U.S. History
Mr. Detjen
CWD Class Notes, Prof. Mike Ruddy, SLU 1998, “U.S. Foreign Policy, 1945-1990”
Vietnam (1954-1975)
1. Introduction and Overview
2. Truman and Vietnam
--Ho Chi Minh
Vietminh
--shift from FDR’s (anti-) colonial policy
France and ERP/NATO
--impact of the Korean War
3. Eisenhower
--Geneva Conference and Accords (1954)
--Ngo Dinh Diem
4. Kennedy
--Special Forces/advisors and troop commitments
--protests in South Vietnam
Self-immolations of Buddhist monks
--Diem assassination
Introduction
Vietnam, and U.S. involvement therein, must be viewed not from the perspective of the escalation and failures of the 1960s and 1970s, but from a post-WWII Cold War context. As with the Cold War generally, there are different ideas on the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of the beginnings of the war in Vietnam. In fact, the background and chronology have long roots dating to the end of the Second World War and evolving with direct ties to the 1960s. And despite our post-1970s/Watergate viewpoint with its vantage point of 20/20 hindsight, for the first two decades of U.S. interest/involvement (1945-1965), Vietnam fit the traditional Cold War context of the U.S. as a great power which could influence any situation anywhere/everywhere in the world vs. the Soviet Union with its monolithic, expansionist Communism.
In 1963 almost no Americans even knew where Vietnam was on a map, despite a decade + of commitment. That is, until the mid-1960s, Vietnam as of secondary importance, hardly on the American public’s radar; U.S. policy toward Vietnam was not based on what was happening in Vietnam, but how it fit in with the global context of U.S. Cold War perspectives and interests.
Finally, in opposition to D. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, which describes a sense of stumbling and bumbling wherein the U.S. was deluded/blinded into a series of mistakes, it is George Herring’s, America’s Longest War: America and Vietnam, 1953-1975, thesis/theme that the U.S. was involved not blindly, but deliberately, consciously. According to Herring, U.S. presidents/leaders dating to Truman in the immediate aftermath of World War II and through IKE, JFK, LBJ, and RMN, faced with choices and information on both sides, in each case made a specific, rational choice which in turn narrowed/limited the options of his successor. Thus, though not involved blindly, each president had increasingly limited options; there was lots of deliberate rationality. The “blindness” was arguably with respect to the long-term impacts. From Truman onward, with rational, if increasingly limited options/reasons for decisions, each administration limited the freedom of choice for he who followed.
In sum, three (3) general statements about Vietnam may be said to hold true from World War II through the mid-1960s and Johnson’s escalation policy. First, the U.S. looked at Vietnam within a Cold War geopolitical framework wherein the U.S. was an unbeaten great power at odds in a bipolar world with the monolithic, expansionist Communism of the Soviet Union.
Second (and related to One) is the idea that Vietnam itself was a secondary consideration with respect to U.S. policy. Anti-communism was the bedrock with less and less/no consideration of why communism might be a threat to the U.S. and/or so domestically popular. That is, Vietnam was just another case of Moscow’s expansion (China, “lost” to communism in 1949, was generally not considered. State Department experts, known as “China hands,” and dating to Truman and the immediate aftermath of WWII, focused on indigenous issues between Mao and Chiang Kai-Shek, but by the 1950s were caught up in McCarthyism and either resigned or were drummed out of State, resulting in a vacuum of understanding about Asia, generally). And policy makers were left with a fear of dominoes and the perception of success vis a vis the limited war in Korea.
The third generality is that the series of decisions to be in Vietnam at all, and then to escalate U.S. involvement were the results of conscious, rational, deliberate choices. In opposition to Halberstam’s “best and brightest” stumbling and bumbling blindly into chaos, George Herring’s thesis/focus was that when each administration was presented with choices and alternatives, a rational choice was made to follow a particular path, an assumed advantageous course of action, though the ultimate effect/impact was to limit the choices available to each successive administration.
Truman and Vietnam
Throughout World War II, Franklin Roosevelt had—at least rhetorically—supported the principle of national self-determination as expressed in the Atlantic Charter. And he had perceived the end of European colonial rule over the Third World, notably Britain in India and Burma, France in Indo-China, and everybody in Africa. But FDR was dead before the end of the war and the case can be made that he had at least acquiesced to the notion of spheres of influence, especially on the Russian periphery. He was succeeded by Harry Truman, who faced Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam.
Ho Chi Minh was an ardent anti-colonialist. Educated in France, and editor of the Communist newspaper La Paria, Ho was in opposition to a century of oppression by French colonial rule. During the war he was supported by the OSS against the Japanese, and there’s evidence that at the end of the war he tried to make contact with Truman, in fact wrote several letters, but he got no response.
Query: How did Ho Chi Minh fit in? Was he a communist? A nationalist? Both? To what extent either? According to David Halberstam, Ho: A Biography, he liked power, regardless of the ideology. He was a nominal communist with its people-oriented ideology. He was a nationalist insofar as that meant an opposition to colonialism or outside rule of any kind, whether French or (historically, for a thousand years) Chinese. A quote attributed to him, “It’s better to sniff French dung for a while than to eat Chinese dung forever,” reflects the 1000-year history of Chinese intervention in Vietnamese affairs.
Ho Chi Minh was a symbol of opposition to outside interference, and was therefore appealing to both North and South Vietnamese. He was the leader of the Viet Minh, a revolutionary body with very strong Communist influence, but which was nevertheless an eclectic group of communists, anti-colonialists, Catholics, and Buddhists.
At the end of WWII, the Japanese were driven out; their control was over and their attempted “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” in ruins. So, apparently was the U.S. commitment to national self-determination. In the 2 to 3 years after the war, the French re-established a colonial government and influence with the subsequent re-emergence of indigenous civil unrest against the French by the Viet Minh. At the time, Truman needed French support in Europe for NATO and the Marshall Plan, so we see the first (a la George Herring) conscious, deliberate, rational choice on the part of the Truman administration as the U.S. shifted from FDR’s anti-colonial, pro-national self-determination policy to support of the re-establishment of French colonial rule.
Query: Why? Rhetorically, in justification, Ho Chi Minh was a communist and therefore his efforts were de facto (perceived as) Soviet-directed. Even more important was the then pre-eminent focus/concern with Europe in the immediate postwar years. The U.S. had the choice to end colonial rule or to support the French against the communist Ho Chi Minh in an era when the primary focus of the U.S. was on Europe, and when the U.S. needed French support there. Thus, despite the growing problem in Vietnam with its anti-colonial civil unrest, Europe was in real and immediate need with Germany in ruins, Stalin looming, and Great Britain and France needed/integral for the Marshall Plan and NATO. To forestall any break and to appease the French as the U.S. moved to set up strong, solid, anti-communism in Europe, the Truman administration supported the French against Ho Chi Minh in then far-off, distant Vietnam. The U.S. feared French retaliation against NATO if no U.S. support in Vietnam, and it would take a couple of years for “containment” to move beyond the periphery of Europe.
Initially, U.S. aid was “under the table;” some of the Marshall Plan monies were diverted to Vietnam. But from 1950 and the “Police Action” in Korea, with its attendant fear of dominos falling, U.S. aid was more direct. By 1954 the U.S. was providing almost 80% of the French effort against the Viet Minh. Such was the first rational choice. That is, in terms of the impact of the Korean War (1950-1953) on the issue of rational choices with respect to U.S. support of the re-advent of French colonialism, the Korean conflict served to widen the U.S. focus out of Europe to include Asia and the world. The U.S. not only needed French support in Europe, but also offered increased economic assistance in Vietnam so that, by 1954, the U.S. was underwriting 78% of the French effort there.
Eisenhower, the Geneva Accords, and Diem
The second rational choice came during the Eisenhower presidency in the aftermath of the 1954 Geneva Conference. President in 1953, Ike faced a challenge within months. The French had been fighting the Viet Minh since 1946, but after 8 years they had little to show for it (a mirror/precursor of the U.S. experience?) except lots of costs—financial, political, domestic—and pressure at home to end the commitment. By late 1953 the French stronghold at Dien Bien Phu was surrounded and besieged. Defeat was imminent. The French called for U.S. aid, and there was some brief discussion of the use of “tactical” nuclear weapons, though Ike quickly dismissed the idea.
The French were looking for a way to get out of the war with honor intact. The Geneva Conference was the answer, with delegates from France, Vietnam, Russia, and China. The U.S. sent observers (John Foster Dulles pointedly did not shake hands with the Chinese delegation), but played no official role; it took no legal part in the proceedings. The terms of the Geneva Accords included: (1) elections to be held in 1956 in both the northern and southern parts of the country to enable the Vietnamese people to determine a single leader over a united country; (2) respect for Vietnam’s territorial integrity, which meant no foreign occupation, troops, or bases; and (3) a temporary division of the country at the 17th Parallel (shades of Korea), a military demarcation line (DMZ) which was specifically not a political or territorial boundary. The division did not create two countries, but a cease-fire zone as a precursor to the settling of political divisions; the intention was a temporary division as the Viet Minh retired to Hanoi and Bao Dai, the puppet emperor established by the French and notorious playboy in Paris, moved to Saigon in the South.
The French saw the Geneva Accords as a way out—a way to get troops out of Dien Bien Phu immediately and then a gradual, orderly withdrawal of its colonial presence from the South. But the United States, with its geo-political perception of a global and expansionist Soviet communist threat, stepped in to replace the French.
Bao Dai had appointed Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic, an anti-colonialist, and a virulent anti-communist with some links to French colonials, to head the area in South Vietnam. Diem was a Catholic in a primarily Buddhist nation, but his biggest credential as far as the Americans were concerned was as an anti-communist. By 1955, the U.S. persuaded Bao Dai to appoint Diem as head of the government. The United States had replaced the French and supported Diem as the 1956 called-for elections were approaching. Unfortunately for the anti-communist Americans, the reality of the situation was that Ho Chi Minh, whether nationalist or communist, was the only person with universal indigenous support, and it was a certainty that he would win the election. U.S. thinking was that rigged elections were probable with Ho in control in the North, and he also had a strong following in the South.
The second conscious decision was that since the U.S. was not a signatory to the Geneva Accords, and since Diem was provisional/interim head of the government at that time, there would be no elections. Ho Chi Minh won decisively in the North. No elections were held in the South.
Throughout the Eisenhower years the U.S. provided some impressive economic support to Diem. The Mekong Delta, for example, South of Saigon, was the richest rice-producing area in Asia and the U.S. sent lots of money to increase production. Ike also pressured Diem, whose government was not at all democratic, to reform, but to no avail (a la Syngman Rhee of South Korea). Diem’s was a very corrupt government, and with his brother as head of the security forces, they rooted out all opposition groups, including Buddhists, and established some impressive Swiss bank accounts. By the end of the Eisenhower administration in 1960, there were 8-900 military advisors in South Vietnam.
Kennedy and “Flexible Response”
John Kennedy, also a “cold warrior” who recognized the Soviet threat, initiated the policy of “flexible response” which involved increased funding for other options, including covert operations and Special Forces/ Green Berets. He was aware of the threats against the Diem government and increased the U.S. military commitment to Vietnam so that by the end of the Kennedy administration (his death in November, 1963) there were 16-17,000 “advisors;” that is, not combat troops but Special Forces units with a training and counter-insurgence responsibility, an important distinction in diplomacy. The commitment deepened.
But Kennedy was also increasingly disenchanted with the Diem government and the latter’s resistance to reform. From 1961 the self-immolation of Buddhist monks in Saigon streets as they protested against Diem and which were played out on American TV, even as Madame Nhu, the wife of Diem’s brother, was quoted as saying/referring to the suicides as “a Buddhist barbecue,” a reflection of the callous ruthlessness of the Diem government. Kennedy was increasingly concerned, and by 1963 the reality of no forthcoming reforms from a corrupt and nepotistic Diem administration, coupled with an ineffectiveness to resist Ho Chi Minh’s efforts led to the third rational choice: when Diem was assassinated by South Vietnamese generals under U.S. aegis/ acceptance/ knowledge of the coup.
The assassination/coup took place on the night of November 1, 1963, when the U.S. had said, “we won’t support you generals actively, but we won’t get in your way.” With the caveat that we don’t yet have access to CIA or NSC documents for confirmation (all governments seal many official documents for periods of time—25 to 100 years, depending on their sensitivity—to allow time and passions to elapse before they are available for historical analysis) Kennedy probably wanted/expected Diem overthrown and exiled, but he was killed by the Vietnamese military (after he was allowed to take communion) outside a church. Kennedy is reported to have been visibly shaken upon learning about the murder, and he himself was dead 3 weeks later.
Vietnam was in the midst of turmoil just at the same time that LBJ faced a tumultuous domestic agenda—the Great Society “war on poverty”—in the United States.
1. Tonkin Gulf Incident (1964)
--controversy
--resolution
--significance
2. LBJ and conduct of the war
--limited war
--guns and butter
--military and political “responsibility”
3. Growing opposition
--collapse of Cold War consensus
--economic problems
--credibility gap
4. Tet Offensive (January 1968)
Larry Berman, “Lyndon B. Johnson’s Tragic Decision to Escalate,” from ibid, Planning a Tragedy: The
Americanization of the War in Vietnam (1982), excerpted in Paterson, ed., Major Problems in American
Foreign Relations Vol. 2, 4/e, p. 555-564.
In an article excerpted from his Planning a Tragedy, Berman asserts that there was lots of confusion and disagreement among LBJ’s advisors and analysts, and posits that Johnson must bear the responsibility for a decision that resulted in a personal and national tragedy. Berman’s focus is the July 1965 decision to increase the number of U.S. troops in Vietnam from 75,000 to 125,000 (and more as required by General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam). Berman asserts that though considerable time and effort was taken to consider dissenting views, in fact both LBJ and his advisors came to the table with 20 years of intellectual baggage about Soviet-directed aggressive communism, and as “anti-communism” was elevated to the status of policy, it was too generally, too indiscriminately, and too simplistically applied; the debate was over how to save the South Vietnamese government, not why or whether it was worth saving. Berman also asserts that LBJ’s first priority was his domestic Great Society agenda, and that the escalation bought much needed time to keep the ball rolling on the domestic legislation.