Was the US justified in first committing military personnel and later escalating involvement in Vietnam?
Both Democratic and Republican administrations shared the consensus in 1954-75 that South Vietnam should be maintained as a standing domino against the expansion of Communism in Asia, although whether it actually could survive, at least at an acceptable cost, was another question entirely. Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon all expressed similar foreign policy views in the 1950s and 1960s, as they moved steadily deeper into the quagmire of the Vietnam War. At the time when the U.S. refused to allow elections to reunify the country in 1956, in violation of the 1954 Geneva Accords, the main justification was that no freedom of speech or voting existed in the North, so the elections would not be legitimate. It was always true that the Communist countries were one-party states and the elections were shams, although the right-wing dictatorship in South Vietnam was hardly more democratic at any time, and the strongest internal opposition it faced was from the Buddhist majority there. By 1963, the government of Ngo Dinh Diem had thoroughly alienated this group to the point of open rebellion, with Buddhist monks committing public suicide by setting themselves on fire. On JFK’s orders, Diem was overthrown and assassinated in November 1963, but the political and military situation continued to deteriorate throughout 1964, to the point where Lyndon Johnson ordered a major escalation in the ground and air war, which would expand the U.S. troop presence there to over 500,000 by 1968. Vietnam became the most unpopular of American wars, and behind the scenes, all of the presidents involved in this various steps up the escalatory ladder doubted whether South Vietnam could ever be a viable independent nation, although they never doubted the overall Cold War policies that the U.S. was pursuing in these ‘underdeveloped’ regions of the world at that time. In the end, of course, the ‘dominos; in Southeast Asia turned out not to be viable, despite a huge expenditure of blood and treasure, so by that pragmatic and calculating measure alone, the escalation was not justified.
As the ceasefire agreement and the Geneva Accords of 1954 indicated, the partition of Vietnam into northern and southern zones was only supposed to be temporary and provisional, and elections were supposed to be held by 1956. Article 1 of the ceasefire agreement stated explicitly that this was only a “provisional military demarcation line” for the withdrawal of French and Vietminh forces, and that all foreign troops, bases and munitions were to be removed from the country under the supervision on an international commission (Agreement on the Cessation of Hostilities 1954). Even though the United States never formally signed these agreements, it certainly violated the spirit of them when it organized a new country in South Vietnam and installed Ngo Dinh Diem as its president. Naturally the elections were never held in 1956 because the administration of Dwight Eisenhower feared that Ho Chi Minh would be elected president of a united Vietnam. Indeed, the U.S. government promptly sent an ambassador to South Vietnam and a military advisory group headed by Gen. Lawton Collins to arm the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). In addition, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) organized the relocation of hundreds of thousands of Catholic refugees from northern Vietnam to the south, where they became the most important base for Diem’s government.
Since Diem was a Catholic in a country that was 80-90% Buddhist, his regime did not really have any strong basis of popular support outside of this group. When the U.S. government stated that South Vietnam was “confronted by dangerous forces threatening its independence and security” it meant the Communist government in the North, supported by Russia and China. Collins was sent there to determine the type of military and economic aid that Diem would require, although even at that time, American officials were privately very dubious about South Vietnam’s viability as an independent country (Mission of the Special United States Representative 1954). They simply believed that they could not afford to ‘lose’ another country to the Communist, and that if South Vietnam collapsed it would encourage revolutions in other Asia nations, which would also be assisted by the Soviets and Chinese. This was certainly the strongly-held view of Richard Nixon, both as vice president in 1953-61 and president in 1969-74.
In foreign policy, John F. Kennedy was at first determined to escalate the Cold War in both rhetoric and reality, including the war in Vietnam. Initially, at least, he accepted the Cold War consensus that the main task of the United States was to contain the Soviet Union. In Asia, Africa and Latin America during the Kennedy years, national security concerns were primary. As a senator in 1956, Kennedy had praised the accomplishments of the Diem regime in a speech to the American friends of Vietnam, citing the “increased solidarity and stability of the Government, the elimination of rebellious sects and the taking of the first vital steps toward true democracy.” He also praised the land reform and “vastly improved” conditions of the peasants (which never occurred in realty), and the equally nonexistent progress in health care, education and working conditions, as well as the fighting qualities of the ARVN (America's Stake in Vietnam 1956). As president, however, he was far less forthcoming in his admiration for Diem, and would finally order his death.
Kennedy was also on record against sending large numbers of foreign ground troops to Indochina going back to the time of the French debacle there in 1954. He was skeptical of the right-wing regime of Ngo Dinh Diem and gave the green light for a military coup against it in November 1963, there weeks before his own death. Even so, he escalated the war there and sent 17,000 military advisers by 1963, although by then he had grown discontented with Diem’s leadership and approved his overthrow as assassination, just three weeks before his own death in Dallas, Texas. At the same time, Kennedy did understand the desperate poverty in Asia, Latin America and other regions of the ‘Third World’, as it was called at the time, and proposed massive economic assistance programs like the Alliance for Progress in Latin America, in hopes of preventing Communist revolutions.
In Reporting Vietnam (1998), William Hammond noted that the media attitude toward the Vietnam War changed greatly after the Tet Offensive in 1968, and that prior to that time they usually reported the official line on the war and the antiwar movement. Prior to 1968, the dissent was very limited and generally reflected factions within military and civilian officialdom who doubted that it could be won. Southeast Asia had received very little media coverage at all in the 1940s and 1950s, up until the time when Kennedy began to escalate the war in 1961 by sending in thousands of advisers to prop up the government of President Diem. Elite media such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Life and Newsweek were given special attention by officials in Washington and Saigon, “especially when they conflicted with the official line on an event” (Hammond, 1998, p. x).
Even at this early date, however, there was already a hostile and suspicious relationship between the journalists and military and embassy officials in Saigon. As Halberstam put it, “the journalists very quickly came to the conclusion that the top people at the embassy were either fools or liars or both”, and this adversarial relationship intensified as the war escalated (Halin, 1980, p. 5). Diem’s press was completely controlled, as much as that in China or North Vietnam, and he “could not understand why the United States was unable to do the same” (Hammond, p. 4). From time to time, he ordered certain American journalists expelled from the country because of their unfavorable coverage, particularly stories about the ineffectiveness of the ARVN, corruption and drug dealing in high places, or the inability of the government to win over the peasants. In 1962-63, the Kennedy administration became highly critical of Halberstam and other print journalists, and tried to have them removed from Vietnam, even as it gradually turned against Diem as well.
Just three weeks before his own assassination, Kennedy approved a coup against Diem by the military and CIA, leading to his overthrow and assassination. In the next year and a half, however, the military and political situation in South Vietnam continued to deteriorate, and Lyndon Johnson finally responded with a major escalation in the ground and air war in 1965. Whether Kennedy would have ended the U.S. role in Vietnam after he had been reelected is a moot point and will never be known for certain. He was on record many times endorsing military and ec0onomic support for South Vietnam, but certainly not Americanizing the war with hundreds of thousands of troops, as Lyndon Johnson did after 1965. In reality, Johnson also hesitated before taking this fateful step, even after he had obtained the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution from Congress in 1964. Like Kennedy, he seems to have had a sense that such a long ground war in Asia would be unpopular at home, and the South Vietnam could not be salvaged at any cost. He did not doubt the overall foreign policy of the Cold War, only the viability of the dominos the U.S. had created in Indochina after 1954. All of these had collapsed by 1975, after the U.S. had withdrawn its own ground troops and the public had become thoroughly sick of Indochina, so simply the fact that so little was accomplished in the end despite such a huge cost demonstrates that the effort was not justified in the first place. Perhaps the presidents could not have known that at the time they made their original decisions, but many of them certainly suspected it all along.
REFERENCES
Hammond, W.M. Reporting Vietnam: Media and the Military at War. University Press of Kansas, 1998.
Halin, D. C. The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam. Berkeley, 1980.
Indochina - Agreement on the Cessation of Hostilities in Viet-Nam, July 20, 1954
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/inch001.asp
Indochina - Mission of the Special United States Representative in Viet-Nam: (1) Statement Issued by the White House, November 3, 1954 (2) Department of State Bulletin, Nov. 22, 1954, pp. 777-778
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/inch033.asp#2
Kennedy, J.F., "America's Stake in Vietnam: The Cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia", Speech to American Friends of Vietnam, 1 June 1956.
http://www.credoreference.com.vlib.excelsior.edu/entry.do?id=9912046
