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"The Vietnam War was an aspect of the Cold War." Henry Kissinger, 11/09/06

French to U.S. Involvement

In May 1945, the Truman administration gave France its approval to resume colonial authority in Indochina, Truman hoping that France would liberalize its rule there. In that part of Indochina called Vietnam, the French were already facing a declared independence. A movement called the Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh, a veteran Communist, had been fighting the Vichy French regime in Vietnam, which was administering Indochina for Japan. And the Viet Minh had been helping the Americans by rescuing downed U.S. airmen. At the end of the war the Viet Minh had committees throughout Vietnam, and Ho Chi Minh announced Vietnam's independence. Most Vietnamese were overjoyed and looked upon the Viet Minh and Ho Chi Minh as heroes. This was the nationalist aspect that U.S. forces in Vietnam would be fighting. In spirit, Vietnam was independent of foreign rule. But the Truman administration and the other Allied powers repeated the policy of the Allied powers at the end of World War I. They ignored the wish of the Vietnamese to be independent. The French tried to force their way back in Vietnam, and a war between the French and the Viet Minh began in December 1946.

The United States helped the French in Vietnam, President Truman doing so for the sake of the fight against communism in Europe and in Indochina. Much of France's efforts to overthrow Ho Chi Minh's government in Vietnam was being financed by the United States, and around 1950 the Viet Minh began to benefit from the coming to power of the communists in China. After North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson persuaded Truman to increase U.S. assistance to the French effort in Vietnam, and the United States recognized France's puppet king in Vietnam, Bao Dai. After Eisenhower took office in 1952, U.S. aid to the French effort in Vietnam increased, and by 1954 the U.S. was paying 80 percent of the financial cost of the war against the Viet Minh. 

In 1954 the French in Vietnam faced military defeat at Dienbienphu, and the French asked the U.S. to contribute air and naval power. The U.S. Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, conferred with congressional leaders, and Congress wished to help, but it wanted France to declare Indochina independent so that the United States would not appear to be fighting for colonialism. But France, of course, did not want to declare Indochina independent.

Some Americans saw the issue in Vietnam as simply communism, and a few of them were eager to drop atomic weapons on the Viet Minh forces or to send in U.S. troops rather than see a communist victory there. However, a new premier in France, Pierre Mendès-France, chose to negotiate an end to France's seven years of war in Vietnam. At Geneva Switzerland, in July 1954, the French and Viet Minh signed a settlement. Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, Communist China, and representatives from the two other Indochina nations, Laos and Cambodia, attended the conference. The settlement signed at Geneva was an agreement that Vietnam was to be temporarily divided at the 17th parallel. For two years the French were to be allowed to maintain their administration in the southern half of Vietnam. Then elections were to be held to reunite Vietnam.

International agreements were still an important part of maintaining peace among nations, as they had been in the 1930s. But U.S. strategists, John Foster Dulles among them, believed that nothing could be gained from the agreements at Geneva. (See the Pentagon Papers.) These strategists favored challenging the spread of communism in Asia while the People's Republic of China was still young and less formidable than they believed it was bound to become. The United States had not signed the Geneva Accords, and in the place of respecting the Geneva agreement, Dulles wished to keep an option open to fight communism. With the Viet Minh having prevailed against the French and having established itself in Vietnam, Dulles was in effect aiming to roll back this gain and wishing he could roll back communism elsewhere.

The Viet Minh abided by the Geneva agreement. It withdrew its military from areas in the south that it had dominated for years. It ruled in the north of Vietnam while the French maintained its puppet regime in the south: the Vietnamese king, Bao Dai. And, as agreed to at Geneva, the Viet Minh remained organized and represented in the south.

Escalation and War

Below the 17th parallel the U.S. had been applying its influence. A Christian Vietnamese named Ngo Dinh Diem had been in the United States between 1950 and 1954. There he had met various Americans, among them Cardinal Francis J. Spellman and Senator John F. Kennedy. Diem disliked Vietnam's communists. He was Catholic, and in 1945 the communists in Vietnam had imprisoned him and then exiled him to Chiang Kai-shek's China. Diem's anti-communism attracted the Americans. He had become their hope as an alternative to communism in Vietnam.

While Diem was in the United States he was named Prime Minister by the puppet king in Saigon, Bao Dai. The Eisenhower administration began giving Diem financial support and began training an army in Vietnam loyal to Diem. Ignoring the Geneva agreement of 1954, Diem and Bao Dai competed in an election for president. Diem's troops guarded the polls, and those who attempted to vote for Bao Dai were assaulted. Observers claimed that the fraud was obvious. In Saigon, for example, Diem claimed more votes than there were registered voters in the entire area. Diem won and proclaimed the Republic of South Vietnam. The elections that were supposed to unite Vietnam were ignored. The Eisenhower administration had recognized that the popularity of the Diem regime could not stand up to the popularity of the Viet Minh and their leader Ho Chi Minh. Eisenhower had feared that Ho Chi Minh would win as much as 80 percent of the vote. This was one of those elections that communists could have won, and people in Washington were not about to surrender to exceptions.

Diem was a nationalist. He was a man of courage. But he was not popular with the common Vietnamese. He surrounded himself with friends and family and failed to cultivate relations with local leaders and the various political and religious groups in the South. He tried to rule by command. And he sided with large landowners who wanted lands returned to them or payment for lands that had been distributed to people by the Viet Minh. Peasants in the south who were being threatened with a loss of the land given them by the Viet Minh were as ready to fight to keep their land as were farmers in the American West.

Something fundamental to a new war in Vietnam was developing. Communist leadership in the North Vietnam saw the Diem regime as illegitimate. They saw it as the creation of and maintained by foreigners. They believed that they and their supporters in the southern half of Vietnam had more right to apply their wills to developments in the whole of Vietnam that did these foreigners. And many in the United States did not see it this way. The Cold War was still on. People in the U.S. believed that Communist aggression had to be deterred.

Diem had begun a campaign against the Viet Minh and communists in the south, and in the process his forces in rural areas became increasingly feared. The Viet Minh and communists in the south struck back - the beginning of a new guerrilla warfare. In the North the Viet Minh remained aloof, not feeling the pressure of Diem's anti-communist campaign and fearing war with the United States. Under pressure from comrades in the south, the regime in the north, in October 1957, ordered the organization of new fighting units in the south: the Vietcong. Diem's regime started a "strategic hamlet" program - the rounding up and relocating of peasants into communities surrounded by barbed wire, to separate peasants from communist guerrillas. And the peasants disliked being forcibly removed from their hamlets.

In 1961, France's Charles de Gaulle told President John F. Kennedy that in Vietnam the U.S. would sink "step by step into a bottomless quagmire," however much it spent "in men and money." President Kennedy had begun sending more advisors to Vietnam to help the Diem regime, increasing their number to 800 in 1961. Kennedy allowed U.S. pilots to fly combat missions while pretending to be instructors, and he supported counter-insurgency to overthrow the communists in the North.

Kennedy saw hearts and minds as part of the struggle in Vietnam, and in the face of failures in Vietnam he described the battle in Vietnam as needing to be won by the Vietnamese themselves, not by Americans. Kennedy watched as Diem's reign become more hated by people in the southern half of Vietnam. The Diem family was Roman Catholic and had come into conflict with Buddhists - a large segment of the South's population. In the city of Hué, Catholics had been permitted to fly the papal banner, but the Buddhists had been prohibited from raising their flag. In May 1963 thousands of Buddhists in Hué staged a protest demonstration. The Diem regime sent troops in armored vehicles against them, and nine of the Buddhists were killed. Diem accused the Buddhists of being communist sympathizers, and in the weeks to come clashes took place between Diem's troops and anti-Diem Buddhists. Buddhist monks began setting themselves afire, creating a sensation around the world, while Diem's sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, described the burnings as a Buddhist barbecue. Then, in August, Diem ordered troops loyal to him to attack Buddhist temples in Hué, Saigon and other cities in the south.

The Kennedy administration was aware of Diem's lack of popularity. He saw that Diem would remain unable to rally the South in the fight against the communists. The Kennedy administration hoped to find an alternative to Diem, and, with U.S. connivance, the Diem regime was overthrown by his generals. Diem was assassinated, and in the South people erupted in joy, people in Saigon bedecking army tanks with flowers and parading joyously through the streets.

The regimes in Saigon that followed Diem were many, and they were led by military men. An attempt was made at elections, but none of the generals was able to rule democratically. Their regimes had some civilian supporters, but none represented the feelings of a broad segment of the population of South Vietnam. These were regimes that would owe their existence to U.S. money, material support, and increasingly to U.S. military power. These regimes would have their fervent followers, but not enough public support in fighting against communist forces. The guerrilla forces in South Vietnam, meanwhile, were thriving because they had support from local populations. Guerrillas without local support failed - as Che Guevara did later in Bolivia.

Soon after Diem was assassinated, the same fate befell President Kennedy. And soon after that, the new U.S. president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was handed a report by the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, the gist of which was that the U.S. had a hard choice: either dramatically increase U.S. involvement in the war or see a communist victory there. That such a choice had to be made was a sign of failed policy for the U.S., a policy built on the failed assumption that with U.S. help the anti-communist regime in Saigon would be popular enough to win against Ho Chi Minh and the communists. Johnson's response to the report from the ambassador to South Vietnam was personal and political. It was not yet America's war to lose, but he said that he was not going to be the first U.S. president to lose a war. Johnson was afraid of hardline anti-communists in Congress whose help he wanted in getting civil rights legislation passed.

So far the United States had lost only a couple of dozen or so "advisors" in Vietnam. On July 31, in the Tonkin Gulf, the U.S. Navy was helping South Vietnam make raids against a North Vietnamese radio transmitter on the island of Hon Ngu. The North Vietnamese responded by attacking hostile ships in the area. The torpedo boats approached the U.S. destroyer Maddox, and two of the torpedo boats were sunk and a third damaged. On August 3, Secretary of Defense McNamara told President Johnson about the fighting and the naval mission in the area. On August 4, off the coast of North Vietnam, the Maddox thought that it was again under attack, in the dark of night. The Captain of the ship was to admit that it was just an "overeager sonarman" who "was hearing his ship's own propeller beat." But for two hours the Maddox and another destroyer, the USS Turner Joy, fired at imaginary targets. Air support from two U.S. aircraft carriers were sent on a retaliatory mission against targets on Vietnam's coast. And President Johnson spoke to the America public about "deliberate attacks on U.S. naval vessels," and the retaliation and added that "we must and shall honor our commitments." On August 6, Defense Secretary met with U.S. legislators and gave them a distorted description of  U.S. naval activities in the Tonkin Gulf.  On August 7 the Senate and House of Representatives passed the "Tonkin Gulf Resolution," characterized as a response to communist aggression against innocent U.S. naval vessels. The swell of public opinion in support of a tough response against communism was overwhelming, with only two U.S. senators, Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska, voting against it.

In his 1964 run for the presidency, Johnson had said that he would not be sending American boys to do the fighting that Vietnamese boys should be doing, but in 1965 he believed he had good reason for doing so. He characterized his policy as liberating South Vietnam from communism, and he said nothing about the nationalist element against which the U.S. was pitting itself. He and the American people were unwilling to resort to the kind of all out war as the United States had fought against Japan and Germany, but the U.S. would try to use American ground forces and air power to bomb the communists into submission. General Curtis LeMay, who retired in 1965, claimed the U.S. should bomb Vietnam back to the Stone age. (In 1968, LeMay ran as the candidate for vice president on the George Wallace ticket for the American Independent Party.)

The Johnson administration and others argued that if the United States did not stop communist aggression in Vietnam, communism would spread elsewhere in Southeast Asia. On university campuses, students attended debates on the war, and in these debates those supporting Johnson's policies were less convincing than those who opposed Johnson's policies. Hearing debates that the public at large was not hearing, students rose in great numbers against the war. Pacifists joined others in opposing the war in Vietnam. Overwhelmed by World War II and largely silent about Korea, the war in Vietnam gave pacifists a great opportunity to protest war.

Americans had been getting news of guerrillas being supported by local people but they gave little thought to the right of people to local government of their own choosing. It was the ability of the guerrillas to fade back into their local communities that had made fighting the guerrillas so frustrating for those fighting on the side of the regime in Saigon. The Saigon regime had been making military forays against villages, but the Americans focused instead on communist atrocities - some of which were guerrilla forces murdering people sent by Saigon into villages, killings that were often supported by the local people, who hated or feared Saigon agents. There was also Communist mistreatment of captured American men, which added to the anger of Americans. On the other hand, few Americans supporting the war effort in Vietnam considered the atrocities being committed by those fighting for the regime in Saigon. This included terrorist air strikes. Napalm was being splashed around. The Saigon regime and the U.S. were bombing areas in an attempt to discourage its inhabitants from cooperating with those among them who had joined the guerrillas. Villages and towns were being destroyed. One American claimed that a town had to be destroyed in order to save it from communism.

President Richard Nixon took office in 1969 with a plan he stated that would end the war. His policy was "Vietnamization" of the war, in other words turning it over to the Vietnamese to fight and gradually withdrawing U.S. forces. He ended the draft. He bombed North Vietnam, and in 1972 U.S. air power encouraged Hanoi to  established an agreement with the United States. Hanoi agreed to leave the Viet Cong (Communist) forces in the south of Vietnam to fight alone.  The U.S. part of the agreement was that it would pull its troops out of Vietnam and dismantle its bases. The U.S. and Hanoi agreed to an exchange of prisoners. According to the agreement, the U.S. could replace arms, on a one-to-one basis, that had been supplied to the Saigon regime. And should the Hanoi violate the agreement, President Nixon planned to use air power again to deter Hanoi.

People in the U.S. had been turning against United States involvement in the war in Vietnam in greater numbers - as had happened among the French. They had not been influenced much by demonstrations. They were not influenced at all by demonstrations that disrupted traffic and other routines of daily life, but they were influenced by what they saw on television, including children running from bombing being carried out by Saigon's U.S. backed airforce. The U.S. Congress responded to the change in public opinion on the war, and it voted restrictions on material support to the regime in Saigon.

In January 1973 the Paris Peace Accords were signed by the United States, North Vietnam, the Republic of Vietnam (of Saigon) and the Viet Cong (the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam). A ceasefire began. Like the Geneva Accords of 1954 it was built upon the assumption that Vietnam was one country. There were to be negotiations between Saigon and the Viet Cong that would allow elections in the south and an eventual reunification of Vietnam to be "carried out step by step through peaceful means." The U.S. agreed to withdraw it forces within sixty days, and it did so. Saigon's Thieu regime began seizing areas occupied by communist forces in the Mekong Delta and elsewhere in the south. In a meeting in Hanoi, communist strategists acknowledged that their troops in the south were exhausted and in disarray. Their spies tell them the Saigon's President Thieu has plans to continue grabbing territory. Fighting between the Viet Cong and Saigon forces persisted. In 1974 the U.S. Congress cut off funding military assistance for Saigon or anyplace else in Indochina. And in 1974 Nixon was driven from office by the Watergate scandal. Believing that Saigon was not living up to the Paris Peace Accords, and with no fear of  U.S. bombing, and finding weakness among the Saigon forces, the north moved against Saigon in force, believing that it had a right to do, because the whole of Vietnam was their country, and believing they were liberating their country from a regime that was not legitimate. 

The effort by the United States to prop up an anti-communist regime in Saigon had cost the lives of 50,000 U.S. military men, and it had accomplished nothing. Losses among the Vietnamese were greater. Among those fighting in Saigon's military, about 220,000 were killed. Those killed fighting on the side of the Communists are estimated to be between 650,000 and 1,000,000. Civilian deaths are estimated at around 4,000,000 - a lot of lives that would have been spared if nation-wide elections had been allowed in Vietnam in the late 1950s. 

Postwar Opinions

In Vietnam, many who had fought on the side of the Viet Minh and Ho Chi Minh continued to see their struggle and sacrifice as having given their nation freedom to chose its own destiny. But some among them were dismayed by the move toward free enterprise and accommodation with the capitalistic global economy. They believed that the war had also been fought to preserve Vietnamese socialism, and they wondered whether their victory was being lost.

Some of  the Vietnamese who had fought on the side of the Saigon regime and had fled to the United States saw themselves as having fought for freedom because they had fought against communism, and they described their loss of the war as having been abandoned by the United States. Twenty years of U.S. support, and eight years of intensive U.S. military firepower were not enough for them. The idea, as expressed President Johnson in 1964, that  it was a war that the Vietnamese rather than "American boys" had to win was not acceptable to them. Neither was President Nixon's "Vietnamization" of the war.

Some Americans agreed with them. Some in the U.S. continued to see the North as invaders of the South and to see the war as simply Communist expansion. They believed that those fighting on the side of the Saigon regime were stabbed in the back by U.S. television, journalists, demonstrations and weak-kneed politicians. A few described help from the Soviet Union and China as having made the communist victory possible - without comparing the level of that support to the support that the United States gave to Saigon for more than a decade.

Some Americans felt the same about pulling out of Vietnam as had some French had in 1954. The French public had to some extent been indifferent about the fate of the Vietnamese, but some French military men were upset as they left on shore those Vietnamese they had promised never to abandon. Those in Vietnam who supported the French had been a minority, but they had committed themselves to the side of the French and were now exposed to the hostilities of other Vietnamese. Many swam to the French ships and begged to be taken aboard. The French watching this felt shame and that they had been betrayed.

In 1975, some Americans believed that what they saw of Vietnamese trying flee Vietnam with the Americans meant that the South Vietnamese in general appreciated what the United States was doing in Vietnam. Some others saw this as confusing the minority who sided with the United States with the majority of South Vietnamese. If the South Vietnamese had been overwhelmingly supportive of the regime in Saigon in its fight against the communists why, with all that firepower given them by the United States, could they not have won against the communists? What was the high rate of desertions among those drafted into Saigon's army about?

One of Saigon's wartime prime ministers, Nguyen Kao Ky, took an exceptional position among Vietnamese veterans living in the United States. He saw the roll of hearts and minds in Saigon's defeat. In his book How We Lost the War in Vietnam he described the U.S. role in Vietnam as "misguided" and naive concerning the opinions of the common Vietnamese.

Some Americans who were critical of their government promoting war in Vietnam believed that to liberate a people it is best to have most of them wanting your liberation. They believed that winning the war should never have become an issue because U.S. forces should not have been in Vietnam to begin with and tended to view U.S. involvement in Vietnam as a product of arrogance. Some other Americans wondered why the U.S. had been able to stop the Communists from taking over South Korea but could not stop North Vietnam from taking over South Vietnam. They believed in winning, the way teams won in sports, but with higher stakes in that friends, sons or brothers were killed in the battle. They believed that justice would have been served and that righteousness would have prevailed if the U.S. had applied whatever force and violence was necessary to win a "victory" in Vietnam. Victory alone, they believed, would given meaning to the sacrifice of the fallen. Americans with an opposing point of view were angered that so many had died from what they believed was a mistake and the increasing the deaths in no way would erase that mistake.

Other Lessons, and Dominoes

During the decades that followed the military triumph of the communist forces in Vietnam, the much feared spread of communism to other nations in the Far East did not happen. Thailand, Burma, Indonesia or the Philippines did not become felled communist dominos. A murderous communist force had taken power in power in Cambodia was largely the result of the turmoil spilling into Cambodia from Vietnam during the Vietnam war - including U.S. bombing there. But the Cambodian Communists (the Khmer Rouge) did not remain in power long. Neither did the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia in opposition to that communist force.

In the United States, lessons of the war became much talked about on television and radio. Not much talked about was one lesson that the U.S. military took from the war. This was the discarding of terror bombing, bombing as psychological warfare, as had been done in South Vietnam to discourage support for the Viet Cong.

Another lesson was drawn by the former U.S. commander in Vietnam, General Westmoreland. He mentioned that the U.S. war in Vietnam was the first major conflict "fought without censorship." Without censorship, he said, "things can get confused in the public mind." It was decided among some military strategists that the free-roaming journalism in places of military action should be replaced with restricted access for journalists and with military-led television briefings - as occurred during the Gulf War in 1991.

A third lesson that high-ranking military men often expressed was that no U.S. troops should be committed to battle without a clear goal, a feasible plan and public support.

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