When Hypnotics Won a War : Vietnam Used Democrats’ Vulnerability to Illusion

Thirteen years after the fall of Saigon, there are still plenty of skeletons and questions left in the Vietnam cupboard.

Why, for example, do communists so often manage to confiscate a national liberation or anti-colonial struggle? At an early stage they liquidate competitors, as Ho Chi Minh did from the 1930s to the 1950s: Trotskyites or nationalists went overboard while liberals and left-wingers were fascinated by Uncle Ho’s benign and bearded figure. Ho wrote poems but more systematically he shot his Vietnamese opponents. With the naive help of Americans like Archimedes Patti who unwittingly aided in training Ho’s forces, Ho masqueraded as a nationalist. Under the leadership of the regretted secretary general of the Vietnamese Workers Party, Le Duan, the Hanoi pontiffs were millenarians and thought of themselves as the avant-garde of world revolution.

In South Vietnam, the elites did not manage to produce a convincing and driving ideology. Often the South Vietnamese soldiers fought well. But they knew only what they were against, not what they were fighting for.

North Vietnam was a totalitarian state, South Vietnam half a democracy. But the news media criticized Saigon more than Hanoi: The South was accessible to reporters doing their critical job, thus the emerging picture was formidably unbalanced.

Should the Americans have accepted from the French the mantle of fighting the communists in South Vietnam? Probably not alone. International support, combined headquarters in Korea, a declaration of war would have strengthened the American case. But Washington can’t be entirely blamed for its isolation. After all, America was attacked by its allies--by French President Charles de Gaulle speaking in Phnom Penh, only an hour’s flight from Saigon.

Author Andre Malraux claimed that during the Spanish Civil War, communists helped communists and fascists supported fascists, but democrats dropped democrats. There weren’t many fascists in South Vietnam. All the socialist so-called “popular democracies” backed Hanoi. But democrats in the West looked the other way--or chanted “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh” or “Hey, hey, L.B.J. how many kids did you kill today?” from Berkeley, through the Sorbonne, to Berlin.

Should the United States have conducted the war differently? Of course, yes. I am not retrospectively advocating the use of tactical atomic weapons, “bombing them into the stone age” and all that. I am simply saying what every military strategist from Sun Tzu to Clausewitz has known: You can’t win a limited war. South Vietnamese troops never forged north. Bombing limitations were strict, central Hanoi was never attacked. In Haiphong some docks were conveniently off-limits. Military men’s hands were tied.

To me, one situation symbolizes this very odd war: Soviet cargo ships loaded with missiles sailing past American aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin. Unloaded in Haiphong, the Russian missiles--the famous surface-to-air missiles--were set up around North Vietnamese towns, bridges and roads. Then, they would knock out of the sky the American planes taking off from the very same carriers that could easily have sunk the Soviet ships. True, American Presidents were afraid that they would have to confront the Soviet Union and Red China if the war “expanded.” With hindsight, it’s easy to claim that Moscow and Beijing were not ready to die for Hanoi. Still, the overall American geopolitical analysis was wrong.

Why, throughout the West, did people (I include myself up to 1973) who loathed the regimes in Warsaw, Budapest and Prague work so hard to install in Saigon a similar but tougher regime? This question should be addressed to psychoanalysts, not merely to political scientists. Hanoi’s propaganda worked crudely but efficiently. Intellectuals are frequently fascinated by brute force in revolutionary and humanistic garbs. Wishful thinking also comes into it--we want communism to have a human face. The light, some thought, would come from Hanoi: Those communists at least didn’t bump off each other at the top. They were pure and heroic. Many, along with author Frances Fitzgerald, felt that the (thin) flame of revolution would purify Vietnamese society! Anyway, wasn’t peace better than war--a variation on “better red than dead”?

But the 18 North Vietnamese divisions who took Saigon brought penury and the police state, more war and conscription for Cambodia. Now, every week still, boat people, not all bourgeois, sail away from Vietnam. What kind of peace is this?

Sgt. Hazard in the film “Gardens of Stone” argues against the way the war was fought and against his improbable pacifist girlfriend, not against the war. He’s right. Americans have nothing to be ashamed of, generally, about their aims in Vietnam. They tried and they fumbled and they failed.

And all other democracies with them.