University of Virginia Library

Presidents Yield
To Vietnam Burden

not talk of self-determination
for the people of Vietnam. On
the contrary, he supported
Diem's resolve to ignore the
Geneva Conference provision
for all Vietnam elections
because, as he explained, "had
elections been held as of the
time of the fighting, possibly
80 per cent of the population
would have voted for the
Communist Ho Chi Minh as
their leader."

Kennedy Did Not Subscribe

Neither did President
Kennedy subscribe to the
self-determination myth. He
perceived something of the
complexity of the situation; a
strain of ambivalence runs
through most of his comments
on the war. In the end,
however, he accepted and
acted on the
Truman-Eisenhower notion
that the domino theory made
South Vietnam vital to
American interests. He was also
influenced by the circumstance
that "the best and the
brightest" of his advisers, to
use David Halberstam's apt
phrase, remained wedded to a
monolithic conception of
communism for some time
after the Soviet-Sino split was
obvious and for more than a
decade after the
Soviet-Yugoslav split was a
demonstrable fact. Saddest of
all, Kennedy was animated by
fear – fear that the loss of
Indochina, following the Bay
of Pigs fiasco and his personal
humiliation by Khrushchev at
Vienna, would destroy his
capacity to govern by inducing
a McCarthy-like "soft on
communism" reaction. As he
said in acquiescing in the
interventionist
recommendations of the
war hawks, Walt Rostow and
Gen. Maxwell Taylor,
Eisenhower was able to put the
blame on the French, but "I
can't take a 1954 defeat
today."

Johnson Rides Into Battle

President Johnson's record
majority in 1964 owed much
to the electorate's feeling that
Barry Goldwater would
convert the Indochinese
conflict into the major war
that Johnson had pledged by
implication to avoid; Johnson
could have withdrawn from
Indochina to little more than a
corporal's guard of protest
from the Republican right
wing. But partly because he
himself was a product of the
Cold War demonology and was
confident of America's
limitless capacity to do good,
partly because he projected his
own ego into the situation, he
rode into battle. "I am not
going to be the first President
to lose a war," he boldly
declared.

By Mr. Nixon's inauguration
in 1969, few informed
observers still believed in the
monolithic communism thesis
or still thought that control of
Vietnam had the remotest
relationship to the security of
the United States. Yet many
policy makers insisted that the
logical response to what was at
last recognized as a civil war
– total withdrawal forthwith –
would materially compromise
the geopolitical position of the
most powerful nation in the
world. There was also a
personal factor. Mr. Nixon, like
Mr. Johnson, was determined
not to be the first president to
lose a war.

Mr. Nixon's solution was to
defuse the militant, draft-prone
university students by
disengaging on the ground
while bringing the North
Vietnamese to bay by
escalating in the air. This
agonizing process lasted four
years, caused the death of
20,000 additional Americans,
and killed nobody knows how
many Vietnamese; by its end
Mr. Nixon had rained more
bombs on Indochina than the
Allies dropped on Hitler's
Germany in World War II. Out
of the holocaust came the
face-saving agreement of last
October. But then, prodded by
President Thieu, Mr. Nixon
violated what the authority on
Nuremberg, Gen. Telford
Taylor, terms the principle of
proportionality by instituting,
in Taylor's words, the
"wanton" Christmas bombings
for essentially "trivial
objectives.

War's Third Phase

As the war moves into its
third phase, those who deal in
processes, techniques and
marginal shifts in power will
doubtless say that the United
States retains a vital interest in
the latest settlement. That is
true only in the immediate
sense; it is no more in the long
range American interest to
impose its will on Indochina in
say, 1975 than it was in 1946.
Many analysts feel that the
first order of business
following the return of the
prisoners should be removal of
the bombers now poised on
Thailand. The second should
be the granting of amnesty to
those who refused to serve in a
war that was misguided in its
first phase and dishonorable in
its second.