Robert D. Schulzinger - A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975

A Time for War

The United States and Vietnam, 19411975

ROBERT D. SCHULZINGER

Oxford University Press

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Copyright 1997 by Oxford University Press

First published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 1997

First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1998

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schulzinger, Robert D., 1945

A time for war: the United States and Vietnam, 19411975 /

Robert D. Schulzinger.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13 9780-19512501-6

ISBN 019-5125010 (Pbk.) ISBN 019-5071891

1. United StatesForeign relationsVietnam. 2. VietnamForeign

relationsUnited States. 3. Indochinese War, 19461954

4. Vietnamese Conflict, 19611975.1. Title.

E183.8V5S37 1997

327.730597dc20 9624690

10 9 8 7 6

Printed in the United States of America on
acid-free paper

For my daughter, Elizabeth Anne, with love

MAPS

The war in Vietnam is always with us. From the 1988 and 1992 controversies swirling around Dan Quayles and Bill Clintons draft status, to the emotions stirred by the movie Forrest Gump in 1994, to the sulphurous reception in 1995 of Robert McNamaras Vietnam apology, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, memories of the Vietnam war continue to divide and sadden Americans. So deep were the feelings that it took twenty years, until 1995, for the United States and Vietnam to resume full diplomatic relations, an action that subdued but did not put to rest the arguments over Vietnam. Indeed, the lingering animosities, regrets, second thoughts, and bitterness of the Vietnam era may die only when the last public official involved in setting Vietnam policy and every Vietnam veteran and antiwar protester have left the scene. The Vietnam War stands as the sort of watershed event for American politics, foreign policy, culture, values, and economy in the 1960s that the Civil War was in the 1860s and the Great Depression was in the 1930s.

U.S. participation in the war originated from ignorance and excessive optimism and escalated even though officials became dubious of eventual success. The wars aftermath created self doubt and social fragmentation. The war became the dominant issue of foreign affairs by 1965 and acted as the catalyst for vast domestic social upheavals. In the aftermath of Vietnam, Americans changed the way in which they conducted their politics, foreign and military affairs, economic life, and culture.

The war had similarly wide ranging effects in Southeast Asia. For a whileuntil the collapse of the Soviet Unionit altered the geopolitical balance of power in the region. The triumph of North Vietnam and the NLF in the spring of 1975 appeared at the time to have represented the culmination of decades of Vietnamese nationalism against outside powers. Yet the ensuing poverty of Vietnam, the murderous regime of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the exodus of hundreds of thousands of boat people made postwar Southeast Asia a tragic place.

The war devastated Vietnam, exposed the limits of U.S. military power, altered the role of the United States in Asia, and destroyed the consensus over post-World War II U.S. foreign policy. By 1968 military stalemate made it nearly impossible for the U.S. government to conduct an effective foreign policy. Differences over Vietnam opened fissures within the major political parties (especially the Democrats), fractured overseas alliances, changed the shape of the American military, wrecked the credibility of public officials, and spawned the twentieth centurys most massive protests against government policies. Suspicion of officials generated by Vietnam reinforced a pervasive distrust of authority and the sense that many of American societys major complex institutions (the military, the presidency, universities, business, labor unions, some religious groups, the mass media) were corrupt, arrogant, and unresponsive. The occasional revulsion, cynicism and despair felt by large segments of the American population as they contemplated an interminable and unsuccessful war undermined public confidence and personal self-assurance.

Enough time has passed and a mountain of archival material has appeared in the twenty years since the war in Vietnam ended to warrant a fresh historical investigation. This book, A Time for War, is the first of two volumes in which I examine the war in Vietnam and its legacy, and covers events from the nineteenth century until the end of the war in 1975. The second volume, A Time for Peace, will explain the legacy of the war on the contemporary politics and economy and the cultural and social lives of America and Vietnam.

A Time for War represents an effort I began over fifteen years ago to place the Vietnam War in the context of contemporary history and international politics. My earlier work has been in the history of twentieth-century U.S. foreign relations. While I pursue that interest with a detailed discussion of the diplomacy of the war and the decision making at the highest levels, I go beyond it to examine the impact of the war on the lives of ordinary Americans and Vietnamese. The book discusses at length domestic American politics, the role of Congress, the pro- and antiwar movements, and the way in which the war was fought. I have tried to incorporate the most recently available unpublished material from archives in the United States, Europe, and Canada. The unpublished records of many prominent members of Congress have greatly enriched my understanding of the domestic politics of the Vietnam era. The book is also based on as complete a reading as possible of the vast secondary literature on Vietnam. In that sense, I intend this book as a compendium of the current state of scholarship on the Vietnam War.

As this project developed, the Cold War ended. This dramatic and largely unpredicted upheaval in the political landscape called for a further re-evaluation of the Vietnam War. Participants in and historians of the war have long considered it the high point of the policy of containment, for it was always about something other than events there or even in the rest of Southeast Asia. As John Kenneth Galbraith told President Lyndon B. Johnson in

From the perspective of the end of the Cold War, I have tried to answer some related questions: Why did policy-makers think Vietnam mattered? Why did they persist in these beliefs even after they correctly absorbed the lesson that Vietnam meant little for its own sake? What impact did the growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam have on the development of the Cold War? Did it prolong it, hasten its end, make little difference? Inside the United States the war changed many peoples ideas about the worth and the duration of the Cold War, which, like the Vietnam conflict, seemed to most people to have lasted too long. Just as the war in Vietnam emerged out of containment and the Cold War, so it hastened their end. Time is a major theme of this book. How decision makers and ordinary people measured time, how patient or impatient they were to see the results of their efforts, helped determine the way in which Americans and Vietnamese conducted themselves during the war.