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The effects of the South Vietnamese government's poor performance from
Ngo Dinh Diem's death until the middle of 1965 have been understood
widely, but its causes have not. According to one standard explanation,
the Saigon government failed because its leaders and its American
advisers selected the wrong methods for combating the enemy. In truth,
however, the problem was not in the concepts but in the execution. An
explanation more commonly advanced, closer to the mark but still only
partially correct, is that the South Vietnamese government faltered at
this time because the country's ruling elite was bereft of strong
leaders. Many individuals who occupied positions of power in the
post-Diem period, it is true, did lack the necessary leadership
attributes, and none was as talented as Diem, but the caliber of the
elites as a whole was not a critical problem. The critical problems,
rather, were the exclusion of certain elites from the government and
the manipulation of governmental leaders by the militant Buddhist
movement. From November 1963 onward, the top leadership in Saigon
repeatedly removed men of considerable talent, either because of their
past loyalty to Diem or because of pressure from the militant
Buddhists. And in spite of these purges, the government still had some
men, even at the very top at times, who possessed leadership
capabilities that would have made them successful leaders had it not
been for militant Buddhist conniving. The Buddhist leaders tried to
bridle every government that held power after Diem, and in most
instances they succeeded, largely because government officials feared
resisting the Buddhist activists after watching Diem lose American
favor, and his life, for resisting them. As its American advocates had
desired, the 1963 coup led to political liberalization, but rather than
improving the government as those Americans had predicted,
liberalization had the opposite effect, enabling enemies of the
government to undermine its prestige and authority, as well as to
foment discord and violence between religious groups. Not until June
1965, by which time the United States and most South Vietnamese leaders
had come to realize the necessity of suppressing the militant Buddhists
and other troublemakers, would political stability return. By then,
however, South Vietnam had sustained crippling damage and Hanoi was
pushing for total victory.
Lyndon Johnson's lack of forcefulness in Vietnam in late 1964 and early
1965 squandered America's deterrent power and led to a decision in
Hanoi to invade South Vietnam with large North Vietnamese Army units.
According to the prevailing historical interpretation, the leadership
in Hanoi relentlessly pursued a strategy of attacking in the South
until it won, with little regard for what its enemies did. In reality,
however, North Vietnam's strategy was heavily dependent on American
actions. Although Johnson's generals favored striking North Vietnam
quickly and powerfully, he chose to follow the prescriptions of his
civilian advisers, who advocated an academic approach that used small
doses of force to convey America's resolve without provoking the enemy.
Because of his chosen strategic philosophy and because of international
and U.S. electoral politics, Johnson made only a token attack on North
Vietnam following the Tonkin Gulf incidents of 1964 and undertook no
military action thereafter. Rather than inducing the North Vietnamese
to reciprocate with self-limitations, as the theorists predicted,
however, this approach served only to heighten Hanoi's appetite and
courage. Johnson's lack of action, as well as his presidential campaign
rhetoric, convinced Hanoi that the Americans would not put up a fight
for Vietnam in the near future. This change came at a time when the
weakened condition of the Saigon government indicated that South
Vietnamese resistance to a North Vietnamese invasion would be weak.
Consequently, in November 1964, Hanoi began sending large North
Vietnamese Army units to South Vietnam, with the intention of winning
the war swiftly. The Americans were slow to identify the shift in North
Vietnam's strategy and thus lost any remaining chance of deterring
Hanoi or otherwise enabling South Vietnam to survive without U.S.
combat troops.
Some well-known historians have argued that President Johnson wanted to
inject U.S. ground troops into the war whether they were needed or not.
Johnson made his decision to intervene, they contend, at the end of
1964 or in early 1965. In actuality, Johnson reached his decision no
earlier than the latter part of June 1965, by which time intervention
had become the only means of saving South Vietnam. The first U.S.
ground troops sent to Vietnam arrived in March 1965, but Johnson
deployed them only to protect U.S. air bases, not to engage the main
elements of the Communist forces. At the time of the initial ground
force deployments, Johnson and his lieutenants did not foresee a major
war between American and Communist forces, because they did not know
that Hanoi had begun sending entire North Vietnamese Army regiments
into South Vietnam. They did not learn of this development until the
beginning of April. By the middle of June, abetted by a continuing
infusion of North Vietnamese soldiers, the Communist forces had won
many large victories and the South Vietnamese Army was losing its
ability to challenge large Communist initiatives. The North Vietnamese
had entered the third and final stage of Maoist revolutionary warfare,
in which the revolutionaries use massed conventional forces to destroy
the government's conventional forces. Hanoi's ultimate success, as its
leaders repeatedly stated, depended above all on the ability of its
conventional forces to destroy the South Vietnamese Army, particularly
its mobile strategic reserve units, not South Vietnam's small
counter-guerrilla forces. The fighting of 1965 demonstrated that,
contrary to the contentions of a multitude of pundits and
theoreticians, the Americans and the South Vietnamese had been correct
to develop a large conventional South Vietnamese army during the 1950s
and early 1960s rather than concentrate exclusively on small-unit
warfare.
Lyndon Johnson had always wanted to avoid putting U.S. troops into the
ground war if there was any way that South Vietnam could continue the
war without them. Like most of his advisers, he doubted that U.S.
ground force intervention would result in an easy victory, believing
instead that it would result in a long, painful, and politically
troublesome struggle against an enemy who might never give up. But in
June 1965, Johnson and his military advisers concluded, correctly, that
only the use of U.S. ground forces in major combat could stop the
Communist conventional forces from finishing off the South Vietnamese
Army and government. Even as Johnson became convinced of the need for
intervention, he held out hopes of withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam
relatively soon, regardless of how the fighting was going, in the
belief that a brief intervention might achieve as much as a sustained
intervention in terms of preserving U.S. credibility and prestige in
the world.
Johnson decided that South Vietnam was worth rescuing in 1965 primarily
because he dreaded the international consequences of that country's
demise. His greatest fear was the so-called domino effect, whereby the
fall of Vietnam would cause other countries in Asia to fall to
Communism. Historians have frequently argued that Johnson fought for
Vietnam primarily to protect himself against accusations from the
American Right that he was soft on Communism, which would have harmed
his reputation and denied him the political support he needed to carry
out his domestic agenda. In actuality, the domestic political
ramifications of losing Vietnam had relatively little influence on
Johnson's decision on whether to protect South Vietnam. Johnson
recognized that the American people were largely apathetic about
Vietnam and would be no more likely to turn against him politically and
personally if he left than if he stayed and fought. Domestic political
considerations did, on the other hand, exert great influence on how
Johnson protected South Vietnam, as they discouraged him from bridling
Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, from taking a tough stance on Vietnam
before the 1964 election, and from calling up the U.S. reserves and
otherwise putting the United States on a war footing. That there has
been great cynicism and confusion about Johnson's motives was partly
the responsibility of the President himself, for during this period he
repeatedly misrepresented his intentions to the American people and he
did not provide decisive leadership that would have clarified his views
and inspired the people's confidence.
The domino theory was valid. The fear of falling dominoes in Asia was
based not on simple-mindedness or paranoia, but rather on a sound
understanding of the toppler countries and the domino countries. As
Lyndon Johnson pondered whether to send U.S. troops into battle, the
evidence overwhelmingly supported the conclusion that South Vietnam's
defeat would lead to either a Communist takeover or the switching of
allegiance to China in most of the region's countries. Information
available since that time has reinforced this conclusion. Vietnam
itself was not intrinsically vital to U.S. interests, but it was vital
nevertheless because its fate strongly influenced events in other Asian
countries that were intrinsically vital, most notably Indonesia and
Japan. In 1965, China and North Vietnam were aggressively and
resolutely trying to topple the dominoes, and the dominoes were very
vulnerable to toppling. Throughout Asia, among those who paid attention
to international affairs, the domino theory enjoyed a wide following.
If the United States pulled out of Vietnam, Asia's leaders generally
believed, the Americans would lose their credibility in Asia and most
of Asia would have to bow before China or face destruction, with
enormous global repercussions. Every country in Southeast Asia and the
surrounding area, aside from the few that were already on China's side,
advocated U.S. intervention in Vietnam, and most of them offered to
assist the South Vietnamese war effort. The oft-maligned analogy to the
Munich agreement of 1938 actually offered a sound prediction of how the
dominoes would likely fall: Communist gains in one area would encourage
the Communists to seek further conquests in other places, and after
each Communist victory the aggressors would enjoy greater assets and
the defenders fewer.
Further evidence of the domino theory's validity can be found by
examining the impact of America's Vietnam policy on other developments
in the world between 1965 and the fall of South Vietnam in 1975,
developments that would remove the danger of a tumbling of Asian
dominoes. Among these were the widening of the Sino-Soviet split, the
Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the civil war in Cambodia. America's
willingness to hold firm in Vietnam did much to foster anti-Communism
among the generals of Indonesia, which was the domino of greatest
strategic importance in Southeast Asia. Had the Americans abandoned
Vietnam in 1965, these generals most likely would not have seized power
from the pro-Communist Sukarno and annihilated the Indonesian Communist
Party later that year, as they ultimately did. Communism's ultimate
failure to knock over the dominoes in Asia was not an inevitable
outcome, independent of events in Vietnam, but was instead the result
of obstacles that the United States threw in Communism's path by
intervening in Vietnam.
It has been said that the Johnson administration, in its first years,
could have negotiated a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam that would have
preserved a non-Communist South Vietnam for years to come. Evidence
from the Communist side, however, reveals North Vietnam's complete
unwillingness to negotiate such a deal. The Communists would not have
agreed to a settlement in 1964 or 1965 that could have prevented them
from gaining control of South Vietnam quickly. With their list of
military victories growing longer and longer, with a clear and
promising plan for conquering South Vietnam on the battlefield, the
North Vietnamese had no reason to accept a diplomatic settlement that
might rob them of the spoils.
The Americans did miss some strategic opportunities of a different
sort, opportunities that would have allowed them to fight from a much
more favorable strategic position. In the chaotic period following
Diem's overthrow, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other U.S. military
leaders repeatedly advocated an invasion of North Vietnam. Johnson and
his civilian advisers rejected this advice, however, on the grounds
that an American invasion of the North could lead to a war between the
United States and China. Historians have generally concurred in the
assessment that Chinese intervention was likely. But the evidence shows
that until at least March 1965, the deployment of U.S. ground forces
into North Vietnam would not have prompted the Chinese to intercede.
Having suffered huge losses in the Korean War, the Chinese had no more
appetite for a war between themselves and the Americans than did their
American counterparts. Johnson's failure to attack North Vietnam also
worked to the enemy's advantage by facilitating a massive Chinese troop
deployment into North Vietnam, which in turn freed up many North
Vietnamese Army divisions for deployment to South Vietnam and made a
subsequent U.S. invasion of North Vietnam much riskier.
Another opportunity not taken -- one that never carried a serious risk
of war with China -- was the cutting of the Ho Chi Minh Trail with
American forces. Johnson rejected many recommendations from the Joint
Chiefs to put U.S. ground forces into Laos to carry out this task, and
on this point, too, historians have backed the President over his
generals. The Johnson administration and some historians have argued
that the Ho Chi Minh Trail was not essential to the Communist war
effort, but new evidence on the trail and on specific battles makes
clear the inaccuracy of this contention. The Viet Cong insurgency was
always heavily dependent on North Vietnamese infiltration of men and
equipment into South Vietnam through Laos, and it could not have
brought the Saigon government close to collapse in 1965, or defeated it
in 1975, without heavy infiltration of both. Other orthodox historians
have argued that an American ground troop presence in Laos would not
have stopped most of the infiltration, but much new evidence
contradicts this contention as well. The United States, moreover,
missed some valuable opportunities to sever Hanoi's maritime supply
lines, although it did cut some of the most important sea routes in
early 1965.
In sum, South Vietnam was a vital interest of the United States during
the period from 1954 to 1965. The aggressive expansionism of North
Vietnam and China threatened South Vietnam's existence, and by 1965
only strong American action could keep South Vietnam out of Communist
hands. America's policy of defending South Vietnam was therefore sound.
U.S. intervention in Vietnam was not an act of strategic buffoonery,
nor was it a sinister, warmongering plot that should forever stand as a
terrible blemish on America's soul. Neither was it an act of hubris in
which the United States pursued objectives far beyond its means. Where
the United States erred seriously was in formulating its strategies for
protecting South Vietnam. The most terrible mistake was the inciting of
the November 1963 coup, for Ngo Dinh Diem's overthrow forfeited the
tremendous gains of the preceding nine years and plunged the country
into an extended period of instability and weakness. The Johnson
administration was handed the thorny tasks of handling the post-coup
mess and defending South Vietnam against an increasingly ambitious
enemy -- and in neither case did the administration achieve good
results. President Johnson had available several aggressive policy
options that could have enabled South Vietnam to continue the war
either without the help of any American ground forces at all or with
the employment of U.S. ground forces in advantageous positions outside
South Vietnam. But Johnson ruled out these options and therefore,
during the summer of 1965, he would have to fight a defensive war
within South Vietnam's borders in order to avoid the dreadful
international consequences of abandoning the country.
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