What Vietnam Teaches Us

Bundy successfully managed the legacy of America's postwar policy in Europe and toward the Soviet Union. Where he failed was in extending to Southeast Asia the policies that reconstructed Europe and eventually won the cold war. The difficulty was that Southeast Asia presented a different strategic problem. In Europe, governmental institutions had survived the ravages of the Second World War. The threats they faced were to their economic expectations—compounded by the Soviet troops along their borders. The Marshall Plan took care of the first threat; NATO addressed the second.

None of these conditions existed in South Vietnam. The dividing line in Vietnam was technically a demilitarized zone never accepted as an international frontier by Hanoi, which was attempting to undermine governmental institutions by guerrilla warfare. In this war without front lines, military containment took on a different meaning. In Europe, there were established states, the legitimacy of whose governments was firmly established; in South Vietnam, there was no legacy of a state at all. Governmental institutions had to be created while under constant military attack. In Europe, the basic challenge was territorial integrity; in Southeast Asia, it was governmental legitimacy.

The new Kennedy administration paid lip service to this distinction, but never solved how to act on it. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations had slowly increased the American commitment in South Vietnam. By the end of the Eisenhower administration, Hanoi had committed its forces in all countries of Indochina. During the transition period, Eisenhower had told the president-elect that if North Vietnamese infiltration continued, American combat forces should be sent to Laos.

The Kennedy administration accepted the conventional wisdom regarding the issues; it rejected the strategy. Like its predecessors of both parties, it assumed containment to be indivisible and the domino effect of the collapse of South Vietnam to be a kind of natural law. As described by Goldstein, Bundy and his senior colleagues defined the domino effect as involving the Philippines, Thailand, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea and Taiwan. The new Kennedy administration even added a philosophical refinement. Vietnam was no longer treated as one of many fronts in the global cold war but as the central front. Conventional aggression having been stymied by NATO, guerrilla warfare needed to be similarly frustrated in Vietnam. China and the Soviet Union were perceived as part of a joint enterprise to tip the global equilibrium.

With the perspective of nearly four decades, it is possible to challenge these assumptions. Communism has proved not to be monolithic; the dominoes did not fall with the collapse of South Vietnam (though 10 years of effort may have helped steady them); the problem of how to deal with guerrilla warfare has grown worse, not better.

Goldstein argues with some justice that Bundy should have raised these possibilities. And from the present perspective, it would be the task of the modern NSA to bring such issues to the attention of the president. But one must remember that governments run by addressing conventional wisdom, not by challenging it. Caught between established convictions and his premonitions, Bundy concentrated on managing the crises in terms of familiar patterns. No cabinet-level official challenged that established view (not even George Ball, who opposed escalation in Vietnam for other reasons). Nor did many observers on the outside.

With departmental memoranda and personal letters seeking to influence the president, the real debate took place more or less ad hoc in the meetings of the National Security Council or at informal meetings of cabinet-level officials. Decisions were reached but no settled strategy was agreed upon. The administration slid into a series of ad hoc decisions that pre-empted Kennedy's strategic choice. Presidents, in any event, are prone to avoid confrontations, having reached their eminence in part by merging seemingly contradictory constituencies. Both Kennedy and Johnson, according to Goldstein, occasionally went so far as to instruct cabinet members on what recommendations they would welcome at formal meetings in order to avoid having to overrule some associate openly.