—a predictable tragedy that only firm American intervention could prevent.

The argument about when the war actually began is nicely reflected in a passage from Michael Herr’s Dispatches:

You couldn’t find two people who agreed about when it began, how could you say when it began going off? Mission intellectuals like 1945 as the reference date; if you saw far back as War II and the Japanese occupation you were practically a historical visionary. ‘Realists’ said that it began for us in 1961, and the common run of Mission folk insisted on 1965, post-Tonkin Resolution, as though all the killing eJthat had gone before wasn’t really war.”16

Politically, the US engagement in Vietnam may be said to have begun with the division of the country. With the signing of the Geneva accords on July 21, 1954, the country was split into what was to be regarded as two military zones along the 17th parallel, to be administered by two civilian governments: the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) to the north, and what was then called the “State of Vietnam” in the south. The military forces pertaining to both sides were to regroup north and south of this line after the signing of the agreement, and nationwide elections were to be held within a two-year time period to decide who would govern the entire country.17 The US refused to sign the agreement, thereby undermining its effectiveness, because it was thought that Ho Chi Minh, who was widely perceived as the leader opposed to foreign occupation, would win the elections. Responsibility for maintaining order belonged to the signatories of the armistice: the DRV in the north and the French in the south. Three months before the deadline for holding the elections, however, the French forces pulled out, in effect turning over political power in the south to the anti-Communist regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. Dulles had, in any case, already begun bypassing the French and dealing directly with Diem.18

A hot war erupted when Diem, encouraged by the Americans, declared the southern part of the country the independent Republic of South Vietnam (1955). The guerrilla forces of the NLF in the south thereupon devoted themselves to undermining Diem’s regime. The US sent military advisors, civilian aid workers, and a great deal of money to South Vietnam to aid the southern regime in repressing the opposition in a series of actions that were justified and approved of at the time as part of a praiseworthy effort to help preserve the freedom of the new nation by repelling a supposed Communist invasion from the north. It is surprising to learn from the Pentagon Papers that the US military was initially opposed to sending troops to Vietnam. As the Joint Chiefs of Staff advised: “Indochina is devoid of decisive military objectives and the allocation of more than token U.S. armed forces to that area would be a serious diversion of limited U.S. capabilities,”19 a realistic assessment compared to the wishful thinking of the American civilian officials who would prevail.

In short, the US government gave up Franklin D. Roosevelt’s declared opposition to European colonialism toward the end of World War II for a policy of what would be called the “containment” of Soviet expansionism.20 Note that this expansion was assumed to be directed by Moscow, even in Third World countries like Vietnam that were not controlled by it. Every US president in the half century from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan championed and implemented some form of this policy, most materially those who held office during the war—John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon.

In reply to speculation after the assassination of Kennedy (November 1963) that he would have called a halt to the war, Heydrick Smith, writing on the Kennedy years, concludes that in fact the president “transformed the ‘limited-risk gamble’ of the Eisenhower administration into a ‘broad commitment’ to prevent Communist domination of South Vietnam,” often by secret measures that concealed from the American public the extent of the US role there. The US had not signed the Geneva accords but had promised not to undermine them. The expansion of military personnel, the sending of 400 Special Forces troops to South Vietnam as military advisors, however, was only the first breach of the Geneva agreement. This force was run by the CIA rather than the regular military so that “it was possible to handle these troops covertly,” and the number of advisors soon rose to 16,000.21 Smith adds that specific measures that were not disclosed included the beginning of a “covert warfare campaign in North Vietnam.”22

In his “bear any burden in the defense of liberty” 1961 inaugural address, Kennedy reiterated presidential guarantees of the cause, and the speech had considerable influence on the nation’s idealistic youth. The president saw Vietnam as a “test case” of the nation’s determination to maintain its commitments.23 His civilian advisors, drawn from the country’s intellectual and corporate elite, “the best and the brightest” in David Halberstam’s ironic words, scorned the accumulated knowledge and experience of the academic and government experts on Asia, believing in the superiority of their own class and education to make the right decisions.

John Kenneth Galbraith has asserted, however, that this Harvard-educated power elite knew nothing about the world, “ours or theirs,” believing that it was enough to know the “difference between a Communist and an Anti-Communist” without regarding the changing nuances of history and by clinging to the ideology of the Cold War that was still the prevailing line of thinking in US foreign policy in the 1960s.24 The rabid anti-Communist McCarthyism of the early 1950s had not completely died and still had a major influence on the thought and policies of politicians of both parties, particularly the Democrats, who felt especially vulnerable to attacks on their patriotism for being (as the expression went) “soft on Communism.” On the other hand, most Vietnamese perceived the Viet Minh, their leader Ho Chi Minh, and later the NLF, as liberators from a series of foreign oppressors: first, the French, then the Japanese, again the French, and eventually the Americans.

After Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, President Lyndon Johnson would give continuity to his policies by retaining the former administration’s key figures—Dean Rusk as Secretary of State, Robert McNamara as Secretary of Defense, and McGeorge Bundy as National Security Council advisor—men who thought that the expanded global role of the US had increased the importance of holding the line in Indochina.25 If the containment of Communism had worked in Europe, where internationally recognized spheres of influence were established after World War II, it was mistaken to try to extend that policy to Asia, where the specter of Red China sent out more tremors. Besides, holding the line in Southeast Asia was based on the mistaken assumption that Communism—which was not only a political system, but also a set of practices, a creed, and an ideology—could be contained militarily. Even if that were possible without another world war, it would probably have been counter-productive at the time. The threat perceived as embodied in China was not so much military as political and cultural.26

The implementation of US policy was carried out with the arrival of civilian and military advisory and support personnel in southern Vietnam. The Saigon Military Mission (SMM) was to be led by Colonel Edward G. Landsdale, a notorious figure who will appear as a model for a character in several novels that will be discussed in these pages. The SMM was to enter Vietnam quietly and assist the Vietnamese, not the French, in unconventional warfare, with the French being retained as friendly allies.

The following years saw Ngo Dinh Diem as the USA’s favorite anti-Communist, although his increasingly autocratic rule alienated American leaders, who tried to link US financial and military aid to governmental reforms on his part, which he resented and often ignored. When he and especially his powerful brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, who were Catholics, began to repress the protests of the Buddhist majority, which led to the self-immolations of Buddhist monks that shocked world opinion, the popularity of the government dropped to an all-time low. Popular discontent focused on Nhu and his outspoken wife, known as Madame Nhu (who notoriously referred to the Buddhist monks’ suicides as “barbecue”). Eventually, the Ngo brothers would be ousted by a coup of conspiring military commanders with the direct connivance of the CIA and its experienced operator Lt. Col. Lucien Conein, a veteran of the Indochina war.

The Pentagon’s secret study shows that “Kennedy knew and approved of plans for the military coup d’état that overthrew President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963.”27 The Ngo brothers were assassinated only a few weeks before Kennedy himself perished by an assassin’s bullet in Dallas (it is noteworthy that Kennedy had championed the Catholic anti-Communist Diem back in the 1950s, well before he became the US president). The Pentagon study points out that Diem’s ouster presented an excellent opportunity for the US to disengage from South Vietnam and the taint of propping up an oppressive and anti-democratic government, but the effect was that US officials discovered that the war against the NLF had been much worse than had been thought and decided that it therefore ought to do more, not less, for the South Vietnamese government. The Pentagon Papers concludes that “by supporting the anti-Diem coup the US had inadvertently deepened its involvement.”28

The argument for direct military intervention was based on the alleged aggression of North Vietnam, which continued to be cited as an example of Communist bad faith. US officials always claimed that the National Liberation Front, the so-called Viet Cong, was merely the southern arm of North Vietnam and was controlled by Hanoi, the North Vietnamese capital. In fact, the NLF was founded and sustained as a southern organization of resistance to Diem—a CIA report of December 1964 confirmed the NLF’s indigenous origins at that late date.29 Butterfield, in his chapter on the origins of the insurgency in the Pentagon Papers account, confirms that “the war began largely as a rebellion in the South against the increasingly oppressive and corrupt regime of Ngo Dinh Diem.”30 He goes on to argue that North Vietnam was “concentrated on its internal development.” The cadre members who remained in the south after the division of the country were ordered to engage only in “political struggle.” They evidently believed that they would eventually wrest control of the country through elections or through the collapse of the Diem regime from its own internal weakness.31

In any case, the Pentagon study makes it clear that the provocation for war initiated with the Americans: “an elaborate program of covert military operations against the state of North Vietnam” began in February 1964.”32 Covert operations included U-2 spy plane reconnaissance, the kidnapping of people for intelligence information, parachuting psyche war and sabotage teams into North Vietnam, commando raids to blow up bridges, and the bombardment of coastal installations by PT boats.33 Bombing raids that began in Laos against North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao (Communist guerrilla) troops were a prelude to the bombing of North Vietnam by the Johnson administration “to bring more military pressure against North Vietnam.”34 The bombing of North Vietnam increased as the NLF rebellion was prosecuted successfully in the South.35 The inability of the post-coup Saigon government under General Khanh to compete politically with Hanoi negated the possibility of a political settlement between the Vietnamese themselves, because it was believed that “it would result in a Communist take-over and the destruction of the American position in South Vietnam.36 What American officials and politicians insisted was the North Vietnamese “aggression” that prevented a peaceful settlement must be seen in this context.37

The pretext for the hot war came with the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident (August 1964), in which two US Navy destroyers in North Vietnamese waters, on a spying mission for the NSA, were said to have been attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. A top secret analysis of the incident completed in 2000, however, “concluded that the second attack, the one actually used to justify the war, never took place.” Instead, NSA officials withheld 90% of the information on the incident from the Johnson administration officials, except for what “supported the claim that the communists had attacked the two destroyers.” The alleged attack, based on this misinformation, led to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which justified President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on North Vietnam without a formal declaration of war from Congress, as required by the US Constitution.38

The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was passed on August 7, 1964, unanimously in the House and with the only two dissenting votes in the Senate cast by Wayne Morse and Ernest Greuning, who would later become leading opponents of the war. The resolution gave the executive broad authority to act and had no time limit, but it gave misleading assurances that the US would not escalate its involvement. Senator Morse said the US had provoked the attacks on the ships in the Tonkin Gulf by escorting South Vietnamese boats too close to the shore, charged the government with a “snowjob” about the attacks on northern coastal installations, and correctly foresaw disastrous consequences. Historian Robert D. Schulzinger notes that between August 1964 and July 1965, the US passed the “point of no return” in Vietnam, with the role of troops changing from advisors to combatants and the number of troops doubling.”39

The shift from advisors to combatants is one way of officially dating the beginning of the American Vietnam War. In March 1965, General Westmoreland, in what Stanley Karnow calls “one of the crucial decisions of the war,” requested a detachment of 3,500 Marines to be based in Da Nang, purportedly to protect the air base, which was the beginning of his repeated requests for more men. The build-up would reach almost 200,000 men by the end of that year. This first contingent of American ground forces (i.e. not counting the Special Forces units and other personnel already acting as advisors to the South Vietnamese Army) stirred up no political opposition because President Johnson presented it as a temporary expedient.40 In accordance with Johnson’s newly aggressive posture, the era of the US advisors to South Vietnam in the first half of the 1960s therefore drew to a close, and with the arrival of these combat troops a new phase of the war began with optimistic but generally ineffective operations both in the air and on the ground, which lasted until the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive of 1968, when the earlier optimism began to be replaced by serious doubt.

General Maxwell Taylor, a commander in the Korean War, wanted these early combat troops to maintain merely a defensive role, authorizing patrols into a surrounding but limited area, but General William C. Westmoreland, an administrative commander with little experience in combat leadership, had no confidence in the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) and insisted that US forces actively seek out and engage the enemy—the notorious “Search and Destroy” strategy, which prevailed from 1965 forward. In one of few major battles of the war, the Army’s 1st Air Cavalry Division successfully fought the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) at the Ia Drang Valley, with heavy casualties on both sides. Thereafter, the NVA and NLF forces would avoid large battles with American forces, owing to the superiority of American firepower and air support in such confrontations, preferring to engage their enemy using hit-and-run guerrilla tactics, in which they were successful. On the American side, punitive excursions beyond the original perimeter soon escalated, accompanied by annual incremental increases in troop levels. The “Americanization” phase of the war had begun in earnest.

In the 1980s, conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan attempted to “rewrite” the history of the Vietnam War as a noble cause doomed by faint-hearted policies that ensured that the US would not prevail, a notion that many military men and civilians would claim thereafter, expressed in the popular phrase “they wouldn’t let us win.” What they evidently thought had been lacking was a policy that resembled Air Force General Curtis LeMay’s notorious advice to “bomb ‘em back to the stone age.” Given the international pressures of the period, however, of which Johnson and his advisors were well aware, unrestricted warfare waged on a civilian population was never an option. During the 1964 presidential campaign, the Republican candidate Barry Goldwater had talked about using nuclear weapons in Vietnam, making the incumbent Johnson appear so restrained by comparison that the latter was actually elected as the “peace candidate.”41 Johnson, however, soon gave into the pressures of the civilian advisors he had inherited from Kennedy and waged a more aggressive war to achieve the long desired but elusive military victory, including, one month before the landing of the first ground forces, a long-range bombing campaign, “Operation Rolling Thunder,” designed, in the expression of the period, “to bring North Vietnam to its knees.” In their persistence in the use of bombing to secure submission, however, the US leaders seriously underestimated Vietnamese endurance. Stanley Karnow wrote that President Johnson “eventually failed because he misjudged the enemy’s capacity to withstand pain, believing there was a threshold to their endurance.” 42

General LeMay, Defense Secretary McNamara, and presidential advisor Walt W. Rostow firmly believed in the effectiveness of long-range bombing to win the war. Significantly, all three men had participated directly in the long-range bombing campaign of Germany during World War II: McNamara had masterminded the campaign, LeMay had commanded it, and Rostow had selected targets. And yet, so-called “precision bombing” during that war had a poor record: the postwar U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey found that both civilian resistance and German industrial production actually seemed to increase after the bombing. It was the inaccuracy of this strategy that eventually led to “area bombing,” which increased civilian casualties, and, as Paul Fussell has suggested, led “inevitably, as intensification overrode scruples, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”43 The lone dissenter among Johnson’s civilian advisors was George Ball, who had apparently learned something from his participation in the bombing campaign of the earlier war. As a result of his dissension and persistent opposition to escalating the Vietnam War, however, Ball became increasingly isolated from Johnson’s “hawks” and from the president himself.

The other civilian advisors only disagreed with General LeMay’s call for the unrestricted nature of the bombing of the previous war. They supported bombing but insisted on selected targets to avoid population centers and the international censure that would surely follow. They mistakenly thought, however, that bombing would—again, in the face of evidence from the last war, which suggested that such attacks actually hardened the will of the enemy—weaken the morale of the civilian population and make Ho Chi Minh give in, or at least negotiate a settlement on favorable terms. The strategy of a limited bombing campaign would also have the advantage of being easier to control from Washington, where the targets were actually selected on a daily basis by Johnson and his civilian advisors.44

Air power would turn out to be militarily effective only toward the end of the US intervention, in the “Linebacker” campaign (1972) ordered by Nixon in response to the NVA’s major three-pronged offensive against South Vietnam after the withdrawal of nearly half a million US troops. Without the American presence on the ground, the NVA commander, General Giap (the victor of Dien Bien Phu), who had successfully waged the war for the north up to that time, finally adopted “the conventional, large-unit tactics that American air-forces are highly trained to counter.”45 This more unrestricted bombing campaign, however, which illegally extended the war into Cambodia, only temporarily saved South Vietnam from collapse. Despite earlier fears of losing prestige by abandoning the intervention in Vietnam, the bombing aroused, as critics had anticipated earlier, worldwide condemnation and accusations of genocide.

In 1967, a large operation involving thousands of American and South Vietnamese forces, called “Operation Cedar Falls,” was launched with the aim of finding the long suspected headquarters of the NVA.46 It failed in that elusive objective but it did uncover an extensive underground network of tunnels in the area called the Iron Triangle, which revealed the extent of the military resistance to Diem in the south. In the same year, McNamara testified to a Senate subcommittee that the bombing raids had not achieved the twin objectives of reducing the flow of supplies from north to south and undermining the morale of the North Vietnamese, which were their original justification.

The turning-point of the war has been seen by most commentators as the Tet Offensive of January 31, 1968, the all-out NVA and NLF surprise attack on South Vietnamese and American government installations in Saigon and other cities that was, according to historian David Schmitz, “arguably, the most important event of the Vietnam War,”47 for it changed the American public’s perception of the possibility for victory and forced the US government to reevaluate. At great human cost to the oppositional forces—more than 80,000 of their troops were killed or captured—units from both north and south drove into the seven largest cities of South Vietnam and thirty provincial capitals from the Delta to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) but were eventually repulsed after savage fighting. The Tet offensive was designed by the North Vietnamese planners to instigate a general insurrection among the South Vietnamese population, in which mission it failed. On the other side, the outcome was regarded by the US press as an American military victory but a psychological and political defeat.48 In the end, Halberstam insists, “it was not American arms and American bravery or even American determination that failed in Vietnam; it was American political estimates, both of this country and of the enemy.”49

The year of the Tet Offensive revealed that the war was tearing American society apart. In March, Lieutenant William Calley led Charlie Company of the Americal Division’s 11th Brigade into the group of villages known as My Lai and perpetrated the massacre of up to four-hundred civilians, an atrocity that shocked the American public. The general feeling was: how could our boys behave like Nazis? President Johnson, buffeted by a long series of setbacks, announced that he would not seek re-election. Violence escalated at home as protests against the war became ever more numerous and aggressive. In August, a group of antiwar demonstrators at the Democratic convention in Chicago was savagely set upon by Mayor Daly’s police as the nation watched on television. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., who spoke out against the war and encouraged a united effort by civil rights and antiwar organizations, was assassinated in April. And Robert Kennedy, who was expected to step in as the Democratic candidate to bring a halt to the war, was assassinated in June.

In November, Richard Nixon, with only 43% of the vote, was elected president, promising an “honorable” end to the war (as Eisenhower’s Vice-President back in 1954, Nixon had wanted to send American troops to bail out the French at Dien Bien Phu, an idea that was squelched by Eisenhower). Instead of withdrawing from the war, Nixon instead extended it for several more years, undermining the Paris peace talks by sending a secret emissary to reassure the South Vietnamese government and by ordering the covert bombing of Cambodia to destroy enemy supply routes and base camps, which set off nationwide student protests. During the Christmas season of 1972, he ordered the bombing of North Vietnam in the most intense campaign of its kind ever, again setting off protests all over the country. Nixon’s rhetoric of “peace with honor” could not conceal the continuing American goal of a non-Communist Vietnam, essential to his chief advisor Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik global strategy.50 It was, however, secret negotiations between Kissinger, who would become Nixon’s Secretary of State, and North Vietnam’s Le Duc, which began in 1970, that would eventually lead to the withdrawal of US troops in 1973.

With the implementation of Nixon’s policy of “Vietnamization,” in which military responsibility was handed back to South Vietnam, defeat was virtually inevitable, and in fact came two years later, with the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, followed by the reunification of the country by the North Vietnamese military and civilian authorities. By that time, the war had claimed over 57,000 American, and an estimated one to two million Vietnamese and other Indochinese, lives. The first article of the Paris Agreement, which formalized the withdrawal, stated: “The United States and all other countries respect the independence, sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity of Vietnam as recognized by the 1954 Geneva Agreements on Vietnam.”51 That is to say, nearly twenty years later and all the attendant deaths, suffering, and costs, the United States was back to square one.

Ultimately, American policy in Southeast Asia was based on a misunderstanding of historical, political, and military realities. Despite the fears of American leaders, the press, and the public, there had never been a global Communist expansion controlled by Moscow. As Hobsbawm has argued, “there is no real evidence that [the U.S.S.R.] planned to push forward the frontiers of communism by revolution until the mid 1970s,” that is, by the time that the Vietnam War had ended.52

The war had far-reaching political, as well as economic and social, consequences. It divided the Democratic Party—with two presidents from that party leading the nation into Vietnam—to such an extent that it never recovered its reputation since the 1930s as the progressive party of working people. The economic boom after World War II ended in 1963 with the global oil crisis, but also owing to the immense cost of the Vietnam War, which resulted in part in the downward spiral of working people’s incomes that continues until today. The social and historical significance of the war continued to be felt long afterward.53 The American public’s confidence in its government had been dealt a mortal blow, which gave an impulse to the “New Right” in subsequent years and the candidacies of men like Ronald Reagan, who actually campaigned for government office on anti-government platforms.