Vietnam

Learning From Tragegy

by Thomas Martin

We've kicked the Vietnam syndrome.

President George Bush, 1991

We have allowed William's "tragic" view of American diplomacy to obscure our vision. . . . if one compares . . . the American tragedy against those of other Great Powers in the twentieth century, ours appear more to fade out than stand out.

John Lewis Gaddis[1]

In 1988 historian Robert A. Divine's most incisive observation was the "reverse course" of the Vietnam revisionism.[2] Unlike the historiography of World War I, World War II, or even Korea, which all began as a consensus that was later challenged by a critique, the history of the Vietnam War began as a critique in search of a consensus. In his 1988 Presidential Address in the journal Diplomatic History, Thomas Paterson categorizes four schools of historiographical revisionism.[3] On the ideological fringes are the "win" and "no more Vietnams" schools, the former an outright denial of the moral, political, and military failures of the war, and the latter a withdrawal to isolationism, much like the "no more Koreas" sentiment of the 1950s. Closer to Paterson's center, the "inevitability" school embraces the heirs of Schlesinger's apologetic "quagmire" thesis as well as more refined variations of bureaucratic inertia. The "diplomatic intervention" school acknowledges the "mistakes and failures" of Vietnam, but nevertheless maintains an optimistic perspective on the role of the United States as a constructive participant in global affairs. Paterson clearly identifies with the "diplomatic intervention" school, but he also feels compelled to condemn the contemporary Reagan-era anti-Communist interventions in Central America. He points specifically to the analogy with Vietnam. The "lessons" of Vietnam are being flagrantly ignored.[4]

In 1990 George Herring's Presidential Address in Diplomatic History takes up the Vietnam War once again and describes America and her South Vietnamese ally as "peoples apart". Much like the American conduct during the Vietnam War, American historiography had virtually ignored the plight of the Vietnamese.[5] In the same issue Stephen Pelz offers a sobering, if not chilling, "stroll down alibi alley" with a review of United States Ambassador Frederick Nolting's memoirs. More recently historian Gary Hess summarizes the current Vietnam historiography as a controversy between the "Clausewitzians," "hearts-and-minders," and "legitimacists"-critics and revisionists alike of warfare, counter-insurgency, and moral issues surrounding the Vietnam War.[6] Despite all the rebuttals to "hawkish revisionism" and "Ramboloney," self-justifications and "stab-in-the-back" revisionism continue to conjure up visions of the "victory that could have been."[7]

Historical scholarship is heavily influenced by contemporary ideologies, and no theme has proven more resilient than triumphal historical narratives. Indeed, the perspective (quoted above) by John Lewis Gaddis is an example of a general historiographical tendency to produce sanguine narratives-sometimes even from the ashes of history.[8] If anything, this tendency has increased following the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. For example, despite Thomas Paterson's criticism of Reagan's foreign policy in 1988, Oliver North was able to mount a nearly successful bid for the United States Senate in 1994. More recently, in 1995, Martin Sherwin and many other professional historians fought and lost a political battle against World War II hagiography enshrined in the Smithsonian's Enola Gay exhibit. Both events illustrate just how difficult it is to articulate tragic narratives when they touch upon memory, ideology, and questions of national identity.[9]

This essay presents three scenes from a tragic drama about knowledge, power, and fate that were turning points in the history of American involvement in Vietnam. The initial turning point coincid-ed with the unanticipated "loss of China" which expanded and escalated a defensive policy of European anti-Communist containment, catapulting Vietnam's status to a contested borderland in the Cold War. The second turning point occurred at the Geneva Peace Conference in 1954 when the United States refused to endorse the international agreements and embraced a policy of covert operations in Vietnam. The third turning point occurred over a decade later during the Tet Offensive when American war propaganda and military strategy was called into question by a massive Vietnamese attack. This essay will briefly summarize these critical moments and, with the benefit of hindsight, critically examine the role that ideology and historical knowledge have played in shaping American policy during the Cold War and beyond.

French Indochina, 1950

The primary Vietnamese concern is eventual independence. Vietnam will have it regardless of anything else and will seek allies wherever it may be necessary.

Historically no ruling group has ever remained more or less indefinitely in power in the face of active or even passive resistance from the governed, or without ruining itself in the process. There is no convincing evidence that nationalism in Indochina proposes to be an exception.

John F Melby, United States Ambassador, Southeast Asia Mission, 1950[10]

American intervention in Vietnam began by invitation with a minor event, unnoticed beyond the periphery of the "Strange Alliance" between Churchill's British Empire, Stalin's Communist Russia, and Roosevelt's capitalist America.[11] In early 1945 the Vietminh, led by a young Ho Chi Minh, rescued a downed American pilot and returned him safely to American officials in Kunming, China. Motivated by the provisions of the United States Office of War Information and the Atlan-tic Charter for self-government, Ho Chi Minh promptly joined the Allied effort against the Japanese by becoming OSS agent "Lucius".[12]

With the capitulation of Japan, and the successful campaigns against the Japanese during the famine of 1944-45, the Vietminh emerged as the strongest indigenous political and military force in Vietnam. The opening lines of the Constitution of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam borrowed a democratic ideal directly from the American Constitution, and at the independence celebrations the Star-Spangled Banner was played both to recognize the individuals who had supported them in their war against the Japanese and, more importantly, to make a bid for diplomatic support against resurgent French imperialism in Indochina.[13] However, American diplomacy following the end of World War II would largely ignore Southeast Asia and instead focus upon Western Europe and Nationalist China. As late as March 1949, Washington's official policy towards French Indochina remained ambivalent. Just a few months later, the "knee-jerk reaction to Communist victory in China" globalized a United States diplomatic strategy of anti-Communist containment.[14]

Within two months of Japan's surrender, the French began diverting weapons to Vietnam that had been earmarked for the defense of Europe. Anti-colonialists in the United States State Depart-ment failed to block the use of American ships to transport men and materials from France to Indochina for colonial military operations. Not only did the State Department fail to prevent the diversion of ships from the Atlantic shipping pool, but virtually all of the military equipment shipped to Vietnam was the product of the "arsenal of democracy" and much of it still bore the United States insignia.[15] When the United States refused to provide direct military aid to the French for their re-colonization of Vietnam, De Gaulle simply diverted Marshall Plan funds to finance the French expeditionary campaign in Vietnam.

Competing factions within the State Department in the late 1940s included anti-colonialists, Eurocentrists, and a diverse China lobby still fascinated with Far Eastern cultures. All were about to be "smothered by the mushrooming of anti-communism."[16] The shock of Mao Zedong's victory over Jiang Jieshi's Nationalists in China and the proclamation of the People's Republic of China on 1 October 1949 set in motion a series of domestic and diplomatic initiatives that still influence the course of American political and diplomatic policy.

Recognition of Ho Chi Minh's Republic of Vietnam by the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union in January 1950 led to an immediate French request for military aid, which Secretary of State Dean Acheson promptly approved. By May 1950, the Truman administration had committed $10 million in military aid to the French-backed state of Vietnam, and the United States had embarked on a course of diplomacy that would eventually lead to direct United States military intervention. Virtually ignored as late as 1949, by 1950 Vietnam occupied a strategic region on the periphery of a rapidly expanding Communist threat.

When Ambassador Melby delivered his report on Vietnam to the State Department Policy Planning Staff in November 1950 (quoted above), George Kennan listened "politely" and "atten-tively."[17] Melby's report complicated, if not contradicted, Kennan's bipolar United States-Soviet containment strategy.[18] Despite his initial emphasis upon Europe and his preference for economic rather than military measures, Kennan believed the "grievous political defeat" in China meant that a communist state in Southeast Asia would represent "a major political rout the repercussions of which will be felt throughout the rest of the world, especially in the Middle East and in a then critically exposed Australia."[19] The globalization of Kennan's European containment strategy was thus a direct consequence of the unexpected events in Asia-the "loss" of China. The outbreak of war in Korea, while also contradicting Kennan's bipolar Eurocentric strategy, mobilized the more belligerent policy of containment embodied in National Security Council Memorandum 68 written by Kennan's successor, Paul Nitze. The domestic political response to the loss of China and the subsequent bloody stalemate in Korea would soon fuel the anti-Communist persecution and purges of the McCarthy era, and serve to remove all vestiges of anti-colonialism from American political and public discourse.[20]

Geneva, 1954

You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 7, 1954[21]

Despite last-minute efforts by Vice President Richard Nixon to gather support for American intervention to rescue the French at Dien Bien Phu, resistance from Senate Democratic Leader Lyndon Johnson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff persuaded Eisenhower to abandon any immediate plans for military intervention.[22] On 7 May 1954, when French forces at Dien Bien Phu surrendered to the Vietminh, John Foster Dulles was attending the Geneva Conference of 1954. He had hoped to avoid any territorial concessions to the Vietminh in the Far East negotiations. With the Vietminh battlefield success, the American delegation simply walked out. However, at the insistence of America's European allies, Eisenhower soon dispatched Walter Smith to participate as an observer. Only with the fall of the French government and the arrival of Socialist Premier Pierre Mendes as France's chief negotiator did progress towards peace in Indochina begin.

On 20-21 July 1954, the Geneva Accords and the Geneva Armistice Agreement were signed. The signatories agreed to a truce and a temporary partition of Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel. The French were to withdraw south of that line. Foreign troops as well as imports of arms and munitions were prohibited. The agreement specifically stipulated that "the military demarcation line is provisional and should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary." Moreover, the settlement of political problems, effected on the basis of respect for the principles of independence, unity and territorial integrity, shall permit the Vietnamese people to enjoy fundamental freedoms, guaranteed by democratic institutions established as a result of free general elections by secret ballot. . . . (to) be held in July, 1956."[23]

The Geneva settlement recognized the defeat of French colonial administration and specified a schedule for elections and the complete withdrawal of French forces from Vietnam.[24] It also provided the Eisenhower administration with the opportunity to withdraw honorably from Vietnam in full support of a French ally. However, if Eisenhower and Dulles narrowly avoided American military intervention to defend French colonial forces at Dien Bien Phu, they eagerly embraced the opportunity to assume sole responsibility for anti-Communist containment in Vietnam following the Geneva Conference of 1954. Many historians now view the obstructionist diplomacy of John Foster Dulles at the Geneva Conference and the subsequent escalation of American intervention in Vietnam as the "major turning point in the American relationship with Vietnam."[25]

The Geneva conference of 1954 was the first international summit conference following Stalin's death, and the first conference to include representatives from the People's Republic of China. It offered the United States a unique opportunity to experiment with a polycentric negotiating strategy to "contain" the Soviet Union and China.[26] Instead, Dulles arrived in Geneva prepared to confront the twin demons of world Communism. His petty seating rearrangements, and his refusal to shake Zhou Enlai's hand, convinced the Chinese delegation of "vile and arrogant" United States intentions, while his futile attempt to organize an anti-Communist "United Front" was rejected by virtually all the major European participants.[27] Not only did the United States fail to exercise constructive leadership, its refusal to endorse the the treaty and armistice sent a signal to communist adversaries and the Third World that the United States would not submit to diplomatic negotiations and international law, but preferred to use unilateral and covert military force.

Even while the obstructionist tactics of the United States prompted conservative Republicans like Senate Leader William Knowland to denounce the Geneva Conference of 1954 as the "greatest victory the Communists have won in twenty years," both the Soviet and Chinese diplomats, Molotov and Zhou Enlai, had been quite willing to sacrifice Ho Chi Minh's military victory to serve their own national interests. Both Eisenhower and Dulles had good reason to believe that "things could have been worse."[28] Soviet and Chinese adherence to the international agreements reached in Geneva contrasted the covert escalation of American involvement in Vietnam.

Eisenhower and, in particular, Dulles were guided by the "lessons of history" in both their perceptions and actions at the Geneva Conference of 1954. The spirit of the conference was the "psychology of appeasement"; the historical analogies were Munich and Yalta where it was believed that totalitarian states had gained unilateral concessions from democratic states. To negotiate was to capitulate, and Dulles went to great lengths to disassociate himself, Eisenhower, and the United States government from the agreements.[29] In contrast, the success of covert actions and military intervention in Greece, Iran, Guatemala, and especially the Philippines (as well as of the British in Malaya) appeared to validate the aggressive global policies of containment-the "lessons" learned from Munich and Yalta.[30]

The Tet Offensive, 1968

Every quantitative measurement we have shows we're winning this war.

Robert McNamara[31]

The massive American intervention begun by Lyndon Johnson and orchestrated by Robert McNamara transformed Vietnamese society more radically and ruthlessly than Vietminh nationalism or Viet Cong guerrilla warfare could ever hope to. American financial aid supported an American consumer economy in a society dominated by rural villages. Saigon immediately became a boom town with an overflowing port, teeming streets, restaurants, bars, and prostitutes catering to American soldiers. Yet despite (or perhaps because of) this infusion of American wealth, American and South Vietnamese relations remained strained. Crime and corruption flourished, and American leverage over the South Vietnamese government weakened even as American commitment escalated.[32]

The cultural chasm separating American soldiers and Vietnamese peasants created a surreal South Vietnamese economy and urban culture. Viet Cong revolutionaries (VC) might challenge the traditional village customs and institutions with their revolutionary nationalism, but they clearly stood for the defense of a uniquely Vietnamese way of life in the countryside. American counter-insurgency and forced relocation programs only undermined the efforts of traditional elders trying to preserve their villages in the face of competing nationalist, communist, and foreign threats. In this struggle, the Viet Cong could always maintain that "what we wish to change, our enemies attempt to eliminate altogether."[33] Village elders, parents, and revolutionaries thus often found themselves unlikely allies in a struggle that bound revolutionary nationalism and traditional Vietnamese cultural values against the impropriety and corruption of the rapidly growing cities.

In the unprecedented military escalation in South Vietnam, normal village life and culture retreated, or was virtually swept aside by the sheer intensity and brutality of anti-guerrilla military operations. Buddhists feared meeting because Catholic troops from the Saigon government might "mistake them" for Viet Cong guerrillas and either shoot them or shell them with artillery. In the rice fields, groups of ten of more were avoided because they became potential targets for airstrikes. Even village burial ceremonies were sometimes suspended due to the sheer intensity of the war.[34]

The most important traditional Vietnamese holiday celebration (fete) to survive the Americani-zation of Vietnamese culture was Tet, the lunar New Year celebrations. Transcending religious, ethnic, and regional boundaries, Tet was a traditional time of cease-fire. Families and villages could come together without the threat of bombs and shells. The roads filled with travelers on the way to holiday reunions, sharing a common Vietnamese culture. Blending with the Tet holiday travelers like "fish in water," thousands of guerrillas transported themselves, their weapons, and their supplies to assembly areas throughout South Vietnam, but especially to the area surrounding the ancient Vietnamese capital of Hue.[35] Amid the firecracker celebrations on the eve of Tet, Vietnamese guerrillas test-fired their weapons and assembled for the critical battles of the Vietnam War. Though still outnumbered, they had succeeded in concentrating their forces for a conventional military assault. Most importantly, they had the strategic advantage of surprise. While American military histories of the Vietnam War now correctly record that American soldiers won a tactical victory defending the capital city of Hue and the areas around Khe Sanh during 1968-69, Vietnamese insurgents and North Vietnamese regular troops won a strategic victory that changed the course of the Vietnam War.[36]

Richard Nixon's "secret" to end the war in Vietnam proved to be little more than campaign rhetoric, if not simply a premonition of the American bombing of Cambodia. In fact, both the nature and the intensity of warfare in Vietnam escalated after the Tet Offensive.[37] Casualties on both sides rose, and more American and South Vietnamese soldiers were killed and wounded under the Nixon administration than the Johnson administration. The American diplomatic presence in South Vietnam ended on 28 April 1975, when President Gerald Ford ordered an emergency helicopter evacuation. In a desperate scene, American Marines fought back the crowds of panic-stricken Vietnamese who had swarmed to the American embassy as North Vietnamese troops advanced on Saigon. Two days later Saigon fell and was renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

The Lessons of History

A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is intently watching. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from paradise, it has caught his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer move them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (IX)[38]

No matter how stupefying, the numbers remain important. To narrow the focus to the period between 1965 and 1974 when Lyndon Johnson's and Richard Nixon's administrations bombed North and South Vietnam and conducted search-and-destroy campaigns of attrition, approximately one million Vietnamese civilians were wounded by warfare.[39] Vietnamese civilian deaths numbered around 250,000 in South Vietnam; 65,000 civilians died in the bombing of North Vietnam. North Vietnamese and Viet Cong military casualties comprised approximately 660,000 killed compared to 225,000 South Vietnamese and 50,000 Americans troops. The estimates of North Vietnamese wounded are still in the "countless" category, but roughly 500,000 South Vietnamese and 300,000 American soldiers were wounded between 1965 and 1974.[40]

The Vietnamese countryside, home to an ancient Vietnamese way of life, became the most heavily bombed landscape on earth, having more bombs dropped on it than all countries involved in World War II combined. The 1972 Christmas bombing campaigns by Nixon and Kissinger also made Hanoi the most heavily bombed city in the history of warfare. South of the seventeenth parallel around Khe Sanh, not far from the devastated ancient city of Hue, unexploded bombs still kill an average of one Vietnamese farmer per day. Where chemical defoliants once destroyed jungle sanctuaries, today only "American grass" will grow.

By the unprecedented twentieth-century standards of modern warfare and genocide, the human statistics of the Vietnam War do indeed, "appear more to fade out than stand out."[41] The scale of the atrocities of the infamous totalitarian dictators of continental states-Hitler, Stalin and Mao-dwarf the meager human statistics of the Vietnam War. Yet the very need to invoke the comparison betrays the nature of the problem, and demands reflection upon the kinds of lessons that history can teach.

The disciplines of international relations, diplomatic history, and their sibling, military history, inhabit an intellectual and practical realm of "alternative histories" that lend them-selves to fictitious scenarios. This is the discourse of the "if. . . then. . ." hypothesis concerning the imaginary course of past and future history. It is an ordered world with logical chains of events, rational causation, and historical analogies. However, it was historical analogies and the "lessons of history" that guided decision-makers to intervene in Vietnam.[42] At the Geneva Conference of 1954, when presented with the opportunity to help solve or simply disengage from the nationalist revolution in Vietnam, John Foster Dulles drew upon the lessons of Munich to justify his obstructionism and used the recent historical precedents of covert operations to justify and advocate an escalation of American intervention in South Vietnam. Paradoxically, Lyndon Johnson was guided by the lessons of Korea both when he objected to Richard Nixon's proposal to intervene during the Dien Bien Phu crisis of 1954 and when the "best and brightest" convinced him to commit American ground troops to Vietnam in 1965.[43] A partitioned Korea, which had once embodied a (partial) military and diplomatic failure, had, a decade later, become a viable model. The American history of involvement in Vietnam would suggest that both historians and policymakers should be mindful of James Bryce's advice: "The chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies."[44]

With regard to the role of public opinion and democratic institutions, neither the American Congress nor the American public seriously challenged administration policies towards Vietnam during or immediately following the critical periods of escalation. Indeed, there was enthusiastic support for global policies of containment and armed intervention. The critical turning point was the Tet offensive. American casualties in Vietnam began to increase rapidly just as violent demonstrations erupted in the United States during the presidential election campaigns of 1968.[45]

The political lessons of Vietnam are embodied in the War Powers Act, which limited presidential powers of military intervention and was passed by Congress over Richard Nixon's presidential veto in 1972. Yet, as historian Thomas Paterson's 1988 Presidential Address testifies, this too failed to prevent similar kinds of covert, even illegal, military intervention by subsequent United States administrations.[46] The military lessons of Vietnam are more clearly defined, and they have had a much more significant impact upon American diplomacy.[47] Not surprisingly, it was the Reagan administration's Secretary of Defense who articulated the military lessons of Vietnam most succinctly. In 1984 Caspar Weinberger outlined "six major tests" for the decision to commit American military forces overseas: (1) a region of vital American national security interests, (2) a "clear intention of winning," (3) well-defined interests, (4) a willingness to reassess deployment, (5) use of Americans only as a "last resort," and (6) a "reasonable assurance [of] . . . the support of the American people and their elected representatives."[48] While the Bush administra-tion's "Desert Storm" campaign went even further to gather international (NATO) support and Russian cooperation, what is clearly absent from the "lessons" of Vietnam is any articulation of the rights and obligations of indigenous peoples and states. Indeed, critics of American foreign policy in Vietnam might easily argue that the 1965 decision to commit American forces could easily have met the criteria listed above.

The lessons of Vietnam notwithstanding, the nature of contemporary warfare on the eve of the twenty-first century poses fundamental questions about contemporary diplomatic and military strategies and tactics. Current events suggest that the "tragedy" in Mogadishu, the orgy of violence in Rwanda, the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, and the "invasion" of Haiti are far more symptomatic of the challenges facing contemporary diplomatic negotiators and military planners than anachronistic, "technologically sweet" military engagements like Desert Storm, or nationalist-Communist conflicts like the Vietnam War.[49] Modern diplomacy and military strategies are founded upon the existence of "states" with exclusive rights to conduct diplomacy and war. This paradigm retains validity in the developed countries of the Northern Hemisphere forming the center of the strategic geopolitical stage, where international diplomacy is increasingly concerned with global demographic, economic, environmental, and nuclear-proliferation issues. In contrast, armed conflicts ushering in the twenty-first century are erupting along and beyond the periphery of the developed world where local and global problems have overwhelmed the resources of national political institutions. Conflicts and negotiations in these regions often take place amid internecine warfare between organizations that do not represent official, let alone viable or palatable, political organizations. The twin tasks of conducting modern warfare (a.k.a. "peace-keeping missions") in urban settings, which severely limit the advantages of modern military technology, while simultaneously organizing democratic "nation-building" institutions, has proven an elusive, if not hopeless, mission. Indeed, the United States' missions to Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia appear to demonstrate that United States priorities are preoccupied with perfecting exit strategies rather than tackling chronic problems requiring long-term commitments (with admittedly uncertain prospects of success).

Recently the military theorist Martin Van Creveld borrowed a phrase from Karl Marx to capture the mood of many United States diplomatic and military strategists facing post-Cold War crises: "A ghost is stalking the corridors of general staffs and defense departments all over the developed world-the fear of military impotence, even irrelevance."[50] The tragedy of Vietnam remains a haunting reminder of the limits of both power and historical experience in providing effective remedies for contemporary diplomatic and military crises.

Endnotes

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1 John Lewis Gaddis, "The Tragedy of Cold War History," Presidential Address, Diplomatic History 17, no. 1 (Winter 1993), 15. Return to essay.

2 Robert Divine, "Vietnam Reconsidered," Diplomatic History 12, no. 1 (Winter 1988). Critical Vietnam historiography sees the Vietnam War as an integral part of Cold War diplomacy. See George C. Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam 1950-1975 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1979), x. "Vietnam was not primarily a result of errors of judgment or of the personality quirks of the policy makers, although these things existed in abundance. It was a logical, if not inevitable, outgrowth of a world view and a policy, the policy of containment which Americans in and out of government accepted without serious question for more than two decades. The commitment in Vietnam expanded as the containment policy itself grew." Return to essay.

3 Thomas Paterson, "Historical Memory and Illusive Victories: Vietnam and Central America", Presidential Address, Diplomatic History (Winter 1988): 1-18. Return to essay.

4 Ibid., p 1. Return to essay.

5 George C. Herring, "People's Apart: Americans, South Vietnamese and the War in Vietnam," Presidential Address, Diplomatic History 14, no. 1 (Winter 1990): 1. "In much of the writing on the war, the South Vietnamese are conspicuous by their absence, and virtually nothing has been done on their dealings with the United States." Return to essay.

6 Gary Hess, "The Unending Debate: Historians and the Vietnam War," Diplomatic History (Spring 1994): 239-264. Return to essay.

7 Stephen Pelz, "Vietnam: Another Stroll Down Alibi Alley," Diplomatic History 14, no. 1 (Winter 1990): 123-130. For an interesting review article, see also Ben Kiernan, "The Vietnam War: Alternative Endings," American Historical Review (October 1992). Return to essay.

8 For a penetrating look at similar trends in modern German historiography, see Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). Return to essay.

9 For a discussion of historical perspectives and narratives surrounding the Enola Gay exhibit, see John W. Dower, "Triumphal and Tragic Narratives of the War in Asia," Journal of American History (December 1995): 1124-1135. Return to essay.

10 John F. Melby, "Memoir: Vietnam-1950," Diplomatic History 6, no. 1 (Winter 1982): 107-108. Return to essay.

11 The "Strange Alliance" is taken from Stephen Ambrose, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938, (New York: Penguin Press, 1985), 16.(hereafter Ambrose) Return to essay.

12 George McT. Kahin, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 11-15. Return to essay.

13 George Katsiaficas, ed., Vietnam Documents: American and Vietnamese Views of the War (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1992), 7. "All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Return to essay.

14 Melby, 97 Return to essay.

15 Kahin, 7. Return to essay.

16 Melby, 104-105. Return to essay.

17 Ibid., 109. Return to essay.

18 Thomas G. Paterson, ed., Major Problems in American Foreign Policy, vol. II, Since 1914 (Lexington: D.C. Heath and Company, 1989), 301-305.(hereafter Major Problems) Return to essay.

19 George F. Kennan, cited in Walter Hixson, "Containment on the Perimeter: George F. Kennan and Vietnam," Diplomatic History 12, no. 2 (Spring 1988), 152. Return to essay.

20 James C. Thompson, "Historical Legacies and Bureaucratic Procedures," in Major Problems, ed. Paterson, 590. Return to essay.

21 Paterson, Major Problems, 453. Return to essay.

22 See Herring, 35; and Robert Buzzanco, "Prologue to Tragedy: U.S. Military Opposition to Intervention in Vietnam, 1950-1954, Diplomatic History 17, no. 2, (Spring 1993). Return to essay.

23 Paterson, Major Problems, 571. Return to essay.

24 The uprising in Algeria led to an early withdrawal of French forces from Vietnam. Return to essay.

25 Kahin, 66. Return to essay.

26 Richard H. Immerman, "The United States and the Geneva Conference of 1954: A New Look," Diplomatic History 14, no. 1 (Winter 1990): 52-53: "Less than a decade later the Sino-Soviet split would reverberate throughout the international system. By that time, however, America was at war in Vietnam," 66. Return to essay.

27 For an Australian perspective on this issue, see Gregory James Pemberton, "Australia, the United States, and the Indochina Crisis of 1954," Diplomatic History 6, no. 1 (Winter 1982). Return to essay.

28 See Herring, America's Longest War, 40. Return to essay.

29 Immerman, 51, 54, 64-65. Return to essay.

30 Kahin, 69-70. See also David L. Anderson, "Why Vietnam? Postrevisionist Answers and a Neorealist Suggestion," Diplomatic History 13, no. 3 (Summer 1989). Return to essay.

31 Quoted in Ambrose, 209. Return to essay.

32 See Herring, "Peoples Quite Apart," 8-13. For a more sobering look at "politicians, pimps, and drugs," see Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York, 1973), Ch. 5, "South Vietnam: Narcotics in the Nation's Service," 149-222. Return to essay.

33 David Hunt, "Village Culture and the Vietnamese Revolution," Past and Present 94 (February 1982): 145. Return to essay.

34 Ibid., 144. Return to essay.

35 The most convenient source for a translation of the "fish in water" quotation is Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, Sixteenth Edition, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992), 686: "The people are like water and the army is like fish," commonly attributed to Mao Zedong, but he was simply restating an ancient Chinese military epigram. Return to essay.

36 At the time, the American media characterized the Tet Offensive as an American defeat; however, American forces are now credited with a successful defense. The concept of "tactical victory, strategic defeat" is the lesson of Tet. For an excellent critical summary of two popular works of military history, see Gary Hess, "The Military Perspective on Strategy in Vietnam: Harry Summer's On Strategy and Bruce Palmer's The 25-Year War," Diplomatic History 10, no. 1 (Winter 1986). Return to essay.

37 See Ronald H. Spector, After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam (New York, 1993). Return to essay.

38 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Shocken Books, 1973), 257-258. Return to essay.

39 James Olson, ed., The Dictionary of the Vietnam War (New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1987). This is a total estimate inflicted by all belligerents regardless of nationality or military affiliation. Return to essay.

40 Ibid. Return to essay.

41 Gaddis, 15. Return to essay.

42 For an interesting cognitive and psychological discussion of analogies in the decision-making process of the Vietnam War, see Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies of War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnamese Decisions of 1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Return to essay.

43 Ibid., Chapter 5, "Korea". Khong selected an introductory quote from George Ball: "I would suggest to you that if we had not gone into Korea, I think it would have been very unlikely that we would have gotten into Vietnam," 97. Return to essay.

44 Quoted in Khong, 251. Return to essay.

45 However, it was not until the 1970s, following the invasion of Cambodia and the shooting of American students at Kent State, that polls began to indicate that a majority of Americans opposed the Vietnam War. See David W. Levy, The Debate Over Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991): "As late as 1970 Americans considered campus unrest to be the number one problem in the U.S,"105. Return to essay.

46 Paterson, "Historical Memory and Illusive Victories." Return to essay.

47 See W. Scott Thompson and Donaldson D. Frizzell, The Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Russak & Company, 1977), and more recently, Philip B. Davidson, Secrets of the Vietnam War (Novato: Presidio Press, 1990). Return to essay.

48 Quoted in Bruce Palmer, Jr., The 25-Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam (Lexington, 1984), 87. Return to essay.

49 For an essay comparing civil conflict in the U.S. and abroad, see Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Civil Wars: From L.A. to Bosnia (New York: New Press, 1994). Return to essay.

50 Martin Van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York: The Free Press, 1991), 1. Return to essay.