American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War

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Summary: Vietnam in the Cold War Context
Review: David E. Kaiser, American Tragedy : Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)

As the Vietnam War recedes into history, debate over its causes and conduct continues. In this massive, authoritative study of the war's origins, David Kaiser asserts that Dwight Eisenhower initiated policies calling for military responses to Communist aggression in Southeast Asia, and John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, although they may have questioned these policies, never changed them. Kennedy was reluctant to commit American ground forces in Vietnam. In contrast, Johnson was determined to confront North Vietnam, and the war began in earnest early in 1965, when the bombing campaign commenced and ground forces were introduced.

Kaiser offers the provocative theses that the war was the work of the "GI generation," a term he borrows from William Strauss and Neil Howe's 1991 book Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069, for men born between 1901 and 1924 who lived through the Great Depression and then did most of the fighting during World War II. According to Kaiser, the "strengths" of the GI generation included a "willingness to tackle tough and costly tasks, a faith in the institutions of the government of the United States, a great capacity for teamwork and consensus, and a relentless optimism," and its weaknesses included "an unwillingness to question basic assumptions, or even to admit the possibility of failure, or to understand that the rest of the American population was less inclined to favor struggle and sacrifice for their own stake." Kennedy and Johnson, most of their senior civilian advisers, and all of the Joint Chiefs, belonged to the GI generation, and they "almost unquestionably accepted the need to resist Communist expansion wherever it took place." Nevertheless, the Kennedy administration never agreed about policy in Vietnam. According to Kaiser, throughout most of 1961, Kennedy "resisted the bureaucracy's repeated calls for full-scale American military intervention in Southeast Asia." Events in1962 made intervention more certain, and the Pentagon began planning "to defeat the Viet Cong...with conventional military operations." But, by that time, President Kennedy was increasingly reliant on State Department official Roger Hillsman, who believed that "[c]onventional military tactics were ineffective against guerrillas." Ngo Dinh Diem's government in South Vietnam also posed serious problems. The regime received significant American aid, and its army was wholly financed by the United States, but "Diem never showed the slightest tendency to follow American advice." To the contrary, Diem relied upon his widely-hated brother Ngo Dinh Nhu. In late 1961, when the U.S. proposed "fundamental changes in the operation of Diem's government and army in order to win the struggle against the Communists," Diem resisted. Coup rumors circulated for the next two years. Kaiser provides a lengthy, detailed narrative of the administration's relationship to Diem's demise. In June 1963, longstanding Buddhist opposition to the regime erupted into a full-scale crisis, and this "ultimately led to the overthrow and assassination of Diem." Until then, according to Kaiser, "President Kennedy generally stayed out of the details of Vietnam policy," but, the situation in South Vietnam began "to require attention at the highest levels." By August, The New York Times reported that "the United States has almost openly been advocating a military coup," but what Kennedy "feared more than anything, from August through October, was an American-sponsored coup that failed." American ambivalence, sometimes encouraging the plotters, sometimes showing disdain, was inexcusable. Nowhere in this country's history is there a more shameful record of the U.S. maneuvering to undermine an ostensibly friendly government. According to Kaiser, "the four key men who led the United States into the Vietnam War" were Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. Kaiser writes that "Johnson, McNamara, and Rusk - with Bundy's general support - had forged a personal bond around the cause of the war in South Vietnam." Kaiser's indictments are hard, if not harsh. Johnson never evinced "interest in any long-term alternative to escalation." The President later told Bundy, "I don't think [Vietnam is] worth fighting for," but Johnson seemed to believe that the United States could not get out without a substantial loss of face. Rusk "clung to his version of the lesson of the 1930s: that firmness alone could deter Communist aggression anywhere around the world." According to Kaiser, "[t]he mystique that built up around McNamara should not obscure the essence of his role: implementing other men's plans, in pursuit of other men's objectives," and "McNamara lacked the ability, or perhaps even the intention, to change the manner in which the U.S. Army planned to fight this war." And, in May 1964, Bundy told Johnson that "the US cannot tolerate the loss of Southeast Asia to Communism." Kaiser makes clear that Kennedy and Johnson missed several opportunities to disengage from Vietnam. In November 1961, John Kenneth Galbraith, Kennedy's ambassador to India, visited Saigon, and, after reporting that "Diem's political intransigence was probably the biggest source" of South Vietnam's problems, Galbraith suggested that "the United States would eventually have to dump" Diem. In August 1963, Mike Mansfield, the Senate Majority Leader and an expert on Asia, confidentially advised Kennedy that "the United States should reserve the right to withdraw its assistance should the Saigon government prove incapable of making use of it." In March 1965, Walter Lippmann wrote that South Vietnam was not a vital American interest. And, during a 1965 meeting with President Johnson, Clark Clifford argued, according to Kaiser, that, if the U.S. did not get out of Vietnam, "the alternative was a five-year, 50,000-casualty war that China and the Soviet Union would never allow the United States to win."

According to Kaiser, "[o]ne great irony of the Vietnam war...is its essential lack of effect upon the Cold War." That is a startling conclusion, but it is essentially correct. Kaiser's position is supported by the fact that the Cold War continued for nearly 15 years after the fall of Saigon and then ended in favor of the United States. The war in Vietnam was, in every sense, an American tragedy.

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Summary: A detailed account of the US entry into Vietnam
Review: David Kaiser has accessed newly released documents to write an excellent book. He has chronologed the day by day decisions and opinions of the men at the upper levels of the government that led America into the Vietnam War. We see how Eisenhower's men wanted to commit troops to stop the expansion of communism in Southeast Asia, especially in Laos. Then we see how Kennedy's people continued these policies, while Kennedy reigned them in and wanted to move more carefully.
Kaiser shows us the different agendas. How Diem did not want to use his troops against the Viet Cong, but rather to keep him in power. Diem refused to give any of his military officers enough power to fight the Viet Cong for fear they would plot a coup. He only gave his officers enough force to show the governments strength, keeping Diem and his family in power.
After Kennedy was assassinated Lyndon Johnson inherited Kennedy's advisors, but did not keep a reign on them, so the government made commitments to send troops into Vietnam. Even after Diems death, the Vietnamese only wanted to continue their troops in their power plays instead of fighting the Viet Cong. McNamara and Rusk continued to lead us into war and Lyndon Johnson agreed with them. Ball continuously tried to slow the slide to commitment down, but Johnson and his advisors ignored him.
Kaiser argues that the opinions each man held depended on when he was born. He explains that some were born, and grew up during the 30s and 40s during what he calls the GI generation. Because of this they believed that the United States could achieve anything. Kaiser also points out that the arrival of World War 2 also affected their opinions. Rusk devoutly believed that we had to stop the communists in Vietnam, or there would be another World War. Johnson also held this all or nothing viewpoint. Kennedy on the other hand held a more sophisticated view, placing Vietnam behind other problems, unlike Johnson.
Kaiser shows how Johnson and his advisors refused to negotiate with North Vietnam unless North Vietnam gave us everything we asked for first. An unlikely event. Eventually Johnson and others lied about the problems to keep the commitments increasing. Johnson also tended to ignore other foreign policy problems.
Kaiser's writing usually moves easily so it is not as hard to read as it might have been, given the complexity and detail of the subject matter.

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Summary: Terrific Entry In Debate Over Responsibility For Vietnam!
Review: In an interesting, provocative, well-written and often very surprising work of careful scholarship, author David Kaiser has raised the level of intellectual discussion regarding the origins and prosecution of the war in Vietnam. Using a range of new archival materials only now available, he carefully constructs an intriguing and disturbing portrait of individuals out of control. In this sense this book is a worthy companion piece to David Halberstam's memorable book, "The Best And The Brightest", in the fact that it argues that it was a number of specific individuals with their own personal credos, private agendas, and belief systems that led to the deepening involvement in Southeast Asian affairs. However, this is not to suggest that Professor Kaiser either agrees with Halberstam's thesis or to argue that he has nothing new or worthwhile to reveal. Yet there are undeniable threads of similarity running through both works. Most interesting is Kaiser's contention that it was the unique and singular "can-do" Yankee spirit and aggressive attitude of the World War Two generation that directly led to the decisions to interfere in the internal policies of Vietnam.

Unlike previous tomes such as Halberstam's as well as Stanley Karnow's excellent book, "Vietnam", that portrayed President Eisenhower's policies of global containment of communism as extremely cautious and careful, Kaiser presents a mass of documentary evidence that reveals that it was precisely those decisions and policy predispositions established by Eisenhower, including a willingness to use nuclear weapons tactically, that later led to the fateful moves toward greater involvement by Lyndon Johnson. Even more interesting, Kaiser presents evidence by way of policy changes made By President Kennedy illustrating his own deep concern and reticence regarding involvement in the former French Indochina. In fact, the author shows that for the three years of his administration, Kennedy purposefully denied repeated attempts by both his senior advisors and the military to significantly widen our action in Vietnam. According to Kaiser, while JFK did allow escalation by way of many more military advisors, he repeatedly quite specifically denied, both verbally and by way of documented minutes to meetings with advisors, authorization to escalate by introducing direct combat involvement.

However, the author argues that even Kennedy was seriously misled and misserved as to the status of ongoing efforts by deliberate deception on the part of that great national hero and contemporary revisionist historian, Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense in Kennedy's administration (see my review of McNamara's book). As a result, Kennedy died believing the situation in Vietnam to be much more constrained and careful than it actually was. With Kennedy's departure from the scene in late 1963, events began to move much more quickly and fatefully toward our blind involvement in a situation we neither appreciated the complexity of nor had any real strategy to deal with. In this sense, Lyndon Johnson became the single worst possible foil for the efforts by McNamara and Army General William Westmoreland to massively escalate the war by introducing forty-four combat battalions to the conflict.

According to Kaiser, Johnson lacked Jack Kennedy's sophisticated foreign policy approach and did not understand or appreciate the massively negative effects that an active prosecution of the war would have in our relationship with the rest of the world. So, even as he reassured the American people to the contrary, Lyndon Johnson prepared for a quick and massive entry into the single most disastrous American foreign policy decision of the 20th century. Later, of course, he tried to extricate himself from the tar baby the war became for his administration, yet given his own philosophical world view as a cold warrior, could never manage to take Hubert Humphrey's advice to "just cut and run'. Likewise, Johnson's successor, Richard Nixon, did no better. After shamelessly interfering in the internal political disposition of the South Vietnamese government through Madame Chennault in order to ensure his place in winning the closely contested 1968 elections, Nixon soon found himself stuck to the waist in the sucking quicksand of continuing involvement in the war and a terrifying related national debate approaching a revolutionary fervor. He waited four long and painful years before finally ending American involvement.

This is a wonderfully written book, and the author's style is both entertaining and edifying. He handily deals with a myriad of issues, complexions, and countervailing situations with aplomb, honesty and verve. He makes the otherwise inexplicable descent into national madness and the nightmare of Vietnam all too understandable and human. While I do not share his personally stated philosophical resignation regarding the liability of those individuals responsible for prosecuting the war (I still believe that Robert McNamara, General William Westmoreland, and a number of others should be tried as war criminals for crimes against humanity; after all, otherwise to try Serbians and Croats for their detestable deeds in the former Yugoslavia is utter hypocrisy), I believe this book will quickly become the standard text for helping us to understand how the ritual abuse of power by officials not democratically elected can itself become an anti-democratic force profoundly affecting not only the lives of our citizens, but people everywhere in the developing world.

Hopefully books like this will help us to come to understand and accept the reality of what the American government did in our name to Vietnam. We need to understand how we came to export our darkest emotional suspicions and a sense of national paranoia about a monolithic communist threat into an incredibly murderous campaign that almost exterminated a whole generation of Vietnamese by way of indiscriminate carpet bombing, deliberate use of environmentally horrific defoliates, and creation of so-called "free-fire" zones, where everthing and anything moving was assumed to be hostile, whether it be man, woman, child, or beast. All of this was visited on the world in general and the Vietnamese in particular for little or no reason other than the extremely aggressive and ultimately dangerous can-do macho world-view of the power elite. The sooner we recognize this, the better it will be for us as citizens of a democratic government, and the more likely it is we will stop the next set of so- inclined bureaucratic monsters from acting in this way again.

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Summary: Professor David Kaiser's American Tragedy
Review: Professor David Kaiser of the Strategy and Policy Department of the Naval War College tells us the real story behind the bureaucrats who put us into Vietnam, and in doing so lives up to the highest traditions of the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps which have generally been far ahead of the other services in their resistance to bureaucratic pressures from politicians. The CIA refused to provide Kaiser with anything but token documents, violating the Freedom of Information Act. Kaiser shows how politicians including Presidents Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson grew up under the spell of Churchill's anti-appeasement speeches to believe that the USA had to become the World Policeman. When he became President, Eisenhower began U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia covertly and the Joint Chiefs of Staff except General Shoup of the Marines were badgered into accepting this. When John F. Kennedy became President, both his Senate and Navy service led him to oppose intervention for a long time, in agreement with the U.S. Senate Democrats (Mansfield, Humphrey, etc.) and isolationist Republicans (Dirksen, etc.). The State Department Bureaucrats (who controlled the CIA) and their allies in related departments and the Joint Chiefs so badgered and pressured Kennedy that he eventually collapsed under their bombardment and agreed to intervention in Laos. When Johnson came in as President, he made full scale intervention. Some readers may recall that I have reviewed biographies of Field Marshalls Montgomery and Slim of Great Britain and Marshall/General Zhukov of Russia but not Eisenhower. The Allies produced 4 creative geniuses in World WarII: Montgomery, Slim, Zhukov, and Admiral Nimitz. Eisenhower was not one of them. He was then and later more suited to bureaucratic Ingenious Follower status than to individual Creative Genius status, like Lyndon Johnson. Our British and French allies opposed the intervention (Churchill would probably have opposed it too) not because of De Gaulle's *intransigence* as the news media claimed, but because they are the two nations with the most creative geniuses (along with Italy) in world history. When all is said and done, World War II was needed to defend the USA, but most wars are not and were not (like World War I, which was a bureaucratic war and nothing more). I hope that we start thinking more about jobs and education and environment at home and less about creating overseas what we cannot do at home.

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Summary: Another incomplete rehash of Vietnam lore
Review: The frightening aspect of this work is that it is simply another glazing over of what Americans call the Vietnam War. The sources consulted do not constitute anything resembling a full scope of available scholarship. Americans do not understand the Indochina conflict because they are only allowed to see one side. This book is simply another work in a long line of American political lore which has created convenient rationalization for complex events in Southeast Asia. There are significant scholarly works available for the reader who desires true understanding. This work is certainly not to be held among them.

Rating:
Summary: Another incomplete rehash of Vietnam lore
Review: The frightening aspect of this work is that it is simply another glazing over of what Americans call the Vietnam War. The sources consulted do not constitute anything resembling a full scope of available scholarship. Americans do not understand the Indochina conflict because they are only allowed to see one side. This book is simply another work in a long line of American political lore which has created convenient rationalization for complex events in Southeast Asia. There are significant scholarly works available for the reader who desires true understanding. This work is certainly not to be held among them.

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Summary: Unlike most historians, David Kaiser sees the social subtext
Review: These days, not many argue with Tom Brokaw's coinage, "Greatest Generation," for those who came of age with World War II and held power in America from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Back in the '60s, David Kaiser reminds us, this was the generation of Rusk, McNamara, the two Bundys, alias the "best and brightest" on the far side of the angry "generation gap."

In this extraordinary book, Kaiser reveals more than just who wrote which memo for whom; he also describes and interprets the peer motivations that made Vietnam the tragic failure of these men of geopolitical hubris, numbers-crunching technocracy, and "controlled response" secularism--much to the anger of their draft-age children.

Kaiser's sharp eye for generational dynamics is what makes "American Tragedy" such a fine and complete history, one that should be required reading for anyone who has read or heard Brokaw's encomia. Yes, this was a "great generation," but also one with great flaws. They, not Boomers, were the real Vietnam Generation.