The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

by Barbara W. Tuchman

General Taylor himself and Secretary McNamara with the assignment to find out how far the political chaos had affected the military effort.

Their report on 2 October, while positive on military prospects, was full of political negatives that belied their hopes. All contradictions were muffled by McNamara’s public announcement, with the President’s approval, that 1000 men could be withdrawn by the end of the year and that “The major part of the United States military task can be completed by the end of 1965.” The confusion and contradiction in fact-finding did nothing to clarify policy. On 1 November the generals’ coup took place successfully. It included, to the appalled discomfort of the Americans, the unexpected assassinations of Diem and Nhu. Less than a month later, President Kennedy too was in his grave.

FROM THE MOMENT he took over the presidency, according to one who knew him well, Lyndon Johnson made up his mind that he was not going to “lose” South Vietnam.

Within 48 hours of Kennedy’s death, Ambassador Lodge, who had come home to report on post-Diem developments, met with Johnson to brief him on the discouraging situation. Political prospects under Diem’s successor, he reported, held no promise of improvement but more likely of further strife; militarily, the army was shaky and in danger of being overwhelmed.

Unless the United States took a much more active role in the fighting the South might be lost. Hard decisions, Lodge told the President squarely, had to be faced. Johnson’s reaction was instant and personal: “I am not going to be the first President of the United States to lose a war,” alternatively reported as “I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way that China went.”

Forceful and domineering, a man infatuated with himself, Johnson was affected in his conduct of Vietnam policy by three elements in his character: an ego that was insatiable and never secure; a bottomless capacity to use and impose the powers of office without inhibition; a profound aversion, once fixed upon a course of action, to any contra-indications.

The military aim was to stop infiltration and supply.

The Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 7 August 1964

was a blank check for Executive war.

The cause was the claim of the destroyer Maddox and other naval units that they had been fired upon at night by North Vietnamese torpedo patrol boats outside the three-mile limit recognized by the United States. Hanoi claimed sovereignty up to a twelve-mile limit. A second

clash followed the next day under obscure conditions never fully clarified and subsequently, during re-investigation in 1967, thoug...

After a one-day hearing, the Resolution authorizing “all necessary measures” was adopted by the Foreign Relations Committee by a vote of 14 to 1 and subsequently approved by both Houses. It justified the grant of war powers on the rather spongy ground that the United States regards as “vital to its international interests and to world peace, the maintenance of international peace and security.”

Meanwhile, with evidence accumulating of confusion by radar and sonar technicians in the second clash, Johnson said privately, “Well, those dumb stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.” So much for casus belli.

No one is so sure of his premises as the man who knows too little.

Limited war is basically a war decided on by the Executive, and “without arousing the public ire”—meaning the public notice—means parting company with the people, which is to say discarding the principle of representative government.

Eric Sevareid, reporting what Stevenson had told him just before his death, revealed for the first time that Hanoi had in fact agreed to the meeting proposed by U Thant, whereas Johnson had recently told a press conference that there had not been the “slightest indication” of interest on the other

in the year prior to America’s entering active belligerency, Johnson or his White House spokesman had stated no less than seven times that the United States was seeking no wider war. The President’s personal credibility suffered accordingly.

On top of the Stevenson story, another failed peace overture became known. At the request of the United States, the Italian Foreign Minister, Amintore Fanfani, then a delegate to the UN, arranged for two Italian professors, one a former acquaintance of Ho Chi Minh, to go to Hanoi. While encountering “a strong desire to find a peaceful solution,” they also reported, as Fanfani wrote to Johnson, that Ho’s conditions included a cease-fire throughout North and South, in addition to the Four Points previously announced. He had, however, agreed to begin talks without requiring withdrawal of American forces. Since a cease-fire in place would have left North Vietnamese units inside the Sou...

Disconcerted at being exposed as uninterested in peace, the President ordered a bombing halt at Christmas time and launched a spectacular flying peace circus. Officials were despatched like carrier pigeons to capitals east and west, ostensibly to seek paths to negotiation—Harriman on a round-the-world tour to Warsaw, Delhi, Teheran, Cairo, Bangkok, Australia, Laos and Saigon; Arthur Goldberg, Stevenson’s successor at the UN, to Rome, Paris and London; McGeorge Bundy to Ottawa; Vice-President Hubert Humphrey to Tokyo and two Assistant Secretaries of State to Mexico City and the African states, respectively. Nothing came of this display except stimulation of heavy public pressure on Johnson to extend the bombing halt. It was extended for 37 days with the announced purpose of testing Hanoi’s willingness to talk, in vain.

Talks in Warsaw with Polish intermediaries in mid-1966 seemed to be making progress until, at a delicate point, American air strikes, directed for the first time at targets in and around Hanoi, caused North Vietnam to cancel the contacts. The episode showed that neither side basically wanted negotiations to succeed. In his unsparing way, McNaughton stated the dilemma for the United States: aiming for victory could end in compromise but aiming for compromise could end only in defeat, because to reveal “a lowering of sights from victory to compromise … will give the DRV [North Vietnam] the smell of blood.”

The war was turning nasty with napalm-burned bodies, defoliated and devastated croplands, tortured prisoners and rising body counts.

It was also becoming expensive, now costing $2 billion a month. Progressive escalation bringing troop strength to 245,000 in April 1966 required a request to Congre...

The price was a confirmation of the French view of a “rotten war.” In pursuit of attrition, Westmoreland deployed combat units as lures to provoke attack so that American artillery and air force could close in for a kill and a gratifying body count.

“Search and destroy” missions using tanks, artillery strafing and defoliation from the air left ruined villages and ruined crops and destitute refugees living in festering camps along the coast in growing resentment of the Americans. Bombing strategy too was directed toward attrition by famine through the destruction of dikes, irrigation ditches and the means of agriculture. Defoliation missions could destroy 300 acres of rice within three to five days and strip an equal area of jungle within five to six weeks. Napalm amounted to official terrorism, corrupting the users, who needed only to press the firing button to watch “huts go up in a boil of orange flame.” Reports of American fighting methods written by correspondents in chronic antagonism to the military were reaching home. Americans who had never before seen war now saw the wounded and homeless and the melted flesh of burned children afflicted thus by their own countrymen.

While American armed intervention had prevented the insurgents’ victory, it had not brought closer their defeat.

Progress was deceptive. When the balance wavered, Russia and China sent in more supplies to the North, refreshing its strength. The low morale deduced from prisoners was a misinterpretation of the stoicism and fatalism of the East. In the American forces, short-term one-year tours of duty, intended to avoid discontent, prevented adaptation to irregular jungle warfare, thereby increasing casualties since the rate was always highest in the early months of duty.

The “pacification” program was a strenuous American effort to strengthen the social and political fabric of South Vietnam in the interests of democracy. It was supposed to build confidence in Saigon and stabilize its footing. But the successive governments of Generals Khanh, Ky and Thieu, all of whom resented the patronage they depended upon, were not helpful collaborators. Nor were the white men’s forces in their massive material presence the agents to “win hearts and minds.”

That program, known as WHAM to Americans in the field, failed of its object despite all the energy Washington invested in it and in some sectors turned sentiment against Saigon and the United States.

During the bombing pause, 77 members of the House, mostly Democrats, urged the President to extend the pause and submit the conflict to the UN. When the bombing resumed, fifteen Senators, all Democrats, made public a letter to the President, opposing the renewal. When Senator Morse proposed repeal of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution as an amendment to an appropriations bill for Vietnam, three Senators—Fulbright, Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota and Stephen Young of Ohio—joined the undeviating Morse and Gruening in its favor. It was defeated 92 to 5.

While not very bold, these were signals of opposition to the President from within his own party. They were the beginnings of a peace bloc that would split the Democratic Party over Vietnam, but they had no convinced and determined leadership in either House or Senate that was ready to oppose the majority.

Disaffection was deeper than the meager votes indicated. Congress continued to vote obediently for appropriations because most members could not bring themselves to reject Administration policy whe...

Further, they were in large part willing captives of the giant identified by Eisenhower as the military-industrial complex. Defense contracts were its currency, manipulated by more than 300 lobbyists maintained by the Pentagon on the Hill. The military provided V.I.P. tours, dinners, films, speakers, planes, sporting weekends and other perquisites, especially to senior committee chairmen in both Houses. A quarter of the membership of Congress held reserve commi...

Fulbright’s vote on the Morse amendment signified an open break with Johnson.

He now organized, in January–February 1966, in six days of televised hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the first serious public discussion at an official level of the American intervention in Vietnam.

Ambassador Kennan brought out the question of self-betrayal. Success in the war would be hollow even if achievable, he said, because of the harm being done by the spectacle of America inflicting “grievous damage on the lives of a poor and helpless people, particularly on a people of different race and color.… This spectacle produces reactions among millions of people throughout the world profoundly detrimental to the image we would like them to hold of this country.” More respect could be won by “a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions” than by their stubborn pursuit. He quoted John Quincy Adams’ dictum that wherever the standard of liberty was unfurled in the world, “there will be America’s heart … but she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Pursuing monsters meant endless wars in which “the fundamental maxim of [American] policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.” No harder truth was spoken at the hearings.

The issue of longest consequence, Executive war, was not formulated until after the hearings, in Fulbright’s preface to a published version. Acquiescence in Executive war, he wrote, comes from the belief that the government possesses secret information that gives it special insight in determining policy. Not only was this questionable, but major policy decisions turn “not upon available facts but upon judgment,” with which policy-makers are no better endowed than the intelligent citizen. Congress and citizens can judge “whether the massive deployment and destruction of their men and wealth seem to serve their overall interests as a nation.”

Though he could bring out the major issues, Fulbright was a teacher, not a leader, unready himself to put his vote where it counted. When a month after the hearings the Senate authorized $4.8 billion in emergency funds for the war in Vietnam, the bill passed against only the two faithful negatives of Morse and Gruening.

Fulbright voted with the...

Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who said on resumption of the bombing, “We ought all to support the President. He is the man who has all the information and knowledge of what we are up against.” This is a comforting assumption that relieves people from taking a stand. It is usually invalid, especially in foreign affairs.

“Foreign policy decisions,” concluded Gunnar Myrdal after two decades of study, “are in general much more influenced by irrational motives” than are domestic ones.

After World War II a Strategic Bombing Survey by scientists, economists and other specialists had concluded that strategic bombing in the European theater (as distinct from tactical bombing in conjunction with ground...

It had not significantly reduced Germany’s physical fighting capacity or induced an earlier readiness to come to terms. The survey discovered extraordinary rapidity of repairs and no diminution of morale; in fact, bombing could raise morale. In March 1966, when the three allotted months of ROLLIN...

Commissioned by the Institute of Defense Analysis under the code name JASON, a body of 47 specialists in various disciplines went through ten days of briefings by Defense, State, CIA and White House, followed by two months of technical studies.

The group concluded that effects on North Vietnam’s will to fight and on Hanoi’s appraisal of the cost of continuing to fight “have not shown themselves in any tangible way.”

Bombing had not created serious difficulties in transportation, t...

The main reason, JASON stated, for the relative ineffectiveness of the air offensive was “unrewarding targets.” The study concluded that a “direct frontal attack on a society” tended to strengthen the fabric, increase popular determination and stimulate protective devices and capacity for repair. This social effect was not unpredictable; it was the same as had been found in Germany, and indeed in Britain, where heightening of morale and hardening of determination as a result of the German terror bombing of 1940–41 was well known.

Like every other “dissonant” advice, JASON bumped against a stone wall. Strategy remained unchanged because the Air Force, in concern for its own future role, could not admit that air power could be ineffective. CINCPAC continued to raise the punitive level of the bombing on a basis of calculated pain according to a calculated “stress theory” of human behavior:

Hanoi should respond to “stress” by ceasing the actions that produced it.

By the end of 1966 the bombs dropped reached an annual rate of 500,000 tons, higher than the rate used against Japan in World War II. Instead of rationally, Hanoi reacted humanly in anger and defiance, as the British had done under the German blitz, as no doubt Americans would have done if bombed. Instead of bringing the enemy chastened to the negotiating table, the air offensive made them more adamant: they now insisted on cessation of bombing as a fixed precondition of negotiation.

When Washington learned from visitors to Hanoi of finding readiness to talk if the bombing was stopped, the conclusion derived by the United States was that the bombing was hurting and should therefore be augmented to achieve the desired result.