Ending a Personal War

By Hugh Sidey

THE PRESIDENCY

Viet Nam was a President's war. It was a personal thing for the five Presidents who dealt with it. Their decisions did not rise so much out of monstrous events, the usual beginnings of war, as from murky revolutionary stirrings in the jungles, which ultimately had to be weighed in each man's mind and heart.

Ho Chi Minh was not a Kaiser or a Hitler, and there were at first no massed armies sweeping over traditional allied lands that made an American response automatic. There was not even a Korean type of open aggression that could trigger an easy and obvious presidential order to counterattack. From Dwight Eisenhower down to Gerald Ford, the Viet Nam decisions were more the stuff of character of a single man than in any other major conflict this nation has fought.

The decisions came in small and private moments for the most part, the sum of the man's education, family background, experience, his ideas about courage and American tradition. Finally it was simply his "feeling."

The cautious old soldier in Eisenhower saved us from the headstrong secret devisings of John Foster Dulles and Admiral Arthur Radford in 1954. "No one could be more opposed to getting the U.S. involved in a hot war in [Indochina] than I am," he said. "I cannot conceive of a greater tragedy." When Dulles and Radford dreamed up an air strike (with Vice President Richard Nixon's blessing), Ike's insistence that other countries join us and that prior congressional authorization be given caused the plan to fail. One wonders if Ike, with a shake of the head, would have changed history had he been in the Oval Office when the question of putting U.S. troops into Viet Nam came up. Maybe.

John Kennedy, worried about his own courage, upped the ante in Viet Nam by putting in more military advisers. But he walked around the back corridors of the White House profoundly upset by the forces that seemed to push him toward a greater intervention. In the summer of 1961 he slipped up to the Waldorf in New York and listened as General Douglas MacArthur told him to stay out of Asia. He could not get it out of his mind. He had MacArthur come down to the White House for lunch. "You know what he said," Kennedy mused the next day. "He said that we shouldn't put one American soldier on the continent of Asia--we couldn't win a fight in Asia." Again the haunting question: would a simple no or a furrowed brow in the Cabinet Room have prevented the Viet Nam agony? It could have.

Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were such forged products of their past that perhaps there was no way they could have done anything differently. But like those before them, their judgments came not so much from events or from great policy deliberations, but from small facets of their conviction and experience. "I'm not going to be the first President to lose a war . . . Boys, it is just like the Alamo. Somebody should have by God helped those Texans. I'm going to Viet Nam . . . Come home with the coonskin on the wall." That was our President as he moved us deeper and deeper into Viet Nam. Lyndon Johnson, out of Texas legend, could not conceive of courage and wisdom as anything but a victory of force.

And then there was the weekend in 1972 when Richard Nixon brooded on his mountaintop at Camp David and ordered the bombing of North Viet Nam. One man with a few words unleashed the greatest destructive strikes in all of history. The decision came from within him. His life rested to an alarming degree on distrust, hate and a belief in being "tough." He was ready to bomb again that spring. Only the threat of Watergate and his own political death stopped him.

Gerald Ford too has responded to the final Viet Nam convulsion in small, human increments. His first feelings that Congress had failed him by not voting more military aid gave way to his inner dimensions of good sense. In the White House, he looked at his aides when the awful truth overwhelmed him. "It's over," he said. "Let's put it behind us."

The lesson written in the Oval Office is that never again should this nation allow its Presidents to have their own war.

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