The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

by Barbara W. Tuchman

The Geneva Accord declared a cease-fire, confirmed under international auspices the independence of Laos and Cambodia and partitioned Vietnam into separate North and South zones, under the specific provision that “the military demarcation is provisional and should not in any...

The government of neither Hanoi nor Saigon signed the agreement, nor did the United States, which would go no further than a sulky declaration to refrain from “the threat or the use of force” to disturb the arrangements.

AT THIS STAGE, with eight years of American effort in aid of the French having come to nothing, and with the French effort having failed at a cost in French Union troops of 50,000 killed and 100,000 wounded, the United States might have seen indications for disengagement from Indochina’s affairs.

The American government reacted not to the Chinese upheaval or to Vietnamese nationalism per se, but to intimidation by the rabid right at home and to the public dread of Communism that this played on and reflected.

The social and psychological sources of that dread are not our subject, but in them lie the roots of American policy in Vietnam.

the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) met at Manila in September 1954. By involving only three Asian nations, and only two—Thailand and the Philippines—from Southeast Asia (the third was Pakistan), and only one contiguous to Indochina and none from Indochina itself, it lacked a certain authenticity from the start.

The other members were Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand and the United States.

In the meantime a new premier of South Vietnam had been installed who from the start to violent finish was an American client. Chosen

not from within the country but from the circle of Vietnamese exiles outside, he was elevated by French and American manipulations in which France was a very reluctant partner. For the sake of motivating greater energy and self-reliance in South Vietnam, the United States was determined to remove the French presence apart from the unfortunate necessity of retaining France’s armed forces until a reliable Vietnamese army could be officered and trained to take their place.

The United States wanted the contrary and found a player in Ngo Dinh Diem, an ardent nationalist of a Catholic mandarin family whose father had been a Lord Chamberlain at the Imperial Court of Annam.

That we would inherit the distaste felt for any white intrusion was not contemplated. Americans saw themselves as “different” from the French, to be welcomed as well-wishers of Vietnamese independence, while the fact that it was the United States which had brought back the French and financed their war was mentally swept under the rug. By helping an independent South Vietnam to establish itself, it was thought we could prove our good intentions.

November 1954, given the chaotic internal political situation in Vietnam, they found “no assurance … of loyal and effective support for the Diem Government” or of “political and military stability within South Vietnam.” Unless the Vietnamese themselves showed the will to resist Communism, “no amount of external pressure and assistance can long delay complete Communist victory in South Vietnam.”

In the next five years, with a flow of American funds that paid 60 to 75 percent of its budget, including the total cost of its army, and supported an unfavorable trade balance, South Vietnam appeared to flourish in unanticipated order and prosperity.

The French armed forces, under insistent American pressure, gradually departed in phased withdrawals until the French High Command was dissolved in February 1956.

While crushing resistance and establishing control during the period 1955–60, Hanoi enlarged and trained its forces, accumulated arms from China and by degrees built up connections with the insurgents in the South.

By 1960 between 5000 and 10,000 guerrillas, called by the Saigon government Viet-Cong, meaning “Vietnamese Communist,” were estimated to be active in the South.

The population felt no active loyalty either to Diem or, on the other hand, to Communism or the cause of reunification. They wanted safety, land and the harvest of their crops. “The situation may be summed up,” reported the American Embassy in January 1960, “in the fact that the government has tended to treat the population with suspicion or to coerce it and has been rewarded with apathy and resentment.”

the more support he demanded—and received. In a dependent relationship the protégé can always control the protector by threatening to collapse.

In September 1960 the Communist Party Congress in Hanoi called for the overthrow of the Diem regime and of “American imperialist rule.” Formation of the National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam followed in December.

Overt civil war was thus declared just as a new American President, John F. Kennedy, took office in the United States.

THE NEW ADMINISTRATION came into office equipped with brain power, more pragmatism than ideology and the thinnest electoral majority of the 20th century, barely half of one percent. Like the President, his associates were activists, stimulated by crises, eager to take active measures. As far as the record shows, they held no session devoted to re-examination of the engagement they had inherited in Vietnam, nor did they ask themselves to what extent the United States was committed or what was the degree of national interest involved. Nor, so far as appears in the mountains of memoranda, discussions and options flowing over the desks, was any long-range look taken at long-range strategy. Rather,

policy developed in ad hoc spurts from month to month.

how the American interest in Southeast Asia was defined in 1961, replied that “it was simply a give...

The given was that we had to stop the advance of Communism wherever it appeared and Vietnam was then the place of confrontation. If not stopped t...

To act “apart from and in defiance of innately nationalistic aims spells foredoomed failure.”

It is a dismaying fact that throughout the long folly of Vietnam, Americans kept foretelling the outcome and acting without reference to their own foresight.

1956 Kennedy had moved closer to cold war orthodoxy, talking less of “strong native sentiment” and more of dominoes in a variety of metaphor: Vietnam was the “cornerstone of the free world in Southeast A...

The current of rhetoric carried him forward into two traps: Vietnam was “a proving ground of democracy in Asia” and “a test of American responsibility and determination in Asia.”

The American failure to find any significance in the defeat of the French professional army, including the Foreign Legion, by small, thin-boned, out-of-uniform Asian guerrillas is one of the great puzzles of the time. How could Dien Bien Phu be so ignored?

The simplistic either/or about defeating Communism or surrendering the Pacific probably did not influence the President, who was out of sympathy with his Vice-President and vice versa. But the doubts of America’s steadfastness that so affected Johnson raised the issue of credibility that was to swell until in the end it seemed to be all we were fighting for.

Credibility emerged in the Berlin crisis of that summer when, after a harsh and intimidating meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna, Kennedy said to James Reston, “Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place.” But Vietnam was never the place, because the American government itself never totally believed in what it was doing.

The contrast with Berlin was onl...

“We cannot and will not permit the Communists to drive us out of Berlin either gradually or by force,” Kennedy said in July, and he was ready in his own mind, according to associates, to risk war, even nuclear war, over the issue. Despite all the protestations of equal firmness, Vietnam never received a comparable status in American policy, while at the same time no American government was ever w...

“the essential point,” in the words of Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze, “was that the value to the West of the defenses of Berlin was far greater than the...

the value to North Vietnam of gaining control of the country for which they had fought so long was far greater to them than the value of fru...

They were fighting on their own soil, determined to be at last its rulers. Good or bad, unyielding firmness of purpose lay with Hanoi, and because it was unyielding was likely to prevail. N...

Rostow was a positivist, a Dr. Pangloss who, as described by a fellow-worker, would advise the President on learning of a nuclear attack on Manhattan that the first phase of urban renewal had been accomplished at no cost to the Treasury.

If a date is needed for the beginning of the American war in Vietnam, the establishment of Mac-Vee, as it became known, will serve.

By mid-1962 American forces in Vietnam numbered 8000, by the end of the year over 11,000, ten months later, 17,000.

United States soldiers served alongside ARVN units at every level from battalion to division and general staff. They planned operations and accompanied Vietnamese units into the field from six to eight weeks at a time. They airlifted troops and supplies, built jungle airstrips, flew helicopter rescue and medical evacuation teams, trained Vietnamese pilots...

They also took casualties: 14 killed or wounded in 1961, 109 i...

The “strategic hamlet” program, most acclaimed and favored project of the year, sponsored by Diem’s brother Nhu and highly regarded by the Americans, succeeded in actually turning back the Viet-Cong in many places, if it did not endear the Diem government to the rural population. Designed to isolate the guerrillas from the people, depriving them of food and recruits, the program forcibly relocated villagers from their own communities to fortified “agrovilles” of approximately 300 families, often with little but the clothes on their backs, while their former villages were burned behind them to deprive the Viet-Cong of shelter.

Besides ignoring the peasant’s attachment to his ancestral land and his reluctance to leave it for any reason, the program levied forced labor to construct the “agrovilles.” With elaborate effort invested in and hopes attached to them, the “strategic hamlets” cost as much in alienation as they gained in security.

Nineteen sixty-two was Saigon’s year, unsuspected to be its last. American optimism swelled.

Adjustment is painful. For the ruler it is easier, once he has entered a policy box, to stay inside. For the lesser official it is better, for the sake of his position, not to make waves, not to press evidence that the chief will find painful to accept. Psychologists call the process of screening out discordant information “cognitive dissonance,”

an academic disguise for “Don’t confuse me with the facts.” Cognitive dissonance is the tendency “to suppress, gloss over, water down or ‘waffle’ issues which would produce conflict or ‘psychological pain’ within an organization.”

It causes alternatives to be “deselected since even thinking about th...

The trend of his thinking emerged at a Congressional breakfast in the White House in March 1963 when Mansfield renewed his arguments. Drawing him aside, the President said, perhaps because he knew it was what the influential Senator wanted to hear, that he was beginning to agree about a complete military withdrawal. “But I can’t do it until 1965—until after I’m re-elected.” To do it before would cause “a wild conservative outcry” against him. To his aide Kenneth O’Donnell, Kennedy repeated, “If I tried to pull out completely now, we could have another Joe McCarthy scare on our hands”; only after re-election, and he added sharply, “So we’d better make damn sure I am re-elected.” To other friends he implied his doubts, but argued that he could not give up Vietnam to the Communists and ask American voters to re-elect him.

His position was realistic, if not a profile in courage. Re-election was more than a year and a half away. To continue for that time to invest American resources and inevitably lives in a cause in which he no longer had much faith, rather than risk his own second term, was a decision in his own interest, not the country’s. Only an exceedingly rare ruler reverses that order.

Diem’s mandate to govern, never thoroughly accepted by the mixture of sects, religions and classes, was finally shattered by the Buddhist revolt in the summer of 1963.