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.
I agree with your analysis. When I referred to "kick your sister", I was talking about the operational-level programme, if you will, that was carried forward from the 1950's. Or even, if you like, from the moment in the 1940's when a young Hubert Humphrey stood up in the Senate to attack the Dixiecrats on civil rights. I wish someone would revisit those initial moves of the Democratic Left toward the Civil Rights Movement in the terms you outline, as a flanking maneuver designed to drive the Mossbacks from their committee strongholds and open the door for socialism.
At the grand-strategic level, I think we agree that the Civil Rights Movement was about socialism, and that it meant the displacement of the South from the Democratic coalition in favor of black bloc-voters in the cities of the North, who had shown what they could do for the Democratic Party. Hence the emphasis on voting rights for blacks in the South: their Northern sponsors knew they would be 90% straight-ticket Democrats and support socialist measures and candidates when Southern Democrats would not.
The Southern senators were always interested in national affairs, even the later ones who replaced the old string-tie segregationist pols, like Sam Nunn of Georgia and Johnston of Louisiana, who replaced Allen Ellender, and John Stennis of Mississippi. They were intelligent, educated, deeply learned in national-defense and other issues -- and they wouldn't vote right. They always voted for defense issues, like their sometime leader Henry "Scoop" Jackson, who was not a Southerner himself but similarly helped constitute the conservative wing of the Democratic Party -- when it still had one.
The reviewers tell us, btw, that Robert Caro's new book, Master of the Senate, describes how Lyndon Johnson opened that door for the Northern senators by destroying the committee chairmen's power and creating the Senate leadership we know today. In the 1940's, the majority and minority whips were virtual relic positions comparable to Britain's "stick-in-waiting". It was Johnson who changed that, Johnson who opened the doors to the 1957 Civil Rights Act, and Johnson who collected for that small gesture by accepting the Vice Presidency......and then whaddayaknow, suddenly he's the President of the United States, just what he always wanted. And as Theodore White tells us in Making of the President 1964 (p. 64), Johnson was already making the first moves on the Budget that would guarantee his reelection while Jack Kennedy's body lay cooling in the Capitol Rotunda, while being careful to cultivate the public impression that the government's normal business was in respectful suspension until after the New Year.
If you want to nail down the actual date the planning for this started,you will have to go back to the early 1920's. The KKK march on Washington,DC flat scared the HELL out of the old-time northeastern elitist families that controlled and benefitted from our government policies. The saw the south "rising again" politically,and were terrified they would lose the priveledged positions the Civil War assured them. It was obvious the southern Dim politicians were well organized,and that they had not only had a different agenda than insure the Rockefellers,Mellons,Cargagies,and others retained their wealth,but also had grudges against the way these families came into the south after the war and used the power of the government to forclose on farms and businesses so they could buy them at a penny on the dollar.
At THAT time the KKK was really a "government in hiding". This had become a neccessity after the CW because the northeners had installed their own judges,sheriffs,and even congressmen in office,and absolutely NONE of these people had any interest at all in protecting the rights of white southerners. They were basically put into place to serve as "protection" for the northern carpet bagger. The KKK was formed and stepped in to fill this gap. If there was some type of dispute with local authorities, it did you no good to go to the local sheriff. He was appoited by the "lords of the north"m,and was only there to protect them and get his "cut". Go to the KKK and make your case,and suddenly your problems dissapeared. The same was true of things as simple as wife beating or child abuse. The local "authorities" didn't give a damn about that,but the KKK did. They would come by and horsewhip the offender,and promise to come back and hang him if the conduct continued. This was VERY efffective,as there was no appeal or lawyer who could get yo off from that sentence,and they weren't playing.
Anyhow,the above illustrates the "how and why" behind the KKK gaining so much political power by the early 1920's. If you weren't a Dim candidate,you didn't get elected to ANY office in the south at that time. If you didn't have the backing of the KKK,you didn't get even get to run for office. The northern elites were about to have their apple cart overturned,and they couldn't allow this to happen. The solution to their problem was to demonize both the KKK AND any southern politicians who were strongly connected to it.
By the early 1950's,the FBI were doing everything BUT officially running the KKK. The joke used to be that if you needed a FBI agent,the easiest way to find one was go to a Klan meeting. I think we all know what happened after that.
I wonder how he could live with himself. If accounts of the last years of his life are to be believed, LBJ had a very difficult time living with himself, as he was not a complete sociopath like Bill Clinton. My understanding is that LBJ let his hair grow long and stopped taking care of himself and suffered long depressions. Of course, how much of that was regret and how much of that was missing the political power he used to wield like a sledgehammer I do not know.
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