Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, and the US-Vietnam War
* What: The US-Vietnam War from 1965 to 1973. Vietnamese had fought and defeated the French in 1945-54. US troops were in Vietnam as advisers from 1950 to 1965, and actually provided most of the funding for the French government.
* The war is widely referred to as the Vietnam War by Americans, the American War by Vietnamese, and the Second Indochina War by scholars when including conflicts in Laos and Cambodia, though the two Cambodian genocides are often not included.
* The Body Count: Between 1 million to 3.8 million Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, and Americans killed. The estimates of dead killed varies widely, except for Americans, with most counts around 58,000 deaths.
* From 200,000 to 500,000 Vietnamese civilians were killed. The Defense Department estimated almost a million National Liberation Front and North Vietnamese troops were killed. But that estimate has been heavily disputed, with war critics arguing the figures were both highly inflated and included many civilians. Most notably, a 1982 60 Minutes special maintained the estimates were knowingly falsified. General William Westmoreland, commander of US troops during the war, sued, but then dropped the case, with neither side admitting wrongdoing.
* Who Also Gets the Blame:
* While Presidents, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy sent troops to Vietnam as advisers, Johnson expanded the war dramatically. While Nixon did not begin the war, he did continue the war for five more years, mostly just to get re-elected. The war ended on virtually identical terms to what were offered by North Vietnam at the start of Nixon's presidency, without peace or honor.
* The US Congress voted to authorize Johnson using massive military force, based on accounts of alleged attacks on US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. Later evidence showed there was no attack. Congress proved to be one of the main sources of resistance to the war, cutting off funding for the war when Nixon tried to continue despite massive public opposition.
* Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand each sent troops to Vietnam. All five sent troops mostly to prove their commitment to the anti Communist cause. South Korean forces had an especially brutal record in Vietnam, with more massacres of civilians carried out by them than any other nation’s forces. This was true even though there were more than twenty times more American troops than South Korean in Vietnam.
* The South Vietnamese government and military, ARVN, was largely led by former French collaborators. Many were French-Vietnamese mixed ancestry and/or Catholics. The business class was mostly ethnic Chinese. The effect of this is that building support for the South Vietnamese government was difficult since most Vietnamese viewed them as alien outsiders.
* Anti Communist belief, stubbornness, or even hysteria is often advanced as an explanation for why the US fought on for so long, even after lack of success, when most Americans knew little about Vietnam and Vietnam was not of any real strategic or economic interest to the US. One of the most common claims of the time was the Domino Theory, that if one nation were to fall to Communism so would other nearby nations.
* As Johnson famously said, “If we quit Vietnam, tomorrow we’ll be fighting in Hawaii and next week in San Francisco.” He said this despite also referring to Vietnam as a, “raggedy fourth rate country” not worth America’s efforts. But of course, the US lost in Vietnam and Communism did not spread from there to outside Southeast Asia.
* Anti-Communists blamed Communism and even suggested antiwar people were Communists or their dupes. Nixon had the antiwar movement extensively investigated. Even after the FBI found no evidence of Soviet involvement in the antiwar movement he still insisted they must be tied to the Soviets somehow.
* Many anti Communists or conservatives blame the antiwar movement, liberals, or the US media for losing the war. This is yet another conspiracy theory, as irrational and paranoid as most conspiracy theories are. There are three huge problems with that claim:
* 1. The antiwar movement was enormous and not centrally controlled, including conservatives, moderates, liberals, religious protesters, and many military veterans, especially servicemen returned from Vietnam. Seven million Americans took part in antiwar protests, or more than one out of every twenty adults.
* 2. Many liberals were also strongly anti Communist, including Johnson and his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, who ran for president in 1968 promising to continue the war. Both liberals and the Democratic Party were split down the middle over the war.
* Many people also tend to forget there were quite a few moderate and liberal Republicans at the time who opposed the war. Many conservatives also opposed the war as being badly run, wanting to get in and out quickly.
* 3. Most media, both then and now, were and are conservatives. Claims that the media is mostly liberal are based on poorly done studies that only survey small parts of the media, such as the press corps that covers the White House. Many of the more famous investigative journalists tended to be liberal, such as Edward Murrow. Their fame and impact gives a false impression of who makes up most of the media.
* Survey after survey has found almost all media owners, managers, or editors were and are conservatives. For example, the founder and owner of Time magazine for over 40 years was famed conservative Henry Luce. Almost all media is owned by six huge media conglomerates. The idea that multi billionaires would fund media opposed to their interests is absurd.
* Not only that, many conservative leaders openly admit the claim of a liberal media is a lie, a deliberate tactic to “work the ref” as GW Bush's campaign manager admitted. Conservatives from McCarthy to Nixon to Dan Quayle to Ann Coulter admit openly to lying, that they are using this tactic knowing full well they control most of the media, not liberals.
* For the US-Vietnam war, most media coverage was actually favorable to the US, including to the military. Because it was not an officially declared war, there was no censorship as in prior wars. Thus some very famous graphic images of war, such as the My Lai massacre, did make it on the news. But most images were at least neutral or even favorable, such as US soldiers sending greetings back home to their families.
* The US-Vietnam war was a watershed moment for American empire. It was the first US defeat since the Indian Wars, the first massive defeat since the War of 1812. The US dropped more than three times the number of bombs on Vietnam than during all of World War II across both Europe and the Pacific Theater. Add to this massive chemical attacks, defoliants designed to destroy plant life that also harmed many people, including US troops. Yet somehow a guerilla force was able to fight on against both the US and French for a quarter century, losing up to twenty times as many troops, and yet still win the war.
* Two presidents refused to halt the war, kept it going for nine in spite of massive public opposition for the last five of those years. A combination of ego, stubbornness, a determination not to appear weak, macho bluster, and simple refusal to face reality trapped both presidents. The US-Vietnam War has often been referred to as a quagmire, something that sucks you in and you cannot get out of, drags you down farther the more you try to get out. How could two of the most intelligent and skilled politicians the US has ever seen fail to perceive what was coming?
* Truman sent in an advisory group to Vietnam in 1950. Eisenhower continued the advisers, even paying for much of the French war effort. Kennedy, despite the later invented image of him as a peacemaker, was as strongly anti-Communist as Eisenhower or Nixon. All three limited the US role to advisory. There were fewer than a hundred US deaths in Vietnam when Johnson became president.
* The US-Vietnam War was not primarily against Communists. (See Truman and the Cold War.) Most Vietnamese fighting the US were nationalists wanting American invaders to leave. Even the North Vietnam leader Ho Chi Minh was more a nationalist than a Communist. The US buildup in Vietnam had to be gradual, with limited troops sent in initially and bombing slowly increasing. This had to be done because slightly over a year earlier had been the Cuban Missile Crisis. Johnson did not want to risk another nuclear confrontation.
* Much has been written about the character of Johnson and his administration, most of them holdovers from Kennedy. These were The Best and the Brightest as one historian termed them, Ivy League intellectuals of incredible ability leading both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Yet precisely because they were from elite backgrounds, high achievers all, they could never publicly admit defeat.
* In the documentary The Fog of War, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara admitted that he knew very early that the US-Vietnam War could not be won. In November 1967, he suggested to Johnson the US pull out its troops and leave the fighting solely to the South Vietnamese government. Johnson refused. By March 1968 McNamara resigned. Yet he refused to speak out publicly about his doubts on the war until 1995, two decades after the war ended.
* Much has been written about Johnson's machismo. This was a man who prided himself on his toughness to draw a contrast between him and Kennedy. He showed his surgery scars on television, held meetings with aides while sitting on the toilet, and also would grope and brag about his penis size. But for all of his frontier posturing, Johnson was a lifelong politician from a family line of politicians.
* For Vietnam was not intended to be as central to what Johnson wanted to accomplish as it became. He hoped the issue would resolve itself, and that he would not be the first US president to lose a war in over a century. Newsman John Chancellor described with fascination how Johnson press conferences became the president practically begging the country, “Why don't you like me?” His ideological blindness and stubbornness became fatal to tens of thousands of US troops and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese.
* For Nixon, the US-Vietnam War was also all about his own political fortune. Nixon had begun his political career as a hardline anti-Communist in the 1940s. But even in his first campaign, he showed that belief to be subordinate to how it could help his career. He became a Republican by responding to an ad by the local Republican Party, and won his first office by red baiting his opponent to defeat. A second election against Helen Gahagan was even more vicious, spreading rumors that she was backed by “Jew Communists” and had given birth to a Black man’s baby. Nixon’s harsh brand of anti Communism was popular enough to get him chosen as vice president.
* But once president, Nixon’s anti Communism receded. He was a great student of history and noted correctly that great presidents were often ranked so by their foreign policy achievements. For domestic policy, he often dealt with it on Monday mornings alone, leaving the entire rest of the week devoted to foreign affairs. Thus to avoid consuming his time, Nixon conceded virtually every domestic issue to liberals. (See Section Eight.)
* Nixon realized simply maintaining a hardline on Communism would not be enough. He needed a dramatic foreign policy achievement. That would be achieving some measure of peace and stability with the Soviets and China, called detente (relaxation.) The US-Vietnam War stood in the way of that goal.
* But to end the war, he would also have to placate his own conservative base. Nixon had promised “peace with honor,” that the US would not only not be defeated in Vietnam, but that peace would be one the nation could take pride in. It was an enormously deft and subtle manipulation, designed to appeal to both war hawks and doves.
* To both appease anti Communists and to weaken North Vietnam, Nixon ordered the most massive bombing campaigns of the war. Where Johnson’s bombings had been limited but gradually increasing and confined to military targets, Nixon ordered as much bombing as possible. Johnson had even halted the bombing against North Vietnam and successfully gotten North Vietnam to the Paris Peace Talks.
* Against the neutral nation of Cambodia, Nixon expanded the war. Some argue he committed outright genocide, the worst of any US President. (See Section One.) There are claims, heavily disputed, that Nixon and Kissinger even sabotaged the peace talks, offering North Vietnam’s leadership the chance that a Nixon administration would be more favorable, in order to defeat Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s Vice President, in the 1968 election.
* Once in office, Nixon and Kissinger searched for a way to weaken North Vietnam’s position. Kissinger shuttled back and forth in secret negotiations with China, the Soviets, and North Vietnam. The Paris Peace Talks were largely ignored by Nixon and Kissinger for three years. Kissinger’s talks with China did little, until the Pakistani government’s genocide against Bangladesh gave the Nixon administration an opening. (See Section Two.)
* China and the Soviets had been on uneasy terms for decades, disagreeing on ideology and tactics. (See Section Four.) In 1969 there was even a seven month border war between the two. Nixon and Kissinger hoped to use the split to their advantage.
* In the end, Nixon dragged out the US-Vietnam War for five more years, agreeing to terms identical to what those on the left proposed before Nixon was elected, and to what North Vietnam wanted all along anyway. Nixon continued the war and increased the bombing campaign solely to get re elected and convince hardline anti Communists he was not being soft. There is no other case in US history of so many US servicemen and so many people of another nation dying for a politician's desire to look good to his followers.
* There also probably is no other US president who succeeded in convincing historians and commentators he was skilled when he repeatedly failed not only at doing good for the country, but even at his own self declared goals. Keeping the US-Vietnam War going was a lesser goal compared to opening up relations with China.
* Nixon's own stated goals for China relations were three. One, bring a peaceful settlement of the dispute between Taiwan and China. That failed, for the two nations are still in dispute 40 years later. Two, block Soviet influence within the Communist world. The Soviets were already weakening economically since the late 60s, but Nixon failed to realize that. When the USSR fell, it was due to Gorbachev's reforms and very brave protesters inside Russia and Eastern Europe, not because of anything Nixon did.
* Finally, Nixon wanted his “peace with honor” promise on Vietnam fulfilled. This also failed. There was neither peace nor honor. Nixon tried Vietnamization, to get South Vietnamese troops to take over for American troops. ARVN troops remained miserable failures, high desertions and a poor combat record in spite of tens of billions spent on them. Within two years, South Vietnam fell. It was a US puppet state, not wanted by the Vietnamese public.
* The US loss in Vietnam, due to both Johnson and Nixon's staggering incompetence and ideological blindness, was one of the most visible and traumatic failures of any presidents in US history. Anyone alive at the time remembers the horrifying images of South Vietnamese fleeing during the fall of Saigon, and US helicopters being dumped off US ships because the ships were overloaded with Vietnamese refugees.
* For the American left, the main lesson coming out of Vietnam was to never trust the US government and never let such wars repeat themselves. One of the most common bumper stickers in the 1980s was “El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam.” The memory of Vietnam prevented Reagan from a direct US invasion of Latin America, but not from intervening in El Salvador's civil war, a campaign of state terrorism in Nicaragua, and collaborating with outright genocide in Guatemala. (See Section One.)
* Many American conservatives turned to believing in a variation of the Stab in the Back theory, first believed by Germans after World War I. This theory claimed the nation did not really lose the war, but were betrayed. Where Germans in the 1920s and 30s blamed Jews for their loss, US conservatives from the 1970s until today blame liberals, the media, and the counterculture. The level of hatred in both cases is almost equally fanatic, and the conspiracy theories both equally ludicrous and paranoid.
* The Stab in the Back theory suits government elites quite well, for it distracts much of the public from elite failures. It lets Nixon and even Johnson off the hook, lets the public forget that the generals not only failed, but often lied to the public as much as politicians. George Bush Sr. even used the alleged need to get over the Vietnam Syndrome as an argument for the Gulf War.
* Much of the public even believed in conspiracy theories about POW-MIAs still supposedly trapped in Vietnam. (There were actually fewer MIAs in the US-Vietnam War than most other major wars. World War II had nearly 100 times as many.) Ross Perot was one of the more extreme examples of this, even sponsoring a private mercenary mission. Much of the public went to the Missing in Action and Rambo film series, vicariously imagining fighting the war again.
* The Stab in the Back conspiracy theory distracts from two uncomfortable truths. Johnson stumbled into a much larger war simply out of a macho desire not to appear defeated or unmanly. Many who want to believe the US did not really lose the war have the same psychological hang up. Their manhood feels threatened if they cannot convince themselves America is the toughest and most unbeatable nation ever. Nixon could have cared less about the war, the troops, or the trauma the country was going through. His concern was to look good in the eyes of easily impressed and not too discerning followers and commentators.
* Virtually the only success to come out of Nixon's opening to China was trade between it and the US, and in how this in turn pushed the Soviets to sit down for arms talks. Even that success is limited, for Khrushchev had tried to push for arms talks far earlier, for most of his time as Soviet leader.