The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

The sudden victory of Ho Chi Minh’s troops over the French in 1954 had led to a UN partition of the country into a communist North and a pro-American South. But Vietnam was never as divided as it looked. Ho’s Communists would likely have won the national election that the peace accords called for, had the United States permitted one. Ho drew on broad nationalist and anti-colonial sentiments, however big the eventual role of the Soviet Union in supplying weaponry (especially MiG fighters and anti-aircraft systems) and of China in supplying personnel (including troops after 1965) might have been. The South Vietnamese government, by contrast, would have crumbled without U.S. support. Its troops were battle-shy, outnumbered, and outgunned by a domestic (i.e., South Vietnamese) guerrilla insurgency, the so-called Viet Cong, which drew on local discontent as well as imported materiel. Eighty percent of the 5 or 6 million tons of American bombs dropped in the war fell on the South, not the North. The United States, in fact, would drop more bombs on the territory of its putative ally than it had dropped on all its World War II enemies. And then it would go on to do something from which American culture has still not recovered: It would lose the war.