The architects of the Vietnam War knew it was doomed

IN HIS SPRAWLING, captivating 1972 masterpiece, “The Best and the Brightest”, the journalist David Halberstam asked the central question about America’s war in Vietnam: “What was it about the men, their attitudes, the country, its institutions and above all the era which had allowed this tragedy to take place?” They were “the best and the brightest”, after all. Why did it happen?

Halberstam’s answer, repeated by countless authors since, contained two parts: hubris and ignorance. American planners, presiding over the greatest military and economic power in the history of the world, believed that with the resources at their disposal, as well as their intellectual prowess and deep experience, they could wage and win the conflict. They were “swept forward” by faith in their own and their country’s invincibility. But they lacked a sense of history, as well as an understanding of their adversary and the obstacles that stood in the way of victory.

Robert McNamara, who as secretary of defence was one of the architects of the war, later offered substantial endorsement of Halberstam’s thesis. Writing in his 1995 memoir, “In Retrospect”, he lamented that he and other leaders were ignorant of Vietnamese history and of Ho Chi Minh’s nationalist motivations. They saw a monolithic communist threat where none existed, and in their arrogance failed to fully examine the stakes of the struggle and whether success was truly achievable at a reasonable cost. “If only we had known” became a kind of mantra for the latter-day McNamara.

It’s a tantalising notion, but one that is not supported by the evidence now accessible to historians. Even Halberstam’s and McNamara’s own accounts reveal a more complex picture than their overarching claims suggest: a picture pointing not to an overweening confidence on officials’ part, but to a bleak realism. America’s decision-makers were hardly experts on Vietnam and its history, but among themselves and behind closed doors they acknowledged that they were entering a deeply challenging environment, in which triumph was far from assured.

The extensive internal record is clear on this score. It shows the private misgivings of senior Washington officials throughout the years of heavy escalation. The sceptics included McNamara himself, and the two presidents he served: John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. From the time then-Congressman Kennedy visited Vietnam in 1951, during the height of the French-Indochina War, until his death in Dallas in 1963, he expressed doubts that Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary nationalist cause could be subdued by military means. Johnson—who ordered the “Americanisation” of the conflict in 1965, involving the commitment of major ground forces and sustained air power in order to preserve a non-communist South Vietnam—regularly wondered if the struggle could be won, and indeed whether the outcome really mattered.

“I don’t think it’s worth fighting for and I don’t think we can get out,” Johnson confided to McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, in a phone call in May 1964. “What in the hell is Vietnam worth to me?” In February 1965, at the start of Operation Rolling Thunder, which in due course would drop more bombs on North Vietnam than were dropped on Europe in the second world war, Johnson was downbeat: “Now we’re off to bombing these people,” he told McNamara. “I don’t think anything is going to be as bad as losing, and I don’t see any way of winning.”

A few days later, as the first American ground forces were set to disembark, a morose Johnson told Senator Richard Russell of Georgia: “[A] man can fight if he can see daylight down the road somewhere. But there ain’t no daylight in Vietnam. There’s not a bit.” To be sure, master politician that he was, Johnson could say different things to different people; he did not always use such despairing tones. But overall, it can fairly be said that Johnson’s position on Vietnam, from day one to the end, was one of doubt.

And McNamara? In June 1965, as the American military effort in South Vietnam ramped up, the defence secretary acknowledged to a senior British official that “none of us at the centre of things talk about winning a victory.”

This brings us back to Halberstam’s question: why did these men “allow the tragedy to take place”? Why did Kennedy, though he drew the line on ground troops, expand American military involvement in Vietnam substantially during his thousand days in the White House? Why did Johnson, when he could temporise no longer, take the plunge into a large-scale war?

A key part of the answer is that for both men, maintaining the course, through escalation if necessary, offered the path of least immediate resistance. They and their advisers had offered repeated public affirmations of South Vietnam’s importance to American security, and of the certainty of ultimate success. It made sense that they would be tempted to hang on, in the hope that the new military measures would work. It was about credibility—their nation’s, their party’s, their own. Though this posture speaks poorly for their political courage, it has a certain logic behind it. Then again, so did the sceptics’ reply: the credibility would face greater damage if, as seemed likely, America became entangled in a long conflict of questionable geostrategic value in far-off South-East Asia.

And so it would be. As more and more ground forces arrived in South Vietnam, North Vietnam answered with further deployments of its own. Escalation begat escalation.

Not until 1973, under President Richard Nixon—who maintained his own pattern of public bullishness and private foreboding—would America’s war in Vietnam finally draw to a close. More than 58,000 Americans lay dead, along with an estimated 3m Vietnamese, 2m of them civilians. Only later would the grim reality become fully clear: just because “the best and the brightest” could issue vows of the struggle’s importance, and of corners about to be turned, did not mean they believed them. ■