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.

It appears, then, that whether one blames the executive for the failure in Indochina, or whether, like President Nixon, one blames the legislature, the only lesson that emerges is that the president or the Congress, or perhaps both, should use better judgment next time. That certainly is true, but as a guideline it is no help at all.

III

Where did the U.S. government go wrong? In sending American troops to fight in a foreign war, did it support the wrong government? Did it understand who our allies and adversaries really were?

At the outset, one again encounters the disagreement about whether President Nixon and Secretary Kissinger succeeded in negotiating a satisfactory solution to the Indochina conflict. On the conviction they had done so, Mr. Nixon recently wrote that, "As U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick points out, the most generous excuse for those who cut aid to South Vietnam . . . was that they didn’t know what would happen. But now there can be no excuses."

His reference was to Ambassador Kirkpatrick’s statement that the lesson we learned in Indochina—and that will keep us from making the same mistake again—concerns the nature of the enemy. In May 1983 she wrote that, "we didn’t know who the Viet Cong were," but we "know now." She went on to state that, "Western public opinion was manipulated into believing that the National Liberation Front . . . was a spontaneous product of ‘deeper social causes’," but that we now know that the Viet Cong were sent into the South by North Vietnam, and that the regimes they have established in Indochina are brutal, savage dictatorships. "The crucial difference between Vietnam and Central America," she wrote, "is that the Congress that cut off aid to Vietnam could say that it did not guess what would follow."

Insofar as Mr. Nixon and Ambassador Kirkpatrick are distinguishing the moral difference between the Indochina regimes the United States backed and those backed by our adversaries, they are undoubtedly correct. This was particularly true in Kampuchea; corrupt and ineffective though the Lon Nol regime we supported may have been, it was angelic by comparison with the genocidal Pol Pot regime that replaced it. But the point with which Mr. Nixon and Mrs. Kirkpatrick fail to come to grips is that we are faced with not only a moral issue but also a practical one. Much as we might like to do so, it is not always feasible for us to prevent evil regimes from taking power. Nor is it always in our power to dictate what regimes foreign countries will adopt. Many longtime opponents of the war have always considered the communist enemy to be brutal and totalitarian, but continue to believe that it was not in the interest of the United States to send an army to Asia to fight it, since Vietnam itself was of only marginal strategic importance to this country. Such opponents of the war consider many regimes in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe—including those of the Soviet Union and its satellite, Poland—to be brutal and totalitarian, and in some cases bloodthirsty, yet do not propose to send American armies to all of those places to put the world to rights.

From a very different perspective, former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, like Mrs. Kirkpatrick and Mr. Nixon, takes the view that our undoing in Vietnam was in misunderstanding the nature of the enemy. The primary adversary, he believes, was Moscow, and that is where we should have gone from the very start. "If in the beginning we had been willing to go to the Soviet Union and demand an end to the aggression of Hanoi, and if Moscow had believed in our determination, there might very well have been no war," he writes in Caveat, his memoirs.

Yet President Lyndon Johnson, one of the most persuasive arm-twisters in the history of American politics, tried—and failed—to persuade the Soviet leaders to call off the war. Granted, this was not at the very beginning of the conflict; but there is strong evidence tending to show that Moscow did not restrain Hanoi because it could not. Early in 1965, for example, Soviet Prime Minister Kosygin tried to persuade the North Vietnamese leaders to explore a compromise solution—but was unable to do so.

Certainly the Nixon Administration, in which Haig served, consistently put pressure on the U.S.S.R. to use its presumed influence with the North Vietnamese to coerce the latter into accepting a negotiated settlement. This was especially true in the crucial year of 1972, as Henry Kissinger relates in his own memoirs. When North Vietnam launched a series of powerful assaults in early April, Kissinger responded "by moving in the direction Nixon favored, to the extent of holding Moscow responsible for Hanoi’s offensive." For months thereafter, Kissinger and Nixon played an elaborate game of linkage, sometimes condemning Moscow, sometimes coaxing, and sometimes saying that the military actions of the North jeopardized "the larger interests," that is, détente, a summit and an arms control agreement. Again, there is little evidence to suggest that the Russians either took these statements lightly or failed to apply what pressure they could on Hanoi—while there is much to suggest that the North Vietnamese simply would not be pressured.

A very different picture—the mirror opposite of what General Haig and his former superiors imagine the nature of the enemy to have been—emerges from a reading of the Pentagon Papers. In this picture, the Viet Cong forces were an independent entity until 1959, when North Vietnamese forces infiltrated the South with the objective of bringing the Viet Cong under their control. Thereafter North Vietnam made the decisions, and played off its Russian and Chinese sponsors against one another so as to retain its independence. As rivals for leadership of world communism, neither the Soviet Union nor China could afford to appear less ardent than the other in supporting Hanoi. Had Moscow and Beijing been able to act in unison, they might have been able to force Hanoi to do their bidding; but since Hanoi had gained freedom of action by playing off one against the other, it was Hanoi alone that was free to stop the fighting. General Haig said we were wrong not to go to Moscow for a decision; it now appears that perhaps we were wrong not to go directly to Hanoi.