Not Just a Crime But a Blunder

From the vantage point of 2001, aspects of the Vietnam saga seem surreal, but they churned and confounded American society for more than 25 years. “A Grand Delusion” is yet another exhaustively comprehensive indictment of the disastrous encounter between the United States and Vietnam, but its focus on the politics of the struggle between the Senate and the presidency provides a perspective different from most other accounts.

Robert Mann, a veteran aide to two senators, has written a Senate-insider’s book. It is a considerable achievement, albeit a depressing reminder of the compounded misjudgments of four presidents and the wholesale lies and illegalities of two. A primary feature of the book is the political tension over U.S. foreign and military policy beginning in the 1950s, and it delineates how domestic political decisions about these issues led to the country’s eventual full-scale military involvement in Vietnam. Mann seriously faults Congress for “abdicating [its] constitutional responsibilities regarding Vietnam,” but his analysis demonstrates that the legislative branch was really no match for the organized initiatives and manipulations of the executive branch, whose inherent advantages were, almost to the end, buttressed by a wide-spread public belief in Cold War fundamentals. These included the lethal corollary that, owing to the “loss” of China, severe political retribution awaited any new president who presided over the loss of any additional “free world” territory.

The first tendrils of American commitment to the problem in Vietnam appeared when the Truman administration, facing the menacing Soviet threat to Europe, decided to create NATO in 1949. The need for French participation and continental geography gave Paris decisive leverage to demand U.S. material support for its doomed colonial war in Indochina. The 1954 Geneva Conference was a major opportunity to settle the Indochina issue, but President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles were not prepared to oppose powerful segments in Congress or the media, which held that any concessions to “communism” were anathema. France faced the prospect of a military debacle and wanted out. Led by able British diplomacy, Russia and China agreed to join in a Big Power guarantee of a settlement based on a north-south partition of Vietnam and a commitment to hold all-Vietnam elections two years later. But Dulles persuaded Eisenhower not to sign, and the United States’ refusal led to a chain reaction of abdication by Russia, China, Britain and all other potential guarantors of the settlement. South Vietnam had been set adrift.

Vietnam was mostly on the back burner during the second Eisenhower administration. Media coverage was thin, and official reports routinely supported the efforts of the new prime minister of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, a Vietnamese nationalist who hated the French and the communists. Diem soon proved to be a political disaster, an implacable autocrat resistant to social reform who saw all opposition as subversive and was determined to suppress it.

President John F. Kennedy inherited a rapidly deteriorating situation. By 1961, Diem had created a police state, filling jails and camps with 65,000 people suspected of communist activities while demonstrating a total ignorance of economics and a total disinterest in political reform. Viet Cong guerrilla violence, supported by wider segments of the population, was becoming unmanageable, and there loomed the threat of a military coup by frustrated army leaders. Kennedy’s advisors wanted a radical shift from assistance to “limited partnership” involving U.S. participation in the planning and conduct of South Vietnamese offensive military operations. There were a few prescient voices in opposition: Undersecretary of State George Ball told Kennedy such a shift would mean that “within five years, we’ll have 300,000 men in the paddies and the jungles and never find them again.” The Senate majority leader, Mike Mansfield, warned the president that “South Vietnam ... could become quicksand for us .... It is not an American war.”

Torn by conflicting advice, Kennedy ended up hedging. Unable to force reform on Diem but refusing to authorize “combat” units, he increased the level of “military advisors” to 16,000. Mann writes that, like Truman and Eisenhower, Kennedy “firmly believed he lacked the political freedom to ignore” the domino theory involving China’s “perceived hegemonic lust for Southeast Asia.” But the author also cites the Mansfield papers and other sources to confirm Kennedy’s developing conviction that all U.S. forces would have to be withdrawn from Vietnam. “But I can’t do it until 1965-after I’m reelected,” the president told Mansfield. Even then, Kennedy was aware that such action risked a McCarthy-like firestorm: “I’ll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don’t care.”

The military coup that toppled Diem in 1963 (and killed him, contrary to U.S. expectations) created a large opportunity to reassess the entire enterprise, but Kennedy, who was killed just three weeks later, did not live to consider it. A further opportunity arose after Kennedy’s death, but an insecure President Lyndon B. Johnson was obsessed with the need to preserve continuity of policy and advisors. The advisors were now nearly unanimous in believing that only large-scale U.S. military intervention could save South Vietnam from communist takeover.

Johnson’s highly personal calculations led to convoluted actions. Aware that he could not afford to “lose” Vietnam, he was equally concerned to preserve the Great Society programs that were the heart of the legacy he cherished. In the summer of 1965, he thus embarked on a stealth escalation to 170,000 combat forces and a program of continuous bombing of North Vietnam, moves that carried a half-aware America far beyond material and advisory assistance to an American takeover of the war. At the same time, Johnson refused to seek new funding for the escalation, knowing that Congress would insist on reductions in his Great Society program. His posture was to pretend the war was not happening. When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, led by William Fulbright, opened public hearings on the war six months later, an outraged Johnson refused to allow any military representatives to testify. He also ordered the FBI to ascertain whether Sens. Fulbright, Wayne Morse and other dissenters were receiving information from communist sources. Mann writes, “By now the President’s paranoia ran amok.” Despite vehement public protest and a growing antiwar movement that started to destabilize American society, the escalation continued, accompanied by only halfhearted efforts to negotiate an end to the war. The United States’ bottom line was a refusal to accept any form of communist participation in the political life of South Vietnam. By mid-1968 there were 510,000 American military personnel in South Vietnam. The Tet offensive had wiped out the administration’s credibility, the war was dividing American society more corrosively than any event since the Civil War and Johnson had decided not to run for a second term.

A fascinating part of “A Grand Delusion” is Mann’s speculation that Sen. George McGovern would have been the strongest Democratic candidate in 1968. As the antiwar movement gathered and swelled in late 1966 to early 1967, McGovern emerged as the Senate’s most passionate spokesman. He had seen in Vietnamese hospitals young Americans “without legs or arms or faces or genitals.” His nine “indictments” of U.S. policy included “a distortion of history to justify our intervention in a civil conflict,” a gross “misleading of the American public” and “a serious loss of credibility.” But McGovern ducked the chance to be the nominee in 1968.

Mann argues that had McGovern entered the race, he “would have captured the almost unanimous support of the antiwar movement” and that Robert Kennedy, “a close associate, probably would not have run, thereby pitting the antiwar forces against Humphrey and Johnson.” Mann believes that had McGovern gained the nomination (‘by no means a certainty”), the violence at the Chicago convention would have been largely avoided and the Democrats would have run on a clear program to end the war. Mann does not say McGovern would have beaten Richard M. Nixon, but it is a fact that Hubert Humphrey (although severely compromised by his “shamelessly” fulsome support for Johnsonian policies he privately opposed) almost did. Four years later, when McGovern did get the Democratic nomination, it had become, in Mann’s words, “devalued currency.”

Mann reinforces earlier evidence that Nixon owed his 1968 election to his “cynical and deadly game” involving secret assurances to Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu, the last head of government in Saigon, conveyed through Anna Chennault, the Chinese widow of the leader of the Flying Tigers of World War II. Prior to the election, preliminary peace talks in Paris had finally reached the point of a possible deal: The United States would stop the bombing on good-faith assurances that serious negotiations would follow and would accept participation by the communist guerrilla movement in the peace talks and, by implication, in a proposed coalition government of South Vietnam. The Chennault message to Thieu was blunt: You will get a better deal under Nixon: no bombing halts and continued heavy pressure on Hanoi. Thieu balked at the Paris proposals. Johnson, who knew of the Nixon ploy from CIA wiretaps, called it “treason” but could not reveal the wiretaps, which were illegal.

Fulbright warned Nixon not to escalate and received categorical assurances. “Just give me a year,” he told the senator. In fact, Nixon was implacably opposed to a rapid withdrawal from Vietnam, believing it would imperil his political position and perceiving the antiwar movement as a “liberal conspiracy to destroy him.” He deliberately widened the war, ordering the secret bombing of Cambodia and major incursions into Cambodia and Laos. In the unprecedented public outrage that followed, he invoked “the Silent Majority” against the “peace at any price” crowd and argued that failure to use blunt power would have shown its enemies that the United States was “a pitiful, helpless giant.” He taunted antiwar protesters, telling them they would have no effect on his actions. Even when polls showed that 72% of the public wanted a deadline for ending the war, and the number of passionate antiwar senators increased dramatically, no majority in Congress could be found to shoulder that responsibility. The Senate floor was “littered with vanquished antiwar amendments.” An increasingly manic Nixon pushed his executive powers to the limit, and there proved to be no countervailing force in the political system or the body politic. No one could stop him. In early 1971, Newsweek observed that “Nixon appeared to have a free hand to test his theory that the war can be ended by expanding it.”

What kept Congress and the public off balance was a combination of deceptive reports on the alleged progress toward “peace with honor” and a continuing draw-down of U.S. ground forces. Nixon had taken office with a promise to end the fighting, but four years and 20,000 additional American casualties later, he was still pushing the concept of “Vietnamization,” a strategy not to end the war but to wage it as long as possible with South Vietnamese ground forces and U.S. air power. Mann labels Nixon’s conduct of the war a ruse-’a retreat disguised as an offensive’-but a success in domestic political terms. By late 1972, the war “had all but disappeared as a major topic on the nightly television news.” The fighting and dying continued, but “the illusion of a rapidly vanishing war” assured Nixon’s reelection.

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Had Nixon avoided descent into the bottomless paranoia that led to the treacherous breaches of law that came to be known as Watergate, Mann suggests, he would have finished out his second term without a major scandal, able perhaps to further postpone the “day of communist victory,” but not to avoid it. Tragedies like Vietnam, Mann concludes, occur when presidents “captivated by their grand delusions” pursue war policies “without the informed support of Congress and the American people.” His book shows us that this continues to be an inherent risk even in an advanced democracy, presumably replete with checks and balances.