The Unresolved War
Copyright © 2000 by Dave Badtke
On January 27, 1965, one week after his presidential inauguration, Lyndon Johnson received a memo from his National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy, a former professor and dean at Harvard who was one of the "Wise Men" advising the President. In the memo, Bundy, writing for both himself and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, informed Johnson that he saw two alternatives in Vietnam: "... [U]se our military power ... to force a change in Communist policy ... [or] deploy all our resources along a track of negotiation." Bundy added that: "Bob [McNamara] and I tend to favor the first course...."
Johnson had defeated Barry Goldwater in 1964 by an unprecedented 15,000,000 votes. During his campaign, Johnson had pledged to continue his "Great Society" program, which would result in the creation of Medicare and in the passage of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. He had also pledged that he would not increase our involvement in Vietnam. Goldwater had been the Vietnam hawk, pledging more extreme action by suggesting that we should be "carrying the war to North Vietnam – ten years ago we should have bombed North Vietnam, with no risk to our lives."
At the time of the election, there were 23,000 US troops in South Vietnam.
While Johnson was telling the American people that he wanted to follow a middle course, in his meetings with Bundy, McNamara and Dean Rusk, his Secretary of State, he was telling them that he wanted to: "Win the War!" When Johnson decided to follow Bundy’s first course of action and use overwhelming military power to force change, he did so over the objections of Dean Rusk. By July, just 6 months after he took office, Johnson was bombing North Vietnam and US troop strength had grown to 175,000.
Americans had voted overwhelmingly for a candidate who had lied about his intentions in Vietnam: We felt betrayed. (In 1968, Johnson would withdraw from his reelection bid when Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy, running in opposition to the war, won 20 of 24 New Hampshire Primary delegates.)
On April 30, 1975, 25 years ago last Sunday, the South Vietnam government unconditionally surrendered to North Vietnam. The US had lost what the Vietnamese call the American War.
More than 58,000 Americans were killed and 153,000 were wounded. Military casualties were 220,000 in South Vietnam and as many as 1,000,000 in the north. Civilian casualties were 415,000 in the south and 30,000 in the north.
Southeast Asia continues to suffer terribly from the war: 6,000,000 mines remain in Cambodia and from 1985 to 1994, in just one Vietnamese province, 474 were killed and 449 were wounded by unexploded ordinance. In addition, we dropped more than 18,000,000 gallons of dioxin-based herbicide which the Vietnamese claim has killed or injured 400,000 and which has contributed to birth defects in more than 500,000 children. (To put the agent orange numbers in perspective, the combined casualty estimates from the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 230,000.)
In trying to understand our involvement in Vietnam, American hindsight falls far short of 20-20. While economic and political changes since the war suggest that liberal democratic evolution would have eventually prevailed in Southeast Asia without military intervention, we must remember that our fathers and grandfathers, those who were the decision makers in the 60s, had lived through the horror of WWII.
After we dropped the bomb on Japan, we understood better than we had before the destructive power of advanced technological weapons. And when Russia launched Sputnik in 1957 and both Russia, in 1949, and China, in 1964, detonated atomic bombs, we feared Communism was winning the Cold War.
Furthermore, while we had helped win WWII, we also knew that if we had intervened sooner, fewer would have died. By committing never again to make that mistake, we saw the likes of Hitler in Nikita Khrushchev, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro.
Our understanding of the Vietnam War will surely improve as historians cull truth from memories and records. Michael Beschloss’s compendium of Johnson tapes, "Taking Charge", includes a segment in which Johnson worries about possibly sending his valet, Kenneth Gaddis, father of six, off to fight in Vietnam. On the tape Johnson rhetorically asks Senator Richard Russell: "...what the hell are we going to get out of his doing it?"
Sadly, after 25 years, we still can’t answer Johnson’s question. We can only speculate how different our society might be today if, after reading Bundy’s memo, Johnson had remained true to his campaign pledge by vigorously pursuing negotiation rather than war.
- Dave Badtke is founder of the developing Carquinez Review literary journal. Find him on the web at www.CarquinezReview.com.
Contact him at:
Dave@CarquinezReview.com or Dave@Badtke.com