Ending the Vietnam War

A History of America's Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War

Henry Kissinger

• Editorial: Touchstone
• Año: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780743245777
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: 20th Century History

Now, for the first time, Kissinger gives us in a single volume an in-depth, inside view of the Vietnam War, personally collected, annotated, revised, and updated from his bestselling memoirs and his book Diplomacy. Many other authors have written about what they thought happened—or thought should have happened—in Vietnam, but it was Henry Kissinger who was there at the epicenter, involved in every decision from the long, frustrating negotiations with the North Vietnamese delegation to America's eventual extrication from the war.Here, Kissinger writes with firm, precise knowledge, supported by meticulous documentation that includes his own memoranda to and replies from President Nixon. He tells about the tragedy of Cambodia, the collateral negotiations with the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, the disagreements within the Nixon and Ford administrations, the details of all negotiations in which he was involved, the domestic unrest and protest in the States, and the day-to-day military to diplomatic realities of the war as it reached the White House.As compelling and exciting as Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, Ending the Vietnam War also reveals insights about the bigger-than-life personalities—Johnson, Nixon, de Gaulle, Ho Chi Minh, Brezhnev—who were caught up in a war that forever changed international relations. This is history on a grand scale, and a book of overwhelming importance to the public record.

1

America’s Entry into the Morass (1950–1969)

It all began with high aspirations. For two decades after the end of the Second World War, America had taken the lead in building a new international order out of the fragments of a shattered world. It had rehabilitated Europe and restored Japan, faced down Communist expansionism in Greece, Turkey, Berlin, and Korea, entered into its first peacetime alliances, and launched a program of technical assistance to the developing world. The countries under the American umbrella were enjoying peace, prosperity, and stability.

In Indochina, however, all the previous patterns of America’s involvement abroad were confounded. For the first time in America’s international experience, the direct, almost causal relationship the nation had always enjoyed between its values and its achievements began to fray as Americans turned to questioning those values and why they should have been applied to so distant a place as Vietnam. A chasm opened between the Americans’ belief in the unique nature of their national experience and the compromises and ambiguities inherent in the geopolitics of containing Communism. In the crucible of Vietnam, American exceptionalism turned on itself. American society did not debate, as others might have, the practical shortcomings of its policies but America’s worthiness to pursue any international role.

This universalist approach had a long pedigree. From the beginning of the twentieth century, one president after another had proclaimed that America had no “selfish” interests, that its principal, if not its only, international goal was universal peace and progress. Truman, in his inaugural address of January 20, 1949, had committed his country to the objective of a world in which “all nations and all peoples are free to govern themselves as they see fit.” No purely national interest would be pursued. “We have sought no territory. We have imposed our will on no one. We have asked for no privileges we would not extend to others.” The United States would “strengthen freedom-loving nations against the dangers of aggression” by providing “military advice and equipment to free nations which will cooperate with us in the maintenance of peace and security.”¹ The freedom of every single independent nation had become the national objective, irrespective of those nations’ strategic importance to the United States.

In his two inaugural addresses in 1953 and 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower took up the same theme in even more exalted language. He described a world in which thrones had been toppled, vast empires had been swept away, and new nations had emerged. Amidst all this turmoil, destiny had entrusted America with the charge to defend freedom unconstrained by geopolitical considerations or calculations of the national interest. Indeed, Eisenhower implied that such calculations ran counter to the American value system, in which all nations and peoples are treated equally: “Conceiving the defense of freedom, like freedom itself, to be one and indivisible, we hold all continents and peoples in equal regard and honor.”²

John F. Kennedy, in his inaugural address in 1961, carried this theme of missionary duty to the world yet another step forward. Proclaiming his generation to be the linear descendant of the world’s first democratic revolution, he pledged his administration, in soaring language, not to “permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world. Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”³ Kennedy’s eloquent peroration was the precise reverse of the famous dictum of British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston that Great Britain had no permanent friends, only permanent interests.

By the time of Lyndon B. Johnson’s inaugural on January 20, 1965, conventional wisdom had culminated in the proposition that America’s foreign commitments, springing organically from its democratic system of government, had erased altogether the distinction between domestic and international responsibilities. For America, Johnson asserted, no stranger was beyond hope: “Terrific dangers and troubles that we once called ‘foreign’ now constantly live among us. If American lives must end, and American treasure be spilled, in countries that we barely know, then that is the price that change has demanded of conviction and of our enduring covenant.”⁴

Much later, it became fashionable to cite such statements as examples of the arrogance of power, or as the hypocritical pretexts for America’s quest for domination. Such facile cynicism misreads the essence of America’s political faith, which is at once “naïve” and draws from that apparent naïveté the impetus for extraordinary practical endeavors. Most countries go to war to resist concrete, definable threats to their security. In the twentieth century, America went to war—from World War I to the Kosovo war of 1998—largely on behalf of what it perceived as moral obligations to resist aggression or injustice as the trustee of collective security.

This commitment was especially pronounced among the generation of American leaders who had in their youth witnessed the tragedy of Munich. Burned into their psyches was the lesson that failure to resist aggression—wherever and however it occurred—guarantees that it will have to be resisted under much worse circumstances later on. From Cordell Hull onward, every American secretary of state echoed this theme. It was the point on which Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles agreed.⁵ Geopolitical analysis of the specific dangers posed by the Communist conquest of a distant country was deemed subordinate to the twin slogans of resisting aggression in the abstract and preventing the further spread of Communism. The Communist victory in China had reinforced the conviction of American policymakers that no further Communist expansion could be tolerated.

Policy documents and official statements of the period show that this conviction went largely unchallenged. In February 1950, four months before the start of the Korean conflict, NSC document 64 had concluded that Indochina was “a key area of South East Asia and is under immediate threat.”⁶

The memorandum marked the debut of the so-called Domino Theory, which predicted that, if Indochina fell, Burma and Thailand would soon follow, and that “the balance of Southeast Asia would then be in grave hazard.”⁷

In January 1951, Dean Rusk, then Assistant Secretary of State and later Secretary of State for eight years, declared that “to neglect to pursue our present course to the utmost of our ability would be disastrous to our interests in Indochina and, consequently, in the rest of Southeast Asia.”⁸ In April of the year before, NSC document 68 had concluded that the global equilibrium was at stake in Indochina: “…any substantial further extension of the area under the domination of the Kremlin would raise the possibility that no coalition adequate to confront the Kremlin with greater strength could be assembled.”⁹

Much later such reflections were dismissed if not ridiculed as the expression of an overwrought Cold War mentality. But the context is important. The policymakers of the early 1950s had experienced the Iron Curtain descend on Europe, Communist coups in a series of East European countries, the Berlin blockade, and the Communist invasion of South Korea.

Even so, some fundamental questions were avoided. Was it really true, as the document implied, that every Communist gain extended the area controlled by the Kremlin—especially given the experience of Tito’s Yugoslavia which, though Communist, broke with Moscow? There were in fact vast differences in the nature of the threat. In Europe, the principal threat emanated from the Soviet superpower. In Asia, the threat to American interests came from secondary powers which were at best surrogates of the Soviet Union and over which Soviet control was—or should have been understood to be—questionable. In reality, as the Vietnam war evolved, America came to fight the surrogate of a surrogate (China), each of which deeply distrusted the respective senior partner. In the American analysis, the global equilibrium was under assault by North Vietnam, assumed to be controlled from Beijing, which, in turn, was conceived to be controlled by Moscow. This turned out not to be the case. In Europe, America was defending historic states; in Indochina, America was dealing with societies that, in their present dimensions, were building states for the first time. The European nations had long-established traditions of how to cooperate in the defense of the balance of power. In Southeast Asia, statehood was just emerging, the concept of the balance of power was foreign, and there was no precedent of cooperation among the existing states.

These fundamental differences between the geopolitics of Europe and Asia, together with America’s interests in each, were submerged in the universalist, ideological American approach to foreign policy. The Czech coup, the Berlin blockade, the testing of a Soviet atomic bomb, the Communist victory in China, and the Communist attack on South Korea were all lumped together by America’s leaders into a single global threat—indeed, a centrally controlled global conspiracy. Realpolitik would have sought to limit the Korean war to the narrowest possible dimension; America’s Manichean view of the conflict worked in the opposite direction. Truman coupled his dispatch of American troops with an announcement of a significant increase in military aid to France in its own war against the Communist guerrillas in Indochina (then called the Vietminh). American policymakers drew an analogy between Germany’s and Japan’s simultaneous assaults in Europe and Asia in the Second World War, and Moscow’s and Beijing’s maneuvers in the 1950s, the Soviet Union replacing Germany, and China standing in for Japan. By 1952, a third of the French expenditures in Indochina were being subsidized by the United States.

America’s entry into Indochina introduced a whole new moral issue. NATO defended democracies; the American occupation of Japan had imported democratic institutions to that nation; the Korean war had been fought to turn back an assault on the independence of small nations. In Indochina, however, the case for containment was initially cast in almost exclusively geopolitical terms, making it all the more difficult to incorporate into the prevailing American ideology. For one thing, the defense of Indochina ran head-on into America’s tradition of anticolonialism. Technically still French colonies, the states of Indochina were neither democracies nor even independent. Although, in 1950, France had transformed its three colonies of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia into the “Associated States of the French Union,” this new designation stopped well short of independence because France feared that, if it granted full sovereignty, it could do no less for its three North African possessions—Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco.

By the end of 1950, the Truman administration had decided that the security of the free world required Indochina, a French colony, to be kept out of Communist hands—which in practice meant bending America’s anticolonial principles by supporting the French war against the Communist insurgents in Indochina. Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson saw no other choice because the Joint Chiefs of Staff had concluded that the American armed forces were stretched to the limit by simultaneous commitments to NATO and to the ongoing war in Korea, and that none could be spared for the defense of Indochina—even if it were invaded by China.¹⁰

As it turned out, America’s initial commitment to Indochina in 1950 established the pattern for its future involvement: large enough to get America entangled, not significant enough to prove decisive. In the early stages of the quagmire, this was largely the result of ignorance about the actual conditions and the near impossibility of conducting operations through two layers of French colonial administration, as well as whatever local authorities the so-called Associated States of Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) had been permitted to establish.

Fearing to be tarred as a party to colonialism, both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department sought to protect their country’s moral flank by pressing France to pledge eventual independence.¹¹ The State Department expressed its awareness of the complexities of this delicate balancing act by naming its Indochinese program Operation Eggshell. The label, unfortunately, conveyed an understanding of the predicament far greater than its contribution to the solution. The basic strategy was to prod France into granting independence to Indochina while urging it to continue waging the anti-Communist war.¹² Why France should risk lives in a war designed to end its presence in Southeast Asia was not explained.

By the time the Truman administration prepared to leave office, evasion of the hard choices had matured into official policy. In 1952, a National Security Council document formalized the Domino Theory and gave it a sweeping character. Describing a military attack on Indochina as a danger “inherent in the existence of a hostile and aggressive Communist China,”¹³ it urged that the loss of even a single Southeast Asian country would lead “to relatively swift submission to or an alignment with Communism by the remainder. Furthermore, an alignment with Communism of the rest of Southeast Asia and India, and in the longer term, of the Middle East (with the possible exceptions of at least Pakistan and Turkey) would in all probability progressively follow.”¹⁴

Obviously, if that estimate was correct, such wholesale collapse was bound to endanger the security and stability of Europe as well as to “make it extremely difficult to prevent Japan’s eventual accommodation to Communism.”¹⁵ Nor was the perception of the long-range danger to Europe shared by America’s European allies, which, in the years to come, consistently refused to participate in the defense of Indochina.

On the other hand, the arguments of the NSC memorandum were not as superficial as they later were represented to be. Even in the absence of a central conspiracy, and for all the West knew at the time, the Domino Theory might nevertheless have been valid. Singapore’s savvy and thoughtful Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, clearly thought so, and he has usually been proven right. In the immediate postwar era, Communism still possessed substantial ideological dynamism. A demonstration of the bankruptcy of its economic management was another generation away. Many in the democracies, and especially in the newly independent countries, considered the Communist world to be poised to surpass the capitalist world in industrial capacity. The governments of many of the newly independent countries were fragile and threatened by domestic insurrection. At the very moment the NSC memorandum was prepared, a Communist guerrilla war was being waged in Malaya.

Washington policymakers had good reason to be concerned about the conquest of Indochina by a movement which had already engulfed Eastern Europe and taken over China. Regardless of whether Communist expansion was centrally organized, it seemed to possess enough momentum to sweep the fragile new nations of Southeast Asia into the anti-Western camp. The real question was not whether some dominoes might fall in Southeast Asia, which was likely, but whether there might not be better places in the region to draw the line—for instance, around countries where the political and security elements were more in harmony, such as in Malaya and Thailand.

Truman’s legacy to his successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was an annual military assistance program to Indochina of some $200 million and a strategic theory in search of a policy. The Truman administration had not been obliged to face the potential gap between its strategic doctrine and its moral convictions, or to confront the necessity of making a choice between the geopolitical rationale and American capabilities. Eisenhower was left with the responsibility of dealing with the first challenge; Kennedy, Johnson, and Richard Nixon with the second.

The Eisenhower administration did not question America’s commitment to the security of Indochina, which it had inherited. It sought to reconcile its strategic doctrine and its moral convictions by stepping up pressures for reform in Indochina. In May 1953—four months after taking the oath of office—Eisenhower urged the American ambassador to France, Douglas Dillon, to press the French to appoint new leaders with authority to “win victory” in Indochina, and at the same time to make “clear and unequivocal public announcements, repeated as often as may be desirable,” that independence would be granted “as soon as victory against the Communists had been won.”¹⁶

For France, the issue by then had already gone far beyond political reform. Its forces in Indochina were enmeshed in a frustrating guerrilla war, with which they had no experience whatever. In a conventional war with established front lines, superior firepower usually carries the day. By contrast, a guerrilla war usually is not fought from fixed positions, and the guerrilla army hides among the population. A conventional war is about control of territory; a guerrilla war is about the security of the population. As the guerrilla army is not tied to the defense of any particular territory, it is in a position to determine the field of battle to a considerable extent and to regulate the casualties of both sides. Whereas in a conventional war, a success rate in battle of 75 percent would guarantee victory, in a guerrilla war, protecting the population only 75 percent of the time ensures defeat. While the conventional army is bound to lose unless it wins decisively, the guerrilla army wins as long as it can keep from losing.

Neither the French nor the American army, which followed in its footsteps a decade later, ever solved the riddle of guerrilla war. Both fought the only kind of war they understood and for which they had been trained and equipped—classical, conventional warfare based on clearly demarcated front lines. Both armies, relying on superior firepower, strove for a war of attrition. Both saw that strategy turned against them ...