WHAT ARE THE LESSONS OF VIETNAM?

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000200990005-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 20, 2012
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: March 1, 1983
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

ST Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/20: CIA
oDl FA::E_~L
David F.~7z
James Chace
WHAT ARE THE LESSONS
OF VIETN."I?
lien 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:
It seems to me the American people want to forget Vietnam and not
even remember that it happened. But the cost was 55,000 dead, 303,000
wounded. $150 billion. With some of us it will never be forgotten because
it was one of the most tragic, if not the most tragic, episodes in American
history. It was unnecessary, uncalled for, it wasn't tied to our security or a
vital interest. It was just a misadventure in a part of the world which we
should have kept our nose out of.'
Today the desire to forget Vietnam seems to have given way
to a desire to learn about it-specifically to learn how to avoid
getting involved in such disastrous misadventures again. The
last decade has witnessed not merely a resurgence of interest
in America's Indochina experience as such but also in the
possible parallels that can be drawn to it in Central America,
the Middle East and elsewhere. Increasingly one hears appeals
to the lessons of Indochina-generally if inaccurately referred
to as the lessons of Vietnam-in support of or in opposition to
current foreign policy initiatives around the world. Thus, Sen-
ator Gary Hart, when he charged in the 1984 presidential
primary campaign that former Vice President Mondale mis-
understood the crisis in Central America, claimed that "At the
heart of the difference is, perhaps, the lesson of Vietnam ...
Mr. Mondale ... has not learned the lesson of Vietnam." In
reply, Mondale said that "Hart has learned the wrong lesson
from Vietnam.''
There are certain undisputed practical lessons that can be
drawn from the long history of American involvement in
Indochina's affairs, but most of these are of an operational
character-those relating to the techniques and technologies
of warfare-and as such lie outside the realm of this article.
We propose to direct our attention solely to the question of
whether or not the Indochina experience can provide lessons
about where and in what circumstances America ought to
intervene militarily in foreign conflicts.
EXCERPT
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II
A difficulty that arises at the very outset is that the answers
what actually happened, but accounts differ on just
depend on
that. Did the American govern ve the knoowledge and
what it was doing in Indochina. D d it ha
the accurate information that was needed in order to make the
right decisions?
In 1983, the knowledgeable George E. Reedy, once press
secretary to President Lyndon Johnson, blamed the ignorance
of Americans, from the President on down, for the errors that
were committed in Indochina. In 1983 too, Senator Christo-
pher Dodd (D-Conn.) drew a parallel between Indochina and
Central America: "The painful truth is that many of our
highest officials know as little about Central America in 1983
as we knew about Indochina in 1963." The lesson is that both
government officials and private citizens should in future be
better informed about world affairs. Good advice; a worthy
New Year's resolution. But are we likely to carry it into effect?
How many of us at this moment are studying the situation in
Baluchistan or some other likely flashpoint of crisis?
In any event it is by no means universally conceded that we
did not know what we were doing. Barbara Tuchman is among
those who do not agree that we lacked the knowledge to make
the right decisions in Indochina. In her much-discussed recent
book. The March of Folly, she claims that "ignorance was not a
factor in the American endeavor in Vietnam." Instead, she
concludes that American policy in that country was a principal
illustration of governmental folly. By folly, Mrs. Tuchman
means irrationality: the pursuit of policies that run contrary to
self-interest by people who knew they were doing so. She writes
that in Vietnam, "All the conditions and reasons precluding a
successful outcome were recognized or foreseen" by American
officials who willfully refused to draw conclusions or to act
upon the basis of what they knew.
Support for her premise that American officials were well-
informed of the realities of Vietnam is offered by Leslie Gelb
and Richard Betts in their 1979 book, The Irony of Vietnam:
The System Worked. They assert that, throughout the various
administrations involved in the Vietnam conflict, "virtually all
views and recommendations were considered and virtually all
dds
onfiillusions
important decisions were mPaerswithout
tha ton the whole
for success." The Pentagon
the American intelli ence community supplied the overnment'
hiet
h
e
with accurate information, and that t
did the
o
i
i
e n
-?
-
took a more realistic. p
d other civilian bodies. The
il
an
National Securit 7 Counc
here would seem to be that the cIA and the joint Chiefs should
and civilian
future
h
i
,
e
n t
eater role in decision-makin
idea for a
i
ve
ess, but that is hardly an attract
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For Barbara Tuchman, then, the lesson of Vietnam is that
in the future the American electorate ought to choose candi-
dates for high office who have more courage and character.
More good advice, but experience suggests that we are unlikely
to follow it. It may be more than coincidence that the senators
who had the courage to oppose the Vietnam War when it was
Ernest Gruening,
still unpopular to do so-Wayne Morse,
George McGovern, Frank Church and, later, J. William Ful-
bright-were defeated for reelection, and none of them was
elected to public office again. To be fair to Mrs. Tuchman, it
should be said that the tone of her book suggests that she does
not seriously expect the American electorate to heed her
sermon.
Closely related to the dispute over whether ignorance was a
key factor-either in general or at one particular level of
government-is the argument over how America got involved
so deeply in Vietnam. Some see it as having been a gradual
process in Which the U.S. government ended up somewhere it
did not intend to go to when it began the process. Thus
Representative Henry Gonzalez (D-Tex.), in the course of the
congressional debate on El Salvador in March 1983, remarked
that, "Those of us who remember the Gulf of Tonkin Reso-
lution know just how big a seemingly innocuous commitment
War
can te nst Sof theillustration
same year, Congressman
Powers rs debaeba September
to limit
was no use
Gene Snyder (D-kyo) the claimed Obviously, even trying he
a grant of power
had the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in his pocket, it was not the
President's intention to use it to expand the American presence
in Vietnam." That is why, said Mr. Snyder, it was unwise to
grant powers to President Reagan in the Middle East while
trying to impose limits on them. "I contend that these limita-
tions and restrictions are nothing more than good intentions-
like the ones we heard from the administration in 1964-and
we must recognize that a war in the Mideast can be just as hard
on good intentions. as a war in Southeast Asia was." The
solution he urged was to refuse the President even the limited
powers for which he asked in the Middle East.
Representative Gonzalez is clearly right in observing that
small commitments can develop into large ones without anyone
intending for them to do so. But is the Congress then going to
stop entering into commitments altogether? Clearly it cannot.
And those like Representative Snyder who believe the lesson
of Vietnam to be that the President must be strictly limited in
Cmbued
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his power to intervene with armed forces abroad may have
achieved less than they had hoped by passing the War Powers
Act. Since that time, President Reagan has surely gone much
further in involving the United States in, for example, Central
America than an apprehensive Congress may have desired; the
act seems not to have had all that much effect. There is,
therefore, a real question as to whether such legislation can-
as it is intended to do-prevent new Vietnams.
EXCERPTED
' Quoted in Michael Charlton and Anthony Moncrieff, Many Reasons Why: The American
Involvement in Vietnam, New York: Hill and Wang, 1978, p. 67. -
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.
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