Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 30 - June 23, 2025
It took the lives of close to sixty thousand Americans and perhaps three million Vietnamese.
from late August 1963 to late February 1965. This period, I argue, is the most important in the entire thirty-year American involvement in Vietnam,
Unless we extend our frame of reference beyond America’s borders and beyond the boundaries of South and North Vietnam, we cannot fully understand the sources and consequences of American officials’ derisions, the options they faced, and the choices they did or did not have.
U.S. officials typically explained their decision to escalate the war in international terms.
Only by examining how the war played in other capitals—in London and Paris, in Ottawa and Tokyo, in Moscow and Beijing— can we make meaningful assertions about how the world looked upon what Washington sought to achieve in Vietnam.
To really answer the question of whether the 1965 escalation of the war could have been prevented, we must look closely at the efforts to prevent it. In this book, I attend to the attempts at finding a diplomatic solution in the year and a half before Americanization.
August 1963: the same month that saw America’s Vietnam problem become acute also witnessed what Jean Lacouture has accurately called the “diplomatic kick-off” in Vietnam, as French President Charles de Gaulle publicly called for an end to foreign intervention there.
my primary concern is understanding and explaining how and why leaders in Washington chose to commit the United States to war in Southeast Asia.
The third theme is the failure of the large and distinguished group of opponents of escalation to fully commit themselves to preventing it.
For Gelb and Betts, and for the majority of authors who followed them and who have examined the issue at length, the practical alternatives to a stand-firm U.S. posture had disappeared by the latter part of 1964, if not before
a core component of the “inevitability thesis” is that American public opinion embraced a “Cold War Consensus” in this period and thus wholeheartedly supported a staunch commitment to defend South Vietnam,
The strong consensus habitually referred to in the literature does not appear until after the Americanization decisions had been made and U.S. ground troops were on the scene. (Vietnam 1965 provides a textbook example of the rally- around-the-flag effect.)
newspapers across the United States, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, editorialized against any deepening of American involvement. Many prominent columnists did the same.
The key allies opposed escalation and refused strong U.S. pressure to take part in it,
neither Moscow nor Beijing, nor most American allies, nor indeed many U.S. officials, believed Washington’s global credibility would be crippled if it failed to stand firm in South Vietnam,
Did senior American officials grasp this reality? The unqualified answer is that they did. A startling aspect of the war in these months is the pronounced pessimism at the center of American strategy on Vietnam.
The fluidity that marked assessments about the war outside the halls of power was not present inside.
One of the salient characteristics of the massive documentary record for these eighteen months is the gross disparity between the amount of American contingency planning for military escalation and that for a possible diplomatic solution to the conflict;
absence of any domestic or allied consensus on what to do in the event of collapse in Vietnam: American leaders themselves did not believe such a consensus existed.
The coup against Ngo Dinh Diem in November 1963 happened in part because Kennedy administration officials feared that Diem might opt for an end to the war through an agreement with the enemy.
Said a State Department intelligence report at the end of the period under study: “Has Hanoi shown any [serious] interest in negotiations? Yes, repeatedly.” The same thing could never have been said of the United States.
the importance to our story (in a negative sense) of the State Department and of the nation’s chief diplomat, Secretary of State Dean Rusk.
Rusk’s role in the buildup to war was essential, though more for what he did not do than for what he did.
If the mark of the true statesman is the ability not merely to take advantage of existing diplomatic opportunities but to create new ones, Dean Rusk failed the test.
we must understand the aversion to negotiations of John F. Kennedy and the inflexible foreign-policy mind of Lyndon Baines Johnson.
The evidence, however, shows that Johnson was not pulled into war by deep, structural forces beyond his control; nor was he pulled into it by overzeal- ous advisers from the Kennedy era. He inherited a difficult situation in Vietnam, in large part because of the policy decisions of his predecessor, but he made that situation far worse with his actions, not merely before the November 1964 election but, more important, in the three months thereafter. This period represented the last good chance to withdraw the United States from Vietnam.
He, more than his top advisers, feared a premature move to negotiations;
It should come as no surprise that the “ heroes” of this story are the large number of voices who understood already in 1964 the essential futility of what the United States was trying to do in South Vietnam and who believed that Vietnam was in any case not crucial to American or western security. By the end of that year, the group included most allied governments as well as key members of the Senate Democratic leadership, numerous second-tier officials in the State Department, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, and dozens of editorial writers and columnists across
...more
whereas the Paris government of Charles de Gaulle forcefully disputed the U.S. position at every turn, the more important American ally in London consistently refrained from doing so, despite the fact that officials there largely shared the French leader’s views.
Undersecretary of State George W. Ball, though genuinely opposed to an expanded war, willingly became the designated in-house “dove” on Vietnam and always put careerist ambition and loyalty to Johnson before principle;
It will not do to merely state that a face-saving American disengagement could have been arranged in, say, late 1964, after LBJ had been safely returned to the White House. Precisely how could it have been arranged? What would likely have happened if it had been?
It is a counterfactual question, resistant to conclusive answer, but it is no less important for that.
The “structural forces"” explanation for Americanization, which had initially struck me as intellectually sophisticated, proved intellectually insufficient, even lazy, particularly after I examined the wider context— domestic and foreign—of American decision making.
Born in the same year that John F. Kennedy and Ngo Dinh Diem met their deaths, in a place—Stockholm, Sweden—about as far removed from the scene of the fighting as one could be, I had no memories of the Vietnam War or the controversy surrounding it
Too many folks at the time, in too many important locales, foresaw the essential futility of what Washington sought to achieve. Too many were convinced, at the time, that it was unnecessary even to try. This realization, along with the finding that U.S. officials were themselves pessimistic about the prospects and, in many cases, dubious of Vietnam’s importance, raised questions in my mind not merely about the wisdom of America’s Vietnam policy during The Long 1964 but also about the motivations behind that policy;
By the start of 1963, the American presence in the South had grown to more than sixteen thousand military personnel,
De Gaulle’s statement, made in a cabinet meeting on 29 August and then (in a highly uncommon procedure) cited verbatim to the press by Minister of Information Alain Peyrefitte,
independent of outside influences, in internal peace and unity,
Overnight a cable had arrived from the U.S. ambassador in Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, which minced no words: “We are launched,” Lodge wrote, “on a course from which there is no respectable turning back: the overthrow of the Diem government.”
No doubt he had already seen that day’s Washington Post, which included large headlines on the previous day’s civil rights march in the city
Thus the logic of beginning our story at the end of August 1963: it represented a key juncture in the war. Both the documentary record and later testimonials make this clear.
after mid August Vietnam for the first time became a high-priority, day-to-day issue for America’s foreign policymakers, and it would remain such for the next ten years.
the month witnessed, in de Gaulle’s pronouncement, the first major attempt at diminishing the tensions and preventing the resumption of large-scale war—what
How reasonable was de Gaulle’s call for a political settlement in the context of that summer? It is a large question
We shall find that the thinking in several of the key capitals was fluid that summer— partly because of important changes in the international system—with considerable support for the French president’s analysis, including his belief in the need for a political solution.
It is no contradiction to say that the summer of 1963 constituted one of the great missed opportunities to prevent the tragedy that was the Vietnam War, and one that never came close to being realized.
On 1 April Nhu told Australian officials in Saigon that the American “way of life” was completely inapplicable to an underdeveloped but ancient society like Vietnam and that it would be good if half the U.S. personnel currently in the country went home. He repeated the claim several times that month.
a consensus developed among several senior State Department officials that the regime should be ousted.11 The members of this group, which included Undersecretary of State George W. Ball and Assistant Secretaries Roger Hilsman Jr. and W. Averell Harriman,
American officials professed to believe, then and later in the fall, that his motive was merely to secure increased leverage with Washington, in effect to blackmail the Kennedy administration into retreating from its efforts to reform the Ngo family.
Given Diem’s unshakable anticommunism throughout his nine years in power, it indeed may be doubted.
