WHAT ARE THE LESSONS OF VIETNAM?

HENRY A. KISSINGER

Secretary of state from 1973 to 1977 and Nobel Prize laureate for negotiating the U.S.-Vietnam peace treaty: If an interest is vital, we have to be able and willing to defend it. We have to be willing to face the fact that the challenge is almost certain to be ambiguous and ambiguous in this sense: If you could prove that the danger to us is overwhelming, everybody would agree, but by the time that the danger is overwhelming in the modern period, it is too late to do something about it. This is, in fact, a change between the ‘50s and ‘60s and the ‘70s. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, we were so preponderant that we could wait. Now we are likely to face ambiguous situations. But if we commit ourselves, we must prevail. You cannot fight a war for a stalemate. You can only fight a war for a victory and then you can be generous in the settlements. GEN. WILLIAM C. WESTMORELAND (Ret.)

Commander of U.S. forces in South Vietnam from 1964 to 1968: We as a nation cannot accomplish anything and be successful in any major undertaking unless the public is in support. Our political leaders will have to be assured that the public is going to back the effort (before the United States enters another war). (As for Vietnam), the South Vietnamese lost it. . . . There were no United States troops in Vietnam 10 years ago. We had removed all of our troops about two years prior to that. . . . We didn’t lose a battle of any consequence. American troops did a really magnificent job over there. But, as a nation, the price became higher than the American people wanted to pay. . . . It came as somewhat of a shock to many of us that the South Vietnamese collapsed as rapidly as they did (after the United States withdrew). But we didn’t give them the support we had intended to give them.

REP. JOHN S. McCAIN, (R-Ariz.)

Former Navy pilot and prisoner of war in Hanoi: It is awfully easy to look back with the benefit of history. The way the war ended up, we obviously should never have been involved. At the same time, I can understand the atmosphere and the decision-making process of the time that led us into that quagmire. We were so sure we were omnipotent that we tried to choose South Vietnam’s leaders for them. When that happens, we can’t expect the people to have faith in their government. I think the blame should be spread around equally--the politicians for failure to prosecute the war properly and failure to explain what we were doing to the American people; the military for failing to stand up and say “we quit” when it became obvious there was no way to win; the media, particularly television because of the limitations of the evening news, for failing to give the full picture of what was going on. I also must fault the anti-war movement, not for what they did during the war but for turning their backs on what happened later.

GEN. MAXWELL TAYLOR (Ret.)

Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff and ambassador to Saigon: We should never again wage a limited and undeclared war. We Americans really feel we have obligations that are different in peace and war. In war, we really are ready to sacrifice and do many things we don’t do if we have a military operation short of war. The sad fact is that we walked off the battlefield of an ally and left him to suffer. Forty years ago, we won the war in Europe. We never will forget that. Most of us will forget as fast as we can the outcome of our failure to support an ally. We made three major errors in Vietnam: We didn’t know our allies (the South Vietnamese government and army) well enough, what they could do and could not do; we didn’t know the enemy well enough because there was not a man in Washington who had ever been close to Ho Chi Minh and we had no sense of what we were fighting; and we did not know ourselves well enough.

DAVID CHRISTIAN

President of United Vietnam Veterans and one of the most decorated soldiers of Vietnam conflict: In looking at any war, you should make a clear decision at the beginning that if you are going to sacrifice human life, you should fight to win. If we had fought to win, we would have won the war. We were very restricted in what we could do--it was very tough on morale. You can’t commit troops to a real war unless you tell the nation it is a war. Back here in America, they tried to make it look like a non-war and a lot of people sat it out. Today, it is still not called a war--it is an era, the Vietnam era. The American GIs did not lose that war, the politicians lost it. If there is any guilt, any delayed stress, it should be on the politicians, but they don’t seem to lose any sleep over it. After World War II, you couldn’t get elected President unless you were a veteran. When will we have a Vietnam veteran in the White House? When we came home, it wasn’t good to be a war hero. People didn’t want to be reminded of the war. It was painful and lonely.

WALT W. ROSTOW

President Lyndon B. Johnson’s national security adviser: If we get through without another big war over Southeast Asia, it is possible that historians will say that, although it was a bitter thing the Americans went through, it bought time for the people out there--that those painful 10 years were not all wasted. When Saigon fell in 1975, the non-communist nations of Southeast Asia were much stronger than they were in 1965. Given the economic power of the area, it is doubtful that anyone will ever again be as casual about Southeast Asia as Congress was when it cut off aid funds to South Vietnam in early 1975 (after the final withdrawal of U.S. ground forces but before the fall of Saigon). In spite of Congress’s refusal to keep our commitments, President Ford used force to recapture the (freighter) Mayaguez. The executive did not join Congress in the bugout and that made a big difference. If the United States had said “forget SEATO,” do you think we’d still have Subic Bay (naval base) and Clark Air Force Base (in the Philippines)?

SEN. JOHN F. KERRY (D-Mass.)

A decorated naval officer who became a leader of the anti-war movement: The war could have been stopped in 1964 or ’65 when (President) Lyndon Johnson made those crucial decisions. At a minimum, it should have been stopped in 1968 or 1969. The 1968 election was based on that war. (President Richard) Nixon ran for office claiming he could bring an honorable end to the war. I don’t think anyone believed that the secret plan for peace was to keep the war going for an additional seven years while they (the Nixon Administration) tried to get some breathing room so they could be out before it (the collapse of the South Vietnamese government) happened--to me that was dishonor, not honor. What we were predicting in 1968 finally happened in 1975. Any number of negotiated settlements were possible during that time. That was one of the things that made me so angry--they were face-saving with the lives of my friends. The soldiers fought with as much valor in Vietnam as the soldiers of any war in our history. It was the policy that was wrong.

ARTHUR KRAUSE

Father of Allison Krause, one of four students shot to death by Ohio National Guardsmen during a protest at Kent State University on May 4, 1970: Ten years ago, our case was still in the courts. . . . Our trial didn’t end until 1979 (with an out-of-court settlement for which the Krauses and other plaintiffs got a signed apology). The end of the war meant that other people weren’t getting killed, too. That was very important to me, too, but it was five years too late, five years of people being killed (in Vietnam), five years of my daughter being shot in the back by some brave guardsman. Maybe if the war had been over sooner, Allison wouldn’t have been dead. . . . (The Krauses persevered) so that nobody else would have to go through the things that we’ve had to go through, so their daughter won’t get killed. . . . Is dissent a crime? Is that a reason for killing her? The war had gotten into us so badly we’d turned and were killing our own people on a campus in Ohio. . . . In other words, people were against (the war) and what did they do? They rose up in protest against it and so the next thing you know, they killed them, they reproached them. . . . The war meant shame: We killed our own children.