The 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq is upon us, one of the biggest strategic errors in the history of US national security policy. It was a fatally flawed action, one that transformed the entire security picture in the Middle East for the worse, destabilized countries in the region and diminished US influence. I vehemently opposed it, suspecting a disaster. After an initial success, we doubled down on the mistake in Afghanistan.
We should have known better. “Iraq” is Arabic and “Afghanistan” is Pashto for “Vietnam.” One way or another, all of us had been to this movie, forty years earlier. As a political event, Vietnam taught us to distrust what the government told us. It was a knife in the heart of US credibility abroad. The lesson did not last; overcoming the “Vietnam syndrome” became an important goal of US presidencies; George Bush thought he had succeeded in doing that in 2003. He was mistaken, as was the war he initiated.
The personal and the political became completely intertwined during the war in Vietnam, our “War,” the way World War II was “The War” for the previous generation. Whether you fought in the jungles, resisted at home, ran, or just ducked, The War was seared into the soul of every American male born between 1941 (me) and 1955 (a few million others). It is bound up with shame, rage, disappointment, sadness and depression.
We were being lied to, deceived and manipulated by decision-makers in Washington, and a lot of guys were paying the price. Our eyes were opened by the Vietnam War; at least mine were, along with many others.
My experience of Vietnam is a long story; it will take two columns to tell. it This is Part 1.
I was a clean-shaven young Republican in the 1950s, one who handed out Ike and Dick literature on the streets of his hometown, getting thrown out of the Park Hotel by the desk clerk – a Stevenson supporter – for invading his lobby with my leaflets. I thought John F. Kennedy was quite possibly a communist sympathizer when I organized phone banks for Nixon-Lodge in 1960.
By 1963 I had become a Democrat. I still drank the Kool-Aid, though, about the “good” America was doing in the world and the threat posed by global communism. My disillusionment started early, on Armistice Day, November 11, 1963, 11 days before Kennedy’s assassination. I sat in a yellow Belgian school bus with 40 other students from 19 countries, getting a guided tour of World War I battlefields near Ypres (“Wipers,” the American soldiers had called it.).
M. Le Moal, our short, wiry French history professor was in the front of the bus, reciting the tragic story of that war. In the back I was reading Le Monde. Near the back page I read a news story datelined Saigon by a reporter named Eric Rouleau.
As a Frenchman, Rouleau had deep sources in Saigon. He reported that the US embassy, and American intelligence were directly involved in the November 2, 1963 coup that threw out South Vietnam’s president – Ngo Dinh Diem – and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, chief advisor, and head of the secret police. Diem gained the presidency with the help and support of my former hero – Ike – and my new one (by then) JFK.
The CIA and the US embassy (Amb. Henry Cabot Lodge, specifically, and a shadowy CIA agent named Lucien Conein) were in cahoots with the coup leaders. The Vietnamese officers carrying out the coup would only act (as Stanley Karnow’s brilliant history of Vietnam revealed) if the US gave the green light and made it clear that we would not stand in the way. The coup was complete when Diem and Nhu’s assassinated, mutilated bodies lay in the back of an armored personnel carrier in Saigon.
The article shook me. It opened a window on what my country was really up to in Vietnam. I remember saying – maybe even out loud – “this is wrong; my country should not be doing this.”
It took another eight years and thousands of dead and wounded before America caught up with the real story. Dan Ellsberg leaked and the New York Times and Washington Post began to publish the Pentagon Papers, the documentation of the real war behind the scenes, including the inside story of the coup.
In 1963, Vietnam was a blip on the country’s radar screen. Even for me; I was still climbing into the US national security policy establishment. For the next seven years, Vietnam dogged me every step of the way, with growing intensity. In the end, it changed my life.
Two years after the bus ride, a graduate student at Columbia University, I got my first summer internship with the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in Washington, DC. ACDA was created during the Kennedy years to promote peace by controlling and ultimately eliminating nuclear weapons. It was in its heyday with Kennedy and Johnson, playing a key role as a negotiator for the Test Ban Treaty of 1963, a first step toward those goals.
I was in a hot, muggy DC summer for the very first time. I went down to Capitol Hill one day to have lunch with my Member of Congress, a balding former mayor from Northern California named Harold T. “Bizz” Johnson. (His uncle named him “Bizz” because he used to lead kids around the schoolyard like he was Bismark.) A pure machine pol – loyal to the Democratic Party and reelected to 11 terms before Northern California voters decided he and the Democrats were too liberal.
Bizz was happy to pontificate about Washington and impress this young intern, at least until I asked him about his views on Vietnam. It was 1965 and I already had my doubts. He stiffened, disdainful of my questioning of the policy. “I don’t make foreign policy for the President,” he said. A lot of Democrats were ducking in just that way.
But 1965 was the year the US got deep in the big muddy in Vietnam. The US commanders were urgently calling for more troops. After many delays, President Lyndon Johnson decided to approve, rather than be the president who lost the war. On July 25, he announced that he was going to increase the number of US soldiers in Vietnam from 75,000 to 125,000. Rather than call up the reserves, he put the war square in the lap of America’s families, more than doubling the monthly draft call from 17,000 to 35,000, a decision that hit me two years later.
I watched him announce that decision as I sat in the office of the ACDA director watching the speech on a tiny black and white TV. One-by-one my colleagues grew somber and then slipped out of the room. They knew the decision doomed the agency’s mission of peace and disarmament. A year later, most of the people in my division had departed.
Everywhere I turned, I ran across Vietnam. I took an internship at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. I was a researcher for one of America’s preeminent national security thinkers, Hans J. Morgenthau, a hard-core realist. He thought the war was fatal for America’s global role; he wrote and said it endlessly while I supplied some of the evidence. His wisdom wore off on me; the war was a disaster and nobody was listening to him, except Sen. William Fulbright (D-AK).
As a member of an elite fellowship group at Columbia, I went back to Washington with prestigious doors opened to us. Six of us sat in our conventional dark suits, white shirts, and narrow ties in a small meeting room in the looming grey wedding cake building next to the White House - the Old Executive Office Building. Across the desk from us sat one of the most powerful officials in Washington, McGeorge Bundy, the National Security Advisor and a key architect of Vietnam War policy.
We listened to Bundy lie about how essential a victory in Vietnam was to US global credibility; how Ho Chi Minh was the leading edge of communism in Asia; about how dominoes would fall throughout the region if he won; about the success of creating strategic hamlets; about how the “body count” of communist dead made it clear we were winning the war. We did our rational, graduate student best to argue back, responsibly and respectfully we all hoped.
We didn’t know what he knew, didn’t have the facts, he said. Our reading of Karnow, David Halberstam, Izzy Stone was erroneous; we were being duped. Trust us, Bundy said, we are the good guys. Only when the Pentagon Papers appeared did we learn that it was Bundy who sent the key, elliptical cable to Amb. Lodge in October 1963 reading: "We do not accept as a basis for U.S. policy that we have no power to delay or discourage a coup." Sort of said “yes” in a roundabout way.
We sensed that there was a lot of daylight shining through the holes in his story. We didn’t yet have the tools to argue back successfully. We wore the suits, sat at the center of power, but weren’t taking the meal on offer.
While some of the young men our age were fighting and dying in this hopeless, misguided cause, others of us took off the suits, grew facial hair and became anti-war activists. Me, I straddled – an activist, and a graduate student on a track. One world slowly diverging from the other until they collided in 1970.
(Stay tuned for the drama of Part 2 next week…)
A two party story... Yay!!!
Vietnam was a time of shifting my world view. I protested and canvassed in a lackluster manner. If it were now I would be much more vocal. I was just a kid. What did I know. But this trend of the United States sticking their rather arrogant noses in the business of others is a deep part of our history. I don't know enough history to understand where it started but we gained a degree of prestige few other modern countries have had. Getting involved is a slippery and treacherous slope. Considering the lessons of our past should we be taking sides in the Ukraine war? Is there a benefit solely to us for supporting Ukraine? Is there an imminent danger in not getting involved? Do we have a moral obligation to stand against corrupt leaders of authoritarian regimes? And if we do why are we not standing up to other atrocious regimes? I don't think there is one answer. What I do know is we are inextricably a global society. Like a mobile that sways and spins at a single touch what happens in one place effects much. I'm not a nationalist for the very reason that we are a global society. There is strength in diversity. There is wisdom in appreciating the cultures of all different groups and countries. All I have is a whole lot of questions and not one significant answer. Thanks for your post. I look forward to part two.
An extraordinary story well told. Thanks, Gordon.