Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975

The merits of rival causes are never absolute. Even in the Second World War, the Western allied struggle against fascism was compromised by its reliance upon the tyranny of Stalin to pay most of the blood price for destroying the tyranny of Hitler. Only simpletons of the political Right and Left dare to suggest that in Vietnam either side possessed a monopoly of virtue.

The main thing those Americans who really knew about Vietnam knew was how little they knew.

It seems a fair test of any political movement to enquire not whether it is capitalist, communist or fascist, but whether it is fundamentally humane.

70 per cent to avoid a humiliating defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor) – 20 per cent to keep South Vietnam (and the adjacent territory) from Chinese hands – 10 per cent to permit the people of South Vietnam to enjoy a better, freer way of life’.

The egregious error committed by US statesmen and commanders was not that of lying to the world, but rather that of lying to themselves.

Not until 1961 did Vice-President Lyndon Johnson deliver his memorable apologia for Diem: ‘Shit, man, he’s the only boy we got out there.

The domestic lesson of the 1950–53 war that wrecked Harry Truman’s presidency was that, though Americans were willing to pay other people to die combating ‘Reds’ in faraway Asian countries, they resisted seeing their own boys sacrificed.

Following a 1945 Muslim revolt in Algeria in which a hundred Europeans were killed, an estimated twenty-five thousand people were slaughtered by French troops. After a March 1947 rebellion in Madagascar, where thirty-seven thousand colons lorded it over 4.2 million black subjects, the army killed ninety thousand people.

Relative American openness, contrasted with the communist commitment to secrecy, in my view constitutes a claim upon a fragment of moral high ground. The egregious error committed by US statesmen and commanders was not that of lying to the world, but rather that of lying to themselves.

Yet they persevered because a lethal cocktail of pride, fatalism, stupidity, and moral weakness prevented them from acknowledging their blunder.

On 1 November the old OSS man arrived by appointment at army headquarters, wearing uniform and carrying a .357 revolver together with $US40,000 in cash, which he deemed the appropriate fashion accessories for an afternoon’s work overthrowing a government.

Possession of armed might can be corrupting: it feeds an itch among those exercising political authority to put it to practical use. Successive Washington administrations have been seduced by the readiness with which they can order a deployment, and see this promptly executed. It is much easier to commit armed forces, especially air power, in pursuit of an objective than to grapple the complexities of social and cultural engagement with an alien people.

Diem regarded the Americans as ‘great big children – well-intentioned, powerful, with a lot of technical know-how, but not very sophisticated in dealing with him or his race’.

Yet both Langlais and ‘Bruno’ were better suited to enduring a crucifixion than inspiring a resurrection.

Pierre Asselin, noting that all totalitarian governments require enemies, has written that “demonization of the United States . . . created a ‘useful adversary’ that facilitated gaining and maintaining public support . . . for advancing the Vietnamese revolution.

It remains as difficult now as it was then to see virtue in Gen. Harkins’s attempts to deny the real state of affairs. The maxim obtains for all those who hold positions of authority, in war as in peace: Lie to others if you must, but never to yourselves. MACV’s chief could make a case for talking nonsense to Halberstam and Arnett, but he was peddling the same fairy tales in top-secret cables to Washington. Nonetheless, a valid criticism persists of the media’s coverage throughout the war: the critics got bang to rights the shortcomings of the Diem regime and its successors but gave nothing like the same attention to the blunders and horrors perpetrated by the communists.

Bob Kelly, a psychological-warfare adviser working with the South Vietnamese in Quang Ngai Province, organized pro-government rallies, of which the first was not an unqualified success. Local people were herded like cattle to attend, then left sitting without water under a hot sun. The occasion’s highlight was to be a C-47 flying low overhead, broadcasting government propaganda. The plane arrived early, and from a thousand feet its raucous tones drowned out the local province chief’s speech on the ground. Then the airborne broadcaster demanded in Vietnamese, “Mr. Province Chief, have you finished yet?” This infuriated and humiliated local officials, whose temper was not improved when the plane began to drop leaflets in bundles that failed to burst in the air, so they landed like bombs. It never occurred to the Americans involved, some laughing and others almost tearful amid the shambles, that it was wildly inappropriate for them to be seen orchestrating a Vietnamese political rally.

Colonialism was sustainable only as long as it appeared to subject peoples as the inevitable order.