COMING TO TERMS WITH VIET NAM
By Hedley Donovan
COMING TO TERMS
The following Essay by Hedley Donovan, the editor-in-chief of Time Inc., is based on a speech he delivered in Chicago last month at the annual FORTUNE dinner for executives of the 500 largest U.S. corporations:
THERE are still important choices to be made about Viet Nam. The U.S. is halfway out of the war, and the further troop withdrawals that the President has announced will see us two-thirds of the way out by the end of this year. But it is still far from clear just how we are going to come the rest of the way out. Can we come all the way out? When? And do we come out in ways that make it possible to live with the result?
There are also choices to be made regarding how Americans think about what they have been through in Viet Nam. These are choices that could be quite critical for the future of the country for a good many years to come. There are things that we as a nation can reasonably ask the President and Congress to do, or stop doing, now.
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We must all begin by recapturing some sense of astonishment that the U.S. is still engaged in this war. Very few people can say any longer just when the U.S. did begin fighting in Viet Nam. It could be dated all the way back to the death of the first American soldier there in 1961; in the next year or two, about 250 Americans were killed while serving as military advisers. There are college seniors graduating this week who, if they began paying some attention to the news when they were, say, 14 years old, have never known a time when the U.S. was not fighting in Viet Nam.
The major intervention began on Feb. 7, 1965, with the first U.S. bombing of the North, followed in early March by the first U.S. ground-combat units going ashore near Danang. Surely nobody then in the White House, the Pentagon or Congress could have imagined that the commitment would grow to more than half a million men and the cost, at its peak, to nearly $30 billion a year; that more than six years later there would still be a quarter of a million Americans there; that in the first week of June 1971 the total of American dead would increase from 45,183 to 45,231. Richard Nixon could not have foreseen this when, while campaigning in New Hampshire in March 1968, he said, "It is essential that we end this war, and end it quickly." That was more than three years ago and, as matters have turned out, the U.S. was then less than halfway through the war. We must try to stay astonished by this. President Nixon, in his present statements about Viet Nam, ought to put more stress on the sheer staggering length of the war, because so much else flows from that.
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About a year ago, an editorial in LIFE advocated a fixed date for total withdrawal of U.S. forces from Viet Nam; the end of 1971, then 18 months away, was proposed. That date has now drawn too close to be practical, but a deadline of April 1, 1972, or July 1, could be met. This is not too different, of course, from what may be inferred from various statements by the President and members of his Administration, which suggest that virtually all U.S. ground troops will be out some time in the second half of 1972. So far, however, the President stoutly refuses to commit himself publicly to a final date or to specify what residual forces might be left behind. The impression--but it cannot be pinned down--is that the U.S. ground-combat role will end late this year, but that U.S. air-combat operations and logistical support could continue a year or two longer, with up to 100,000 Americans still involved in Southeast Asia. The President's desire to hold back one or two cards for bargaining vis-`a-vis North Viet Nam is understandable, but no longer worth what it costs in the U.S. or in South Viet Nam.
In South Viet Nam there are important elections coming up--in August for the Lower House of the National Assembly, in October for the presidency (see THE WORLD). The South Vietnamese candidates and voters are entitled to a clear understanding of what is now quite fuzzy: the limitations on the future U.S. role in South Viet Nam. There begins to be a good deal of evidence that the South Vietnamese do more on their own behalf when the U.S. does less. For better or worse, however, they should now have to plan on the Americans being gone, instead of assuming, because U.S. leaders never quite say otherwise, that our presence can always be prolonged. It would be good to get this out in the open before the South Vietnamese elections; to postpone the news is to export a bit of our own credibility gap.
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Senator Adlai Stevenson III of Illinois has proposed that a commission from the Congress go to Viet Nam to make sure that the American Embassy is neutral in the coming elections. This would surely be seen as a sign that the Congress was neutral against President Thieu. His regime has severe corruption problems, and he has thrown some of his most prominent political opponents, not necessarily Communists, into jail. But his government is fairly effective and has shown remarkable staying power. It is not up to the U.S. to try to "dump" Thieu.
There is an election coming up in the U.S. too. As between President Nixon and the various Democratic candidates and warmers-up, it is hard to say who would be helped and who hurt by a clear presidential commitment this summer that we will be out by next summer. But the U.S. would be helped in many ways by having such a resolve finally understood, and the general quality of next year's presidential campaign would certainly be improved. We would give both Viet Nams, North and South, far less opportunity to interfere in our election.
Coming out of Viet Nam means removing all American combat and support forces--land, sea and air--from South Viet Nam, and ending air operations, carrier-based or Thailand-based, over Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia. The U.S. should continue supplying military equipment to South Viet Nam, as it does to twelve other countries, and could maintain a small military advisory group there, perhaps a few thousand men. It is true that this leaves the North Vietnamese with no need to negotiate to get us out. Over the years, however, they have shown very little interest in negotiating no matter what we did, whether we bombed them, stopped bombing, put troops in, took troops out.
The U.S. must regain control of its own policy. Many thoughtful Americans are honestly doubtful that a non-Communist South can survive after we go, and at least a few Americans will apparently be disappointed if it does. Actually, there are grounds for thinking that the South has a fighting chance, but it is also clear that the U.S. can no longer stay indefinitely to protect or improve that chance. It really is up to the Vietnamese.
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Way back in 1966, Republican Senator George Aiken of Vermont suggested that the U.S. should claim victory and come home. We may well have accomplished more in South Viet Nam than in our present mood we give ourselves credit for. The point is, we have now done what we could. President Nixon should stress more often that America has made an enormous effort, far beyond anything that could have been considered a diplomatic or moral contract with South Viet Nam. He should also emphasize America's willingness to contribute generously to the postwar economic development of Viet Nam, North as well as South, and all of battered Indochina. Nixon, and President Johnson before him, have been strangely reluctant to make this a major theme. We do not need to flagellate ourselves--as various church groups, student organizations and so on have suggested--by calling such aid "reparations." But economic assistance surely is a duty as well as an opportunity to give an affirmative cast to U.S. policy in Southeast Asia.
There are particular people who should be very much on our minds and consciences. We owe special honor and comfort to the families of the Americans who gave their lives in Viet Nam, and we owe a special scorn to any politicians who might seek to exploit their sorrow. We owe far better medical care to the Viet Nam wounded than they are getting in many of our hospitals. We must, of course, bring home our prisoners from North Viet Nam, though it may not help to treat this as a condition for, instead of a consequence of, peace. We may need to prepare some kind of asylum opportunities for individual South Vietnamese who may feel that they have to leave when the last American troops leave. Meanwhile, it is reckless for American officials to raise the specter of a bloodbath. That could be an argument for staying in Viet Nam forever.
We are not talking here about deserting an ally, and we are certainly not talking about the defeat of the U.S. We are discussing one specific and important failure: despite a tremendous effort, we were not able to project American power into a very complicated little country 8,000 miles from San Diego in such a way that a non-Communist government was certain to prevail. We are having to settle for a possibility that it will prevail.
Was our mistake to try at all? Or was it the way we went about it? For my own part, I happen still to think that the U.S. was right to try in 1965 to prevent the forcible takeover of South Viet Nam by Communism, and that such a takeover would have happened if we had not moved in as we did. I would say now, though I did not see it then, that we went on in 1966 and 1967 to expand the U.S. effort far out of proportion to our original purposes, and that this enlarged commitment then began to take on a life of its own and even to work against our original purposes. It took me the better part of those two years to begin to see that. I wish I had been wiser sooner.
I mention my own record not because it is important in itself but to suggest a kind of Viet Nam autobiography that many of us carry around, whether we like it or not. Government officials, journalists, academics, business executives, clergymen, student leaders, military men--all the Americans who have spoken out about Viet Nam need some perspective today on their own earlier views. Some will conclude that they were right all along, and perhaps some were. But if the country is to come to terms with the Viet Nam experience, the process must begin with a good many individuals studying and acknowledging their own errors.
Such a process could help arrest any wave of national bitterness and recrimination. The President should do more to prepare the public for an ambiguous or even painful outcome in Viet Nam. This would be good immunization against the "right-wing backlash" that the White House professes to fear.
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There are those who worry about a new "stab in the back" legend--an American equivalent of the Nazi notion that the German army really was winning World War I but was betrayed by the softness of the home front. But it would be surprising if such an unpopular war as Viet Nam, in such a cloudy cause, could spawn similar postwar legends. It would take an absolutely brilliant demagogue to get much mileage from the question: Who lost Viet Nam?
There was a left-wing rumor that had a few days of life earlier this spring. A story was printed about stupendous petroleum possibilities in the waters off South Viet Nam. One could almost hear a great cry of "Aha!" rise up from all those people who have known all along that the Viet Nam War must be a plot of American capitalists. The great oil bonanza was soon deflated; among other things, a wire service had made a mistake in a figure, and 4,000,000 bbl. had become 400 million. Except to the farthest-out, craziest left, U.S. business really is not a satisfactory Viet Nam villain; it is not easy to name many American corporations that have been getting much good out of the war, and it is easy to show that corporate profits and the whole economy have been hurt. The sophisticated Marxist comment about U.S. business and Viet Nam would perhaps be that the ruling class is not always bright.
Our Viet Nam policy was not the work of any lobby. It has not been deeply influenced by Republican or Democratic partisanship and certainly has not been a vehicle for individual career ism. It has been quite "pure" executive policy, conceived and carried out by honorable and able men; indeed, some very brilliant men have had a hand in it. Yet in many respects it has been badly bungled under three Presidents of two parties.
One of the ways a stable individual recovers from a frustrating or wounding experience is by telling himself that at least he learned something from it. As a nation there is plenty we might learn from Viet Nam.
One lesson, surely, is that Viet Nam has been and still is too much a President's war, first Johnson's and now Nixon's. A democracy does not fight at its best that way. Senator John Stennis of Mississippi, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, has proposed legislation that would not apply to Viet Nam but thereafter: permitting the President to send troops into battle without a declaration of war only to repel an attack against the U.S. or to protect Americans abroad. These troops would have to be withdrawn within 30 days unless Congress approved the action. Senator Jacob Javits of New York had already put forth a similar bill. Some such legislation is very much in the national interest. There is no question that the President needs sweeping powers to deal with one of those 15-minute thermonuclear decisions that he, and we, pray that he will never have to face. But Viet Nam has been about as far from the midnight showdown as anything that could be invented: each major decision in the whole long, agonizing process has been studied for days, weeks, sometimes months, within the Executive Branch. There would have been plenty of time for full collaboration with Congress at every step of the way.
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It is very difficult--practically impossible, fortunately--to visualize another place in the world where another Viet Nam could develop, where conditions of enough complexity could sustain such a baffling and inconclusive war over so many years. But it is not impossible to imagine other local and limited wars with American involvement. The warmaking responsibility should be shared by the President and the Congress, not only because the founding fathers so clearly intended it but because this is a decision that needs the benefit of collective wisdom and collective accountability. And if the decision is for war, then the war will be better understood and better prosecuted.
The Executive Branch of the Government urgently needs some possibility somehow of being wrong. That is, it needs arrangements that would allow men to change their minds. In March of 1968, Lyndon Johnson finally came to a momentous shift in Viet Nam policy: the decision to level off U.S. troop strength, to stop bombing the North, to pursue negotiating possibilities more actively. In short, the beginning of deescalation. But it had taken the enemy's Tet offensive of January and February, Senator Eugene McCarthy's stunning showing in the New Hampshire primary in March, and the entrance of Robert Kennedy into the presidential campaign to bring about this policy shift.
We keep learning of important figures in the Johnson Administration who are now said to have been increasingly skeptical about the Viet Nam policy in 1966 and 1967. In those years the President and his men apparently found no way to stand at a distance and periodically re-examine Viet Nam policy with open minds. It is conceivable that some day we will learn of men within the present Administration who in 1970 and 1971 also had the feeling that there was no way to break free of vested interest in past error. The question is whether there is some political mechanism that can operate in between presidential-election years to provide a tough internal review of Executive policy.
If Richard Nixon is reelected, he might tackle this question in his second term. He has shown a very strong interest in the --organization of the presidency and the flow of work and responsibility within the Executive Branch. Some of his critics treat this as a trivial preoccupation with mechanics, but that is a quite mistaken view. Management instruments, in government as well as corporate life, can have highly creative consequences.
Still within the Executive Branch, there are important questions to be asked about the effectiveness of our intelligence operations and our ability to draw policy conclusions from intelligence information. It is extraordinary how often our side was wrong about what the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong could and would do. We have consistently underestimated their military capability--especially their ability to adjust to our moves--and we have overestimated their interest in negotiating. We possess tons of captured enemy documents. We have interrogated thousands of prisoners and flown thousands of reconnaissance sorties. Our South Vietnamese allies presumably have agents on the ground in North Viet Nam. Yet the enemy has repeatedly surprised us.
There are some other questions to be asked, in due course, about the quality of the U.S. military strategy and performance in Viet Nam. We are up against the most experienced guerrilla fighters in the world, but we tried to force much of the South Vietnamese military effort into conventional U.S. military forms. The whole Kennedy-McNamara-Johnson doctrine of slowly stepping up the levels of force was a failure. The enemy was always able to adapt and respond. The fantastic complexity of the U.S. command structure, the mystifying extra layer at Pearl Harbor, the tremendous logistical and bureaucratic component in our forces in Viet Nam --all of these deserve rigorous review. So do the American doctrines of airpower.
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There is one large lesson not to be drawn from Viet Nam. Some cynic has said that Viet Nam has given war a bad name, and it sometimes seems as though Viet Nam has also given foreign policy a bad name. Thomas Hughes, the new president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, deplores "the flight from foreign policy." Surely it would be the greatest of all tragedies of Viet Nam if it so soured or embittered us that we tried to draw back in on ourselves. The U.S. cannot escape the consequences of American power even if it wanted to, but just to try could be costly and dangerous.
President Nixon obviously remains a world-minded man. He is pursuing some very skillful diplomacy, both patient and imaginative, in regard to the Middle East, China and the Soviet Union. He was proud last month (and rightly so) to be able to announce the possibility of an anti-ballistic missile agreement with the Russians, and he is plainly pleased and intrigued by the opening in our relations with China. And this brings us to the final irony of our Viet Nam War, now in its seventh year. We first became involved in Viet Nam to contain China, and our contain-China policy first developed in the days when China and Russia seemed to be a monolithic Communist bloc. If it is now safe for us to trade with China and safe to negotiate an ABM agreement with Russia, it should be safe, at last, to bring our soldiers home from Viet Nam.
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