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.

For nearly a generation the security and progress of free peoples had depended on confidence in America. We could not simply walk away from an enterprise involving two administrations, five allied countries, and thirty-one thousand dead as if we were switching a television channel. . . . As the leader of democratic alliances we had to remember that scores of countries and millions of people relied for their security on our willingness to stand by allies. . . . We could not revitalize the Atlantic Alliance. . . . We would not be able to move the Soviet Union toward the imperative of mutual restraint. . . . We might not achieve our opening to China. . . .

And, Mr. Kissinger added, we might not have succeeded in our Middle East diplomacy if world confidence in America’s willingness to honor all of its international engagements were to be weakened or lost.

It is a strong case that Mr. Kissinger makes, but it is not a conclusive one. Was not confidence in American leadership deeply shaken by the spectacle of our persevering in the Vietnam War long after even the most pro-American foreigners agreed that the war was unpopular, unnecessary and unwinnable? Does it increase confidence in the intelligence of our strategists if, when we perceive a trap starting to close around us, we manfully refuse to withdraw from it? Were 31,000 deaths made more meaningful by incurring 27,000 more?

In reflecting upon recent events in Lebanon, President Johnson’s undersecretary of state, George Ball, wrote in The Washington Post in the autumn of 1983:

Our Vietnam experience also showed another reason for prudence: as a great power, we should avoid putting our troops in an untenable position, since we would then have to pay a political price to extricate them. Yet, as we learned to our sorrow in Vietnam, we should never let the prospect of that cost prevent us from closing out a hopeless situation. . . . Prestige, after all, is an elusive and evanescent abstraction that consists of many elements; other nations and peoples will respect us more if we demonstrate prudence, good sense and realism than if we appear abstract and foolhardy.

Looking back a decade later, the American defeat in Vietnam seems not to have destroyed the world’s confidence in the willingness of the United States to honor international commitments. This may be because the Nixon Administration persevered in the war for five more years (as Henry Kissinger believes) or despite the fact that it did—which is what the authors of this article believe.

V

In every respect the Indochina war was a profound experience, not only for the men and women who fought there but for all of us who lived through it. It was also an intensely personal, subjective experience. Not only are there diverse political and historical visions of what happened, but there are also diverse moral conclusions that persist.

President Reagan may have been right when he said, at the dedication of the Vietnam War Memorial in 1982, that the nation should "debate the lessons at some other time." But his use of force to back up his own foreign policy initiatives—the dispatch of marines to Lebanon, the widescale troop maneuvers in the Caribbean and Honduras, the invasion of Grenada, the sending of military advisers to the government of El Salvador—makes it all the more likely that the American people will not hold off from the debate. Indeed, if the foreign policy of the second Reagan Administration proves to be as assertive militarily as that of the first, the likelihood is that the debate over Vietnam will be renewed often and angrily in the years to come.

The passage of time has not helped, as yet, to resolve the debate over Vietnam. Richard Nixon still believes that the war was won, while seminars and symposia assemble to inquire why it was lost. In late 1984 Robert McNamara testified in a New York courtroom that he had disagreed with other Johnson Administration officials and with General Westmoreland about such basic questions as whether the war could be won. He indicated that in the intervening period neither he nor they had budged from their views. He did not believe that one could establish objectively which side was right. In describing his disagreement with his colleagues, he noted that "I say this without saying I was right and they were wrong."