Joseph Makhluf

History 574

Precis

10 April 2008

Hunt, Michael H. Lyndon Johnson’s War: America’s Cold War Crusade in Vietnam, 1945-1968.

New York: Hill and Wang, 1996.

Michael H. Hunt’s work Lyndon Johnson’s War explores United States involvement in Southeast Asia from the end of World War II to the Tet offensive of 1968, leading to the fall of Saigon in 1975. In 1961, The Ugly American painted an “alarming picture of a communist tide about to wash over Southeast Asia” (Hunt, vii). Another, perhaps more important book was Street Without Joy which explored France’s failed attempt to hold on to its colonial empire in Indochina. Further, The Quiet American portrayed Americans as innocents engaged in a global struggle which allowed “little room for national self-doubt or the peculiarities and particularities of the country that they had come to save” (viii). As it became increasingly evident in the 1950s that France would no longer be able to hold onto Indochina, the United States would take that nation’s place in what would become one of the bloodiest conflicts of the twentieth century. Presidents from Truman to Lyndon Johnson would fail to take into account almost a hundred years of colonial misrule in the region, and engage in a struggle for the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people.

Beginning in 1940 with the arrival of the Japanese in Indochina, Franklin Roosevelt portrayed Asians as unable to “exercise freedom and wisdom” (Hunt, 6) – an assumption which, in Hunt’s view, would become a hallmark of U.S. foreign policy for years to come. Regarding the Indochinese, “Roosevelt thus concluded that they required a prolonged period of tutelage, casually citing twenty to thirty years as the time needed to imbue them with a sense of responsibility” (Hunt, 6). The intense Cold War rivalry between the United States and Soviet Union that emerged after World War II also affected U.S. Indochinese policy. According to Hunt, “The growing conviction that the Cold War was a global struggle provided the catalyst that transformed Indochina into an important strategic area whose loss would have fateful consequences for the region and for U.S. security” (7). In 1947, Truman promised to defend all people threatened by communism or “internal subversion” (Hunt, 9). At the time, Ho Chi Minh was winning popular support in his struggle against French imperialism. The Truman administration decided that Ho was a “tool” of Moscow, and “thus imposed on the region a Cold war logic that led inexorably to U.S. involvement” (Hunt, 10). In 1954, Ho’s forces attacked the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu, signaling the end of French colonial rule in Vietnam. During the 1954 Geneva conference, it was agreed that Vietnam would be divided at the seventeenth parallel with elections scheduled to unify Vietnam in 1956. The United States opposed a unified Vietnam under Ho and chose to back Diem instead. Eisenhower turned to Ngo Dinh Diem to lead a free and noncommunist South Vietnam. By 1961, American aid to the region would accrue to $7 billion dollars. By the late 1950s, however, it became increasingly evident that Diem enjoyed little popular support, and remained unresponsive to U.S. pressure for reform. In 1954, Landsdale applied techniques better suited for an advertising agency to promote U.S. values in the region. He suggested that U.S. policymakers get to know their audience (the Asian elite), and “promote their product with energy and unwavering confidence” (Hunt, 16). The United States would find that find this to be increasingly more difficult.

Ho was able to able to win popular support by answering the peasants’ call for land reform and seizing grain supplies held by the elite during a famine that had killed at least a million (Hunt, 23). His brocade bag (patriotism, Leninism, populist program) provided the answers to age old questions confronting the Vietnamese. On August 19, 1945 Ho established the DRV with himself as its head. Increasingly after 1954, Ho feared that he had defeated the French only “to face a stronger United States” (Hunt, 33). In 1960, the NLF was founded to “put the Southern opposition to Diem on a sustainable, organized basis with its own administration and army” (Hunt, 35). In 1962, Saigon responded by establishing a strategic hamlets program to reclaim the countryside. However the program remained “vulnerable to the appeal of insurgents who spoke their language and shared their values” (Hunt, 36). In January 1963, fighting broke out at Ap Bac between the NLF and South Vietnamese forces. According to Hunt, Ap Bac deomnstrated that the NLF was much more formidable than imagined, and that Saigon units lacked “the support of rice-roots political organization” (38). Ap Bac further showed supporters of the NLF that “the struggle in the south was primarily against a foreign invader and secondarily against the elites recruited to serve as their puppets…”(Hunt, 40). Eisenhower, much like those who would follow him, saw things in an entirely different light. Indeed, as Hunt notes, the American President “had difficulty seeing Vietnam as something more than the scene of a simple struggle between slavery and freedom or between a communist monolith and a free world” (Hunt, 41).

Elected to succeed Eisenhower in 1960, President Kennedy would surround himself with “Ivy Leaguers” “who felt sure that they could make the instruments of American policy work for the benefit of their country and the world” (Hunt, 43). Many of the “learned academics” who would play an instrumental part in the Kennedy administration had little or no foreign policy experience (Hunt, 49). Faced with continuing political instability in South Vietnam, Kennedy authorized more resources in order to keep Diem’s regime afloat. At around the same time, McNamara and Rusk suggested to Kennedy to expand the U.S. military presence in Vietnam (Hunt, 59). On May 8, 1963 a “clash” between government troops and individuals celebrating the Buddha’s birthday “further narrowed Diem’s base of political support and [distracted] his government from the anticommunist struggle” (Hunt, 63). The administration became convinced that Diem had to go (Hunt, 64). Forces loyal to General Duong Van Minh ousted Diem and killed both the leader and his brother. Soon after Kennedy was killed in Dallas.

Hunt asserts that Kennedy might have changed his Vietnam policy, perhaps by phasing out troop levels by 1965, but acknowledges that such a move ran grave political risks. However, any such plans died in Dallas as well. Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, instead escalated U.S. involvement in the war in a series of important decisions. First, Johnson wanted an end to the division among Americans in Vietnam and made it clear that he wanted “ his ‘fellas in Vietnam to “get out in those jungles and whip hell out of some Communists’ so that he could focus on his domestic program” (Hunt, 79). Secondly, Johnson decided that he would launch a bombing campaign against North Vietnam. At the same time, the President became more aware that the coup was not reversing the fragile South Vietnamese political situation. The leadership in Saigon became less concerned with fighting communists “than with controlling access to U.S. largesse flowing into the country” (Hunt, 80). In 1963, McNamara demanded that the Minh government “put its house in order, offered specific advice on command appointments and troop deployments, emphatically ruled out a neutralist course, and pressed Minh to speak to his people” (Hunt, 80). At the same time, Johnson characterized the struggle Vietnam in Cold War hyperbole—describing U.S. efforts as “a ‘war against the forces of enslavement, brutality, and material misery’” (Hunt, 81).

In 1964, two U.S. destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf reported that they had been attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats. Following the attacks on the Mattox and the Turner Joy, Congress granted the President authority “to take all necessary measures” to defend U.S. forces in Southeast Asia (Hunt, 84). The Tonkin Gulf resolution was followed by pledges from Beijing to send troops to protect the DRV from U.S. invasion. According to Hunt, by mid 1965, “Chinese engineering and antiaircraft units (totaling some 250,000 men) began to arrive in the DRV to keep road and rail lines open, build airbases, and defend strategic targets against U.S. bombers” (87-88). Meanwhile, the Soviet Union offered an economic-and military-aid program to prevent Beijing from “becoming the DRV’s dominant international partner” (Hunt, 88).

Lyndon Johnson’s April 7, 1965 speech at John Hopkins University was the closest the President would come to “the war message to Congress required by the Constitution” (92). Meanwhile in Saigon, morale plunged amid the appearance of North Vietnamese units confirming that “Ho would not abandon his lifelong commitment to national independence and unification” (94). Johnson, however, remained optimistic. In a later speech at Baltimore University, the President characterized the use of airpower as not constituting a “change or purpose. It is a change in what we believe that purpose requires” (Hunt, 93). Following the President’s speech at John Hopkins, the media was informed of the administration’s decision to place marines in the Hue area (Hunt, 94). By July, troop levels escalated to 175,000 with perhaps another 100,000 to follow (Hunt, 95). Dean Rusk was convinced that if Hanoi and Beijing faced U.S. bombers and troops, they would recognize that the Americans were “resolute” and capitulate and abandon “an expansionist course” (Hunt, 97).

The Tet offensive of 1968 signaled a turning point in the Vietnam War, one that would bring media and public support for the war to a new low. According to Hunt, “The offensive dramatically gave the lie to assurances that nearly three years of direct action by the American military was bringing victory nearer” (114). Advisors within the Johnson administration, including the new Secretary of Defense, Clark Clifford, tried to persuade LBJ to change course. In response, Johnson began to restrict bombing attacks on Hanoi in hopes of luring the North into talks; he also announced that he would not seek another term as president. Nixon would rise to the presidency to inherit a failed Vietnam policy. Nixon faced mounting pressure from the public to end the Vietnam debacle, but into 1969 peace talks were yielding nothing. On January 23, 1972, however, Nixon “concluded” a peace accord calling for a “peaceful, political” path towards unification and $4.75 billion in reconstruction aid “contingent on the North’s good behavior” (Hunt, 121).

Michael Hunt’s analysis of the Vietnam conflict and Johnson’s decision to escalate U.S. involvement offers an interesting insight into how the Cold War religion affected United States foreign policy and led to the struggle that would cost so many young American lives. Hunt states that “American leaders suffered a failure of imagination and intelligence on the key issue of enemy outlook and resolve that was nearly absolute” (105). Failing to take into account almost a hundred years of colonial misrule by the French, the Americans were unable to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese since the Vietnamese were unable to distinguish an old colonial master from a perceived new one. Hunt concludes that the tragedy in Vietnam emerged “out of an American culture which claimed to speak and act for other people without knowing their history, language, and aspirations” (107).