Vietnam: The Early Decisions

By Lloyd C. Gardner and Ted Gittinger

This anthology examines the turmoil and conflicting advice that led the US into Vietnam and the roles played by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

For many Americans, Oliver Stone’s film JFK left no doubt that before his assassination Kennedy had determined to quit Vietnam. Yet the historical record offers a more complex view. In this fresh look at the archival evidence, noted scholars take up the challenge to provide us with their conclusions about the early decisions that put the United States on the path to the greatest American tragedy since the Civil War.

The book is divided into four sections. Parts one and two delve into the political and military contexts of the early decisions. Part three raises the intriguing questions of Kennedy’s and Johnson's roles in the conflict, particularly the thorny issue of whether Kennedy did, in fact, intend to withdraw from Vietnam and whether Johnson reversed that policy. Part four reveals an uncanny parallel between early Soviet policy toward Hanoi and US policy toward Saigon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9780292735163

Book preview

PART I

The Political Context

Vietnam

An Episode in the Cold War

Robert A. Divine

The dramatic events that began with the liberation of Eastern Europe in the fall of 1989, symbolized by the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, and then culminated two years later in the dissolution of the Soviet Union have profoundly altered our view of the Cold War. Instead of commenting on an aspect of current affairs, scholars could begin to consider the Cold War as part of the past. The epic struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union might not be seen in quite the same light as the American Revolution or the Civil War, or even World War II, but at least it was now a legitimate subject for historical scrutiny.

In the vast literature on the Cold War, scholars developed several separate areas of concentration. The Cuban missile crisis is one such special field and Vietnam clearly another. Beginning in the late seventies, historians began to remedy the earlier neglect of the Vietnam War—George Herring’s trailblazing history was soon followed by Stanley Karnow’s broad account, which along with the accompanying PBS television series helped bring Vietnam back to the forefront of national attention. As Vietnam studies evolved, they tended to become isolated from the larger field of Cold War scholarship—authors concentrated on specific topics such as Dien Bien Phu, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, the 1965 escalation, the Tet offensive, and LBJ’s decision to seek a negotiated solution. In dealing with these important episodes, scholars tended to see them only in the context of Vietnam, ignoring the larger issues of the Cold War.

I would refocus our attention on the simple, obvious, but often overlooked point that American policy in Vietnam can be understood only in relation to the course of the Cold War. The period we are probing is the early sixties, a time when the Cold War was at its most intense. As Michael Beschloss has demonstrated in his book The Crisis Years, this was a period of confrontation between Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy that led to nuclear saber rattling, first over Berlin in the summer of 1961 and then over the missiles in Cuba in the fall of 1962.

In the relaxed atmosphere of the post–Cold War era, we tend to forget how dangerous and frightening this period was in international affairs. In his recent study of the nuclear age, Life under a Cloud, Allan Winkler reminds us how the fear of an atomic attack pervaded American life in the fifties and sixties. Educators used Bert the Turtle to teach schoolchildren to perform Duck and Cover drills as they sought shelter beneath their desks. Bert ducks and covers, read a comic book distributed to three million elementary students. He’s smart, but he has his shelter on his back. You must learn to find shelter. Civil defense hit its peak under Kennedy with the fallout-shelter frenzy, which raised the ethical question of how to treat less well-prepared neighbors. In Austin, hardware dealer Charles Davis equipped his shelter with four rifles and a .357 Magnum pistol. When most Americans finally came to understand that there was no place to hide in an all-out nuclear attack, civil defense authorities switched from individual shelters to plans for evacuating entire cities—a change from Duck and Cover, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists noted, to Run Like Hell.¹

When I try to describe the American commitment in Vietnam to undergraduates in the nineties, I have the hardest time trying to explain why the United States placed so much importance on a relatively minor and remote part of the world. They have no trouble understanding American involvement in World War II to defeat Hitler and avenge the attack on Pearl Harbor; they see the recent Persian Gulf War as a legitimate defense of the nation’s oil lifeline; they can even accept the Korean conflict as necessary to protect Japan. But they cannot understand why the United States sacrificed more than 58,000 American lives and spent more than $150 billion in what appears today to be such an insignificant place.

The answer can be found only by recalling the intensity of the Cold War. We know today that Moscow was not directing the North Vietnamese, that there was great antagonism between Hanoi and Beijing, that the fundamental issue in Vietnam was a struggle for national independence that had its origin in European colonialism. But just as we have to use our creative imagination to try to understand the Salem witchcraft trials in the seventeenth century or the determination of antebellum white southerners to defend the institution of slavery, so we must go back in time and try to put ourselves in the place of those who made the decisions in Southeast Asia in the fifties and early sixties that led to disaster. Our goal is not to excuse but to understand, and to do that, we must examine the broader context of the Cold War.

The Truman Administration

I would begin with the Truman administration. In the early months of 1950, the Cold War seemed to have reached new depths. Chiang Kai-shek had been driven from the mainland and Mao and the Communists were in power in Beijing. The Soviets had detonated their first atomic device, signaling an end to the nuclear monopoly the West had enjoyed since the end of World War II. At home Joe McCarthy was just beginning his smear campaign against the State Department, laying the basis for the charges that the diplomats had sold out China to the Communists. President Truman responded by refusing to recognize the new regime in China, by intensifying his own loyalty program to drive suspected subversives from government service, and by deciding to answer the Soviet atomic bomb by instituting a crash program to develop the Super—the vastly more destructive hydrogen bomb.

It was in this crisis atmosphere that the National Security Council began to frame its recommendations regarding the civil war being waged by the Viet Minh against the French in Indochina. Two documents from the Pentagon Papers set forth the basic premises that would guide American policy in Vietnam for the next two decades.

The first, dated February 27, 1950, stated what later became known as the domino theory (after President Eisenhower’s 1954 press-conference statement using that analogy). It is recognized that the threat of communist aggression against Indochina is only one phase of anticipated communist plans to seize all of Southeast Asia, the State Department draft began. Stressing the need to halt further communist expansion in Southeast Asia, the document asserted, Indochina is a key area of Southeast Asia and is under immediate threat. The neighboring countries of Thailand and Burma could be expected to fall under communist domination if Indochina were controlled by a communist-dominated government. The balance of Southeast Asia would then be in grave hazard.² In essence the State Department was fearful that the recent Communist triumph in the Chinese civil war would soon lead to a similar outcome in Indochina, thereby endangering all Southeast Asia. In light of future developments, it is interesting to note the author of this document—the deputy undersecretary of state, Dean Rusk.

The second document, dated April 10, 1950, took the argument one step further. In a memorandum to the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff outlined the global implications. The fall of Indochina would undoubtedly lead to the fall of the other mainland states of Southeast Asia, they began, echoing the State Department view. Soviet control of all the major components of Asia’s war potential might become a decisive factor affecting the balance of power between the United States and the USSR. A Soviet position of dominance over Asia, Western Europe, or both, would constitute a major threat to United States security.³

In the crisis atmosphere that prevailed in Washington in the spring of 1950, Indochina had suddenly taken on pivotal importance in the Cold War. Not only would a Communist victory there mean the loss of all Southeast Asia, but Soviet dominance over this region would also tip the world balance of power against the United States. No wonder, then, that in early May Truman authorized Secretary of State Dean Acheson to commit American financial aid and military advisers in an effort to help the French hold back the communist tide in Indochina.

The initial American decision to become involved in Vietnam was clearly the result of Cold War fears. Truman took what he viewed as an essential step not only to save Southeast Asia from Communism but also to preserve a favorable strategic balance vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. There was little thought given to the nature of the Vietnamese struggle for independence from French colonialism, nor any consideration of what might be best for the people of Vietnam. Lloyd Gardner sums up the American view of Vietnam perceptively with his comment, Indeed the whole of that country had assumed a fateful abstraction in American thinking as the place where the line had been drawn against the spread of international communism.⁴ Vietnam was not important to American policymakers in itself; it had become a Cold War symbol, a pawn in the larger struggle against Soviet imperialism.

The Eisenhower Administration

The Eisenhower administration deepened and extended American involvement in Vietnam. Initially, Eisenhower revisionists hailed Ike’s handling of the Dien Bien Phu crisis, praising him for refusing to commit American forces to rescue the beleaguered French at the eleventh hour. But recent scholarship has suggested that the real purpose of the policy Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, pursued was to remove the French and allow the United States, through the regime of Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem, to become the barrier to further communist advance in Southeast Asia.

The change in policy in Vietnam can best be understood as part of a broader pattern. In the 1952 campaign, the Republicans promised a sweeping change in American Cold War policy—a shift from containment to rolling back the worldwide communist advance. In reality, the shift proved to be more rhetorical than real. Safely in office, Eisenhower and Dulles were content with carrying out policies that originated with the Truman administration. Thus they brought the peace talks at Panmunjom to fruition, quickly ending the Korean War. In Europe, Dulles finally achieved the German rearmament that Acheson had sought by bringing West Germany into NATO. Most significant of all, the Eisenhower administration incorporated the hydrogen bomb, first tested in November 1952 before Truman left office, into the American nuclear arsenal and announced the new strategy of massive retaliation. Designed to avoid limited wars like Korea and to achieve reductions in military spending, massive retaliation proved incredible when the Soviets quickly developed their own thermonuclear capability. All Eisenhower and Dulles could do then was threaten mutual suicide; as Churchill so wisely observed, world peace now rested on a balance of terror.

The continuity in policy was much more important than the slight changes wrought by Eisenhower and Dulles in Vietnam. The operating assumption was still the belief that Vietnam was the key to Southeast Asia and that this region was vital to the world balance of power. Thus in 1953, the National Security Council warned that a Viet Minh victory would mean the eventual loss to Communism not only of Indochina but of the whole of Southeast Asia. The loss of Indochina, concluded the council, would be critical to the security of the U.S.⁵ Fearful that the French would allow the Communists to win by default, Dulles used the Dien Bien Phucrisis, as Lloyd Gardner has argued, to free America from the tyranny of the weak, the drowning man’s death grip on the living, the colonialist’s wasteful misuse of resources. True liberation, Gardner contends, meant transferring the defense of freedom in Indochina from those who, as Dulles told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, are, in a sense, old, tired, worn out, and almost willing to buy peace in order to have a few years more of rest, and entrusting it instead to the United States. The leadership of the world has passed to us, Dulles proudly told the senators.⁶

The ensuing events—the misleading talk of Operation Vulture, the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the Geneva Conference, the division of Indochina at the seventeenth parallel, and the final emergence of Diem as the American-backed leader in Saigon—witnessed the playing out of Dulles’s grand design. Some scholars see more muddling-through than foresight in the final outcome; Daniel Greene stresses the great care Dulles took to spare French pride as he eased them out of South Vietnam and the degree to which Diem made himself indispensable to the United States. Having liberated Paris from its military responsibilities in the region and committed itself to the success of the Diem experiment, Greene concludes, the Eisenhower administration acquired a vested interest in seeing it through.⁷

Whatever the intent, the result was a deepening American commitment in Vietnam. Having lost half the country to the Communists, Eisenhower and Dulles were determined to hold the line at the seventeenth parallel. Yet despite all the rhetoric about nation-building and experiments in democracy, there was a growing pessimism. Free Vietnam, commented one American official in 1955, is more an expression of desire than the establishment of a fact. As Daniel Greene points out, If the fictional South Vietnam failed to materialize or if efforts to make it safe for anticommunism faltered, the Americans would have only themselves and no longer the French to blame.⁸ David Anderson arrives at the same conclusion in his aptly named book Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1933–1961. Taken as a whole, he writes, the Eisenhower years were a time of deepening American commitment to South Vietnam premised on superficial assumptions about the government in Saigon, its future prospects, and the importance of its survival to U.S. global strategic interests.⁹

It is that last assumption, the importance of the survival of South Vietnam to the global strategic interests of the United States, that lies at the heart of the Vietnam issue. Locked in the escalating Cold War with the Soviet Union in the fifties, American leaders—Truman and Eisenhower, Acheson and Dulles—convinced themselves that not just the fate of Southeast Asia was at stake in Vietnam but also the world balance of power itself. Tragically, the young challenger who held himself out as the voice of change, with the cry of getting the nation moving again, would be held prisoner by the same Cold War illusion.

The Kennedy Administration

John F. Kennedy came into office at a time when most Americans were convinced that the Cold War had reached a critical point. Kennedy himself helped foster this sense of grave national danger. He and other Democratic contenders claimed that Eisenhower had failed to meet the challenge posed by Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviet Union in the wake of Sputnik. Not only had the Russians gained enormous world prestige by being first in space, but they also appeared to have opened a dangerous missile gap that threatened to turn the strategic balance against the United States by the early sixties.

Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy’s main speechwriter, summarizes the grim prospect facing the new president.

In October, 1957, the Soviet Union had launched simultaneously the first space capsule to orbit the earth and a new cold war offensive to master the earth. . . . In the three years that followed, the freedom of West Berlin had been threatened by a Soviet ultimatum, backed by boasts of medium-range ballistic missiles targeted on Western Europe. The existence of South Vietnam had been menaced by a campaign of guerrilla tactics and terror planned and supplied by the Communist regime in Hanoi. The independence of Laos had been endangered by pro-Communist insurgent forces. . . . The Russian and Chinese Communists had competed for a Central African base in Ghana, in Guinea, in Mali and particularly in the chaotic Congo. The Russians had obtained a base in the Western Hemisphere through Fidel Castro’s takeover in Cuba and his campaign to subvert Latin America. Red China was building its own Afro-Asian collection of client states and its own atomic bomb.¹⁰

In short, the United States was facing a grim prospect—losing the Cold War unless it moved quickly and decisively to confront and overcome the post-Sputnik communist offensive.

Kennedy sounded the alarm throughout the 1960 presidential campaign. He compared the contest to Lincoln’s struggle against slavery a century before, but now it was not the nation but the world that could not continue to exist half-slave and half-free. He blamed the Republicans for the missile gap, for losing Cuba to the Communists, and for declining American prestige throughout the world. Most of all, he promised to reverse the course of the Cold War. Calling the United States the sentinel at the gate of freedom around the world, he declared, I believe that we can check the Communist advance, that we can turn it back, and that we can, in this century, provide for the ultimate victory of freedom over slavery.¹¹

Despite the narrowness of his margin of victory, once in the White House Kennedy worked hard to fulfill his campaign commitments. He stood firm on Berlin, finally forcing Khrushchev to acknowledge defeat by building the Berlin Wall to stop the flow of East Germans seeking freedom in the West. Discovering that in reality there was no missile gap, he nevertheless kept right on increasing the strategic advantage he had inherited from Eisenhower, authorizing a massive nuclear striking force built around 1,000 intercontinental ballistic missiles and more than 600 Polaris submarine missiles. On the most sensitive issue of all, after an early fiasco at the Bay of Pigs, he won his most famous victory by threatening nuclear war to force Khrushchev to withdraw 42 medium- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Cuba.

It was in this context of increased Cold War tension and conflict that Kennedy approached Vietnam. He accepted the prevailing view that Vietnam was the key to Southeast Asia and that this region was vital to the world balance of power, but he gave these ideas a new twist by viewing Vietnam as a test case for what he feared was the most insidious communist threat of all.

Just before his inauguration in 1961, Kennedy received a copy of a speech Khrushchev had given to Soviet officials on January 6. Boasting that socialism was on the march and that capitalism was in retreat on all fronts, Khrushchev acknowledged that a world war was not only unthinkable but unnecessary. Instead, all Moscow had to do was support wars of liberation or popular uprisings. The Communists support just wars of this kind wholeheartedly and without reservation, Khrushchev affirmed, and they march in the van of the peoples fighting for liberation.¹²

Kennedy and his advisers viewed Khrushchev’s pledge of support for wars of national liberation with grave concern. Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson, cabling from Moscow, called the speech a declaration of Cold War. The president was so alarmed that he gave copies to all his top foreign-policy aides and told them to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest it. Ignoring advice from Thompson, who cautioned that the speech reflected only one side of the complex Khrushchev, Kennedy told his top advisers, You’ve got to understand it, and so does everybody else around here. This is our clue to the Soviet Union.¹³

Today most historians believe that the speech was aimed primarily at China in an effort to recapture Soviet command of world communism. A close reading of the text reveals that Khrushchev, despite his extravagant rhetoric, was still careful to call only for the support of wars of national liberation. Kennedy, however, convinced himself that the speech indicated that the Soviet Union was directing wars of national liberation. Thus the contest in Vietnam was not just a local civil war but rather a part of a global communist effort to win the Cold War without risking a nuclear showdown. Vietnam became, in the words of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a test case that the free world can cope with Communist wars of liberation as we have coped successfully with Communist aggression at other levels.¹⁴

The belief that Vietnam was a test of the American ability to defeat the new communist tactics in the Third World lay at the core of the Kennedy administration’s Vietnam policy. The new emphasis on counterinsurgency and the Green Berets, the strategic hamlet initiative, and the covert raids on North Vietnam were all justified on the basis of proving that the United States could contain the Soviet-directed offensive at every level, even in brush-fire wars. When all these efforts proved unavailing, Kennedy still believed he was pursuing the right course. In January 1962 he asked the members of the National Security Council to reread Khrushchev’s wars of liberation speech, adding, We are embarked on a major effort here, and it is not going to be an easy one.¹⁵

The belief that Vietnam was a testing ground for the new Soviet offensive simply reinforced the Cold War premises that had under-girded American policy since 1950. Responding to General Maxwell Taylor’s November 1961 call for 8,000 combat troops in South Vietnam, McNamara repeated the familiar rubric: the fall of South Vietnam would mean communist control in the rest of mainland Southeast Asia and in Indonesia. The strategic implications worldwide, he informed the president, . . . would be extremely serious. Dean Rusk was equally adamant, asserting that a communist victory in Vietnam would not only destroy SEATO [Southeast Asia Treaty Organization] but would undermine the credibility of American commitments elsewhere. He even reminded Kennedy of the disastrous impact of the loss of China on the Democratic party by adding, Loss of South Viet-Nam would stimulate bitter domestic controversies in the United States and would be seized upon by extreme elements to divide the country and harass the Administration.¹⁶

The essays that follow examine in detail the evolution of Vietnam policy under Kennedy and during the early years of the Johnson administration. I would add only one final way in which the broader Cold War helped shape that course—the impact of the successful outcome of the Cuban missile crisis.

Kennedy’s success in forcing Khrushchev to take the missiles out of Cuba in the fall of 1962 created a dangerous sense of American power. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote lyrically about Kennedy’s combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated, that dazzled the world. Those thirteen days in October, Schlesinger observed, gave the world—even the Soviet Union—a sense of American determination and responsibility in the use of power which, if sustained, might indeed become a turning point in the history of the relations between east and west.¹⁷ Zbigniew Brzezinski, then a member of the State Department’s Planning Council, boasted, The U.S. is today the only effective global military power in the world. The Soviet Union, he continued, lacked the military capacity to fight in Cuba, or in Vietnam.¹⁸

The Cuban missile crisis reinforced a trait that many observers felt characterized the Kennedy administration, what Thomas Paterson has termed a cult of toughness. The emphasis on boldness and activism received a boost from the Cuban crisis. The president, who feared he had failed to show Khrushchev that we can be as tough as he is at the Vienna summit meeting in 1961, finally felt he had demonstrated his courage and determination.¹⁹ It was only natural for the men who shaped Vietnam policy under both Kennedy and Johnson to believe in the efficacy of force, as demonstrated in the Cuban missile crisis. We had stood firm and the Soviets had given way. As Brian VanDeMark points out in Into the Quagmire, these advisers readily assumed that ‘controlled’ escalation would dissuade Ho Chi Minh in 1965 as surely as Nikita Khrushchev had been in 1962. He quotes Cyrus Vance as recalling,

We had seen the gradual application of force applied in the Cuban missile crisis, and had seen a very successful result. We believed that if this same gradual and restrained application of force were applied in . . . Vietnam, that one could expect the same kind of result; that rational people on the other side would respond to increasing military pressure and would therefore try and seek a political solution.²⁰

According to James Nathan, the so-called lessons of the Cuban missile crisis—the stress on national guts, superior force, presidential control of decision-making, and highly secretive crisis management—all contributed to the eventual escalation in Vietnam.²¹

Admirers of President Kennedy think the consequences of the Cuban missile crisis were much more benign. Sobered by the experience of going to the nuclear brink, they contend, he softened his rhetoric and began looking for ways to reach accommodation with the Soviet Union. In the oft-cited American University speech in June 1963 he asked the Russians to join him in new efforts to halt the arms race, saying, If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can make the world safe for diversity. Yet he did nothing after October 1962 to halt the continuing nuclear buildup, which gave the United States an enormous strategic advantage over the Soviet Union. In the speech he planned to