The Truth About Vietnam

And she is not alone. Sad to say, FitzGerald’s view of Vietnam is the conventional wisdom today, shared by academics and the media and popularized in such movies as Apocalypse Now. It’s a view that asserts America succumbed to mindless anti-communism and intervened in a war — a civil war, really — that it couldn’t win, even while using excessive force, and wound up humiliating itself and killing fifty-eight thousand GIs and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese in vain. Notice how closely this matches the leftist critique of the late 1960s. That’s what I mean by frozen in time.

Likewise, the dissenting conservative view of Vietnam. It, too, is a relic of the war years, blaming President Johnson and his aides in Washington, and the later secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, for micromanaging the war and limiting the military’s ability to pursue a winning strategy. For a quarter century now, conservative politicians have feasted on this theme. President Reagan, for one, declared in 1981 that soldiers in Vietnam “who obeyed their country’s call and fought as bravely and well as any Americans in our history [were] denied permission to win.” And President Bush vowed pointedly in 1990 to let his military commanders, not the White House, decide tactics in the Gulf war.

Two schools of thought: both dinosaurs, both wrong. And what’s amazing is that no revisionist school has come forth — until 1999. Now, Michael Lind’s Vietnam: The Necessary War and Lewis Sorley’s A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam make a persuasive case for a fresh and different view of Vietnam.

Each does so by looking at the war through a new prism. Lind, who made his name as a journalist by ostentatiously abandoning conservatism, says: “I examine the Vietnam War in light of the end of the Cold War, from a centrist perspective more sympathetic to American Cold War policymakers than that of their critics on the left and the right.” He also leans heavily on writings and newly disclosed documents from North Vietnam. Sorley, an ex-Army officer and CIA official, views the war from the perspective of American military officers. He spent more than a year listening to 455 tapes of meetings and conversations at U.S. military headquarters in Saigon during General Creighton Abrams’s tenure as commander from mid-1968 to 1972.

Lind and Sorley don’t see eye to eye on everything. But they mostly agree, and if we put their books together to synthesize the complete revisionist view, we discover four underappreciated truths about the Vietnam war:

* America was right to intervene militarily, for the worldwide consequences would have been far worse for the non-Communist world if it hadn’t.

* General William Westmoreland’s strategy of using massive force to “search and destroy” and maximize the enemy’s death toll was bound to fail, and did.

* Not only was the war winnable, but it had actually been won by sometime in 1970, as the strategy of Westmoreland’s successor, General Abrams — emphasizing control of territory, not enemy dead — all but snuffed out the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese as major threats in South Vietnam.

* The war was ultimately lost not because of limits on the American military but because American support for South Vietnam was removed.

Before Lind and Sorley, there were hints of revisionism, but not many. The late Peter Braestrup, who covered Vietnam for the Washington Post, deconstructed the media’s claim that the Tet Offensive in January 1968 was a victory for the Communists. Quite the contrary, Braestrup asserted in his two-volume study, Big Story, in 1977. And he showed in detail how the American press, Walter Cronkite included, got the story wrong.

But rather than initiating a wave of revisionism, Braestrup touched off a squall of complaints and alibis by wounded reporters. So far as I know, only two reporters, neither an American, have lamented whatever aid and comfort their writings gave to Hanoi. William Shawcross, a British journalist, wrote in 1993: “Those of us who were opposed to the American effort in Indochina should be humbled by the scale of suffering by the Communist victors.” And in the late 1970s, Frenchman Jean Lacouture, a biographer of Ho Chi-Minh, admitted “his shame for having contributed to the installation of one of the most oppressive regimes history has ever known.”

In his aptly titled 1989 book Lost Victory, ex-CIA director William Colby offered a close approximation of the revisionist view. He argued that “on the ground in South Vietnam, the war had been won” after the Viet Cong were scattered and a massive North Vietnamese assault was repulsed in 1972. But Colby, having run the “pacification” program in South Vietnam and worked closely with General Abrams and U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, was seen as a special pleader.

He did, however, make a telling point about writers on Vietnam. “Most of the literature on the war essentially stops at 1968, a full seven years before the end,” he wrote. By doing so, Colby commented later, chroniclers of the war present a story “similar to what we would know if histories of World War II stopped before Stalingrad, Operation Torch in North Africa and Guadalcanal in the Pacific.” He faulted Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie, a riveting biography of American official John Paul Vann, for devoting only seventy of its eight hundred pages to the period after mid-1968. Vann himself thought the war had been turned around during those years, a contention Sheehan dismissed.

In this new revisionism of 1999, however, Sorley handles the practical, and Lind the geopolitical. Under Westmoreland from 1964 to 1968, Sorley writes, the war went disastrously. Not only was his strategy of luring the enemy into large battles and stressing body counts a failure, but Westmoreland also got little out of the South Vietnamese military. He elbowed them out of the way, thus “abdicating his assigned role as the senior adviser to those forces and essentially stunting their development for a crucial four years.” Westmoreland returned to the Pentagon shortly after the Tet Offensive, and his strategy of attrition warfare was wisely abandoned.

Under Abrams, search-and-destroy was replaced by clear-and-hold. “The object was not destruction but control, and in this case particularly control of the population,” Sorley says. In other words, take back the areas seized by the Communists and secure others, like Saigon, threatened by their rockets and sappers. A stepped-up pacification program helped, “establishing a continuous government presence in rural villages and hamlets so as to bring security and economic and social benefits to the people.” So did the Phoenix program of eradicating the local Viet Cong “infrastructure,” meaning the part-time cadres. So did efforts to stem the flow of supplies from North Vietnam down the Ho Chi-Minh trail.

But what really worked was Vietnamization, the reliance on Saigon’s forces as American troops were gradually brought home. The “draw-down,” Sorley notes, “was, contrary to many later assertions, wholly acceptable to the U.S. command.” Abrams “always maintained that the problem was not lack of manpower, but how the existing manpower was used.” He never requested more troops or protested scheduled withdrawals. In fact, Abrams felt American troops had “helped too much,” retarding the Vietnamese. Anyway, “by late 1969 almost the entire population [of South Vietnam] was thought to be living under substantially secure conditions,” according to Sorley, and by early 1970 the “crossover point” had been reached. The enemy was losing more soldiers than it could replace, and the South Vietnamese army was able to turn back their advances.

“There came a time when the war was won,” says Sorley. “The fighting wasn’t over, but the war was won. This achievement can probably best be dated in late 1970, after the Cambodian incursion.” In those days, Colby found he could travel around the Mekong Delta at night. He took the British ambassador on a tour outside Hue in an unarmed jeep. Sir Robert Thompson, the British anti-terrorism expert, declared Saigon safer than most American cities. And Abrams quipped: “I think President Thieu is freer to move around in his country than President Nixon is in his.”

The press missed most of this, Sorley writes, preferring to cover battles:

Maybe it wasn’t exciting enough, maybe it wasn’t graphic enough for television, maybe it was too difficult to comprehend or to explain, maybe it ran counter to preconceived expectations or even wishes. . . . Hamlets in which the population remained secure, refugees who were able to return to their villages, distribution of land to the peasantry, miracle rice harvests, roads kept open for farm-to-market traffic, and the election and training of village governments were less dramatic than whatever fighting still went on, but they were also infinitely more important in terms of how the war was going.

Soon enough, the victory was thrown away, first by the 1972 peace settlement that allowed North Vietnam to leave 160,000 troops in South Vietnam, then by the refusal of Washington to retaliate against Hanoi’s continued infiltration in violation of the agreement, finally by Congress’s decision to cut off all aid to South Vietnam. The Soviet Union and China proved more faithful allies to North Vietnam than the United States was to South Vietnam. The South Vietnamese had demonstrated they could meet the military challenge, notably in repulsing Hanoi’s sweeping 1972 offensive, but only if America “provided the continuing airpower, naval forces, logistics, and financial support.” With that taken away, the South Vietnamese army collapsed.

Abrams and his aides often talked about South Korea as the model for South Vietnam. There, two American divisions stayed behind after the North Koreans were driven out, enough to deter another attack and allow South Korea to flourish. Lind, too, is attracted to the Korea analogy. The Korean and South Vietnamese wars were similar, he says, “but the United States had left tens of thousands of troops to guard South Korea from the Communist North. In contrast, the United States abandoned its weak South Vietnamese ally to defend itself.” If it was rational to leave troops in Korea, where they remain today, then it was to leave a contingent in South Vietnam as well, Lind says. Hard to argue with that.

Lind makes a larger point: In the context of the Cold War, the United States had no choice but to intervene in Vietnam. Otherwise, it would sacrifice its “credibility as a military power and reliable ally” to both enemies and allies. “The danger,” Lind writes, “was that if the United States were perceived as lacking in military capacity, political resolve, or both, the Soviet Union and/or China and their proxies would act more aggressively, while U.S. allies, including important industrial democracies such as West Germany and Japan, would be inclined to appease the Communist great powers.”

The proof of Lind’s point came after South Vietnam fell in 1975. The Soviet Union and its friends were emboldened “to engage in more assertive and reckless imperialism throughout the world.” The Soviets transported Cuban troops to fight in Angola and Ethiopia, and they invaded Afghanistan themselves. Nicaragua fell to the Communist Sandinistas. And the West German tendency to appease the Soviets grew. In short, there was a pro-Soviet realignment globally, short-lived but real. “The victory of Moscow’s Vietnamese clients gave the declining Soviet regime a boost in prestige and morale for much of a decade,” Lind insists.

Vietnam: The Necessary War is marred by several strange theories. Lind says, for instance, we needed an American Charles de Gaulle to pull U.S. troops out of Vietnam in the late 1960s before the level of casualties eroded domestic support for waging the Cold War in other regions. He absurdly reduces America’s political struggle over Vietnam to a dispute between “the Greater New England anti-interventionist bloc” and the promilitary South.

But Lind cleverly takes apart a series of leftist myths about the Vietnam war. Was Ho Chi-Minh a patriot who just happened to be a Marxist? Lind recounts his record as a doctrinaire Stalinist who murdered non-Communist leaders and dissidents. And Ho was no Tito either with whom American leaders “missed opportunities” to forge an early alliance. This is a favorite notion of former defense secretary Robert McNamara, who met with Hanoi officials in 1997. Despite McNamara’s claims, there’s no evidence North Vietnam would ever have permitted a coalition government to last indefinitely in Saigon.

My fear is that the revisionist school of Sorley and Lind, as powerful as their case is, will be obscured by the spate of books on Vietnam that continue to be published and reliably take the conventional view. The worst of the lot is Reporting Vietnam, the Library of America’s lavishly praised two volumes of writings by correspondents who covered the war. Reporting Vietnam contains, in all, 113 mostly negative pieces by more than eighty writers, including Frances FitzGerald. In the second volume, covering 1969 to 1975, only a piece by Peter Kann of the Wall Street Journal suggests South Vietnam might be making progress in the war. Kann, now the Wall Street Journal’s publisher, is more famous for a piece in 1992 chastising Bill Clinton for reiterating his college-age view that American intervention was wrong. Hindsight, Kann noted, should have taught Clinton “who were the good guys and who were the bad guys” and that America’s “painful Vietnam experience bought the time” for the foundation of the free markets and political freedoms that have since appeared across most of Asia.

But Clinton, like FitzGerald and so many others, hasn’t learned a thing.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.