"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War. Tom Burns

ten).14 As stated above, by 1950, the official policy of the US government on Indochina, as stated in NSC 64, declared that the Communists’ war was “one phase of anticipated plans to seize all of Southeast Asia,” and recommended that all practicable measures be taken to prevent further expansion.15 As a response to the French military defeat by the Viet Minh forces at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Eisenhower publicly invoked the Domino Theory, which would be cited then and thereafter as signifying the global danger of other countries falling to Communism—a predictable tragedy that only firm American intervention could prevent.

      The argument about when the war actually began is nicely reflected in a passage from Michael Herr’s Dispatches:

You couldn’t find two people who agreed about when it began, how could you say when it began going off? Mission intellectuals like 1945 as the reference date; if you saw far back as War II and the Japanese occupation you were practically a historical visionary. ‘Realists’ said that it began for us in 1961, and the common run of Mission folk insisted on 1965, post-Tonkin Resolution, as though all the killing eJthat had gone before wasn’t really war.”16

Politically, the US engagement in Vietnam may be said to have begun with the division of the country. With the signing of the Geneva accords on July 21, 1954, the country was split into what was to be regarded as two military zones along the 17th parallel, to be administered by two civilian governments: the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) to the north, and what was then called the “State of Vietnam” in the south. The military forces pertaining to both sides were to regroup north and south of this line after the signing of the agreement, and nationwide elections were to be held within a two-year time period to decide who would govern the entire country.17 The US refused to sign the agreement, thereby undermining its effectiveness, because it was thought that Ho Chi Minh, who was widely perceived as the leader opposed to foreign occupation, would win the elections. Responsibility for maintaining order belonged to the signatories of the armistice: the DRV in the north and the French in the south. Three months before the deadline for holding the elections, however, the French forces pulled out, in effect turning over political power in the south to the anti-Communist regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. Dulles had, in any case, already begun bypassing the French and dealing directly with Diem.18

A hot war erupted when Diem, encouraged by the Americans, declared the southern part of the country the independent Republic of South Vietnam (1955). The guerrilla forces of the NLF in the south thereupon devoted themselves to undermining Diem’s regime. The US sent military advisors, civilian aid workers, and a great deal of money to South Vietnam to aid the southern regime in repressing the opposition in a series of actions that were justified and approved of at the time as part of a praiseworthy effort to help preserve the freedom of the new nation by repelling a supposed Communist invasion from the north. It is surprising to learn from the Pentagon Papers that the US military was initially opposed to sending troops to Vietnam. As the Joint Chiefs of Staff advised: “Indochina is devoid of decisive military objectives and the allocation of more than token U.S. armed forces to that area would be a serious diversion of limited U.S. capabilities,”19 a realistic assessment compared to the wishful thinking of the American civilian officials who would prevail.

In short, the US government gave up Franklin D. Roosevelt’s declared opposition to European colonialism toward the end of World War II for a policy of what would be called the “containment” of Soviet expansionism.20 Note that this expansion was assumed to be directed by Moscow, even in Third World countries like Vietnam that were not controlled by it. Every US president in the half century from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan championed and implemented some form of this policy, most materially those who held office during the war—John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon.

In reply to speculation after the assassination of Kennedy (November 1963) that he would have called a halt to the war, Heydrick Smith, writing on the Kennedy years, concludes that in fact the president “transformed the ‘limited-risk gamble’ of the Eisenhower administration into a ‘broad commitment’ to prevent Communist domination of South Vietnam,” often by secret measures that concealed from the American public the extent of the US role there. The US had not signed the Geneva accords but had promised not to undermine them. The expansion of military personnel, the sending of 400 Special Forces troops to South Vietnam as military advisors, however, was only the first breach of the Geneva agreement. This force was run by the CIA rather than the regular military so that “it was possible to handle these troops covertly,” and the number of advisors soon rose to 16,000.21 Smith adds that specific measures that were not disclosed included the beginning of a “covert warfare campaign in North Vietnam.”22

In his “bear any burden in the defense of liberty” 1961 inaugural address, Kennedy reiterated presidential guarantees of the cause, and the speech had considerable influence on the nation’s idealistic youth. The president saw Vietnam as a “test case” of the nation’s determination to maintain its commitments.23 His civilian advisors, drawn from the country’s intellectual and corporate elite, “the best and the brightest” in David Halberstam’s ironic words, scorned the accumulated knowledge and experience of the academic and government experts on Asia, believing in the superiority of their own class and education to make the right decisions.

John Kenneth Galbraith has asserted, however, that this Harvard-educated power elite knew nothing about the world, “ours or theirs,” believing that it was enough to know the “difference between a Communist and an Anti-Communist” without regarding the changing nuances of history and by clinging to the ideology of the Cold War that was still the prevailing line of thinking in US foreign policy in the 1960s.24 The rabid anti-Communist McCarthyism of the early 1950s had not completely died and still had a major influence on the thought and policies of politicians of both parties, particularly the Democrats, who felt especially vulnerable to attacks on their patriotism for being (as the expression went) “soft on Communism.” On the other hand, most Vietnamese perceived the Viet Minh, their leader Ho Chi Minh, and later the NLF, as liberators from a series of foreign oppressors: first, the French, then the Japanese, again the French, and eventually the Americans.

After Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, President Lyndon Johnson would give continuity to his policies by retaining the former administration’s key figures—Dean Rusk as Secretary of State, Robert McNamara as Secretary of Defense, and McGeorge Bundy as National Security Council advisor—men who thought that the expanded global role of the US had increased the importance of holding the line in Indochina.25 If the containment of Communism had worked in Europe, where internationally recognized spheres of influence were established after World War II, it was mistaken to try to extend that policy to Asia, where the specter of Red China sent out more tremors. Besides, holding the line in Southeast Asia was based on the mistaken assumption that Communism—which was not only a political system, but also a set of practices, a creed, and an ideology—could be contained militarily. Even if that were possible without another world war, it would probably have been counter-productive at the time. The threat perceived as embodied in China was not so much military as political and cultural.26

      The implementation of US policy was carried out with the arrival of civilian and military advisory and support personnel in southern Vietnam.