CORRESPONDENCE
To the Editor:
The Vietnam War has been over for almost 25 years. We are now in the midst of another controversial war--in Kosovo. Yet it is Vietnam that still inspires rage, for example in Stanley Karnow’s recent comments (Book Review, May 16) on our new book, “Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy.”
Most of Karnow’s criticism was focused on the person of our senior co-author, Robert S. McNamara, U.S. defense secretary for seven of the 15 years in which the Vietnam conflict rose and fell in American life. Because he alone among U.S. leaders has accepted full responsibility for his actions in those years, McNamara is the one most often blamed for the war’s pain--more than Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, McGeorge Bundy or Henry Kissinger, and certainly more than the North Vietnamese, who persisted in the war despite the deaths of more than 3 million of their countrymen.
Our book--co-authored by Col. Herbert Schandler of the National Defense University and Thomas Biersteker of Brown University in addition to McNamara and ourselves--is an effort by Americans and Vietnamese to learn from the tragedy. Our objective, which seems especially important as we once again wage a war few Americans claim to understand, is to draw lessons from Vietnam and apply them to the present and future.
The Vietnam War was among the bloodiest in all of human history. It is estimated that something on the order of 3 million to 8 million Vietnamese (North and South, military and civilian) were killed. The U.S. lost 58,000. Had the U.S. lost in proportion to its population the same percentage as Vietnam, it would have lost 27 million people. Many times these numbers were wounded. In the course of the war, in addition, North and South Vietnam were nearly destroyed as functioning societies, and America was torn asunder by issues related to the war. Ironically, each principal combatant achieved its objectives: The Hanoi government reunified Vietnam under its leadership, and the “dominoes” did not fall--communism and Soviet and Chinese hegemony did not spread across Southeast Asia.
The thesis of “Argument Without End” is that the war was a tragedy for both sides. Both Washington and Hanoi could have accomplished their purposes without the appalling loss of life. There were missed opportunities, for either avoiding the war before it started or for terminating it before it had run its course. McNamara had speculated along these lines in his 1995 memoir of the war, “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam.” But lacking access to either former officials or documents from the Hanoi government, he could not pursue the matter further at that time.
Since then, however, this thesis has been buttressed by an analysis of formerly unavailable, newly translated Vietnamese and Chinese documents as well as six sets of discussions in Hanoi over more than three years between Vietnamese and U.S. scholars and former officials. For the first time, we believe, an understanding has begun to emerge regarding which of the decisions on each side were made on the basis of an accurate understanding of the motives and capabilities of the adversaries and which were made on the basis of misperceptions, miscalculations and misjudgments. We believe our analysis adds significantly to the historical record. On the basis of this analysis, we propose lessons that should be drawn for advancing peace among nations in the 21st century.
We believe, therefore, that history is not immune from human initiative. Does it matter whether one believes that human decisions make a difference? We believe it does, for two reasons: first, because such a view encourages us to search for missed opportunities that, if they had been grasped, would have led to a better result; and second, because the analysis of missed opportunities often points to lessons aimed at preventing missed opportunities in the future. Of course, outside pressures exist that limit actions. But leaders should lead, not succumb to such pressures.
The basic questions put to participants in the Hanoi meetings--and to readers of “Argument Without End”--were, first: In light of what now can be learned from the historical record, what U.S. and Vietnamese decisions might have been different and what difference would they have made in the course of the war if each side had judged the other side’s intentions and capabilities more accurately? And second, would not a discussion of these missed opportunities, the U.S. and Vietnamese mind-sets that led to them and the lessons to be drawn from such an analysis help avoid similar conflicts?
The British historian and philosopher R.G. Collingwood once wrote: “In history, as in all serious matters, no achievement is final. . . . Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way; every new historian, not content with giving new answers to old questions, must revise the questions themselves.”
It is ironic that the research team leading the way in rewriting the history of the Vietnam War in this fashion is headed by a former defense secretary who is neither a professional historian nor, at nearly 83 years of age, a member of the “new generation.” Yet “Argument Without End,” four years in the making, is a work of serious history, one that is fundamentally different, in important respects, from anything that has come before it. Why? Because we have asked questions seldom (if ever) asked in the West. We have asked them of knowledgeable Vietnamese scholars and former officials who have never before spoken for the public record. And because their answers over the last four years have been given within the context of an evolving U.S.-Vietnamese dialogue of increasing trust and openness.
The critical oral history recorded in the dialogues of “Argument Without End” is in large part the record of the evolution of Americans and Vietnamese as they begin to develop the capacity to see these pivotal events more or less the way their former enemies saw them at the time. They discover their faulty understanding of the reality the other side faced. That is the first part; they learn they were wrong. The full impact comes, however, only when they discover the ways in which their faulty understanding became embedded in a spiral of escalation that led to the events we have gathered to discuss. They learn that their decisions were in part responsible for the tragic events being reexamined.
Here are three examples taken from the dozens in the book. The Americans learned that National Liberation Front commandos, who attacked a South Vietnamese army barracks at Pleiku on Feb. 7, 1965, neither consulted nor informed leaders in Hanoi about that attack, rendering entirely counterproductive the U.S. attempt to “signal” its displeasure about Pleiku by initiating its bombing of the North, which became known as “Rolling Thunder.” The Vietnamese learned that the U.S. bombing pauses between 1965 and 1967 were not public relations tricks, as they believed at the time, but instead were desperate attempts by some within the U.S. government to move to negotiations. In these face-to-face encounters with Americans, many Vietnamese participants said they now believed, for the first time, that millions of their fellow citizens might be alive today if only they had known this between 1965 and 1967. And the Americans were told by Vietnamese participants intimately involved with U.S. policy at the time that a neutral government in Saigon was the goal of Vietnamese communists all along, and that a transition of at least 10 to 15 years was foreseen to reach unification between North and South. Had the Americans known this, the U.S. participants said in Hanoi, the Vietnam conflict might have been ended much earlier because 10 years was a more than sufficient “decent interval” in which to withdraw from Vietnam without appearing to capitulate. These sorts of illuminations occurred in every session of every meeting.
When we talk about Vietnam, we are usually talking about America. We hope “Argument Without End” signals the beginning of the end of this narcissistic American obsession with what the war did to us and the beginning of our understanding of the multi-sidedness of it--of the interactive nature of the decisions made in Washington and Hanoi. Because of “Argument Without End,” when we talk about “Vietnam” we should henceforth be talking about a tragedy brought on by the mutual, colossal ignorance of Americans and Vietnamese communists, both North and South. For the first time, we believe we have enough facts about decision-making on both sides to move beyond bitterness and blaming to real understanding.
James G. Blight, Robert K. Brigham, New York, N.Y.
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To the Editor:
As a Vietnam-era veteran, I found the picture of Henry Kissinger paying obeisance at the coffin of Richard Nixon (Book Review, May 16) stomach-turning.
In a just society Henry Kissinger would be shunned as a war criminal. He has yet to make the obeisance shown in the picture to the coffin of a single American soldier he and Richard Nixon condemned to death with their unnecessary prolongation of the Vietnam War to establish “credibility,” not to mention any notion of regret for the tens of thousands of Laotian or Cambodian victims of the undeclared war on their countries, of “Rolling Thunder” or the North Vietnamese victims of the “Christmas Bombing.”
Your reviewer of Henry Kissinger’s book “Years of Renewal” writes of the former national security advisor’s concern with credibility to the extent that he would falsify history in a vain effort to establish his own credibility. This should come as no surprise to those who have read accounts of the Paris negotiations.
Henry Kissinger and Robert Strange McNamara, whose book was also reviewed in the same issue, are beyond credibility as policymakers and both exemplify, personify and represent the ideology that places ends above means and which ignores any humanist component to policy (even though McNamara has, to his credit, expressed remorse about the policies he championed).
Those with a concern for human beings can never forget that a policy which condemns some to death in the interest of Realpolitik or of “credibility” is no policy at all; it is only egotistically driven simplicity.
The ironic thing about Henry Kissinger is that as a refugee from Nazism, he embraced the essence of that malevolence, forgetting that human beings pay the price of statesmen’s “solutions.”
James E. McGee, Sun City, Calif.