The Irony of Vietnam by Leslie H. Gelb

Author:Leslie H. Gelb
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780815726791
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Published: 2016-04-25T16:00:00+00:00

PRACTICAL POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS

As has been shown, with the exception of a growing body of liberals who thought Washington could negotiate a Communist takeover without the appearance of losing and a small group of conservatives who always wanted to fight a different kind of war, the dominant American political belief about Vietnam until at least 1968 was that the U.S. objective of preventing a Communist victory was the right one. Four presidents were the main propagators of this view. They used the “bully pulpit” to educate Americans about Vietnam’s importance. Most of the available evidence indicates that these presidents believed in the goal, but in the event that any began to doubt it, a host of other very practical considerations would have served to keep their feet to the fire.

Domestic politics is a dirty phrase in the inner sanctums of foreign policymaking. Officials involved in such policymaking rarely write memos with any explicit reference to domestic affairs and seldom even talk about them except to friends and newspapermen off the record. There is an American myth that politics stops at the water’s edge, that the normal play of partisan competition and dissent gives way to unity in matters of foreign policy. This myth is unfounded but nevertheless potent. It creates great pressure to keep one’s mouth shut, to think and speak of foreign affairs as if they are something above mere politics, something sacred. After all, so the myth runs, foreign policy deals with the security of the nation and is no subject to use for narrow political advantage. Therefore, the storehouse of booty on postwar foreign policymaking, the Pentagon Papers, possesses only a handful of memorandums on how Vietnam strategy was related to American politics. What few there are (some to the President and some from assistant secretaries to their bosses) deal with the matter in only the most glancing way. They make such points as (1) a bombing halt is necessary at this time to lay the basis for a future buildup of ground forces, or (2) escalation of the bombing without a peace overture would strain public support for the war. Such assertions without elaboration, scanty memoir material, and dubious interviews are all that is left to scholars seeking to analyze those political imperatives.

Imperatives against Losing

But substantial inferential evidence shows that the practical political imperatives against losing, as well as the shared foreign policy beliefs against losing, were very much on every president’s mind.

First, presidents were worried that losing would open the floodgates of domestic criticism and that they would be attacked for being “soft on communism” or just plain soft. Sensitivity on this issue was widespread among politicians, journalists, and civilian defense intellectuals. But the presidents and those who served in the executive branch of government suffered particularly acute feelings of uneasiness. Only Eisenhower seemed to have and to feel relative immunity from these charges, except to the degree that he felt the need to placate the Taft wing of his party in his first years in office.

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