PBS: Think Tank: Transcript for "Vietnam Revisited: The Myths of the War"

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Vietnam Revisited: The Myths of the War

THINK TANK WITH BEN WATTENBERG
VIETNAM

Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. In 1971, the New York Times published the so-called ‘Pentagon Papers,’ a series of excerpts from a study entitled ‘History of the U.S. Decision Making Process of Vietnam Policy.’ Today, thirty years later, an argument still rages about what those documents revealed as well as about many other aspects of the War. For one, did the government lie about Vietnam? To examine the situation, Think Tank is joined by Lewis Sorley, author of A Better War, the Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam, and Ronald Spector, author of After TET, the Bloodiest Year in Vietnam. The topic before the house, Vietnam revisited, the myths of the War, this week on Think Tank.
Three decades after the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, America is still obsessed with the lessons of the Vietnam War. The Persian Gulf War was painted as a repudiation of the Vietnam syndrome. Many Americans feel that the mere mention of Vietnam is synonymous with any intractable and pointless situation. Others feel that because politicians micro-managed strategy, the military was forced to fight with one hand tied behind its back. There is the belief that Americans scorned veterans as they returned from the War. Many believe that the so-called ‘domino theory’ which served as a partial rationale for the conflict was wholly misguided. Younger Americans may not fully associate the struggle in Vietnam with a larger conflict, a forty-five year long Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. It’s been a long time now, let’s review the bidding.
Gentlemen, thank you for joining us um, Lewis Sorley, Ronald Spector. Uh, let me begin just with a uh, a short question. Did we have to fight the Vietnam War?
Lewis: The people who made the decision to do so thought we did, I believe. And…and the reason they did is they saw it in a context of the Cold War which you just referred to.
Ben: Ron, what about it. Did we have to fight the Vietnam War?
Ron: Well with the perfect hindsight of thirty years we can say, ‘no, of course, we didn’t have to fight the….the….the Vietnam War.’ Uh, but it is hard to see, as uh, Lewis just pointed out, it’s hard to imagine, given the people involved at the time, those who made the decisions and given their mindset and given the historical context, it’s hard to imagine how they could have avoided fighting the Vietnam War.
Ben: The….the Vietnam War uh, if I am not mistaken was perceived to be part of the strategy of containment. Is that correct?
Lewis: I would say that’s correct.
Ron: You buy that?
Lewis: Yes.
Ron: Well uh, in terms of uh, in the context of Vietnam, the containment that was involved was mostly the containment of China. Uh, the People’s Republic of China was considered to be a very aggressive expansionist power. Uh, the uh, Chinese leadership was talking in uh, ways that the Americans found very reckless and threatening and uh, for a long time there had been a belief that the Chinese were trying to expand into Southeast Asia and the U.S. had to do something about that.
Ben: But the….the original containment contern….concerned the Soviet Union.
Lewis: Well yes and it was….became a global outlook I think. You know, for a long time we viewed Communism as the term was a ‘monolithic’ block and that we….wherever Communism expanded its influence, peace-loving uh, countries found their interests threatened.
Ben: And liberty….liberty-loving uh….
Lewis: Absolutely right. Uh, during the course of this uh, long involvement in Vietnam, one of the complicating factors is the Soviets and the Chinese had their own falling out which changed the dynamics quite dramatically. But it took us, I would say it took us quite a while to, first of all have confidence that that was real and not made up. And then secondly to figure out how we ought to adapt to that.
Ron: Although the Vietnamese were actually able to take advantage of this falling out between the Soviets and the Russians to sort of play them off against each other and…and get the maximum amount of aid and support they could from each side.
Ben: I mean you could have a theory where the Soviets and the Chinese were at odds with each other but both were part of a, what was called then a ‘global communist system.’ And if either one of them or both of them gained, we lost.
Ron: Well there was uh, there was a belief I think in the…in certainly the Kennedy administration that uh, it was possible to improve relations with the Soviet Union. And there was an awareness that the Soviet Union and the Chinese weren’t getting along but the….the feeling was or the reasoning was uh, we had to be tough in standing up to the Chinese if we’re gonna improve our relations with the Soviets. I’m not sure exactly what the chain of reasoning was behind that, but that was….that was the belief at the time that just because the two had a falling out, just because we were trying to achieve some kind of detante with the Russians, that didn’t mean that we could improve relations with the Chinese instead and it implied that we had to be tougher.
Ben: You….you mentioned uh, the Kennedy administration. These days people think of uh, of Vietnam uh, in connection with two Presidents, Johnson and Nixon. And yet it goes back not only to Kennedy but to Eisenhower.
Lewis: Eisenhower before that.
Ben: I mean it was Eisenhower who came up with the phrase, ‘falling dominos.’
Lewis: And….and I think all the administrations that dealt with Vietnam uh, while they differed in many other respects, all thought it was important.
Ben: But what does that phrase ‘falling dominos’ mean? I mean it’s become almost a…a joke at times.
Lewis: Well people have made it that and…and uh, we talk about the ‘domino theory,’ the idea of the domino theory was that if the….if Vietnam, let’s say, Vietnam lost and Cambodia fell to Communist influence, then other nearby nations would be….
Ben: And….and they would fall if South Vietnam fell.
Lewis: That was the….that was the first domino, let us say. If that one topples, then the next and the next.
Ben: As in a series of dominos falling.
Lewis: Yes, and people mention Thailand and they mention uh, Indonesia and you can carry it to – you can make be funny by carrying it to such extremes that it seems unlikely. Los Angeles would be…be mentioned. (laughter) There was a better joke and uh, during the War that said in the wake of the….of the 1968 TET offense, which Ron has written ex….excellently about, uh, the domino theory was proven correct even though only one domino fell and that domino was Lyndon Johnson.
Ben: (laugh) Well uh, after Vietnam fell in 1975 Laos and Cambodia fell immediately to…to the Communists. I mean those were two real dominos.
Lewis: They were.
Ben: I wanted to ask about one other thing. What is your take on…on the belief that has grown up that the American servicemen who returned from Vietnam were scorned and the argument is they were spit upon in airports. Is there any real evidence for that?
Ron: Well there’s an awful lot of anecdotal evidence uh, to that effect and….and as a historian I have problems with…with anecdotal evidence. The anecdotal evidence is quite widespread. On the other hand, you have uh, scholars who’ve written book claiming, ‘well no, that never happened. Uh, the anti-war people were very sympathetic towards the GI’s.’ Uh, I don’t think many GI’s really, former GI’s really buy that.
Lewis: I don’t think they do either. Uh, I….I have some friends who are making a documentary series now and one of the things they did was travel around the country recently and interview Vietnam veterans about their experiences uh, growing up in Vietnam and then, and since that time. And uh, they founding….finding very, very interesting things. They’re finding that uh, most of the people who served during that period volunteered to do so, a ratio of about four to one compared to those who were drafted. Uh, the veterans administration did some good polling about uh, five years after the war ended and they found that uh, a high percentage of those who served in the Vietnam era Armed Forces were proud of that service. And uh, here’s a quite remarkable statistic; two-thirds of those that they….that they polled said they would serve again even knowing the outcome of the War, which…which is uh, dramatic.
Ben: There was another Vietnam uh, (?) survey, I think also done by the Veteran’s Administration uh, conducted by Lewis Harris that did what they called ‘a feeling thermometer.’ They asked the American public what they thought about a variety of people – doctors, lawyers, used car salesmen, uh, professors, uh, politicians, talk show hosts, and uh, Vietnam veterans and people who uh, refused to serve and went to Canada. Those were the….there….there was about twenty of them. And at the very, very top of this feeling thermometer which was one to ten were people who went to fight in Vietnam and at the very, very bottom, down at about one and a half were people who refused to serve.
Ron: Uh, I think though, there’s….there’s kind of, there’s a reaction that’s set in uh, against the way that veterans were viewed in the first fifteen years after the War which was that they were all a bunch of uh, drug addicts, people who probably committed atrocities, that people were gonna be social basket cases. And now you have the other swing of the pendulum which is that they were all kind of upstanding patriotic type guys. Uh, it’s true, I think, that you had a majority of volunteers in Vietnam but these were largely draft-induced volunteers.
Ben: You….you had material in your book that toward the end of the War uh, the use of drugs among the American troops did grow enormously.
Ron: Yes, it was….it was very widespread and they caused a great deal of anxiety uh, in Washington. They were….were worried about what when all these crazed drug types come home, were they gonna commit a wave of crimes uh, what….what’s gonna be the impact. And it turned out that most of them stopped using when they got home. They never really could explain that but the great majority uh, of former drug users stopped using when they got back to the U.S.
Ben: But….but did that uh, erode the morale of the American military over there or was that a reflection that the morale had already eroded?
Ron: All of the above. (laughs)
Ben: Yeah, like everything else.
Ron: And, that is though uh, one of the peculiar things is the drug use was very widespread in the rear uh, among troops who were actually on operations, it was not used much at all because, of course, it was common sense, it was gonna impair your effectiveness and maybe you were gonna endanger everybody around you. They’re not gonna, therefore, tolerate you using drugs. But uh, it was….it was a reflection of the drop in morale as well as uh, a reflection of the uh, progressive disintegration of the Armed Forces.
Ben: And it was a reflection (throat clear) of what was happening among young people in America.
Ron: Yes.
Lewis: And….and one of the remarkable things is how well the units performed under those very difficult circumstances.
Ben: Let me…let me just turn to substance for a minute lest we end up avoiding it. Um, you….you are two scholars, each of whom have had uh, distinguished military service. Uh, Lewis Sorley, you were a uh, armed Cavalry man in a tanker, is that right? And uh, Ron Spector, you were in the Marine Corps, you were a Gyrene, you taught at the Naval War College, you wrote – you’ve each written distinguished books uh, and you come out uh, with two very different ideas. If I could characterize them, and you’re welcome to uh, uh, to disagree. Lewis, you said, basically we could have won; and Ron, you said we were bound to lose. Is that an accurate uh, description? Let’s chat about that for a minute (Lewis: Yes, exactly) and then let’s get back to the myth of Vietnam. But I mean, I think it’s useful to say that we have two different views here.
Lewis: Right. We’ve talking about this for…for years along with our other….other friends and colleagues.
Lewis: I….I went farther than you just said. I…I said there came a point at which the war was won. I…I say in A Better War, the fighting wasn’t over but the War was won and the reason it was won, I claim, is that South Vietnam had achieved the capability we’re trying to help them achieve of being able to sustain itself militarily, economically as a viable, independent nation. So long as – and here is the crucial kicker – so long as we kept our commitments to them.
Ron: Well, and they would have probably required even more than that because when you – in the Easter offensive, for instance, it also required….
Ben: That was what year?
Ron: In say 1972, the big….the first big test of whether South Vietnam could defend itself on its own, it turned out they couldn’t. They needed uh, substantial American air support, they needed uh, American command and control facilities, they needed uh, uh, people on the ground to call in these air strikes and coordinate their fire support for them. So this is…..
Ben: This is Easter 1972.
Ron: Yes, Easter of Seventy-two.
Ben: By which time, what eighty, ninety percent of the American troops are already gone, yeah.
Ron: Certainly the combat troops were….are already gone by seventy-two. But my argument, basically, is that the South Vietnamese government, because of its very nature, was never gonna be able to be a viable uh, government. It was uh, it was not a government that many people were willing to risk their lives to support. Uh, from time to time when the South Vietnamese government had enough muscle behind it, people were willing to obey it more or less by….
Ben: For….for a while….
Ron: And that means die for it.
Ben: For a while the uh, the South Vietnam troops, the Arvin was regarded as a pretty good Army, wasn’t it?
Ron: Uh, there were units in the…in the Arvin that were uh, regarded as a pretty good Army. But when you see what happened in 1975 to the Arvin uh, where they basically fold up uh, and it’s not because they’re not brave and it’s not because they don’t want to fight; it’s because uh, the thing that precipitates the panic is their belief that their officers are running out on them. They don’t have enough trust in the government or in their own leadership to stick it out. And that’s the…the whole reason behind the fatal weakness of the South Vietnamese force.
Lewis: I have to….I have to comment on that because my take is…is much different, although the events we agree on, the events in uh, at the end. That the forces that had fought so ably and courageously in 1972 during the Easter offensive did, in fact, melt away. But the reason they melt away….they melted away is we had withdrawn our support. They no longer had any source of wherewithal, neither North or South Vietnam could, themselves, come up with the wherewithal to fight the War. At the same time we’re pulling the plug on South Vietnam, North Vietnam’s patrons of both the Soviets and the Chinese are giving them greatly reinforced quantities.
Ben: Well we did….we didn’t….we pulled the plug in terms of troops but we didn’t pull the plus in terms of money.
Lewis: Oh, I’m sorry – we did. We….we cut off – Teddy Kennedy even then reduced a…an amendment that would borrow the use of money to buy fertilizer for South Vietnam. We cut back the uh, appropriations for the military support for them drastically. We started charging them shipping costs. They wound up with a pittance and they were on the point of running out of whatever…..
Ron: Well but the country….a country whose citizens just toss in the….the towel and say uh, ‘well that’s it,’ because they’re not getting sufficient foreign aid, that’s not a government that people have a deep commitment to.
Ben: Well, but…but if the other side continues to get foreign aid then Lewis has a point.
Lewis: And we have to say about this government – excuse me, Ron.
Ron: Yes, go ahead.
Lewis: And I’ll come back to you. That all the canards about the South Vietnamese government and, Lord knows it had its shortcomings and they were manifold, uh, I think is uh, has to be viewed in the light of what do the people of South Vietnam do throughout the war? We did not have a bunch of people defecting to the North as we had defecting to the South from the North. We did not have a million people moving from the South to the North as we did from the North to the South at the time of the 1954 agreement. We did not have a million people becoming boat people to leave their own country because they feared the (?) administrations of the North Vietnamese when they took over. The South Vietnamese government had its problems but uh, the people showed at every stage they preferred it infinitely to the North Vietnamese government.
Ron: Well…..
Ben: Excuse me, one….just one.
Lewis: Over and over again the North Vietnamese said we’re gonna have a general offensive, general uprising as in TET Sixty-eight which you’ve written so well about. There was never a general uprising because the people in the South always knew they were better off under their government than the North.
Ron: Well I sort of have the flip side view of that. That is, if you look at what the people of South Vietnam did during the course of the War, what they did during the course of the War is the most capable and the most dedicated and the most talented all go with the Vietcong. Uh, and uh, people who uh, stick with the government are usually doing it uh, because of family reasons or uh, because they’re….they’re getting some kind of reward from uh, the government. You really have to ask which side are people willing to die for and in every case, it’s only the other side. It’s not….not President Tu and the South Vietnamese government. They’re willing to die to protect their families uh, which they uh, which they do, uh, South Vietnamese soldiers do. But they’re not willing to really die for the Republic of South Vietnam.
Lewis: Well they’re willing to die to keep the North from uh, taking them under it’s tender…..
Ben: Well let….let…..
Lewis: Wait – we have to say that in every year of the War, the casualties of the South Vietnamese far exceeded those of the allied forces there to help them. Plenty of South Vietnamese died fighting, trying to keep their country free.
Ron: But what….what we know from uh, the interviews that the Rand Corporation did with leaders of South Vietnam after the fall of South Vietnam is that despite all that, they didn’t really believe that the U.S. was going to let South Vietnam go down the drain. In the end they couldn’t conceive of the idea that the U.S. would have spent millions and millions of dollars on this War and then simply let the North win. So they had this great faith, uh, they had no faith in their own government or their own…..
Ben: Well and….and….and the idea – just getting back to what we were talking about earlier was that the United States wouldn’t let it go down the drain because it would be a symbol around the world where this global Cold War was going on that was saying this dog won’t hunt.
Ron: Well that was Nixon’s argument that our credibility was on the line and there….
Ben: The pitiful, helpless giant argument.
Lewis: Right.
Ron: Right, that’s right. Uh, but uh, as you know better than I, the public opinion polls, over time, gradually show that people get more and more disgusted and tired with the War until you get to the point in Seventy-four, Seventy-five where Congress is really reflecting what most people are feeling. That is, they want the War over with and if that means that South Vietnam is defeated, well then that’s all right so long as this darn War is over with forever. Uh, there’s so much war weariness, so much disillusionment that they’re willing to see South Vietnam go down the drain by Seventy-four.
Ben: The….there….there is also an interesting thing when you talk to Vietnam veterans which is, they will tell you - and you tell me if I’m wrong – they say, “We never lost a battle.”
Lewis: Well, you remember Harry Summer’s uh, famous comment. He’s discussing this with his counterpart on the four-power commission, his North Vietnamese counterpart and he makes that observation and then he reports that that uh, officer turned and said, “That may be true, but it is also irrelevant.”
Ben: Because we lost the war.
Lewis: Well because we withdrew from the war and..
Ben: We withdrew from the war….we withdrew from the war and our allies lost it.
Lewis: Well, yes after we had defaulted on our commitments to them. We….we cannot evade that fact. And while it’s maybe true that um, the loss of uh, what credibility or prestige around the world can be assuaged or….or forgotten over time or softened in its impact, we’re never gonna be free of the fact that….that we bailed out on allies that we had made a commitment to.
Ron: But I think it’s really, as I tried to show in my book, it’s really meaningless to say, “Well we never lost a battle.” Most of the battles are between platoon-size units or – and they last maybe twenty minutes. Uh, and we did lose some of those. If you want to uh, look at the relative casualties on…on both sides, it’s true that the…..
Ben: But…but TET was an enormous American victory or South Vietnamese victory.
Ron: It, TET is….TET is a big, certainly a big defeat for uh, for the uh, Vietcong and North Vietnamese. And as I tried to argue, it’s not just TET, it’s the fact that they try another TET in May and they have another set of uh, of offensives in August uh, and another one in early Sixty-nine. That’s what does them in, that’s what enables uh, the South Vietnamese government to make this progress in getting control of the countryside during Sixty-nine and Seventy. Now uh, Lewis argues, well and that led us to win the war. I argue, well that was a temporary advantage that they had until the other side could recover which they start to do in Seventy-one.
Ben: I talked to uh, Les Gelb, who is now the uh, President of the Council on Foreign Relations and who is in charge of assembling the thirty-four volumes of the Pentagon Papers that have been assailed by Daniel Ellsberg, among others, as revealing the lies that this administration told and so on and so forth. And I asked Les, ‘cause he mentioned in….in his article, there were a series of sort of dueling articles, just sort in passing that there was some lying but that’s not what was really important; what was really important was this great geo-political conflict. And I said, “Uh, Les, how….how often did they lie?” And he said there were thirty-four volumes and they identified six places where the administration purposely misspoke. And he sort of laughed and said, “That’s less than the New York Times does in a week about their hiring policies.” I mean a thirty-four volume, six purposeful misstatements, I mean it’s one thing to say, ‘we’re gonna win this war; we’re gonna come back with the coonskin on a wall. We’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do that,’ if you really think it and it doesn’t turn out to be true – that’s not a lie.
Lewis: No, that’s a miscalculation.
Ron: Well, I don’t know what his definition of lie is. Uh, I think that the, you can make a very good case that successive administrations purposely mislead the public as to what they were doing uh, in Vietnam. And when you get to events, for instance, like the Tonkin Gulf incident which uh, was one of the sensational revelations of the Pentagon Papers, certainly there you can say that the administration is purposely misleading people as to what the actual…..
Ben: But the Tonkin Gulf was sensational but remains, as I understand it, to this day unresolved.
Lewis: In that way.
Ben: Who said what to who and…..
Ron: What actually happened in the Tonkin Gulf uh, is….is somewhat unresolved, although most experts now think that there was no second attack. But that doesn’t….that doesn’t matter. What uh, what uh, matters and what my point was is that the way it was represented to the American people was deliberately incomplete and misleading.
Ben: You….you agree with that?
Lewis: I’m not….I’m not sure of that. I….I haven’t studied that enough to be able to answer.
Ben: Because my….my…..
Lewis: I do agree with the point that Ron made that most people now believe the first attack was…was real, the second one probably not. But uh, but another thing I thought you were gonna go on to say, the administration was, we….we believe, um, watchfully waiting for an opportunity to uh, get a resolution similar to the one that they got as a result of the Tonkin Gulf.
Ben: I wanted to ask a….a….a final question that gets a little more cosmic. Uh, if….if we say, as we’ve I think all indicated, that the Vietnam War was, it was part and parcel of the Cold War which was a forty-five year long tortured um, uh, conflict of great meaning which we want to the everlasting betterment, I hope, I think of mankind. And it was sort of good guys versus bad guys. I mean evil empire, the phrase was laughed at when Reagan said it. Nobody much argues now that the Soviets were neither evil nor an empire. But now, so the question is, if you say that a war is a series of battles and some you win and some you lose but it’s what counts as who win….won the war, is it appropriate the view Vietnam as a lost battle in a winning war?
Ron: Well I think uh, out of fairness to the college professors union uh, all of us, no matter what our take on it, we’re almost all of us treated as a product and an incident in….in the Cold War. But I don’t think that that alone uh, says that much. You can…you can treat it if you want as an incident in uh, the Cold War, you could even say it’s a battle in the Cold War, but it might have been a battle that didn’t need to be fought. And that’s….that’s what the real argument is over, did we really need this battle or was it, in fact, a set back for us in the Cold War.
Lewis: But part of the outlook on the…..on the Cold War was, as you pointed out earlier, the contending parties were those where not only peace but freedom matters on the one side and control and domination matters on the other. The Vietnam War was….was a tragedy for the whole Vietnam people. Vietnam today is viewed as one of the most corrupt governments in the world and one of the most repressive and the economy is one of the weakest. And….and all of the people who stayed in Vietnam have….have lost that war. I think you’d have to say…..
Ben: That’s what John McCain said recently, yeah.
Lewis: If you believe in….in freedom and….and extending freedom then that was a war worth fighting. I’ve said, as we’ve both observed, it was a war that could have been won that indeed at one point was won, should have been won. So uh, I’m glad we won the larger context of the Cold War but uh, we didn’t have to take that hit.
Ben: Last question…..last question uh, real fast. It’s fifty years from now, all the players are gone including all the people who are teaching about it now (Lewis laughs) who were the activists as young people and that are deeply invested. What, in a sentence or two, what would history’s judgement of the Vietnam War be?
Ron: Well that’s (laugh), that’s a good question. I think that uh, history will look on it uh, as a tragic event for the United States and an even bigger tragedy for the Vietnamese. Uh, and uh, they will also probably see it as an inexplicable tragedy. The reason I say that is it already seems inexplicable to my students now.
Ben: Okay.
Lewis: I agree completely.
Ben: Okay. (laugh) Uh, I don’t know whether I do or not but I’m gonna think about it. Okay, thank you Lewis Sorley, Ronald Spector and thank you. Please remember to send us your comments via e-mail. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg.

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