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.

The common theme running through most of the retrospective judgments about Indochina is the assumption that, once the lesson of Vietnam is pointed out, readers or listeners will see it for themselves. That basic assumption proves to be an illusion. The truth about Indochina is not self-evident; we all have our own views, but they are evident only to ourselves. The authors of this article also hold strong views about the Vietnam War, but no longer believe they can prove they are right to someone who holds contrary views. It is not because of any doubt as to the truth of the matter; it is for lack of objective evidence that cannot be controverted by the other side.

This leads to the conclusion that the Indochina experience is, at best, of limited use to the United States in building a contemporary consensus on the central issue—whether or not to intervene abroad with military force. The decision to send troops abroad is perhaps the most momentous decision a government can be called upon to make; whatever other value the Indochina experience may hold for us, it does not provide us with a point of departure for common discourse about how to face that challenge.

That robs us of something that could have been of great value. The Munich Pact was a disaster, but at least the Western world recognized it as such and learned that it would be a mistake to commit the same error again. The lesson of Munich can be misapplied—but the point is that it can also be applied. The lesson of Vietnam, if there is one, cannot be applied because we still do not agree about what happened. Far from helping to clarify policy issues in Central America or the Middle East, appeals to the lessons of Vietnam merely compound a conflict about current policy with an argument about history. Reference to Vietnam, therefore, is at this point divisive rather than unifying.

The Indochina war was surely the most tragic episode in the history of the United States in this century. If we could all look at that terrible experience through the same pair of eyes, it could teach us much. But we cannot, so it cannot. That may be the final tragedy of the Vietnam war.