VIETNAM' S LEGACY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000100240003-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 22, 2010
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: March 11, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/06/22 : CIA-RDP90-00552R000100240003-3
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Vietnam's Legacy
America Knows Defeat
But if It Had Won
The War, What Then?
Some Historians, Politicians
Speculate About a World
That Might Have Been
`No Carter and No Reagan'
By Domes FAxN=
s'tgff R.porter of Tna W mA. STRaai' Jounm^L
We could have held South Vietnam.
But what would that have dome to Amer-
ica! s.r. MCC lIV
The whole world would be different if
the outcome in Vietnam had been differ-
ent.
WASHINGTON-Defeat, like the names
of the dead on the black granite slabs of the
Vietnam Memorial here, is carved into the
national consciousness. For the dead and
their mourners, as for the nation, defeat is
an inescapable fact.
But what if the U.S. had won? Then the
world-and American society-would surely
be different. But in what
ways? That is a questlorr
The Wall Street Journal
put to historians. politi-
cians and policy makers
of the Vietnam era.
Their replies, although
often in conflict, do sug-
gest certain conclusions.
Victory wouldn't neces-
sarily have strengthened
the U.S. position in Asia.
Paradoxically, that posi-
tion may be stronger af-
ter defeat than it would
have been after victory.
Nor would victory likely
have impressed a watchful Europe with U.S.
"resolve"-the word that so obsessed offi-
cial Washington during the long Vietnam
struggle. Europe largely regarded resolve In
Vietnam as a mistake.
"Vietnam had tremendous effects. But
the least of them was . on foreign policy,"
concludes Harvard historian Ernest May.
It is at home, not abroad, that victory
would have mattered most profoundly. Vic-
tory would have left Americans with a dif-
ferent conception of themselves. The results,
for better or for worse, would have touched
national life, and certainly politics.
WALL STREET JOURNAL
11 March 1985
"Without Vietnailt. there would have ited war alien to the American charac-
been eo Carter, no Reagan." says Hssr ter, Mr. Kissinger says. Americans will
The former secretary of state, reflect-
trig in his, Manhattan once, reasons that
the Vietnam debacle-and the period of
U.S. drift and Soviet assertiveness that fol-
lowed-so frustrated voters that they
turned to candidates outside the establish-
ment.
His analysis draws agreement from an
unlikely source: fti me ''Sea. Eugene Mc-
Carthy, who In 1909 rallied millions against
the war. "Vietnam probably elected three
presidents," including Richard Nixon. be
says.
'The Defining Event'
But the effects of defeat went well be-
yond presidential politics. This, at least, is
the view of author John Wheeler, a Viet-
nam veteran who wrote a book called
"Touched with Fire." He calls the war
"the defining event" for the Baby Boom
generation-60 million strong and now as-
serting itself at every level of society. For
many in that generation-protester, draft
dodger or veteran-the war remains "a
thousand degrees hot," he says:.
Vietnam-era passions-and-the activism
that swayed institutions-boiled over into
continuing crusades, ranging from
women's liberation to the environmental
movement, Mr. Wheeler argues. And if the
U.S. had won? "That passion probably
would have spent itself about 1973." As it
is, he says, defeat "corked it up" and
forced it inward-where its effects may be
far greater.
The paths history might have taken
aren't knowable, of course. The reality is
'
that Vietnam cost- the U.S. 58,014 military
dead, 303,000 wounded, and a half-trillion
dollars. South Vietnam ceased to exist as a
nation. Cambodia (where perhaps 1.2 Mil-
lion people have died since the U.S.-sup-
support a quick war, and America will sup-
port an "apocalyptic" war between good
and evil. But Vietnam was neither. The
Nixon administration continued the limited
war it inherited while looking for a face-
saving way out. "It required us to empha-
size the national interest rather than ab-
feat there makes U.S. policy makers more
hesitant to. use force for limited pur-
poses.
"What President Nixon and I tried to do
was unnatural," Mr. Kissinger says, a lit-
tle bitterly. "And that is why we didn't
make it."
-U.S.-China relations wouldn't be as
close. Withdrawal seemed to smooth the
way for one of the signal U.S. foreign-pol-
icy accomplishments of recent decades,
the normalization of relations with China.
Robert Komer, who ran President John-
son's Vietnam pacification advisory pro-
gram-recalls a 1900 visit to China with
then-Defense Secretary Harold Brown. Chi-
nese-Vietnamese. friendship had de-
teriorated into mutual distrust and a 1979
border war. At a receptioat the abrupt,.cak
orful Mr. Komer startled his Chinese hoses
with some undiplomatic questions: Wbyr>j
had China- supported Vietnam so vigor
ously against America?' "What were you
drinking then?" be asked
The question wss ? ? met with embar-
rassed giggles, he says. The conclusion
Mr. Komer draws is. that the U.S., while in
Vietnam; stood in the -way of history. With
U.S. withdrawal,. he says. "much larger
forces reasserted themselves."
-Institutions of all kinds would have
been less buffeted by a crisis of public con-
fidence that swept the nation during and
after the war. ,
"When the government loses a war for
satellite, as did Laos. Some of the "dome-
noes" that so concerned U.S. policyl
makers during the war-Thailand and In-
donesia, for example-didn't fall.
A Winnable War?
Was Vietnam ever winnable? Those in-
terviewed differ emphatically on that ques-
tion. "This was a war that could never be
won," says Richard Holbrooke, a former
assistant secretary of state. But former
Defense Secretary James Schlesinger
sounds equally certain that "indeed, we
had won, in all probability"-until war-
weariness and Watergate undermined U.S.
support for South Vietnam. Nor is there
agreement on the definition of "victory.'
Yet for all their differences these men
do offer provocative speculation on a world
that might have been. If the U.S. had
won:
-Washington would be more inclined to
wage limited wars in the shadows of the
main U.S.-Soviet rivalry. The idea of lim-
respect for government is bound to de-
cline," says James Sundquist, a political
scientist, and Brookings Institution senior
fellow. Vietnam wasn't the sole cause-
Watergate, racial tensions, persistent infla-
tion all contributed-and government
wasn't the sole victim. Between 1965 and
1979, "all institutions went down together"
in the public-opinion polls, he notes. But
government was a major victim. Some of-
ficials of the time remember it with.
pain.
J. William Fulbright is 79 now. Two
decades ago, as Senate Foreign Relations
Committee chairman, he sponsored Presi-
dent Johnson's Gulf of Tonkin Resolution,
only to turn sharply against the war later.
He sits at his desk in a prestigious Wash-
ington law firm, reluctantly dredging up
old memories. "I've tried to forget it," he
bursts out at one point. Later he adds:
"You come into those offices believing that
your government tells the truth. I regret
my naivete."
Continued
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/06/22 : CIA-RDP90-00552R000100240003-3