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What Vietnam Teaches Us
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Another self-inflicted handicap was the reluctance to view Indochina as a single strategic theater. Eisenhower was almost certainly right when he described a defense of Laos as essential to the defense of Vietnam. But Bundy resisted that proposition with the argument to Kennedy, according to Goldstein, that "Laos was never really ours after 1954. South Vietnam is and wants to be." This distinction produced the anomalous situation in which half a million Americans fought to achieve a stalemate in Vietnam, a military objective rendered nearly impossible by enemy bases in Cambodia and supply lines through Laos.
As for negotiation, Bundy argued that once Hanoi's efforts to dominate South Vietnam were thwarted, an undefined compromise would emerge through diplomacy—in effect, a strategy seeking stalemate, not victory. But stalemate violates the maxim that the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The escape hatch of diplomatic compromise was based more on American nostalgia than Hanoi's mentality. Hanoi's leaders had fought a decade against France and battled the United States for a similar length of time, not to achieve a political compromise, but to prevail. The effort required to bring about a compromise was indistinguishable from the requirements of victory—as the administration in which I served had to learn from bitter experience.
A reviewer cannot pretend to sum up a generation's travail in a book review. A few observations will be in order:
• WHEN THE PRESIDENT IS ASKED TO CONSIDER GOING TO WAR, HE MUST BE PRESENTED, ABOVE ALL, WITH AN ANALYSIS OF THE GLOBAL STRATEGIC SITUATION ON WHICH THE RECOMMENDATION IS BASED.
• THE PURPOSE OF WAR IS VICTORY. STALEMATE IS A LAST RESORT, NOT A DESIRABLE STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE.
• VICTORY NEEDS TO BE DEFINED AS AN OUTCOME ACHIEVABLE IN A TIME PERIOD SUSTAINABLE BY AMERICAN PUBLIC OPINION.
• HAS TO BE PRESENTED TO THE PRESIDENT A SUSTAINABLE DIPLOMATIC FRAMEWORK.
• DIPLOMACY AND STRATEGY MUST BE TREATED AS A WHOLE, NOT AS SUCCESSIVE PHASES OF POLICY.
• AUTHORITY FOR DIPLOMACY AND STRATEGY MUST BE CLEARLY ASSIGNED.
• THE ADMINISTRATION AS WELL AS CRITICS SHOULD CONDUCT THEIR DEBATES WITH THE RESTRAINT IMPOSED BY THE KNOWLEDGE THAT THE UNITY OF OUR SOCIETY HAS BEEN THE HOPE OF THE WORLD.
Should Bundy have come to conclusions such as these earlier? This is the implication of Goldstein's book. But to do so, Bundy would have had to abjure the views of a generation avowed since Truman's disputes with MacArthur 15 years earlier—that force should be applied in minimum increments, that strategy and diplomacy were separate spheres to be conducted consecutively, that American principles applied in an undifferentiated manner globally were established maxims of a successful policy. These principles were implemented in Vietnam in the early 1960s by the best, not the worst, of their generation. If the policymakers lacked perspective, their critics lacked compassion.
Throughout history, every problem America had recognized had proved soluble by the application of resources and idealism. Vietnam proved obdurate. Mourning the assassination of a president with whom it had identified, and perplexed by an impasse to which its own theories had contributed, the intellectual establishment ascribed its traumas to a failure of the American experience and the moral inadequacy of its leaders. This turned the national debate from an argument over feasibility into a crusade increasingly settled by confrontations designed to demonstrate a moral indictment. In that sense, Bundy was victim as much as cause of the forces unleashed as America was obliged to adapt its history to a changing world.
© 2008
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