Last week VVMF's Founder and President Jan Scruggs and National Education Programs Director Geoffrey Wiles sat down with award-winning journalist and author Marvin Kalb to discuss the Vietnam War and his new book Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama.
GW: When did it appear that the U.S. was going to be involved in the Vietnam War in a substantial way?
MK: Vietnam started on the far periphery of America’s thinking right after World War II. Truman began to support the return of French colonial forces. He needed the French in the battle against the Russians. That was the key thing. He had no interest in Vietnam. He had an interest in keeping the French absorbed with the basic fight against the Russians in Europe. And that started a gradual increase in the American involvement until Eisenhower’s years, when Eisenhower recognized the division of Vietnam into two countries and recognized the existence of South Vietnam as part of the free world. And when he did that it led to the assumption of greater security interests in what was happening there on the part of the US. By the time Kennedy was elected, the situation in South Vietnam was worsening. Kennedy moved 16,000 advisors into South Vietnam. And when he was killed, which followed by 3 weeks the American participation in the killing of President Diem, as it was said at the time, the blood of the South Vietnamese was on America's hands. When Lyndon Johnson came in, he said, "I will not be the first president to lose a war." He started sending US troops in 1965. He operated on the assumption that if you killed enough of the Vietnamese, they would simply back off.
This was a total misunderstanding of the power of nationalism and the determination of the Vietnamese. They simply never accepted the Geneva agreements of 1954 which split the country. . With Lyndon Johnson the United States was into the war in a big way. Again not because we wanted to go in big, not because the US was determined to prevent the Communists from taking over South Vietnam. We were in the cold war and we did not want another country to fall to communism. China had fallen to communism in 1949 and we did not want another country in Asia to fall to communism.
GW: What were you doing at the time?
MK: I was the chief diplomatic correspondent for CBS. I traveled all over the world and on a couple of occasions I visited South Vietnam. I was covering the war in ways that left Presidents Johnson and Nixon very unhappy.
GW: How do you think the reporting affected not only the people on the home front but In Country? Did you see a difference to what was being reported in Vietnam when you were over there briefly to what was being reported at home.
MK: Yes, there were two wars: there was the war as it was reported from Vietnam, which my brother and his group of correspondents did so well. They were much more realistic than we were back in Washington. I covered it, in part reflecting the view of the US government. Even if I was very skeptical of that view, I reported the view. And quite often on the CBS Cronkite news in the evening, they’d have a piece that Bernie did from Vietnam and they’d have a piece that I did from Washington. It was two worlds in collision. That was the development of the idea of the "credibility gap" that plagued the Johnson administration.
GW: Do you think that seeing those two sides of reporting hurt public opinion about the war or do you think that the public's mind was already made up.
MK: No, the public’s mind was not already made up. The public’s mind began to develop a skepticism about the war the longer the war went on, the more the casualties increased and the fewer results one saw. A lot of people being killed, a lot of money being spent and for what? People began to develop a sense of disenchantment about the war, which we saw on college campuses. And that’s a very important point; we saw it on college campuses because there was a draft, which we don’t have today. It’s a fundamental difference between then and now. When you have draft, no matter whether if it’s 40% of the fighting force or 80% of the fighting force, there was a significant number of people who didn’t want to be there. And so people back home began to feel quite unhappy about the war.
When Richard Nixon came into office, one of the first things he did was tell his people he wanted to end the draft. He felt that if he ended the draft, he would end much opposition to the War.
GW: Do you think the credibility gap still exists?
MK: There is a credibility gap, but it’s caused by other factors now. One of the reasons there is a credibility gap is that the wars continue to go on for too long. There’s too much being spent in both treasure and lives for any result that is obvious. If you could say, there is democracy in Afghanistan, it was worth it. But you can’t say that and it’s even difficult for the administration to say that. So to that extent there is the development or the continuation of a kind of credibility gap, between what it is the government says, what is the reality on the battlefield, and what people believe and what the media says. The effect of the media coverage is very important--it has profoundly changed from the days of the Vietnam War. In Vietnam for the most part, the reporters had a good relationship with the military people on the ground, but the Pentagon people felt the reporters were covering the war wrong. That was the development, really, of the five o’clock follies and the credibility gap that followed.
GW: How do you view the media’s change on how war is reported since Vietnam. Do you think it’s for the better or for the worse?
MK: I don’t know the answer to that question. I don’t know if it’s for the better or the worse. I do know that the media has profoundly changed. Whereas in the Vietnam War you had reporters that worked for specific news papers, the three major networks, one or two radio stations, two or three magazines and that was it. Today we have such a vast proliferation of media sources. Reporters today are embedded in these wars, but there are reporters who cover the war on their own. There is intense competition among the cable news operations--one result is that there is less concern about accuracy. There can be an inflammatory description of an event because that attracts higher ratings and that means bigger profits.
GW: How do think that Vietnam has affected the decision making of government in getting involved in wars? In your book, Haunting Legacy, you go from Carter who seems not very interventionist to Reagan, then to Bush and to Clinton and Bush II and Obama and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
MK: I think, because I’ve just come out of this five year effort researching, interviewing and writing Haunting Legacy, I don’t see it quite that way. We go from Ford all the way to Obama--that’s seven presidents. What we try to show in the book is the linkage of Vietnam to presidential decision making. President Ford, for example, did not want the Mayaguez crisis--it followed by three weeks the collapse of the American position in Saigon--but he and Henry Kissinger believed very strongly that we had to do something dramatic. Don’t let this drift. What they felt they had to do was get the merchant ship, the Mayaguez, back. They felt they had to punish the Cambodian pirates who seized the ship and they had to do it in such a way as to demonstrate that the US was powerful and strong. Why? Because Nixon had said that if the US loses in Vietnam, we would be seen around the world as a "paper tiger." Kissinger felt that if you were seen as a "paper tiger," you couldn’t get anything done.
That’s the first president in our book. President Carter was appalled by the Vietnam War. He is a very religious man. When he came into office he wanted to have a bloodless presidency, no spilling of blood, either American blood or anybody else’s. He wanted us to go from being Sparta to being Athens. He did a couple of terrific things: the Panama Canal treaty, an agreement with the Russians, the Camp David Agreement in the Middle East, the China opening. He did some terrific things. Then everything fell apart when radical students occupied the American Embassy in Tehran and then for 444 days we were tied up in the Iran hostage crisis. Then the Russians moved into Afghanistan and Brezynski thought we could give the Russians their Vietnam in Afghanistan. And he did. He worked it out by arranging secretly a kind of military alliance consisting of China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the Brits. If every party played their cards well, he thought we could defeat the Russians in Afghanistan and give them their Vietnam. This could lead to the end of the Soviet Union. Whether he saw it that clearly, I don’t know, but he saw it in broad terms and he turned out to be right.
GW: Speaking of Afghanistan, how do you think the history of Vietnam has hindered or helped decision making on Afghanistan?
MK: I don’t know if it’s hindered or helped but it certainly influenced decision making in a big big way. Obama, during his 2008 campaign, said two things that are quite interesting. At one point in 2008 he said that Afghanistan is a war that we must win. There was a conceptual split at that time between wars of choice and wars of necessity. Obama wasn’t absolutely clear on how he saw Afghanistan, but he made one of those obligatory presidential campaign stops in Iraq and Afghanistan. He invited two senators to join him--this was in July of ’08--Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a Democrat and a Republican. What they both told me was that Obama wanted to talk about Vietnam more than anything else. Mind you, he was going to Afghanistan and going to Iraq but he wanted to talk about Vietnam. Chuck Hagel had been in Vietnam, been wounded in Vietnam, he cared about the war a great deal. Jack Reed was a West Point graduate absorbed with the lessons of Vietnam. Obama is a very smart President, who reads a lot of history, tries to learn, may learn the wrong lessons, and he believed, having just come back from this airborne seminar with these two senators, that the lessons of Vietnam had to be applied in Afghanistan or you run the risk of losing Afghanistan. If you lose Afghanistan, you are in the same position as Harry Truman in 1949 having lost China or Lyndon Johnson in 1965--the lesson was, you cannot lose Vietnam. Obama didn’t want to lose Afghanistan, which he made "a war of necessity." The first thing he did at his first NSC meeting was say, “Afghanistan is not Vietnam.” Why did he say that? Why did he have to deal with Vietnam at all? He dealt with it because it was on his mind in a profound and meaningful way. He based his policy, in large measure, on not losing Afghanistan, on trying to turn a bad situation around with the surge of troops: if not winning, then at least leaving the country in what the US embassy in Kabul calls a “good enough” condition. US diplomats never want to be specific: they just want to say "good enough," and to me that is a deeply pessimistic outlook, because people are dying for a strategy whose goal is only "good enough"? I spoke to an awful lot of people. They just want a policy that is "good enough" to allow us to get out of there.
GW: Do you think the lessons of Vietnam were applied to Iraq?
MK: No, because of what happened right after 9/11. At 6 PM, on September 12, 2001, George W. Bush went to the Pentagon. On his way there, he said in effect; Vietnam be damned. I’m not going to be hung up by the problems Bill Clinton had. Somalia, Kosovo and all that. As Dick Cheney told us, 9/11 changed everything. They didn’t want to think in Vietnam terms but could not escape it. In Chapter 7, Bush II is confronted in an odd way by Stephen Hadley, who was invited to be his NSA chief after Condi Rice became Secretary of State. Stephen Hadley is a very decent Washington lawyer, very proper. Normally, he would never say no to a president. But he was absorbed with Vietnam too. He went to see Bush, who had assumed that Hadley would simply say, “Yes Sir” and salute. But, in fact, Hadley said, “Mr. President I will accept the job, I’m honored to accept the job. But you have to tell me that Iraq is not going to be Vietnam. Because if you are not clear in your strategy about not allowing us to get into a Vietnam situation in Iraq, then I cannot take the job.” President Bush made a passionate point to him, two days in a row, that he understood the dangers of Iraq becoming a Vietnam. But he would not allow that to happen. Bush then made the decision about the surge which, together with a lot of other things happening within Iraq, turned the situation around. Hadley felt reassured and accepted the President’s job offer. Bush had to promise him that he would simply be very mindful about Vietnam and not allow that to happen. So Vietnam played a huge role with Bush II and Obama.
GW: In your opinion what are the lessons of Vietnam?
MK: There are many lessons of Vietnam, but the one that emerges most clearly to me: before a President commits American force to any situation, please, Mr. President, know a little bit about the people you are fighting and the history of their country. In other words, don’t structure your policy with only the USA in mind. If you are going to fight, you are going to fight somebody, find out who these people are. Find out a little about their culture, their religion, their politics. Because it just may be that it’s not necessary to fight at all. Right now, the US, and this comes out of the mouth of the Secretary of State, the US is absorbed with the possibility that China may cut off trade in the South China sea and block Vietnam and the Philippines and that is a genuine concern at the Pentagon and the White House. They see China as a potential threat. They did not know that Vietnam and China are, more often than not, adversaries not allies. The Vietnamese are very suspicious of the Chinese. Hillary Clinton said, in effect, that one day Vietnam and America will stand as one in favor of free navigation of the South China Sea. One question may be, why did we have to fight the Vietnamese if they are our natural ally against China? I’m not in favor of a war against China at all. But why not have that in your mind. We had none of that.
JS: One question will always be “could Ho Chi Mihn have been our Tito” who was a neutral in the Cold War with his guns generally facing Russia. Could Ho Chi Mihn have been a neutral party opposed to expansion of Chinese power? We’ll never know.
MK: Jan, we do know there are letters that Ho Chi Minh sent to Truman inviting a better relationship bdetween Vietnam and the US. Truman, if he ever read them, rejected the idea--his mind was on stopping Stalinist communism, and he saw Ho as a member of Stalin's camp. There was an opportunity to make friends with the Vietnamese, but we didn't explore it.
