Vietnam: The Retrospect: What Are the Lessons of Vietnam?

David Fromkin and James Chace

From Foreign Affairs, Spring 1985

Summary:  When the helicopter rose in flight from the roof of the doomed U.S. embassy in Saigon a decade ago, Americans hoped they had finally left Vietnam behind them. For years afterward there was a widespread effort in the United States to put the Indochina experience out of mind. In the late 1970s, Mike Mansfield, the professor of Far Eastern studies who became U.S. Senate majority leader and then ambassador to Japan, told an English radio audience:

David Fromkin, an international lawyer, is the author of The Independence of Nations and The Question of Government. James Chace is an editor of The New York Times Book Review. He was managing editor of Foreign Affairs from 1970 to 1983, and is the author of Endless War and Solvency, among other works.

In the Vietnam matter, Daniel Ellsberg clearly was someone who believed there was something he could do about it. Ellsberg, who passed the secret Pentagon Papers to the Congress and the press, said that he did so because he had lost faith in the executive branch of the government. A succession of American presidents over the course of 20 years, Ellsberg said, had been supplied with information and nonetheless had chosen to disregard it. Thus it was not the government as a whole that was to blame, but one branch of it.

For Daniel Ellsberg and those who share his views, the lesson of Indochina is that when the executive branch of the government pursues a dangerous course of action, it can and should be halted by arousing the other branches of the government and the public; and this can be done effectively through the news media. But here again one runs up against an irreconcilable conflict over the facts: according to many of those directly in charge of prosecuting the war, it was the executive branch that was pursuing the right course of action, which the news media caused to miscarry.

By such actions as publishing the Pentagon Papers, the news media clearly did play a role in countering the policy of the executive branch of the government in the 1970s. Indeed, many supporters of the American involvement in Indochina blame the media for stopping the war just at the point, they claim, when America had got it won. General William Westmoreland, the commander of the troops there, is only one of those who claim that the war was won militarily, but was lost because the United States no longer was willing to stay the course. As a witness in Westmoreland’s law suit against CBS, Lieutenant-General Daniel O. Graham, who directed the intelligence arm of the Joint Chiefs of Staff a decade ago, told the jury that in 1968 the enemy in Vietnam was "whipped"—and that the United States lost the war later only because of political decisions and the press. Public opinion polls show that a majority of the American public also believes that the war could have been won if we had had the willpower to continue with it.

General Westmoreland and his colleagues may be right when they say they lost the war on America’s television screens. But if so, what have we learned from the experience? So long as the American public is free to read the news in newspapers, hear the news on the radio and—above all—watch the news on television, can the U.S. armed forces ever wage and win a war again? Ronald Reagan apparently does not think so: during the U.S. intervention in Grenada, press coverage was limited to the point of nonexistence. But except perhaps in the case of a lightning operation such as that in Grenada, there is no way that a free society can accept such controls on its flow of information.

General Westmoreland and his colleagues may have overlooked a more fundamental problem they faced in trying to persuade the American people to persevere with the war in 1967-68. It concerns what General Graham meant when he said that the enemy was "whipped." Opponents of the war did not believe that "whipping" the enemy was enough, so long as the enemy refused to submit or surrender. In their view, the American army in Vietnam in 1968 was in much the same position as Napoleon’s army in Moscow in 1812: it had beaten the enemy in every battle, but knew no way to go forward to bring the war to an end. The news media brought home to the American people how little effective control over the population of Vietnam had been purchased by all of General Westmoreland’s victories. The media cannot be blamed for pointing out the problem, and if General Westmoreland knew the answer to it, perhaps he should have revealed it to the public.

President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger did believe that they knew the answer to the problem during their terms in office. They continue to believe that they succeeded in negotiating a satisfactory end to the war. In their view, it was the legislative rather than the executive branch of the government that was to blame for the Indochina disaster. In this respect, the role of the Congress in the final collapse of the American endeavor in Southeast Asia has recently come under strong fire. In his 1983 Wall Street Journal article, Nixon wrote that, "Between 1973 and 1975, Congress cut the arms budget for South Vietnam by 76 percent. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, doubled its shipment of arms to North Vietnam. It is not surprising that in 1975 the North Vietnamese . . . rolled into Saigon." Ellsworth Bunker, who was U.S. ambassador to Saigon then, said much the same thing a year later in an interview with The New York Times: by the end of 1972, "we had achieved our objective, made it possible for the South Vietnamese to defend themselves." But, when "Congress decided not to put up any more money," South Vietnam’s defeat became "inevitable." And President Reagan has left little doubt as to what lesson he draws from this: "In this ‘post-Vietnam’ era, Congress hasn’t yet developed capacities for coherent, responsible action needed to carry out the new foreign policy powers it has taken for itself."

It is, however, very much the president’s job not merely to rally but also to sustain the Congress and the people behind his policies—and not to engage the United States in a war unless he can do so. If the Congress and the nation fail to back him, it might be his fault, not theirs.

Recently Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger took this observation—that the president cannot successfully pursue a war through to final victory if the Congress and the people oppose his policy—as a point of departure in outlining the lessons we should apply in the future. In a speech on November 28, 1984, he listed "six major tests to be applied when we are weighing the use of U.S. combat forces abroad." Elements to be identified by these tests were: vital to our national interest, "the clear intention of winning," well-defined political and military interests, a continual willingness to reassess the "size, composition and disposition" of the forces involved, the recognition that the use of U.S. troops was a "last resort"—and then a point that hearkened back specifically to the Vietnam experience:

Before the U.S. commits combat forces abroad, there must be some reasonable assurance we will have the support of the American people and their elected representatives in Congress. We cannot fight a battle with the Congress at home while asking our troops to win a war overseas or, as in the case of Vietnam, in effect asking our troops not to win but just to be there.

In a speech delivered 11 days later Secretary of State George Shultz made the evident rejoinder: "There is no such thing as guaranteed public support in advance." As pictured by Secretary Shultz, the role of the administration is to lead rather than to follow the country. The burden of statesmanship, as he termed it, was the President’s responsibility for deciding when and where to use American troops abroad.