What Vietnam Teaches Us

In reading the Goldstein book, one is struck by the informal, almost conversational, tone of the process as Bundy was feeling his way. Thus, in November 1961, Bundy wrote to the president: "The other day at the swimming pool, you asked me what I thought, and here it is. We should now agree to send about one division when needed for military action inside Vietnam." Goldstein reports no accompanying options paper, no definition of the meaning of "about one division," nor a definition of a desired strategic outcome.

Goldstein leaves little doubt that Kennedy was opposed to sending combat troops to Southeast Asia. He flatly refused to follow Eisenhower's recommendation, supported by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with respect to Laos in 1961. He resisted similar proposals concerning Vietnam in 1963. It was more the result of a visceral reluctance than a strategic judgment. In fact, on the formal level Kennedy was ambivalent, torn between considering the survival of South Vietnam essential for national security and being loath to achieve this goal with American combat forces. That decision could be postponed in 1963, but it became unavoidable in 1965 when Johnson was president and Vietnam was on the verge of collapse.

As it happened, Johnson's options and his dilemmas were made more acute by a decision taken in the last weeks of the Kennedy presidency, to which the loose procedures of the National Security Council staff made a fateful contribution.

Guerrilla war in a developing country elaborating its political institutions almost inevitably produces a dilemma that has heretofore proved insoluble. Since civil war is ultimately about legitimacy, and legitimacy is unachievable without security, a gap opens up between these requirements. Security is impossible without authority; legitimacy is ultimately unsustainable without consensus. But the time scale for achieving democratic consensus is longer than that for bringing about security.

As the guerrilla war raged in Vietnam in 1963, some American officials became convinced that the governing president's authoritarianism was a fundamental cause of the impasse. The administration came to believe that Vietnam's military would provide a more cohesive and perhaps more democratic governmental framework. On a weekend when both Kennedy and Bundy were out of town, the assistant secretary of state, together with an NSC staffer, contrived an instruction to the U.S. ambassador in Saigon that was used to trigger a military coup. President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother were assassinated. A series of coups followed during which a coherent strategy became ever more problematic. Hanoi saw in this turmoil an opportunity to introduce regular combat troops into the South.

Kennedy was assassinated three weeks later. The decision to send combat troops, left in abeyance in 1963, became Johnson's. Goldstein traces the evolution of the debate, in which the principal advisers—Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara and Bundy—and the Joint Chiefs of Staff strongly advocated a significant buildup of combat forces. Goldstein argues that Kennedy, while accepting the domino theory, would have lived with its consequences, including the communization of all of Southeast Asia, rather than send a large expeditionary force to Southeast Asia. But we cannot know his reaction had he been presented with the strongly held, united views of his principal foreign-policy and security advisers—assuming that they would have presented their recommendations with comparable vehemence to a reluctant president.

When the United States goes to war, it should be able to describe to itself how it defines victory and how it proposes to achieve it. Or else how it proposes to end its military engagement and by what diplomacy. In Vietnam, America sent combat forces on behalf of a general notion of credibility and in pursuit of a negotiation whose content was never defined. The credibility point was reflected in an amazing Bundy statement quoted by Goldstein: that it would be better for America's credibility to lose after sending 100,000 men than not to have resisted Hanoi at all.