The March of Folly (Barbara Tuchman) p374-7
Congressional refusal to allow the United States to re-intervene represented the functioning, not, as Kissinger lamented, “the breakdown of our democratic political process.” Rather than weakness of American will to see the task through, it was belated recognition of a process clearly contrary and damaging to self-interest, and the summoning of political responsibility to terminate it. It came too late, however, for the country to escape punishment. Human casualties are bearable when they are believed to have served a purpose; they are bitter when, as in this case, 45,000 killed and 300,000 wounded were sacrificed for nothing. Expenditures of about $20 billion annually for nearly a decade, amounting to a total of about $150 billion over and above what would have been the normal military budget, contorted the economy to a condition that has not since been righted.
More important than the physical effects was the lowered trust in and authority of government. Legislation by Congress in the post-Vietnam years was repeatedly directed to restricting the Executive in various kinds of conduct on the assumption that without such restrictions, it would act irregularly or illegitimately. The public too learned suspicion, and many would have felt their attitude expressed in two words by one of the White House staff, Gordon Strachan, who on being asked by the Ervin committee what advice he would give to other young people wishing to serve in government, answered, “Stay away.” For many, confidence in the righteousness of their country gave way to cynicism. Who since Vietnam would venture to say of America in simple belief that she was the “last best hope of earth”? What America lost in Vietnam was, to put it in one word, virtue.
The follies that produced this result begin with continuous over-reacting: in the invention of endangered “national security,” the invention of “vital interest,” the invention of a “commitment” which rapidly assumed a life of its own, casting a spell over the inventor. In this process the major mover was Dulles, who, by setting out to wreck the compromise of Geneva and install America as the keeper of one zone and relentless opponent of the other, was the begetter of all that followed. His zeal as a Savonarola of foreign policy mesmerized associates and successors into parroting “national security” and “vital interest,” not so much in belief as in lip service to the cold war, or as scare tactics to extract appropriations from Congress. As late as 1975, President Ford told Congress that unwillingness to vote aid for South Vietnam would undermine “credibility” as an ally, which is “essential to our national security.” Kissinger repeated the theme two months later, telling a press conference that if South Vietnam were allowed to go under it would represent “a fundamental threat over a period of time to the security of the United States.”
Over-reacting was present in the conjuring of specters, of falling dominoes, of visions of “ruin,” of yielding the Pacific and pulling back to San Francisco, of minor dragons like the invisible COSVN, and finally the paranoia of the Watergate White House. More serious, over-reacting led to the squandering of American power and resources in a grand folly of disproportion to the national interest involved. The absence of intelligent thought on this issue was astonishing for, as General Ridgway wrote in 1971, “it should not have taken great vision to perceive . . . that no truly vital United States interest was present . . . and that the commitment to a major effort was a monumental blunder.”
A second folly was illusion of omnipotence, cousin to the Popes’ illusion of invulnerability; a third was wooden-headedness and “cognitive dissonance”; a fourth was “working the levers” as a substitute for thinking.
In the illusion of omnipotence, American policy-makers took it for granted that on a given aim, especially in Asia, American will could be made to prevail. This assumption came from the can-do character of a self-created nation and from the sense of competence and superpower derived from World War II. If this was “arrogance of power,” in Senator Fulbright’s phrase, it was not so much the fatal hubris and over-extension that defeated Athens and Napoleon, and in the 20th century Germany and Japan, as it was failure to understand that problems and conflicts exist among other peoples that are not soluble by the application of American force or American techniques or even American goodwill. “Nation-building” was the most presumptuous of the illusions. Settlers of the North American continent had built a nation from Plymouth Rock to Valley Forge to the fulfilled frontier, yet failed to learn from their success that elsewhere, too, only the inhabitants can make the process work.
Wooden-headedness, the “Don’t-confuse-me-with-the-facts” habit, is a universal folly never more conspicuous than at upper levels of Washington with respect to Vietnam. Its grossest fault was under-estimation of North Vietnam’s commitment to its goal. Enemy motivation was a missing element in American calculations, and Washington could therefore ignore all the evidence of nationalist fervor and of the passion for independence which as early as 1945 Hanoi had declared “no human force can any longer restrain.” Washington could ignore General Leclerc’s prediction that conquest would take half a million men and “Even then it could not be done.” It could ignore the demonstration of élan and capacity that won victory over a French army with modern weapons at Dien Bien Phu, and all the continuing evidence thereafter.
American refusal to take the enemy’s grim will and capacity into account has been explained by those responsible on the ground of ignorance of Vietnam’s history, traditions and national character: there were “no experts available,” in the words of one high-ranking official. But the longevity of Vietnamese resistance to foreign rule could have been learned from any history book on Indochina. Attentive consultation with French administrators whose official lives had been spent in Vietnam would have made up for the lack of American expertise. Even superficial American acquaintance with the area, when it began to supply reports, provided creditable information. Not ignorance, but refusal to credit the evidence and, more fundamentally, refusal to grant stature and fixed purpose to a “fourth-rate” Asiatic country were the determining factors, much as in the case of the British attitude toward the American colonies. The irony of history is inexorable.
Underestimation was matched by overestimation of South Vietnam because it was the beneficiary of American assistance, and because Washington verbiage equated any non-Communist group with the “free” nations, fostering the delusion that its people were prepared to fight for their “freedom” with the will and energy that freedom is supposed to inspire. Such was the stated anchor of our policy; dissonant evidence had to be rejected or it would have made it obvious that this policy was built on sand. When dissonance disturbed attitudes toward either enemy or client, the attitudes, following the rules of wooden-headedness, rigidified.
A last folly was the absence of reflective thought about the nature of what we were doing, about effectiveness in relation to the object sought, about balance of possible gain as against loss and against harm both to the ally and to the United States. Absence of intelligent thinking in rulership is another of the universals, and raises the question whether in modern states there is something about political and bureaucractic life that subdues the functioning of intellect in favor of “working the levers” without regard to rational expectations. This would seem to be an ongoing prospect.
The longest war had come to an end. Faintly from a distance of 200 years might have been heard Chatham’s summary of a nation’s self-betrayal: “by the arts of imposition, by its own credulity, through the means of false hope, false pride and promised advantages of the most romantic and improbable nature.” A contemporary summing up was voiced by a Congressman from Michigan, Donald Riegle. In talking to a couple from his constituency who had lost a son in Vietnam, he faced the stark recognition that he could find no words to justify the boy’s death. “There was no way I could say that what had happened was in their interest or in the national interest or in anyone’s interest.”
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