Posted on 06/13/2002 5:56:54 AM PDT by SJackson
More than anything else about Vietnam, young Americans must keep in mind that their most influential seniors have a large stake in having the war remembered as both unnecessary and unwinnable.
This bias pervades the HBO movie "Path to War," which premiered this month (See additional play times at article's end.). The network bills the production as "an inside look at the men who got us into Vietnam but couldn't get us out." The narrative begins at Lyndon Johnson's inaugural ball in January 1965, and ends with the president's surprise announcement on March 31, 1968, that the war had caused "division in the American house" and he would not seek reelection in the name of "national unity."
Why the emotional investment in the futility of the war? Shame, guilt, and the desire to deflect it.
Vietnam was the first war in U.S. history that elite young men, who are now running the country, avoided fighting. Older Americans in the arts, the media and academia encouraged and abetted their evasions, fostering disrespect for those who served. The anti-war movement heartened the Hanoi Politburo and hastened the U.S. withdrawal from Indochina. After South Vietnam was conquered in 1975, some 1.5 million boat people cast themselves into the sea in a desperate bid for freedom, tens of thousands of our former allies were sent to "reeducation camps," and American credibility in foreign affairs was damaged for decades. "Several hundred thousand" of the boat people perished, a State Department official told United Press International Tuesday.
To admit that one's own actions or evasions contributed to this disaster is to assume a greater psychological burden than most people can bear. Representing the U.S. effort as doomed from the start assuages the conscience.
This is not to cast all opposition to U.S. involvement as self-serving. "Path to War" shows how Undersecretary of State George Ball, played with wonderful midwestern plainness by Bruce McGill, served as the principal critic of intervention within the Johnson administration. But for every George Ball there were 1,000 antiwar protestors whose hypocrisy the Iowan found "stupid and unattractive" for "declaring in sanctimonious tones that American policy is thoroughly in the wrong and that we as a nation are as brutal and viciously ambitious as the other side."
Preserving the freedom of the South Vietnamese people would have been a difficult and protracted effort, and success was not guaranteed. But those who insist the communist victory was inevitable advance arguments that have more in common with theology than historiography.
Nor did such principled critics as Ball argue that the war was wrong. "The qualifications I have are not due to the fact that we are in a bad moral position," Ball told Johnson at a meeting on July 21, 1965. He said he expected South Vietnam to come under Hanoi's control soon after U.S. forces pulled out.
"But George," the president responded, "wouldn't all these countries say that Uncle Sam was a paper tiger? Wouldn't we lose credibility, breaking the word of three presidents, if we did as you have proposed? ..."
"No sir," Ball answered. "The worse blow would be that the mightiest power on earth is unable to defeat a handful of guerrillas."
But a multi-division cross-border blitzkrieg with massed armor and artillery -- not "a handful of guerrillas" -- defeated South Vietnam in April 1975, two years after the last U.S. combat formations had departed. And although the titles at the end of "Path to War" refer to the Paris Peace Accords of January 1973, they tellingly omit the fact that North Vietnam broke the agreement, resumed its aggression and won.
The movie is worth watching if taken with a grain of salt. It does a good job of depicting the situation Johnson faced at home, including his determination not to allow the war to interfere with his "Great Society" -- a legislative package to fund programs designed to improve the quality of life for all Americans. It serves as a useful reminder that the Vietnam buildup occurred at the height of the civil rights struggle. Martin Luther King's belief that his own country was "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world" and King's view that the war was an "enemy of the poor" in the United States were trials to Johnson. It also shows how the president felt trapped by the Kennedy legacy and betrayed when Robert Kennedy turned against the war Johnson had inherited from Kennedy's late brother.
But the viewer learns almost nothing about the situation LBJ faced in Asia, and the show gives short shrift to options that might have led to a better outcome.
"Path to War" is dialogue-driven. HBO says screenwriter Daniel Giat and executive producer Howard Dratch spent more than a decade researching the script, interviewing several of the principals in the story and consulting their memoirs. Rather than trying to verify who said what to whom when, and what constitutes legitimate artistic license and what does not, this essay will explore (1) how things looked to the writer as a college student, (2) the situation in Asia in 1965, and (3) what might have been done differently.
I was not hoodwinked or coerced into going to Vietnam. As a youth I knew that with my "smart" mouth and defiant attitude, I would last about 45 minutes under communist rule before being dragged off. I was profoundly grateful to be living in democratic society, where the penalties for such traits are relatively mild. I saw no reason why my counterparts in South Vietnam, in my own and future generations, should be denied the right to be equally oppositional. The sacrifices of Americans and their allies had preserved the freedom of millions of Koreans south of the 38th parallel. I was aware that the United States was bound to South Vietnam by the Southeast Asia Treaty, ratified 82-1 by the Senate in 1955. Our SEATO ally was being invaded in stages by its larger communist neighbor. President John F. Kennedy, recently assassinated by an American defector to the Soviet Union, had pledged a "long twilight struggle" against communism in his inaugural address. Great powers do not betray allies.
So it became clear well before the big buildup of 1965 that Vietnam would be "my war." In the shower one warm spring day, I pictured maps of Korea and Indochina. It was going to be tough. Our sea and air supremacy had all but quarantined the Korean peninsula. The communists had access to the south only along 130 miles of border. South Vietnam, on the other hand, had a long land frontier with Laos and Cambodia through which the enemy could infiltrate. This spaghetti-like network of roads and paths came to be called the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
What to do? Isolate the battlefield. Cut west through Laos to Thailand at the border between the two Vietnams, blocking the North Vietnamese Army. Then the insurgency within South Vietnam could be put down, as the British had suppressed the Malayan communist rebels in the 1950s.
Walt W. Rostow, Johnson's national security adviser from 1966 to 1968, is played by Gerry Becker. In a phone interview Sunday from his home in Austin, Texas, Rostow said he hadn't seen "Path to War" and couldn't comment on it. I had called to ask him about interdiction, but he surprised me by stating, without being asked: "I believed that we should cut off the Ho Chi Minh Trail. I still hold to the view, and I expressed that view, but I did it properly, because I have great affection and respect for what Johnson was doing at home and abroad."
Rostow said the war was primarily about the balance of power in Asia, a continent Johnson believed would become at least as important to the United States as Europe. The president's reluctant decision in July 1965 to send large U.S. forces to Vietnam was made in the context of a larger Asian crisis. This context is perhaps the most important missing element in the historiography of the war, the former national security adviser said.
"In 1965 the Malaysian confrontation was on," Rostow said. Indonesia's leftist leader, Sukarno, had vowed to crush the new state, Singapore withdrew from the federation, and a communist insurgency broke out in Sarawak. At the same time, regular North Vietnamese forces were entering South Vietnam.
Rostow said Sukarno was maneuvering with China and the leader of the Indonesian Communist Party, or PKI, to effect a communist takeover of his own country. In this "nutcracker" the small nations of the region, including Thailand, would be caught between two giants -- China to the north and Indonesia to the south. "There were few doubters of the domino theory in the Southeast Asia of mid-1965," Rostow said.
Of course, in the fall of that year, the attempted communist coup in Indonesia backfired. Tens of thousands of communists were killed, and the PKI was destroyed.
Rostow said that at least as early as April 1965, Johnson viewed the containment of communism in Vietnam as a way of buying time for a strong, regionally organized, independent Asia to emerge. By April 1973 Singapore leader Lee Kuan Yew was able to predict, accurately, that even if the communists took over in Vietnam, it did not follow that dominoes would fall, as they would have earlier. By this measure, the Vietnam War was a success.
Our "gift of sanctuary" to the North Vietnamese Army in Laos and Cambodia inevitably rendered the war long and inconclusive, Rostow said. Never has a guerrilla war -- or a war dependent on external supply -- been won when one side was granted sanctuary by the other. Blocking the trail network on the ground would have forced NVA troops to mass, and two or three reinforced infantry divisions plus U.S. airpower could have dealt with them on favorable terms.
Rostow said since the war Gen. William C. Westmoreland, U.S. commander in Vietnam from 1964-1968, has been invited to speak in North Vietnam. "We heard from the North Vietnamese a number of times -- Westmoreland knows about this. They much respected his military part in Vietnam. It turned out that all of the North Vietnamese said, 'Why didn't you cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail?'"
He referred to John Prados' 1999 book "The Blood Road: The Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Vietnam War." Prados gives the account of Bui Tin, the North Vietnamese officer who accepted the surrender of the Saigon government in 1975. In 1990, filled with disgust at the "reeducation" camps and communist officials extorting bribes from desperate boat people, he fled to France. Bui Tin once asked Gen. Le Trong Tan (1914-1986), former NVA chief of staff, what he would have done to win the war if he had been an American general. Tan replied that if the Americans had cut the trail and assumed defensive positions, "We would have been stuck. We would never have been able to fight and win as we did."
In his own memoir, "Following Ho Chi Minh" (1999), Bui Tin wrote: "If Johnson had granted Westmoreland's requests to enter Laos and block the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Hanoi could not have won the war."
Rostow told UPI that Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk rejected the option because they had been "traumatized" by the China's unexpected intervention in the Korean War "when we moved up the Yalu" River in November 1950.
"I believed it was a false analogy," he said. "The Yalu abutted onto Manchuria. ... And it was a very sensitive area. Whereas the boondocks around the southern part of China were very difficult terrain ... more than 200 miles away" from the place in Laos where it would have been logical to cut the trail.
"Johnson made a quite firm decision not to let American troops outside the borders of (South) Vietnam, and in my view that was the wrong way to fight the war," Rostow said.
He was asked if Johnson and Rusk were the main opponents of interdiction.
"Yes, but also (Secretary of Defense Robert) McNamara was all over the lot," he replied.
After a recent preview of "Path to War" at the French Embassy in Washington, panelists were asked if -- in retrospect -- the United States could have done anything to win the war. I was astonished to hear the reply of Harry McPherson, special counsel and speechwriter to LBJ, who is known as a dove on the war.
McPherson's said the idea of cutting the Ho Chi Minh Trail was the only one that had made any sense to him.
I told Rostow of my surprise and wondered why McPherson didn't express that belief as a presidential adviser.
"He didn't believe it back then," Rostow said. "He sort of got it in retrospect, I think. And he's a very nice man, incidentally. That was not his view at the time.
The problem is you don't play proportional response football and you don't fight an enemy that way either. Unfortunately not many of our leaders or generals have played football.
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The problem is, one you get subversives in, it takes years to find them and get them out. By the time Nexon came into office the situation was unsalvageable.
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About four yeas ago on another forum a guy who had been a nave enlisted man in a critical position in Washington bragged about sending copies of secret documents and photographs to the New York Times and otther places to aod in the so-called anti-war effort. It was everywhere.
Exactly right. LBJ's ego came first, before everything else. The War was just something that promised to screw it all up, and if he played it straight and asked for articles, he knew old Everett Dirksen, the minority leader, would ask for taxes to pay for the war (like Dick Nixon did with the 10% income-tax surtax), which would saddle LBJ with a burden to his popularity (he had actually tried to get 100% of the vote in 1964, remember), and Dirksen would also be able to defeat much of the Great Society program on the prudential ground that you don't do that kind of stuff in the middle of a war! Which is exactly what LBJ was going to do, come hell or high water.
And yes, I knew DIRTXPOTUS had been on Fulbright's staff.....and I thought at the time that Fulbright had to be one of those 40's socialists who was working for the Russians. I intensely disliked and distrusted him, he belonged in a special category that I suspected were either fellow-travelers or agents outright, either of influence or worse.
Let's get DIRTXPOTUS drunk and laid some time and then secretly load his drink with sodium pentothal. You do the interrogation, and I'll transcribe on a laptop and run the camcorder, and we'll find out just what the hell he was doing in Moscow. Deal? Plus, I don't think anyone ever discovered who placed the Soviet bug that fell out of a chair in a Senate committee room that time. We really ought to get Putin to dump the KGB's files on 1970's North American assets and clear all this up once and for all.
I can just see some archaeologists in the far-off 49th century, excavating LBJ's grave and wondering what the chemical stain on the bottom of the grave-marker is.....and then doing a chemical analysis and discovering.....urea! I'd love to see the look on their faces. Come to think of it, I'd love to see the look on LBJ's!
We all KNOW what he was doing in Moscow. Most people don't know this,but a couple of the things that he did was visit the North Vietnames and the North Korean embassies.
Another one I am saving some kidney space for.
Believe it or not,but he admitted to a PBS show about him a few years back that he purposely distorted and slanted the news because "it was best for America"! The interviewer nailed him about the reporting of Bull Connners and the "Freedom Marchers" in Alabama,and Cronkite admitted they were careful to edit the film footage to only show what they wanted shown. If you ever see these old newsreels again,notice how all the black marchers the dogs go after are wearing "church suits" without the jackets. Look at the white shirts and ties. Know why? Because they had taken their jackets off to slap the dogs in the face to get them to attack. They had film of this,but destroyed it because they wanted everybody to think the attacks were unprovoked racial attacks.
Sorry,it was much more than that to him. The Johnson family got rich off the war and the buildup. They owned the second largest (right behind PA&E) construction firm in VN,and he made a bundle from them building bases,paving roads,putting in water and septic systems,etc,etc,etc.
Check out A Bright Shining Lie." It's about John Paul Vann and Viet Nam. Great book.
I understand ladybird had considerable holdings in Bell Helicopter. Some even think that the switch from the Hughes LOH-6 to the Bell OH-58, in the middle of the war, had something to do with the Johnson's influence.
Remember that shoebox full of $100 bills that Sen. Herman Talmadge's wife threw out into open court during their divorce? Seems ol' "Hummin" had that box for years and years, it was the Senate's "walking-around" money. Now, where did he get that box? My guess is, he got it from Dick Russell when he died, and that Russell got it from LBJ when he became president. Robert Caro documents that LBJ invented the idea of "handy money" for campaigning with, that he got money from Brown and Root, from Sid Richardson and other Texas independent oil men, and spread it around (collecting favor-chits, of course) in the summer of 1940, saving the House of Representatives for Franklin Roosevelt, who'd been widely expected to lose the House after two full terms in office, with a Republican tide running in the country. LBJ's money turned the election around. I've no doubt that "Hummin" had that box from Landslide Lyndon himself, and that they relied for its replenishment on certain businessmen who were determined to be players. Like Earl Long said back in those same days in the 1950's, "early money buys consideration; late money buys good government".
That's the one the local hard-left idiot, Bob Buzzanco, goes on about in his over-the-air lecture series on the history of Vietnam, the last 2/3's of which he spends gloating over America's loss of the war. One of Buzzanco's favorite texts. Why do you recommend it to Freepers? To "convert" us to the Truth laid down by the Left -- in Fire in the Lake, or in Terzi's onanistic Communist victory-gloat?
Southerners were paranoid about the Northern press getting involved, they knew there was going to be a slant......but this is fresh to me. I never even heard that, and you say it was on PBS? It tends to prove what I later came to suspect, by the way, that the entire Civil Rights Movement was an exercise in "kick your sister" and bringing out the worst in people, not the best.
Thanks for that info, I never knew that.
Because it is a good book. Just because some lefty likes it doesn't make the book bad. The fact is that John Paul Vann was incredible officer and early on (1962) saw what was going wrong with the war in Vietnam. Basically there was the widespread corruption among the ARVN and many South Vietnamese officials. On top of that, there was the pollyannish attitudes of the American military at the top, especially by the top U.S. commander there, General Harkins, who would brook no criticism of the South Vietnamese. It is possible that the war was winnable but such a possibility slipped away due to allowing widespread corruption among South Vietnamese officials and ARVN officers (they actually permitted the Viet Cong to constantly slip away because Diem considered the army's primary purpose to protect him), the lack of understanding of the War by the U.S. military command at the top (General Harkins had little connection with what was going on in the field), and the incredible arrogance of Robert STRANGE McNamara.
I suggest you read this incredible book instead of condemning it based on who liked it.
I always heard his family was a major stockholder.
Remember that shoebox full of $100 bills that Sen. Herman Talmadge's wife threw out into open court during their divorce?
No,this is the first I ever heard of it. Thanks for informing me,though.
Yeah,it was one part of a series by PBS that was titled something like "The Media in the 20th Century",or some such nonsense. Cronkite had a whole segment devoted to him because he had the tag of "the most trusted man in America",and the PBS show was out to set the record straight.
It tends to prove what I later came to suspect, by the way, that the entire Civil Rights Movement was an exercise in "kick your sister" and bringing out the worst in people, not the best.
What it really boiled down to was a family fight within the Dim Party between who was going to control it (and the country),the left or the right. Since MOST southern Dims were WAAAY to the right of most of what we laughingly call Republicans today,it was neccessary for the Dims in the northeast and their running mates to demonize the STRONG southern Dims. They used the power of gooberment and the media to do this. Watch the movie the left ranted and raved about "Mississippi Burning" for a good belly laugh. The Dims were over the roof about how "real" it was,yet what it really did is show their lies and slander. One part has the Feeb sent to look for the missing civil wrongs workers talking to the local sheriff about them being missing,and the local sheriff says something about "maybe they went fishing?". The Feeb replies,"These men are both trained agitators,and they had orders to check in every day." One was a obvious Jew with long hair and a beard,and the other was a black man.BOTH were riding around in Missippi and Alabama in a brand new car with plenty of money to spend,trying their damndest to stir up trouble. Basically,the Feebs SENT them there to be murdered. This does NOT excuse their murders in any way,but it's obvious wnat was going on.
Later the head Feed sends a flunkie off to rent them motel rooms,and the flunkie comes back and says "Nobody will rent us rooms". The head Feeb says "Buy the motel. We have a unlimited budget from Washington".
BTW,I will ALWAYS believe it was the FBI behind the church bombings and other nonsense. I don't believe they did it,but I will always believe FBI agents whispered the ideas into the heads of the mental defectives they found there,and those guys went out and did it.
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