ESCALATION

While Kennedy was president there were 15,000 "advisors" in Vietnam. LBJ inherited the situation in Vietnam from Kennedy (who had inherited it from Eisenhower and Dulles). But as the South Vietnam regime was on the brink of collapse in March 1965, LBJ made the fateful decision to send combat troops to Vietnam. On March 8, 1965 Johnson sent 2 battalions of Marines to Vietnam to defend the airbases at Danang. These were the first combat troops. This was called the escalation of the war. By July 16 combat battalions had been sent. By December 1965 there were 200,000 American troops in Vietnam. By December 1966 there were American 400,000 troops in Vietnam. By December 1967 there were 500,000. And General Westmoreland wanted even more.

JOHNSON AND VIETNAM

By 1967 it was clear to Johnson and some of his advisors (the new Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford) that the US could not do what was necessary to win in Vietnam. The South Vietnamese government was weak and corrupt. It did not even have the support of its own people. The US was propping them up. Without us there, South Vietnam would collapse. The US was not prepared to risk the consequences of nuclear war. The US was not willing to go to war with China, and risk a repeat of what happened in Korea, by sending ground troops into the North to destroy North Vietnam. Clark Clifford asked the Pentagon how many men it would take to win? How long? How much money? In each case, the answer was, in essence "we do not know." We just have to keep pouring in more until we win--no matter how many men it takes, no matter how long it takes, no matter how much it costs. But the American people were not prepared to make such an open-ended commitment. The Tet Offensive of late January 1968 involved a massive attack on all of the cities of South Vietnam. Saigon was attacked. North Vietnamese commandos attacked the US embassy. The world could see that the US was not winning. Public opinion turned against LBJ. In October 1967, even before Tet, 100,000 protesters had gathered at the Pentagon. In March of 1968 Senator Eugene McCarthy ran against LBJ for the Democratic nomination, and almost won the primary in New Hampshire (42% of vote to 48% for the incumbent LBJ). Then Senator Robert Kennedy entered the race. LBJ saw that his hope of nomination to another term was doomed, and announced that he would not run again. Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968, and Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic nomination, but lost the election to Richard Nixon.

"Hawks" wanted to nuke North Vietnam. Increasingly, anitwar liberals rejected the American fixation with anti-communism, and favored withdrawal from Vietnam. Antiwar liberals felt it would not be the end of the world if some countries "went communist." The US was not God, and could not be the policeman of the whole world. We would have to learn to co-exist with the communists, especially in China.

NIXON AND THE "CHINA CARD"

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger figured out that after 1962, although Russia and China were both communist, the two countries had a "falling out." They had become bitter rivals. Nixon and Kissinger realized that it would be possible for the US to cozy up to China and "play" china against Russia, and vice versa. Inasmuch as North Vietnam was in a sense a client state of Russia and China, the way to get North Vietnam to "back off" for a little while so that the US could save face and withdraw over the span of 2 years or so, was to get Russia and China to tell North Vietnam to cooperate. In 1972 it was the great anti-communist Republican Richard Nixon who visited China. Any Democrat would have been accused by the Republicans of being "weak on communism." But Nixon was almost immune to such accusations. He had a solid reputation as being a strong anti-communist. And he was a Republican. In January 1973 the US and North Vietnam concluded a treaty of peace. Basically it provided for a truce. The US withdrew, and in May 1975 the Communist North Vietnamese rolled over the South in barely a month. Nixon pursued a policy called détente (relaxation of tensions) with the Soviet Union and China. We do not have to love the Soviets and Chinese or any other communists. Nor do they have to love us. But our differences are not so important that they are worth blowing up the world or starting World War III. We can learn to peacefully co-exist.

JFK AND LBJ WERE TRAPPED

Kennedy and Johnson were trapped in a kind of ideological, psychological and political prison, by Cold War liberalism and a paralyzing fear of looking weak. This made them feel as if they had to stay and fight no matter what—even when the cause was hopeless, even when it was doomed. This was a conditioned reflex to the trauma of the McCarthy era. Basically American troops engaged in a holding action, repelling the North Vietnamese in the jungles and rice paddies but not really destroying them. This crippling fear of looking weak or soft on communism, and of falling prey to anew McCarthy type attack, made it impossible for LBJ to withdraw from Vietnam, even when LBJ saw that we could not win. LBJ was haunted by what happened to Truman and the Democrats when they were blamed for "losing China," haunted by the fear of as repeat of Korea, and haunted by a fear of a repeat of McCarthyism. In the end, the ghosts of the past destroyed him.

THE BOMBING DIDN’T WORK

The US dropped more bombs on Vietnam than in all of World War II. But Vietnam had few factories and industrial sites to bomb. They didn’t have many tanks or railroads or refineries. They had little portable diesel generators, and used bicycles and water buffalo. Were we supposed to bomb every bicycle and water buffalo? Worst of all, the Vietnamese fought a guerilla war. They hid in the jungles, and hit us and ran. When we ran after them, they ambushed us. The North Vietnamese did not wear uniforms. They dressed just like the peasants. We couldn’t tell friend from foe. Children were boobytrapped with bombs. In the end, American soldiers "had" to shoot everybody because we couldn’t distinguish peasants and civilians and innocent children from the North Vietnamese soldiers. We couldn’t distinguish the innocent form the guilty. We couldn’t take the chance involved in finding out (therefore shoot first and ask questions later). It was a no-win situation.

SENDING "KIDS" TO WAR

It was also the case that the average age of an American soldier in World war II was 26 years of age. In Vietnam, the average age was just 19 years of age.

DRAFT DEFERMENTS AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC INEQUALITY

Another unpopular feature of the war was that there were draft deferments for young men who went to college or graduate school. This discriminated against the poor. The sons of the rich had parents who COULD AFFORD to send their children to college. The parents of the poor could not afford college, or the students themselves could not afford it. The children of the rich had an "escape hatch" from the draft: they went to college. The children of the poor and the working class and the farmers could not afford to go to college. They had no way to escape the draft (except to be "disgraced" as "cowards" as conscientious objectors, or go to prison for evading the draft, or flee to Canada). Likewise, the children of the rich went to good private schools. Suburbanites went to good public and private schools. And they all got good grades, which qualified them to be accepted into college. The children of the poor and the working class went to less advantaged inner city schools, while the children of farmers went to less advantaged rural schools. The children of the farmers and the working class and the poor didn’t do as well on standardized tests, and it was harder for them to qualify for admission to college. Basically, the rich found a way to avoid the draft (by going to college), and the children of the poor carried the burden of going to war. It was terribly unfair and unequal, and created deep resentment and animosity. It also created a sense of "liberal guilt" on the part of college kids who knew that had it not been for the draft deferments for college students, THEY would be fighting and dying in Vietnam too. They realized that their good fortune was as matter of wealth and advantage, not just merit or qualification.

CONCLUSION

In Vietnam, we learned, the hard way, that we are not God and there are limits to our power.

The masses of the Vietnamese people wanted independence and the unification of the different regions of their country as one country. The Vietnamese people are one people. North and South Vietnam were merely parts of one country. It did not matter to the masses of the Vietnamese peasants that Ho Chi Minh was a communist. Ultimately he was a nationalist first, and a communist second. Ho Chi Minh would not accept the secession of southern Vietnam any more than Lincoln and Northern Americans would accept the attempt by the American South to secede from the US. Our intervention in Vietnam was like Britain or some European colonial Power trying to intervene in the American Civil War. The US was on the "wrong" side of history. Ultimately Ho Chi Minh and the communists won. The world did not come to an end.

DECEIT CATCHES UP WITH LBJ

Instead of telling the people the truth, LBJ lied and misled the people. In 1967 he and General Westmoreland suggested that "the end was in sight, and there was light at the end of the tunnel." Then all hell broke loose with Tet. LBJ did not trust the people to understand the truth. He was not prepared to sacrifice his own political career and his ambitions and his ego to do what might have been best for the country. In the end, Nixon saw that after expending 60,000 American lives, Vietnam was not worth fighting or dying for.