The Cold War Continued: The Vietnam War

THE COLD WAR CONTINUED: THE VIETNAM WAR

Implementing the Containment Doctrine

America's involvement in Vietnam may be traced to decisions made in the late 1940s and the 1950s as the Cold War and the doctrine of containment of Communism came to be dominant considerations in U.S. foreign policy. Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry'S Truman had expected to let the Japanese-occupied French colonies in Indochina gain their independence at the end of World War II rather than allowing the French to reassert control. As the Cold War emerged in Europe during the late 1940s, prompting the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the United States became more concerned with not alienating France, a crucial member of the new alliance, than with standing by a vague assertion of the right of self-determination for the various peoples of Indochina. The United States became increasingly concerned about Asia when civil war in China resulted in a Communist victory in 1949 and when the Communist North Koreans invaded South Korea in 1950.

The French versus the Vietminh

As they moved back into Indochina the French faced the Vietminh, an indigenous Communist independence movement led by Ho Chi Minh. During World War II the Vietminh had been the heart of armed resistance to Japanese occupation and had fully expected Indochina to be granted independence after the war. With support from the Soviet Union and later the People's Republic of China, the Vietminh seemed to the United States to be yet another example of Communist expansion at work.

The United States Backs France

In 1950 President Truman decided that supporting France in its fight against the Vietminh was important in the effort to contain communism. He began providing military aid to French forces in Indochina. Truman's decision was also guided by the domino theory, which argued that if Indo-china were to fall to the Communists, then the rest of Southeast Asia would fall as well, like a row of dominoes. By 1953 U.S. military assistance to the French had reached $500 million, and the following year it rose to $1 billion. The United States was paying half the cost for the French to continue fighting the Vietminh. In 1954, after a disastrous defeat of their forces at Dien Bien Phu, the French and the Vietminh reached an agreement, the Geneva Accords. Indochina was to be divided into three countries—Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Vietnam was subdivided into two supposedly temporary sectors. The Vietminh were to withdraw to the northern sector, and the French were to withdraw to the south. Elections were to be held within two years to settle the fate of Vietnam as a whole. A government was set up in the south with Ngo Dinh Diem as president. On 23 October 1954 President Eisenhower offered U.S. military assistance to the new Diem government. On 12 February 1955 U.S. military advisers took over from the French the job of training the South Vietnamese military. In addition to the dollar amounts of military aid sent to South Vietnam, the United States had an annual average of about 650 military advisers in South Vietnam from 1955 through 1960. In September 1954 the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), an alliance similar to NATO, was founded to counter Communist threats in Southeast Asia.

The Vietminh Reactivate

The Vietminh were relatively quiescent until 1958, when they began stepping up their activities in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. In 1960 veterans of the Vietminh became the nucleus of a Communist insurgent group in South Vietnam, the National Liberation Front. The Diem government gave the group a pejorative nickname, Vietcong—meaning Vietnamese "commie"—which stuck. The Vietcong, with the assistance of the North Vietnamese, escalated the fight against the Diem government in South Vietnam.

Kennedy's Concerns About Indochina

As he took office in January 1961 President John F. Kennedy was concerned about the continued fighting in Southeast Asia and its possible spread to other Southeast Asian nations. In Laos an American-backed military government, a neutralist faction, and the procommunist Pathet Lao (also backed by the Vietminh) were fighting for control of the country. After learning that American military reserves were stretched thin because of the ongoing confrontation with the Soviets over Berlin, Kennedy expended considerable energy throughout the spring of 1961 to keep Laos neutral and independent. An agreement on a Laotian cease-fire and neutralization was reached in July 1962.

Kennedy's Vietnam Policy

On 28 January 1961, just eight days after his inauguration, Kennedy approved a counterinsurgency plan for Vietnam. The plan included additional funds, which would allow the South Vietnamese army to increase in size by 20,000 men, and authorized the use of Vietnamese agents to mount guerrilla operations in North Vietnam. He sent Vice-president Lyndon Johnson on a fact-finding tour of Vietnam in May 1961, which was followed in June by a request from South Vietnamese president Diem for additional U.S. troops to train the South Vietnamese army. In November 1961 Kennedy sent Gen. Maxwell Taylor and foreign policy adviser Walt Rostow to South Vietnam. On their return they reported that it was possible for the South Vietnamese to defeat the Communist insurgents without an American takeover of the war effort if the United States provided strong political backing for the South Vietnamese government and provided substantially in-creased military and economic assistance. They further recommended that President Kennedy send 8,000 combat troops to South Vietnam. Kennedy decided against sending combat troops but authorized the deployment of up to 15,000 military advisers. By the time of Kennedy's assassination in November 1963 the U.S. effort in Vietnam was costing $400 million a year, and about 12,000 military advisers were providing assistance to the South Vietnamese military effort. By the end of 1963 there had been only 70 American casualties.

Gradual Escalation

Throughout the Kennedy administration American involvement increased slowly, almost imperceptibly. On 8 February 1962 the United States announced the creation of a Military Assistance Command in Saigon. That spring it also began its involvement with the Vietnam Strategic Hamlet programma rural pacification plan by which peasants would relocate to fortified towns where they could defend themselves. This program was intended to provide strong local opposition to the Vietcong and in turn reduce support for the Vietcong in the rural areas. Copied from a program the British had used successfully in Malaya, it did not transfer well to the Vietnamese countryside. Late in 1962 the United States introduced helicopter squadrons flown by American pilots, which helped ferry South Vietnamese troops into battle and provided close air support. Reports from the Military Assistance Command and from the embassy in Saigon repeatedly stressed how well the effort against the Vietcong was going. In early 1963 Gen. Paul Harkins, commander of the military assistance group, advised President Kennedy that he could begin troop withdrawals by the end of the year and that all U.S. forces could be withdrawn by 1965. Gen. William Westmoreland, Harkins's successor in December 1963, maintained a similar optimism in his public pronouncements about the war throughout his tour of duty in Vietnam.

The Overthrow of Diem

Throughout 1963 the South Vietnamese political situation became increasingly unstable. On 15 February disenchanted elements of the Vietnamese air force tried unsuccessfully to kill President Diem by bombing and strafing the presidential palace. As opposition among Buddhists mounted, more and more Buddhist monks practiced self-immolation, committing suicide by dousing themselves with gasoline and setting fire to themselves, in protest of the repressive policies of the Diem regime. By late summer and throughout the fall the government was brutal in its attempts to suppress the dissidents. On 2 November the South Vietnamese military, with the acquiescence and support of the U.S. government, overthrew Diem, murdering him and his family. While Saigon celebrated, U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge met the successful leaders of the coup in his office, where he congratulated them on their victory. He cabled President Kennedy that "The prospects now are for a shorter war." Three weeks later President Kennedy himself was dead, felled by an assassin's bullet, and re-placed by Vice-president Lyndon Johnson, whose political career, especially in the U.S. Senate, had been in-formed by the rabid anticommunism of the McCarthy era and the political recriminations over the loss of China to the Communists.

Stepping Up the War

In 1964, a presidential election year, there was little political debate over the American military presence in Vietnam, at least in part because the two candidates, Johnson and Barry Goldwater, had agreed not to politicize the war during the campaign. In January 1964 the Joint Chiefs of Staff had sent President Johnson a memo urging him to increase the U.S. commitment and to consider a bombing campaign against North Vietnam. By following these two strategies the military hoped that the war could be won more quickly. The commitment of U.S. troops was doubled; by the end of 1964 there were 23,300 Americans serving in Vietnam. In addition Johnson ordered a study to explore the possibility of a bombing campaign.

The Gulf of Tonkin Incident

On 30 July 1964 the destroyer Maddox provided support for South Vietnamese commandos attacking a North Vietnamese radar installation. On 2 August, while on patrol in the Gulf of Tonkin off the North Vietnamese coast, the Maddox was attacked by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats. The Maddox crippled two of the craft and sunk the third. No further U.S. response was planned at the time. The next day the Maddox was joined by a second destroyer, the C. Turner Joy y to patrol in the Gulf of Tonkin. During a stormy night the two ships reported that they were under attack and requested air support, which was provided from the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga. Both destroyers fired at what they believed to be attack vessels, but the pilots from the aircraft carrier saw no signs of such vessels, and in retrospect no crew member of either destroyer was sure that he had seen an attacker. In two later reports the captain of the Maddox stated his doubts that either American vessel had been attacked. Washington, how-ever, reacted to the initial report that the vessels were under attack and took action. While the captain of the Maddox was still quizzing his crew on 4 August, President Johnson ordered naval aircraft from the carriers Constellation and Ticonderoga to retaliate. They flew sixty-four sorties, attacking four North Vietnamese patrol boat bases and an oil depot. In addition, Johnson consulted key members of Congress on 4 August and requested a resolution of support for his actions. With the leadership of Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright, a resolution authorizing the president to "take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression" passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 416-0 and the Senate by a vote of 88-2. Until its repeal in May 1970 the Tonkin Gulf Resolution provided a legal basis for the subsequent escalation and continuation of the war by both President Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon.

Stepped-Up Bombing

In 1965 the U.S. military role in South Vietnam shifted from providing assistance to one of active combat. On 7 February 1965 the Vietcong attacked an American barracks at Pleiku, and the United States retaliated by bombing targets in North Vietnam. U.S. aircraft began bombing Vietcong targets in South Vietnam on a regular basis on 24 February. Operation Rolling Thunder, a systematic bombing campaign against targets in North Vietnam, began in earnest on 2 March. Designed to coerce the North Vietnamese into ceasing their effort in support of the Vietcong, the bombing campaign continued with occasional interruptions until Johnson halted it in fall 1968, as peace talks got under way. Originally directed primarily at military targets, the bombing campaign was expanded to include attacks on the oil depots outside Hanoi in June 1966 and on the main power plant in Hanoi itself in May 1967.

Increases in Troop Commitments

At the beginning of March 1965 General Westmoreland requested that two corps of Marines be provided to help guard U.S. facilities. Johnson agreed, and U.S. combat troops began arriving in Vietnam on 8 March. In April the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended a commitment of 50,000 troops, a recommendation that was revised upward to 80,000 the following month. General Westmoreland upped the ante in June by requesting that troop levels be raised to 200,000. On 28 July President Johnson announced that draft calls would be increased so that the United States could raise troop strength in Vietnam from 75,000 to 125,000 men. By the end of the year there were 184,314 American troops serving there. The U.S. role was also expanded on 8 June, when Johnson authorized American troops to engage in direct combat operations.

A Pattern of Escalation

U.S. forces stationed in Vietnam reached average levels of 389,000 in 1966, 485,600 in 1967, and 549,500 in 1968. At the height of this expansion the United States was employing 40 percent of its combat-ready divisions, 50 percent of its tactical air-power, and 33 percent of its naval forces in Vietnam. Throughout this expansion of the war, the administration continued to express its conviction that a victory was possible.

NORTH KOREANS SEIZE THE PUEBLO

On 23 January 1968 the USS Pueblo, a U.S. Navy freighter equipped to gather electronic intelligence, was sailing in international waters off the coast of North Korea when it was attacked by North Korean patrol vessels. The Pueblo s guns were not fired, and American naval vessels and air-craft were too far away to help, as the North Koreans seized the ship, which was commanded by Comdr. Lloyd M. Bucher, capturing its crew of eighty-three, some of whom were wounded.

The United States immediately demanded the re-lease of the crew and the ship, but it took eleven months of negotiations, with help from the Soviet Union, before the crew was finally released on 22 December. In a news conference after the release, Bucher said that the crew had been tortured and coerced into signing confessions that they were spies.

The incident was an embarrassment to the Johnson administration in an election year. Republican candidate Richard Nixon charged that the administration had committed a tactical blunder by allowing a ship so close to North Korea without making adequate provision for assistance in the event of attack.

In March 1969 a Navy board recommended that Bucher be court-martialed for his failure to defend the ship aggressively, that the signal intelligence officer be court-martialed for not destroying sensitive documents before the capture, and that other officers and crew members be reprimanded. On 6 May, however, Secretary of the Navy John Chafee said that Bucher and his crew had suffered enough and declined to take any further action.

Source:

Vaughan Davis Bornet, The Presidency of Lyndon Johnson (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1983).

The Tet Offensive

This optimism seemed overstated to the American public after the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese launched an unexpected offensive on 30 January 1968 during Tet, the Vietnamese holiday celebrating the lunar new year. Although the offensive was defeated militarily, it created the perception that the war would not be won as easily as U.S. officials had led the public to believe. On 27 February 1968 Westmoreland requested an additional 208,000 troops, but on 22 March the administration ordered him home, signaling a shift away from a total-victory strategy. On 25-26 March the president's senior advisory group on Vietnam met and recommended against further troop increases, suggesting the need to find diplomatic means to extricate the United States from the war. The following year, newly elected President Richard M. Nixon began limited troop withdrawals, ordering home 25,000 in June and another 50,000 in December. By this time U.S. casualties had reached 33,641, a level exceeding the number killed in the Korean War.

The Antiwar Movement

Politically, there was little opposition to the U.S. involvement in Vietnam until the 1965 escalation. The number of troops hi Vietnam had been small, and casualties few. For most Americans the fight was a distant one, both geographically and perceptually, and it was viewed as part of the U.S. commitment to oppose Communist expansion, a goal few Americans questioned. Moreover, individuals with expertise on Asia, inside and outside government, were reluctant to question U.S. policy on Vietnam in light of the political fallout and in recollection of careers destroyed in the wake of the Communist victory in China in 1949. There were a few who expressed their doubts. George Ball, an undersecretary of state, was very critical of the Taylor-Rostow report in 1961 and continued to question U.S. policy through much of the Johnson administration, including writing a sixty-seven-page memorandum in October 1964 that challenged the assumptions of U.S. policy in Vietnam. At a National Security Council meeting on 31 August 1963 Paul Kattenburg, a senior State Department official who had Indochina experience, argued that the United States should consider getting out of Vietnam entirely and soon found himself posted to Guyana, a small country on the Caribbean coast of South America.

MASSACRE AT MY LAI

On 16 March 1968 three platoons of Company C, First Battalion, 11th Brigade, Americal Division swept through the South Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai on a search-and-destroy mission (designed to look for enemy soldiers and kill them). Company C, which had suffered heavy losses on an earlier mission, was commanded by Capt. Ernest L. Medina, and its First Platoon was commanded by Lt, William L. Calley, Jr., an inexperienced young officer. They found no Vietcong, but during the mission hundreds of unarmed civilians, including elderly men, women, and children, were murdered and their livestock killed. The only American casualty was a soldier who shot himself in the foot to avoid participating in the massacre. After army helicopter pilots reported seeing large numbers of dead civilians in the area, the brigade and division commanders investigated but said that they had uncovered nothing unusual.

In April 1969 Ronald Ridenhour, a Vietnam veteran who had been a member of First Platoon, publicly charged that war crimes had been committed at My Lai, and reporters began uncovering details of the massacre. The U.S. Army launched an inquiry, and shortly thereafter Lieutenant Calley was charged with 102 counts of murder. At his court-martial Calley claimed that he was acting on orders from Medina—a charge Medina and others rebutted. On 29 March 1971 Calley was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, but in August his sentence was reduced to twenty years. Although several other officers and soldiers were court-martialed, Calley was the only one convicted.

Galley's case became a cause célèbre among conservatives and others who thought he was being made a scapegoat. In April 1974 Secretary of the Army Howard H. Galloway reduced the sentence to ten years. Calley was paroled in November 1974 and given a dishonorable discharge. In 1976 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld his conviction.

Source:

William H. Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II, second edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

Opposition in Washington

Democratic senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, Lyndon Johnson's successor as Senate majority leader, had taught Asian history at the University of Montana and had been an early sup-porter of the effort in Vietnam. Sent on a fact-finding tour to Saigon in late 1962, he came back pessimistic and urged that the United States reassess its policies and avoid deeper involvement. He continued to counsel against escalating troop commitments and, together with Georgia senator Richard Russell, tried hard to persuade President Johnson to find ways out of Vietnam. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, J. William Fulbright, led the floor fight for the passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964, but within two years he became very critical of the war and used televised committee hearings in the spring of 1966 as a forum to question American involvement. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, brother of President John Kennedy, had taken part in the decisions during the Kennedy administration that had deepened the U.S. commitment to Vietnam. In 1964 he resigned from the administration and successfully sought a U.S. Senate seat from New York. By 1968 he had become an opponent of the war and sought the Democratic nomination for president as an antiwar candidate. Another cabinet member who served both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, became disillusioned with the war by 1966 and resigned in November 1967. Senators Wayne Morse (D-Ore.), Ernest Gruening (D-Alaska), Frank Church (D-Idaho), Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.), John Sherman Cooper (R-Ky.), and George McGovern (DS. Dak.) were all early critics of the conflict. As involvement deepened and the war got more costly in terms of lives and money, more and more members of the House and Senate, as well as other political leaders—including civil rights leaders—began to question the wisdom of the U.S. effort. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., gave muted criticism in 1965 and took an active leadership role against the war in 1967.

Criticism from the Military

Some retired military leaders were also critical of the U.S. policy on Vietnam. Former Marine Corps general Paul Shoup, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Kennedy, argued that "all of Southeast Asia was not worth the life of a single American." Retired lieutenant general James Gavin, an adviser on defense issues to Kennedy's 1960 campaign, was also critical of the war, as was Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway, who had commanded U.S. forces in the Korean War and was Army Chief of Staff from 1953 to 1955. Many military critics thought the commitment of U.S. troops to a land war in Asia was folly. Others thought the United States had over committed its military resources to the conflict and had left itself vulnerable in the event of crises elsewhere in the world.

Public Protests

Protests from the public became more frequent after the 1965 escalation of the war. On 17 April 1965, 15,000 to 25,000 demonstrated in Washington against the bombing of North Vietnam. Teach-ins about the war were held on many college and university campuses that spring. On 15 and 16 October there were antiwar demonstrations in forty U.S. cities, and on 17 November some 15,000 antiwar protesters marched in Washington. Antiwar demonstrations continued throughout 1966 and 1967, involving larger and larger numbers. On 15 April 1967, 100,000 in New York City and another 20,000 in San Francisco attended rallies against the war. A week of draft-resistance activities culminated with a 21 October 1967 march on the Pentagon by 35,000 protesters, including such well-known liberal intellectuals as poet Robert Lowell, novelist Norman Mailer, and critic Dwight Macdonald. Mailer was arrested at the Pentagon and spent the night in jail. Radical activist Abbie Hoffman attracted media attention with a mock exorcism of the Pentagon, in which singing and chanting demonstrators engaged in a comic attempt to levitate the building. The earliest antiwar protesters had tended to be from fringe pacifist groups, anti-nuclear-weapons groups, and radical student groups. As the pro-tests grew larger and the war escalated, the protesters became more representative of the entire political spectrum.

Public Support Steadily Declines

In August 1965, 61 percent of the American population supported the war policy. A little over a year later, in November 1966, polls showed support had dropped to 50 percent. The drop continued: in October 1967, fewer than half of those polled, 44 percent, supported the war, by spring 1968 only 40 percent did so, and by the time of the Democratic National Convention in August 1968 only 35 percent favored the war. In 1969, Richard Nixon's first year as President, support for the war had eroded to 32 percent.

The 1968 Elections

Debate over the war became fully politicized during the 1968 presidential election campaign. Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.), running as an antiwar candidate, challenged incumbent President Johnson for the 1968 Democratic nomination and did surprisingly well in the New Hampshire primary. Newly appointed Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford became a key figure in persuading Johnson to halt the bombing and begin peace talks. On 31 March, after the meetings with his senior advisory group on Vietnam that led to the decision not to raise troop levels further, Johnson gave a televised talk to the nation, in which he announced a partial bombing halt, invited the North Vietnamese to begin negotiations, and announced—in a major surprise—that he would not run for reelection. Not long before Johnson's pullout, Sen. Robert Kennedy had entered the presidential race as an antiwar candidate. Vice-president Hubert Humphrey also sought the nomination, which he eventually won at a convention marred by violent clashes between Chicago police and demonstrators in the streets outside the convention hall. Saddled by the Johnson administration record, Humphrey lost a closely fought election to the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon, who campaigned with a secret plan to end the war.

Antiwar Demonstrations Continue

The Women's Strike for Peace on 26 March 1969 was the first large demonstration against the war since summer 1968. Late in 1969 the so-called Vietnam Moratorium Committee organized massive antiwar protests all across the country. An estimated 100,000 protesters marched in Boston. A month later, on 15 November, 250,000 marched in Washington to protest the war.

Attempts to Start Negotiations

The early strategy of the United States had been predicated on the assumption that the Vietcong could be defeated. From 24 December 1965 to 31 January 1966 Johnson tried a bombing halt as a means to persuade the North Vietnamese to start negotiations. In 1967 Soviet premier Aleksey Kosygin tried, through conversations with British prime minister Harold Wilson in February 1967 and President Johnson at the Glassboro summit in July, to bring the United States and the North Vietnamese to the bargaining table, but the efforts were not fruitful.

Peace Talks Begin

After Johnson's 31 March 1968 speech, North Vietnam agreed to preliminary talks on 3 April. A month later the two sides agreed to begin formal talks in Paris on 12 May. On 31 October Johnson announced a full bombing halt as a prelude to expanded negotiations. Throughout the preliminary talks in 1968 the Johnson administration took the stance that political and military issues could be separated. The United States and the North Vietnamese were to negotiate a military cease-fire and mutual withdrawal of troops while the South Vietnamese and the Vietcong were to negotiate a political settlement between themselves. This strategy was hampered by the refusal of South Vietnam to be a party to the negotiations if the Vietcong were included. After months of negotiations the peace talks were expanded in January 1969 to include the Vietcong and the South Vietnamese. The new Nixon administration continued the strategy of separating the political and military dimensions of the negotiations. Despite secret meetings between National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese negotiator Xuan Thuy, the talks made little progress during 1969.

Nixon Orders Secret Bombing Campaign

President Nixon escalated the war in 1969. For years there had been North Vietnamese and Vietcong military activity along the porous border between Vietnam and Cambodia. The U.S. military had long requested that some action be taken against enemy forces using Cambodia as a sanctuary. Johnson had rejected these requests except on the most limited basis. Within a week of Nixon's inauguration the military was again pressing for permission to press the fight into Cambodia. General Westmoreland's successor, Lt. Gen. Creighton Abrams, estimated that the enemy had recently moved 40,000 troops to Cambodian bases and that they were being supplied through the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville. Abrams recommended that the United States begin a short-term bombing campaign of the enemy facilities and transportation routes in Cambodia. Nixon originally was hesitant but ordered a retaliatory bombing strike in February. A continuing bombing campaign of the bases in Cambodia began in March and went on in secret for fourteen months. Although there was some limited press exposure, the administration did not acknowledge the bombing campaign until 1973.

The Nixon Doctrine

In July 1969 Nixon announced a shift in U.S. foreign policy that has since been dubbed the Nixon Doctrine. In the future the United States would avoid military entanglements like Vietnam and limit its support to economic and military aid. Despite the shift in policy, the war continued into the 1970s, eventuating in more than 55,000 American combat fatalities. Negotiations continued, and a ceasefire went into effect on 28 January 1973.

Sources:

David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972);

Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking/Penguin, 1983);

Paul Kattenburg, The Vietnam Trauma in American Foreign Policy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1980).