Road To Disaster Quotes

“When the Vietnam Veterans Memorial opened, McNamara had been unable to appear at it publicly. “It was absolutely impossible for me,” he later said—the personal pain and shame at that stage was simply too great. By the end of the 1980s, though, he made regular nocturnal visits to the memorial, “but not in a way that anybody could observe me doing it.” After hours, “I’d just walk down in the dark,” and quietly study the thousands of names inscribed on a mournful facade that echoed the night sky above him. It was a “tremendous” experience for him. He felt “a sense of honor for those who served and a sense of continuing questioning of those who caused them to serve”—not least himself.”
― Brian Van DeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“He approached the Wheeler-Westmoreland request like the skilled courtroom attorney he was—by gathering and studying the facts, not just about the request but about the whole war. Thus began “three weeks of the most exhausting, pressure-filled days” Clifford had ever experienced.12 He and other senior advisors spent many sandwich-and-coffee hours in his Pentagon dining room during the first days of March, longer breaks near impossible to wedge into the workload. “He walked the halls of the building all hours of day and night,” one officer remembered. “All he did was ask questions.”13 “Every one of those days was practically a month,” Clifford said later. It was “the most concentrated, exhaustive period.” “I was getting a compressed education in a very short period of time.”14 Some nights he slept on a cot in his cavernous office. He spent hours in “the Tank” interrogating the chiefs as he would cross-examine witnesses, posing fundamental, if uncomfortable, questions in order to get at the truth, so much of which lay encrusted beneath unquestioned assumptions and unexamined premises. Such searching and provocative questions had not been asked since Johnson had committed U.S. combat forces to Vietnam in the spring and summer of 1965. Thus began the first basic reexamination of the war in three years. Clifford could lead such a reexamination because he had no public record to defend, a fact that Johnson well understood when he assigned the task to him.”
― Brian Van DeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“The long and wrenching effort to get out of Vietnam, like America’s later travails in disengaging from Afghanistan and Iraq, confirmed Machiavelli’s sobering maxim that “wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please.”
― Brian Van DeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“Wars have their own rules that are not determined solely by human will. Once underway, a war can be exceedingly difficult to stop, the effort to end it a slow, frustrating, arduous, and agonizing process. The blood and treasure expended, as well as the fears and passions raised, create pressures, momentum, and obstacles that can put decision-makers at the mercy of events rather than in control of them. This is doubly true for a belligerent, even a “great world power,” whose ally is weak and insecure—and therefore desperately dependent on maintaining its patron’s largesse—and whose adversary is fanatically determined and resilient, and enjoys strategic advantages that make it reluctant, if not unwilling, to substantively compromise. The “fog of peacemaking” can be just as thick and confusing as the “fog of war.”
― Brian Van DeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“They would discover—awash in mounting desperation—as Clifford warned, looking back, “It is a thousand times easier to get into a war than it is to get out of one.”185”
― Brian Van DeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“general who ranked second to Giáp in North Vietnam’s military hierarchy, Nguyễn Chí Thanh, laid out this strategy in a paper titled “Five Lessons Learned in a Highly Victorious Dry Season”: Always keep the initiative on your side in battle. Force the enemy to fight on your terms. Try to be always on the offensive, fighting only when the odds favor your side. Otherwise it is better to avoid the enemy, to deflect his attention—to hide, even, while waiting for a time and space of your choosing or a better opportunity. Always try to fight at close range, to fight vigorously and quickly, and to conclude the battle expeditiously; never drag it out or fight an inconclusive battle. Always prepare carefully and understand the enemy, the terrain, and the rules of action, and predict correctly the enemy’s reactions. You must also be flexible, always be on the move, concentrating only enough force for the action; assemble and disperse quickly, and move fast. Finally, keep your moves secret and unpredictable, giving special attention to creating diversions and dissimulation to throw off the enemy’s calculations.35 Such a strategy enabled the Vietcong and North Vietnamese to dictate the tempo and level of fighting and thus to control their casualties—thereby nullifying the fundamental premise and effectiveness of the attrition strategy. Westmoreland’s operations chief, General DePuy, came to see this fatal flaw of attrition after the war. “They metered out their casualties, and when the casualties were getting too high, they just backed off and waited,” he said in retrospect. “I was surprised at the difficulty we had in trying to find the VC. We hit more dry holes than I thought we were going to hit. They were more elusive . . . They were the ones who decided whether there would be a fight.”36 In hindsight, the chiefs themselves acknowledged that “the enemy, by the type of action he adopts, has the predominant share in determining enemy attrition rates.”37 This gave the Vietcong and North Vietnamese the precious commodity of time in a conflict against a militarily superior but adaptively inferior opponent fighting a war half a world away—and they knew it. Instead of a grinding war of attrition, it became a protracted war of endurance that the Vietcong and North Vietnamese would win.”
― Brian Van DeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“On March 20, the chiefs submitted their own request that upped the ante still further: two combat divisions—40,000 men—to Vietnam. This juggernaut of demands shocked officials in Washington. Bombing had been underway for less than a month, and already the military had submitted three troop requests, each one bigger than the one before it. The process resembled sand falling through an overturned hourglass, a scattering of grains quickly becoming a cascade. Unprepared for what was happening, civilian leaders did not know how to slow down or control the process once it got started. Events were beginning to get away from them. The president and his inner circle had hardly discussed whether to send combat troops, and already the discussion had become how many.”
― Brian Van DeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“The marine deployment to Danang marked an immediately invisible but crucial turning point. Up to this time, civilians had dominated policy, controlling the direction and pace of decision-making on the war. Now that began to change. Once the first American combat troops splashed ashore, the initiative implicitly but ineluctably shifted toward the military. The long-standing taboo against committing American ground forces to South Vietnam, once breeched—however slightly—broke an important psychological barrier and began generating powerful pressures for more troops. Suddenly, with almost natural inevitability, the military began setting the agenda and the terms of debate. Once combat troops had been committed, there was no such thing as being a little pregnant. This shift unsettled civilians accustomed to their privileged perch, throwing them back on their heels and on the defensive, forcing them to respond to the demands of the generals, whom even Taylor from his far-away post in Saigon could not stop now. None of this had been anticipated by Johnson and his advisors. Instead they were skidding toward the sobering realization that wars generate their own momentum and are governed by the iron law of unexpected and unintended consequences.”
― Brian Van DeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“Plainspoken and optimistic, Westmoreland epitomized American values, among them confidence and certainty. Westmoreland had both when it came to considering his own talents. (“He never got over being first captain of cadets,” observed a fellow West Pointer who knew Westmoreland well.159) More a good leader than a great intellect, he thought and acted in predictable and conventional ways, and he saw the war as he had been trained and taught: as a military rather than a political struggle, and a conventional one at that. As a result, Westmoreland believed the key to military success in Vietnam lay in targeting the enemy’s main-force units and destroying them; winning the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese people took a distant second place. Like most other American officials, he would vastly underestimate Hanoi’s and the Vietcong’s will to fight, to endure punishment, to replace their losses, and to sustain the war effort despite massive suffering and hardship.”
― Brian Van DeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“Influenced by strategic theories of the day—advanced most prominently by Harvard economist Thomas Schelling*—that conflicts were essentially bargaining situations, that one could signal an adversary that he should in his own interest avoid certain courses of activity, and that participants in a conflict coolly and rationally calculate costs and benefits and arrive at consistent expectations of each other, Taylor, McNamara, and Bundy had assumed bombing would be perceived by North Vietnam as limited and would be controllable—something that could be turned on and off like a faucet. “It’s something you can stop. It’s a bargaining chip,” McNamara would say of bombing—one that seemed to have the advantages of both flexibility and control.146 Taylor, McNamara, and Bundy thought bombing would not last long, perhaps a few months at most. They made the cardinal error of assuming that the North Vietnamese agreed with them. They did not contemplate what would happen if Hanoi did not perceive bombing as a limited gesture and proved willing to absorb its costs because they did not believe bombing would fail, making such considerations moot. They might not have agreed on when to start a bombing campaign, but nobody doubted it would work. None of them foresaw that bombing would instead feed demands for greater military action, that it would be only the first step in what would become a massive American military effort in Vietnam.”
― Brian Van DeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“Critic Dorothy Parker’s caustic remark that Katharine Hepburn ran “the gamut of emotions from A to B,” applied in a sense to the Working Group’s deliberations as well.”
― Brian Van DeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“Transparency is unnatural among most in power because they usually gain a competitive advantage and succeed by withholding information from their opponents. People try to hide the pressures on them because it makes them appear vulnerable. And people—especially politicians—fear being exposed as seemingly feeble and thin-skinned. Johnson could not understand the fundamental truth that a president must trust the public if he wants the public to trust and follow him. He could not understand this because deep down he did not trust his own judgment.”
― Brian Van DeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“For God’s sake, tell me this thing happened,” LBJ told Bundy that night, “because I have scheduled a speech to say it happened, I have told the Congress I am going to go after a resolution, and if I cancel this speech, the press is going to say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ So I sure as hell hope this is right.” “The Lyndon Johnson pressure to get the answer ‘Yes, it happened’ was on very heavy,” recalled Bundy.93 As noted earlier, it is rarely possible to have all of the facts. We live in a world of considerable complexity and uncertainty, and we simply don’t have the time or capacity to calculate all of the probabilities and risks inherent in every choice. Cornell University’s Thomas Gilovich has explained this dilemma. “Instead of providing us with clear information that would enable us to ‘know’ better,” notes Gilovich, the world “presents us with messy data that are random, incomplete, unrepresentative, ambiguous, inconsistent, unpalatable, or secondhand . . . It is often our flawed attempts to cope with precisely these difficulties that lay bare our inferential shortcomings”
― Brian Van DeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“Kennedy’s last public comments on Vietnam support such conclusions. At his final Washington press conference on November 14, eight days before his assassination, a reporter asked Kennedy to “give us your appraisal of the situation in South Vietnam now, since the coup.” Kennedy replied that “our object [is] to bring Americans home, permit the South Vietnamese to maintain themselves as a free and independent country.” Later during the press conference, Kennedy asked rhetorically, “Are we going to give up in South Vietnam?” and answered his question: “The most important program, of course, is our national security, but I don’t want the United States to have to put troops there.”162 Kennedy did, however, publicly and privately acknowledge the difficulty of ending America’s involvement in Vietnam, and his sensitivity to the political climate had been evident from his first campaign for Congress. Far more skeptical in his private comments than in his public pronouncements, he seriously questioned whether the United States could do what the French had failed to do, and in the last days of his life wondered whether the United States should be there at all. But he never shared his doubts and concerns with the American people or educated them about the limitations that he saw. Kennedy perceived the dangers of deepening American involvement, yet his actions paradoxically contributed to this very result. As McGeorge Bundy admitted in retrospect, “When you put your thumb on the scales of domestic politics” as Kennedy did by sanctioning the generals’ coup, “you’re pretty far in.”163 Thus one president who intuitively understood the limits of American military power in Southeast Asia, who possessed the security and self-confidence to resist calls by generals and advisors to apply that power, set in motion during his last months in office an event whose unanticipated repercussions would create immense pressures for greater American military involvement. These pressures would confront another president who lacked Kennedy’s intuitive understanding, security, and self-confidence.”
― Brian Van DeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“McNamara’s successor as secretary of defense, Clark Clifford—who knew Kennedy quite well—agreed. “In judging matters of this kind,” said Clifford, Kennedy “was a real cold fish. He could be totally objective.” There was a JFK smile, and behind doors, also a set of gritted teeth. “Under that façade of charm and attractiveness . . . President Kennedy could be as coldly analytical as anybody I ever saw . . . He was cold, calculating, and penetrating,” with “the ability to step away” and “with a surprising degree of objectivity look at the problem.” Clifford could imagine Kennedy eventually saying, “I’m not willing to take the chance. I don’t like what I see ahead. I’m suspicious of the people who are involved. I just don’t think I ought to accept the representations of the military with full faith and credit extended. I’m going to be more cautious. I’m just not going to get more deeply involved in what is obviously a stinking mess.”159 Kennedy was not, as his aide and historian Arthur Schlesinger dryly observed, “inclined to heavy investments in lost causes.”160 McNamara concurred: “In the most basic terms—avoiding risk—I’ll guarantee you, that moved him.”161”
― Brian Van DeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“Kennedy refused throughout his presidency to commit U.S. combat forces to Vietnam. “JFK saw the U.S. support for Vietnam as strictly limited to helping the Vietnamese help themselves,” McNamara later said. Kennedy never deviated from this position, even as the situation in South Vietnam steadily deteriorated during his three years in office. He had always been dubious about the effectiveness of Western military power on the Asian mainland. He knew from the Bay of Pigs the limits of what the generals recommended. He understood the basic principle of guerrilla warfare: that the object was not killing enemy soldiers, but winning the allegiance of the people—that the solution in Vietnam was fundamentally political, not military. He never accepted the premise that the United States should save South Vietnam at all costs and he never made an unqualified commitment to maintain its independence. If the South Vietnamese were not capable of defending themselves, “he thought it impossible to do so with U.S. military forces,” said McNamara. He went on: “At the time of Kennedy’s death, I think he was very concerned about the dominoes. But when he got to a point where he had to choose between the risk of the dominoes falling and adding 400,000 men,” McNamara surmised, “he wouldn’t have done it.” Perhaps Bobby Kennedy, who knew the president better than anyone, put it best. “Nobody can say for sure what my brother would actually have done, in the actual circumstances of 1964 or ’65. I can’t say that, and even he couldn’t have said that in ’61. Maybe things would have gone just the same as they did. But I do know what he intended. All I can say is that he was absolutely determined not to send ground units.”
― Brian Van DeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“For their part, the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese were flabbergasted when they learned of Diệm’s and Nhu’s deaths as a result of an American-inspired coup; they could not believe the Americans would allow South Vietnam to be disrupted in this way. “They were gifts from heaven for us,” said a senior Vietcong official.155 “Both Ho Chi Minh and he (Mao) thought that Ngo Dinh Diem was not so bad,” wrote journalist Edgar Snow, based on an interview with Mao Zedong in January 1965. “After all,” said Mao, “following his assassination, was everything between Heaven and Earth more peaceful?” Even Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, who participated in the coup that brought down Diệm, later said that “he actually ran the country pretty well” given the circumstances confronting him.156 Diệm had many faults, but his pride meant that he “didn’t want us in there fighting his war,” noted McNamara.157”
― Brian Van DeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“President Kennedy regularly asserted two contradictory propositions about Vietnam: that the South Vietnamese must do the job for themselves and yet the United States must not quit there. Unable to reconcile the conflicting imperatives of avoiding another American ground war on the Asian mainland and avoiding the loss of South Vietnam, he remained indecisive. It was uncharacteristic of him. “When he knew what he really wanted,” McGeorge Bundy said of Kennedy, “he had no problem” making a decision. Kennedy did not live to see the consequences of removing Diệm, but his advisors did, and most of them came to view it as a grave mistake. “It was not well handled,” Bundy later admitted. “There was no victory for the United States in the fall of Diem” and “still less in his death.” That mishandling was rooted in naïveté. “The consequences were so unpredictable, including the death, which was no part of our intent or expectation, which was pretty stupid,” Bundy concluded. “We should have guessed that these people would feel that if you strike at a king, you strike to kill, which they did.” That there was no evacuation plan for Diệm was only one of the wretchedly telling signs that the American consideration of the coup’s possible outcomes was shallow and incomplete. In hindsight, Mike Mansfield was probably right when he said that Diệm “was the only one, despite his frailties, who could have kept South Vietnam together.” None of the generals who followed Diệm did better at leading South Vietnam, and most did worse. All of them would be equally if not more dependent on the United States. “The only durable result of the coup against Diem,” Bundy noted, “was durable political instability in Saigon.”
― Brian Van DeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“Diệm’s assassination sobered Kennedy, vividly reminding him of what he always suspected: that the United States could affect events in Vietnam but not determine them. The realization that the United States had lost whatever control it might have had over circumstances in that country rekindled his skepticism about American involvement in Indochina. The day before he left on the political trip to Texas that tragically ended in his own assassination on November 22, Kennedy wondered aloud to Michael Forrestal about South Vietnam’s long-term prospects and viability and even the American commitment itself. “I want you to organize an in-depth study of every possible option we’ve got in Vietnam, including how to get out of there,” he told Forrestal. “We have to review this whole thing from the bottom to the top.”152 Diệm’s death had taught Kennedy the dangers and limits of American power in Vietnam. Its consequences would confront his successor, Lyndon Johnson.”
― Brian Van DeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“While by 1961 many of the early dynamics of the Cold War—Stalinist brutality, Sino-Soviet cooperation, Moscow’s considerable influence on other Communist movements—had begun to fade, American perceptions, assumptions, and political rhetoric remained rooted in an earlier mindset. (The Soviet Union suffered from its own simplistic myopia about the West during this period.) As a result, Kennedy and his advisors made policy on Vietnam by relying on Cold War blueprints that assumed the monolithic nature of Communism, defined Communism and nationalism in mutually exclusive terms, and understood the domino theory as a given, filtering it all through fear of a domestic political firestorm that would follow the loss of a country to Communism. They feared the costs of what they termed a “cut-and-run” policy “too much and too automatically,” said Bundy retrospectively.27 More fundamentally, “we never fully explored each other’s views about Communism and the danger of it in Asia, particularly Southeast Asia,” McNamara later acknowledged.”
― Brian VanDeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“It is very hard to recapture the innocence and confidence with which we approached Vietnam in the early days of the Kennedy administration,” Robert McNamara lamented three decades later.24 Unlike cabinet members in a parliamentary system such as Great Britain’s who before assuming office have studied the issues for years as shadow ministers in the political opposition, McNamara and his senior colleagues possessed scant knowledge and even less understanding of Southeast Asian history, language, and culture. What did they know about Vietnam? “Not enough to have done what we did,” McNamara later confessed.25 “It was a tiny blip on the radar and we didn’t understand at the beginning how it would develop,” McNamara admitted, looking back.26 While by 1961”
― Brian VanDeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“Washington came to believe that a two-Vietnams solution was possible just the way two Germanys and two Koreas had been. In this sense, assisting a small, pro-Western, anti-Communist government seemed a logical and appropriate extension of earlier Cold War policies that had proven successful. But while Diệm committed to develop democratic institutions, his authoritarian rule and prioritization of loyalty over competence in the government continued to undercut this stated goal. By 1958, Diệm-related unrest among non-Communists and former Việtminh in South Vietnam alike had given way to open rebellion. Shortly thereafter, in 1959, North Vietnam reactivated its support of southern Communists who had remained behind after Geneva. They, along with non-Communist opponents of Diệm, formed a popular front that in December 1960 became known officially as the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF), which Diệm and the Americans derisively called the Vietcong (a derogatory contraction of “Vietnamese Communists”). The NLF adopted guerrilla warfare against the Diệm regime.”
― Brian VanDeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“Diệm’s sense of entitlement was so great that he did not view the 1954 Geneva Accords as binding on him because he had not signed them. In 1956, he thwarted the promised election leading to reunification, citing the absence of free voting in the North (yet Diệm himself had rigged a plebiscite ousting Emperor Bảo Đại the year before with more than 98 percent of the vote*). Eisenhower endorsed Diệm’s decision,* suspecting the South Vietnamese leader would be crushed in a legitimate contest. As Ike candidly remarked in his memoirs, “I . . . never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Hồ Chí Minh as their leader.”18 By acquiescing to Diệm’s decision to abort the 1956 election, however, the Eisenhower administration effectively sealed Vietnam’s political division. Eisenhower and most other Americans in the 1950s simply could not imagine a Third-World Communist independent of Moscow and Beijing. Through this filter, Hồ was not a Communist nationalist wary of traditional Chinese domination of Southeast Asia and eager to establish and protect Vietnam’s independence, but a cunning and obedient acolyte of the Sino-Soviet camp serving its larger purpose of aggressive expansion. They did not know that Moscow and Beijing had actually counseled Hanoi against supporting armed struggle in South Vietnam out of fear that it might draw the United States directly into the conflict, and continued to do so through the early 1960s.19 Yet even without that intelligence, it was remarkable how easily America’s leaders ignored knowable history.”
― Brian VanDeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“They did not know that when faced with the threat of French domination at the end of the nineteenth century, the Vietnamese had set aside their ancient suspicion of Chinese domination and pleaded with Beijing to come to their aid. American policymakers were conditioned so much that even if someone came to them with such information, they did not pay attention to it or discarded it as irrelevant. The atmosphere of Cold War America did not encourage such attention and awareness, or the perceptions and distinctions that went with them, so government decision-makers in Washington—for not the last time—remained dangerously ignorant and therefore seriously overestimated ideological factors and seriously underestimated historical and nationalistic ones.”
― Brian VanDeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“Readers of history do not share the same perspective as makers of history. We know what will happen—all of the twists and turns of the story—but they do not.”
― Brian VanDeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“It means looking at a much-treated subject again—but in a new way that recalls Gustave Flaubert’s advice to the young Guy de Maupassant, when Flaubert sat Maupassant down in front of a tree and told him to describe it: “There is a part of everything that remains unexplored,” Flaubert said, “for we have fallen into the habit of remembering whenever we use our eyes, what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the slightest thing contains a little that is unknown. We must find it.”2 Doing so brings fresh perspective even for those who already know the story of Vietnam well.”
― Brian VanDeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“He [Kennedy] said with great seriousness that the existence of nuclear arms made a secure and rational world impossible.” The only sane solution, Kennedy declared, involved a negotiated compromise with Khrushchev, which JFK believed meant swapping the Jupiter missiles in Turkey for the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Strategically, removing the Jupiters meant giving up little, he added, because deploying Polaris submarines off the coast of Turkey would provide a more secure deterrent and more broadly the insanity of using nuclear weapons in a general war made them “more or less worthless.” Domestic pressure remained an abiding concern for Kennedy, which became clear when he wondered aloud to Ormsby-Gore “whether political developments would enable him to do a deal on the reciprocal closing of bases”70 and that the American public might view a naval blockade as too little too late—to say nothing of a trade. But he had traveled the distance, and was now firm and self-assured.”
― Brian VanDeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“More American servicemen were killed in Vietnam in 1968—nearly 17,000—than in any other year of the war.”
― Brian VanDeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“(In 1968, an average of 45 Americans died in Vietnam every day.)”
― Brian VanDeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam