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Review of The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era (2022)

February 2, 2022

by Bryan Port

Lawrence, Mark Atwood. The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022.

While most Americans are likely to think of President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) in connection with the Vietnam War, Johnson himself wanted to be remembered in terms of his domestic achievements in the form of the Great Society. Lacking in many accounts of LBJ are his policies towards the rest of the world. In The End of Ambition Mark Atwood Lawrence brings into focus U.S. foreign policy during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, by focusing on the third world, with the notable exclusion of Vietnam, during LBJ’s tenure. Few scholars are better positioned to undertake this study. Lawrence is currently the Director of the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum and an accomplished scholar specializing in the Vietnam War and more broadly in the history of U.S. foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s. As an historian steeped in the politics of the era, Lawrence addresses an important shortfall in scholarship on the Johnson Administration and U.S. foreign policy in general.

Lawrence begins by considering the legacy bequeathed to LBJ by John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK). Johnson began his presidency by committing to JFK’s agenda and maintained much of his team. This proved problematic as JFK had often failed to establish clear objectives or priorities and seemed to lack a fixed set of guiding principles. In Lawrence’s words the Kennedy administration was a “conglomeration of tendencies, rather than [an] executor of a core set of ideas.” Lawrence reviews the Kennedy Administration’s approach to four countries—Brazil, India, Iran, Indonesia—and one region—Southern Africa—to provide context for his investigation of the Johnson administration’s approach. Supporters of Kennedy might object to Lawrence’s critical portrayal of the JFK administration as lacking context and depth. However, considering Lawrence’s focus on LBJ’s foreign policy pertaining to the third world, he does an admirable job in providing the right amount of context critical to a nuanced exploration of LBJ’s approach to the third world, without overwhelming the reader.

LBJ’s ambitions in the domestic context were clear, as was his desire to focus on domestic affairs over foreign policy. In line with this basic intent, the Johnson administration adopted a distinct approach to the Third World that, for better or worse, resolved the ambiguities of JFK’s administration. LBJ sought to lower U.S. ambitions in the Third World and reduce risk while shoring up U.S. control over global affairs by establishing or bolstering cooperative regimes. Despite the judgment of many, including LBJ himself, that he lacked foreign policy expertise, LBJ’s approach to international affairs was rooted in intellectual tendencies distinct from those of JFK, not ignorance. Where JFK sought to transform, LBJ sought to manage. Still, Lawrence points out that LBJ was more visionary than JFK in areas that today we refer to as transnational issues. Further, while LBJ’s ambitions in foreign policy may have been tempered by his desire to focus on domestic affairs, he nonetheless displayed the state-building impulse of the 1930s in both the domestic and foreign arenas. This might be expected based on LBJ’s admiration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and LBJ’s desire to bring to full fruition the wider new deal program.

Five case studies form the heart of Lawrence’s book, covering U.S. policy toward Brazil, India, Iran, Indonesia, and Southern Africa. Central to LBJ’s foreign policy in each of these case studies was a desire to minimize U.S. burdens so as to not further distract from efforts in Vietnam as well as Johnson’s broader goal of advancing the Great Society program. This was the key driver in the LBJ administration’s bringing to power, or enhancing relations with, often authoritarian regimes that could effectively govern and reduce the potential for conflict or communist advances while acting in concert with U.S. interests more broadly. In Brazil, LBJ presided over transformative events and constructed a new relationship with a military regime that effectively dismantled Brazilian democracy. The administration’s patterns and policies in Brazil informed his approach to the Third World for the duration of his tenure. These tendencies included favoring the development of constructive change and democracy over the long-term by countering the danger’s posed by communist movements.

A general labeled "anti democratic rulers" says to President Johnson: "Where I'm in charge, there's absolutely no danger of democratic government being subverted." — This cartoon by Herb Block was published in the Washington Post on May 3, 1965, a few days after U.S. Marines landed in the Dominican Republic to bolster a friendly regime. The cartoon hints at the Johnson administration’s attraction to reliable authoritarian leaders across the Third World. Source: The Herb Block Foundation

With India, LBJ shared Kennedy’s hope that resistance to Chinese expansion would serve as a basis for cooperation, but by early 1966 he was losing hope for reasons including India’s lack of support for U.S. actions in Vietnam. In LBJ’s approach toward India we see another principle emerge, the emphasis on economic development more so than military assistance. This certainly held true in the case of U.S. policy toward Iran. There was also a China angle in enhancing relations with Tehran as a hedge against Islamabad’s improving relations with China.

In Indonesia the rise to power of the military led to the “evisceration of the world’s third-largest communist party.” Still, among the countries explored, Indonesia was the most resistant to U.S. influence. The Johnson administration wisely opted for a low-key approach, playing the long game by building influence in select elements of the Indonesian military and society. LBJ and his team viewed Indonesia as a success story that gave American leaders a renewed confidence that the Vietnam War was achieving important results even absent a clear military victory. Johnson felt that if the United States had not taken a stand in Vietnam that the countercoup in Indonesia in 1965 and the defeat of communism would not have come to pass.

A meeting of the National Security Council on January 7, 1964, reached consensus on the need to keep providing aid to Indonesia despite Sukarno’s provocations. CIA Director John McCone sits at the far end of the table, with Budget Director David Bell to his right and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to his left. Around the table in a clockwise direction are Undersecretary of State W. Averell Harriman, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, President Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, Assistant Secretary of Defense William Bundy, Air Force General Curtis LeMay, an unidentified official, and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. Source: LBJ Library photo by Yoichi Okamoto

Even though Southern Africa held less strategic importance to the United States, it provoked more political controversy. This was based on intersections with the U.S. domestic context, specifically civil rights. Here Lawrence’s case study differs in that it involves a region, not just a nation, though Rhodesia is the primary focus. Despite the differences, the same patterns and policies were clearly in evidence including a desire to minimize U.S. direct involvement, particularly any type of military involvement. Vietnam was certainly a consideration, but one can also appreciate a sense of realistic assessments and expectations regarding the importance of the region and what U.S. power could accomplish. Although one could argue that an appreciation of U.S. constraints emerged only due to Vietnam, such a judgment seems to underestimate LBJ’s priorities. It is likely that LBJ would have opted for such an approach even absent Vietnam as his priority was the Great Society. In fact, Lawrence’s work supports the contention that LBJ had across a broad basis a preference for restraint overseas and action on the home front.

Lawrence not only covers this history of foreign policy during a critical period in American history, but he also considers patterns and precedents. The title of the book may be mildly misleading in this regard. Lawrence asserts that the United States is shaped by the competing impulses of worldmaking and self-interest. In this context Lawrence asserts that the United States has faced multiple inflection points in which it curbed its worldmaking ambitions in favor of a narrower pursuit of its self-interest. It might be more accurate to say that the United States tempered its ambition, but that the pattern that Lawrence alludes to in the ebbing and flowing of American ambition remains intact and returned with a vengeance in the 1990s.

Lawrence’s volume raises many important issues including the relationship between domestic and foreign policy that in total represent the national interest. There are few case studies as potentially rich in this regard as LBJ’s basic dilemma – Vietnam vs the Great Society. Such a study would provide additional context and understanding of the priorities and rationale guiding how the Johnson administration faced the rest of the world, aside from Vietnam. For scholars of the Cold War, the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies, and U.S. foreign policy toward the third world more generally, Lawrence’s The End of Ambition makes an invaluable and much needed contribution.

Bryan Port is a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin and a civil servant with the Department of the Army assigned to U.S. Army Futures Command as a strategist. He is a historian of the United States focusing on U.S. intellectual history. His research interests include the construction and application of the idea of national interest as well as grand strategy. Bryan holds a M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University and a M.S. in National Security Strategy from the National War College. His ongoing research centers on American progressive leaders and thinkers of the first half of the 20th century.

In the Shadow of Vietnam: The United States and the Third World in the 1960s

November 3, 2021

By Mark Lawrence

At the dawn of the 1960s, John F. Kennedy and other American liberals expressed boundless optimism about the ability of the United States to promote democracy and economic development in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. So vast were American power, resources, and know-how that almost anything seemed possible in regions striving for progress and a stronger voice in international affairs. Confident U.S. officials cultivated postcolonial leaders around the world, urged vastly expanded economic aid for poor nations, and established new bureaucracies such as the Peace Corps and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

By the end of the decade, however, this vision of uplift and harmony between the United States and the world’s emerging nations lay in shambles. Democracy had given way to authoritarianism in numerous nations, while poverty and inequality remained pervasive. U.S. leaders largely gave up on the ambitions that had fired their imaginations only a few years before. They distanced themselves from nations like India, which persisted in policies of non-alignment and grew increasingly critical of the United States. They lost interest in actively promoting racial equity in Southern Africa, where persistent white rule in South Africa, Rhodesia, and the Portuguese colonies confronted the West with difficult dilemmas. And they either formed or tightened relationships with military regimes in nations stretching from Brazil to Indonesia – governments that had scant interest in the welfare of their own people but promised to serve American geopolitical and economic interests

President John F. Kennedy and Indonesian leader Sukarno ride together during arrival ceremonies at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, D.C., on April 24, 1961. Ensuing meetings failed to resolve the growing controversy over the status of Western New Guinea (West Irian). Source: Abbie Rowe/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library

How can we explain this momentous shift in U.S. foreign affairs? The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era argues that the Vietnam War offers one answer. The war diminished U.S. ambitions in the Third World partly because it demanded so much of America’s military and economic resources, making politicians and policymakers wary of assuming burdens elsewhere and anxious to minimize risks in other regions. As the war in Vietnam dragged on, mounting frustration sapped much of the optimism and confidence that had underpinned the enthusiasm for development and democratization at the start of the decade. The war also undermined the liberal agenda by fueling sharp criticism of the United States in many parts of the Third World, making it increasingly difficult for sympathetic officials in Washington to defend generous and tolerant policies toward areas that seemed increasingly to defy American control.

The war itself was not the sole factor responsible for the transformation that this book aims to explain. The End of Ambition demonstrates that the American retreat from the Third World also resulted from three other developments that transcended the war and would likely have driven significant change in U.S. policy even if no American troops had set foot in Southeast Asia. These three developments were already visible by 1965, when Johnson dramatically escalated U.S. involvement in Vietnam. While their course after that fateful year was not shaped solely by the war, the conflict in Vietnam acted as a powerful accelerant, energizing the other trends leading the United States to reappraise its foreign policies. The effect of the war on the liberal underpinnings of U.S. foreign policy thus ran in parallel to its impact on domestic affairs, where controversy over Vietnam fueled social and political upheaval that steadily eroded policy initiatives that had been embraced by a broad swath of Americans at the start of the Sixties.

The first trend catalyzed by the war was the shift from U.S. leaders unusually sensitive to the challenges of promoting constructive change in the Third World to others who assigned a far lower priority to the issue. Understanding this pattern depends on appreciating the outlooks and decision-making styles of leaders at the pinnacle of the U.S. bureaucracy. The End of Ambition offers fresh appraisals of three president along with their senior aides. . It argues that John F. Kennedy sincerely cared about the political and economic transformation playing out in much of the Third World and genuinely aspired to recast U.S. policy to swim with what he regarded as the inevitable tide of history. But Kennedy, like the diplomats, journalists, and scholars who surrounded him, never settled on a coherent approach and left behind an inconsistent and even confusing record. For his part, LBJ – a key protagonist in this book – lacked both Kennedy’s interest in the Third World and his patience for debate about American policy. He abandoned much of JFK’s agenda and, particularly as the Vietnam War became a major preoccupation, sought to bolster stability throughout the Third World in order to minimize distractions from his priorities. In this way, Johnson anticipated, more than scholars have acknowledged, the approach embraced by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger after they moved into the White House in January 1969. Indeed, the book argues that the Nixon administration did not so much conceive and implement boldly innovative policy departures, as both admirers and detractors have long credited them with doing, as affirm and fully articulate ideas that had been pioneered during the Johnson years.

The second trend that drove U.S. policymaking toward the Third World was the transformation of American domestic politics during the 1960s. During the Sixties, particularly the first half of the decade, many Americans backed liberal reform projects as never before. Yet the 1960s also yielded a powerful surge of conservatism as the pervasive optimism of the early years gave way to disappointment and division, a phenomenon that has increasingly captured the attention of historians focused on explaining the origins of the conservative era that ensued. By around 1965, large numbers of Americans were growing weary of liberal reform and coming to fear that rapid social change threatened their livelihoods and social mores, trends that only intensified under the pressure of political controversies stirred up by U.S. escalation in Vietnam. The book argues that this transformation – as dramatic as any that played out in such a short period of time in all of American history – had profound consequences for both domestic policymaking and U.S. foreign relations. As urban unrest, antiwar protest, and backlash against the perceived excesses of the Great Society fueled hostility to the Johnson administration, policymakers became increasingly wary of risky and costly policies that seemed to invite even greater criticism of the administration if they were not scaled down. Fully cognizant of the shifting political tide, LBJ abandoned what enthusiasm he still had for efforts to revamp U.S. policy toward weak and impoverished nations, diverted funds from aid programs that had been hallmarks of Kennedy’s New Frontier, and grew notably tolerant of authoritarians who promised to bolster U.S. interests.

The third trend that contributed to the transformation of U.S. policy was the marked decline of sympathy for the United States across much of the globe during the 1960s. Mounting hostility to U.S. involvement in Vietnam was one major reason for this tendency. Across the Third World, many nationalist leaders castigated the United States for wreaking destruction on an impoverished society and backing an unsavory autocratic regime in Saigon. But other factors, some of them fully visible before Washington became consumed with Southeast Asia, contributed as well to rising anti-Americanism. For one thing, the accelerating Sino-Soviet competition for prestige and influence among the revolutionary movements in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America drove both communist powers to emphasize their commitments to radical agendas and to step up their support for anti-Western forces in various places. Meanwhile, the non-aligned impulse that had once inspired some Third World leaders to seek a genuine third way outside the Cold War blocs lost traction. That trend flowed partly from a series of coups that tilted numerous countries sharply to the right during the 1960s. Various forces, meanwhile, led other nations in more radical, anti-Western directions, tilting Third World forums against the United States and encouraging cooperation among anti-Western forces in societies as diverse as North Vietnam, Cuba, and Palestine. The death or downfall of charismatic Afro-Asian leaders such as India’s Jawaharlal Nehru and Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah opened the way to more radical alternatives, as did growing tension within the Third World. Conflict between India and Pakistan, Iran and Egypt, and Indonesia and Malaysia exacerbated divisiveness within the Third World, shattering the notion of a united Third World operating independently of the great powers.

To tell the story of U.S. policymaking toward vast swaths of the globe across a decade exceeds the limits of a single volume. For this reason, The End of Ambition aims to strike a productive balance between breadth of coverage – both geographical and chronological – and depth of analysis. It begins with a broad-brush treatment of the Kennedy years and concludes with a brief overview of policy departures undertaken early in the Nixon presidency. The goal in these sections is to identify broad patterns of behavior and establish the interpretive arc of the book. In between, the book follows a different approach, offering five case studies chosen to highlight decision-making during the Johnson presidency, a crucial period of transition. These chapters, rooted in deep research in numerous repositories throughout the United States and abroad, permit close examination of U.S. policymaking with respect to nations or regions that posed especially serious challenges. The areas in question – Brazil, India, Iran, Indonesia, and the British territory of Southern Rhodesia – were selected for their clear importance to international affairs in the 1960s and beyond and because they were representativeness of broad challenges that the United States confronted in the 1960s. All of them captured headlines and commanded the attention of U.S. leaders for much or all of the decade, largely because they seemed to be key battlegrounds of the Cold War and to play crucial roles not only in their regions but in the Third World more generally. Taken together, their stories describe the larger arc of America’s relationship with the wider world during an era of profound turbulence and change.

Mark Atwood Lawrence is Director of the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum in Austin, Texas. Until January 2020, he taught as Associate Professor of History at UT-Austin, where his classes focused on American and international history. Lawrence is author of Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), which won the Paul Birdsall Prize for European military and strategic history and the George Louis Beer Prize for European international history. In 2008, he published The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (New York: Oxford University Press), which was selected by the History Book Club and the Military History Book Club. He has also published several edited and co-edited books, as well as numerous articles, chapters, and reviews on various aspects of the history of U.S. foreign relations. In 2005, he was awarded the President’s Associates’ Award for Teaching Excellence at UT-Austin and in 2019 the Silver Spurs Centennial Teaching Fellowship from the UT College of Liberal Arts. Lawrence has held the Cassius Marcellus Clay Fellowship at Yale University (2006-2008) and the Stanley Kaplan Visiting Professorship in American Foreign Policy at Williams College (2011-2012). He earned his BA from Stanford University and his PhD from Yale University.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

This is Democracy: Vietnam War Legacies

November 3, 2021

In this episode, Jeremi and Zachary talk with special guest Dr. Mark Atwood Lawrence about the Vietnam War and its continuing legacies in American society, global policy, as well as recent similar conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “It is Hard to Build Utopias”.

Mark Atwood Lawrence is Director of the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum in Austin, Texas. Until January 2020, he taught history at UT-Austin, where his classes focused on American and international history. Lawrence is author of Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam, The Vietnam War: A Concise International History, and, this fall, The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era, as well as several edited books and numerous articles, chapters, and reviews on various aspects of the history of U.S. foreign relations. Lawrence has held the Cassius Marcellus Clay Fellowship at Yale University (2006-2008) and the Stanley Kaplan Visiting Professorship in American Foreign Policy at Williams College (2011-2012). He earned his BA from Stanford University and his PhD from Yale University.

Guests

Mark Atwood Lawrence is Director of the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum in Austin, Texas. Until January 2020, he taught history at UT-Austin, where his classes focused on American and international history. Lawrence is author of Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam, The Vietnam War: A Concise International History, and, this fall, The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era, as well as several edited books and numerous articles, chapters, and reviews on various aspects of the history of U.S. foreign relations. Lawrence has held the Cassius Marcellus Clay Fellowship at Yale University (2006-2008) and the Stanley Kaplan Visiting Professorship in American Foreign Policy at Williams College (2011-2012). He earned his BA from Stanford University and his PhD from Yale University.

About This is Democracy

The future of democracy is uncertain, but we are committed to its urgent renewal today. This podcast will draw on historical knowledge to inspire a contemporary democratic renaissance. The past offers hope for the present and the future, if only we can escape the negativity of our current moment — and each show will offer a serious way to do that! This podcast will bring together thoughtful voices from different generations to help make sense of current challenges and propose positive steps forward. Our goal is to advance democratic change, one show at a time. Dr. Jeremi Suri, a renowned scholar of democracy, will host the podcast and moderate discussions.

This episode of This is Democracy was mixed and mastered by Ean Herrera.

Legacies of the Vietnam War

December 4, 2017

(via Flickr)

The Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary The Vietnam War (2017), shown in 10 parts on PBS, once again brought a divisive and contested conflict into American living rooms. Mark A. Lawrence, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and preeminent historian of the Vietnam War, recently wrote about what we are learning from historians’ renewed interest in the subject, especially with new scholarship based on Vietnamese sources. Last month, Lawrence discussed the legacies of the Vietnam War on a panel marking the 35th anniversary of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at the National Archives in Washington D.C. and on a CSPAN program on the state of the war in 1967.

Watch: 35th Anniversary of the Wall

“In partnership with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF), we present a panel discussion about the history and legacy of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, dedicated on November 13, 1982. Participating in the discussion will be Jan Scruggs, Founder and President Emeritus (VVMF), Jim Knotts, President and CEO (VVMF), author and historian Kristin Ann Hass (Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial), and others.”

Watch: State of the War in 1967

“Historians Mark Atwood Lawrence of the University of Texas at Austin and Lien-Hang Nguyen of Columbia University responded to viewer calls and tweets about the state of the Vietnam War in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s strategy, and the politics and motivations of the North Vietnamese government and Viet Cong guerrilla forces.”

Also by Mark A. Lawrence on Not Even Past:

Studying the Vietnam War: How the Scholarship has Changed
Must Read Books on the Vietnam War
The Prisoner of Events in Vietnam
Changing Course in Vietnam – or not
LBJ and Vietnam: A Conversation

Studying the Vietnam War: How the Scholarship Has Changed

September 25, 2017

by Mark Atwood Lawrence

Originally published as “Studying the Vietnam War: How the Scholarship Has Changed” in the Fall 2017 issue of Humanities magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities.”

Editors Note: The Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary The Vietnam War premiered on PBS last Sunday, September 17. Mark A. Lawrence, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and preeminent historian of the Vietnam War, reflects on what we are learning from historians’ renewed interest in the subject, especially with new scholarship based on Vietnamese sources.

These are boom times for historians of the Vietnam War. One reason is resurgent public interest in a topic that had lost some of its salience in American life during the 1990s. At that time, the end of the Cold War and surging confidence about U.S. power seemed to diminish the relevance of long ago controversies and the need to draw lessons from America’s lost war. But then came the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: grueling conflicts that, in key respects, resembled the war in Southeast Asia three decades earlier. Critics complained that George W. Bush had mired the nation in “another Vietnam,” and military strategists focused anew on the earlier war for clues about fighting insurgents in distant, inhospitable places. For their part, historians seized the opportunity to reinterpret Vietnam for a younger generation and especially to compare and contrast the Vietnam conflict with America’s new embroilments.

More recently, intense public interest in the war has been sustained by fiftieth anniversaries of the war’s most harrowing years for the United States. Publishers have used these occasions to release high-profile histories, including Mark Bowden’s widely reviewed Hue 1968, a sprawling account of the largest battle between U.S. and Communist forces during the 1968 Tet Offensive. The media are taking part as well. During 2017 and early 2018, the New York Times is publishing an online series of approximately 130 op-eds focused on the events of 1967. The biggest moment of all is due in late September: the premiere of the much anticipated 18-hour documentary on the war from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, an event certain to inspire new waves of commentary about Vietnam and to rekindle debate in living rooms across the nation.

Footage of Vietnam being broadcast in an American living room, February 1968 (via Wikipedia). The first episode of the highly anticipated The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick premiered on Sunday, September 17, once again bringing a divisive and contested history into American living rooms.

But there is another, less noticed reason for renewed attention to the Vietnam War: Spectacular new source material has transformed the possibilities for writing about the subject. Some of this new documentation has emerged from U.S. archives as a result of declassification in the last decade or so. Records from the Nixon and Ford presidencies (1969–1977), especially, are making it possible for historians to write with more confidence and in greater detail about the final stages of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, long a relatively neglected era of the war.

Indeed, the last phase of U.S. military operations has recently spawned an especially contentious debate on one of the most fundamental controversies about Vietnam: Could the United States and its South Vietnamese allies have won the war if the American public had not turned against it? Provocative new works by Lewis Sorley and Gregory Daddis lead the way in arguing for and against, respectively, the notion that the U.S. military could have secured overall victory, if not for crumbling political support within the United States.

Meanwhile, writing about every phase of American decision-making has been enhanced by the release of audio recordings that U.S. presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard Nixon made of important meetings, telephone conversations, or both. Because these often convey the mood and emotions of senior policymakers, they are invaluable in helping historians gain a richer understanding of the motives that underlay decision-making about the war. It is now possible, for example, to hear Lyndon Johnson’s anguish about escalating the U.S. role in 1964 and 1965. LBJ’s doubts, along with his obvious awareness of the problems that would beset U.S. forces if he escalated the war in Vietnam, have led many historians to scrap the once dominant idea that leaders in Washington, ignorant of Vietnamese politics and blinded by Cold War assumptions about the dangers of communism, walked step-by-step into a “quagmire” that no one had anticipated. The old question—How could Americans have been so ignorant?—has been replaced by a new one: Why did U.S. leaders commit the nation to war despite abundant doubts and accurate knowledge of the obstacles they would confront?

President Lyndon B. Johnson at a National Security meeting on Vietnam, July 1965 (via Wikimedia Commons)

The most impressive new source material, however, has emerged from countries other than the United States. As recently as 30 years ago, historians were limited to U.S. and West European sources, making it impossible to write with authority about Vietnam itself or decision-making by North Vietnam’s allies, China, the Soviet Union, and Eastern European nations. Everything changed with the end of the Cold War. East European nations went furthest in opening their archives to researchers. For its part, the Russian government opened some Soviet-era records, most notably the records of the Communist party. China and Vietnam, where the end of the Cold War did not produce dramatic political change, lagged behind, yet even those governments gradually permitted access to some records from the Cold War years. Most strikingly, the Vietnamese government opened troves of material amassed by the defunct regime in Saigon that ruled below the seventeenth parallel during the heyday of U.S. involvement.

The result has been a large and growing body of new work by ambitious and linguistically skilled scholars eager to explore fresh dimensions of the war. Historians Mark Philip Bradley, Robert K. Brigham, William J. Duiker, Christopher Goscha, David S. Marr, and Sophie Quinn-Judge led the way in examining Vietnam’s experience, drawing on newly available Vietnamese sources to produce pathbreaking studies around the turn of the century. A younger generation of scholars, most of whom wrote dissertations rooted in extensive research in Vietnam, has built on those accomplishments and even, for the first time, begun delving into decision-making by the Communist government in Hanoi. Meanwhile, historians of Soviet and Chinese foreign policy, most notably Ilya Gaiduk, Chen Jian, and Qiang Zhai, have used new documentation to examine the complex relationships between the Vietnamese Communists and their superpower patrons.

Unquestionably, archival openings in Russia and China, just as in Vietnam, remain partial and selective, leaving studies rooted in newly accessible material—stunning as it may be—highly susceptible to debate and revision as more documentation becomes available. Yet, measured against the near impossibility of doing this kind of work just three decades ago, historians have made remarkable progress toward rethinking the Vietnam War as an episode not just in U.S. history but also in Vietnamese and world history. Historians, in short, increasingly appreciate the war for what it was at the time: a multisided conflict involving numerous Vietnamese and international actors and driven by extraordinarily complicated and shifting motives.

What precisely has this new research in non-U.S. sources revealed thus far? Three examples point to the variety and significance of the new discoveries. First, studies of Chinese foreign policy have revealed details of North Vietnam’s dependence on its mighty neighbor to the north in the years before the Cultural Revolution, which greatly diminished China’s ambitions abroad. Despite historical tensions between Vietnam and China, newly available sources show definitively that Chinese military helped train and advise Vietnamese Communist forces from as early as 1950 and played an especially pivotal role in the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the Vietnamese victory that ended French colonialism and dealt a major blow to the West in the Cold War.

The Battle of Dien Bien Phu, 1954 (via Wikimedia Commons)

More strikingly, new documents clarify the vast amounts of equipment and even manpower that China provided to North Vietnam during the later fighting that involved U.S. combat forces. According to historian Qiang Zhai, China sent everything from military gear and weapons to table tennis balls, playing cards, sewing needles, and vegetable seed under a series of agreements with North Vietnam. At the same time, Qiang Zhai asserts, a total of 320,000 Chinese soldiers served in North Vietnam between June 1965 and March 1968, peaking at 170,000 during 1967. To be sure, Chinese forces were not assigned combat roles. But Zhai observes that they enabled North Vietnam to send more of its own forces to southern battlefields by performing valuable functions such as repairing bridges and rail lines, building and relocating factories, and manning antiaircraft guns. Such tasks could, of course, be hazardous, not least because of U.S. bombing of some parts of North Vietnam. According to Zhai’s sources, 1,100 Chinese soldiers died in North Vietnam and another 4,200 were wounded.

Second, new sources from Vietnam are exposing the complexity of decision-making among Communist leaders in Hanoi. For many years, historians assumed that North Vietnamese leaders marched in lockstep and permitted no dissent. This view was sustained in part by the belief that the regime in Hanoi was totalitarian to its core and utterly subservient to its most powerful leaders, above all Ho Chi Minh. Recent discoveries have, however, called all of this into question. For one thing, historians Lien-Hang Nguyen and Pierre Asselin have revealed that Ho Chi Minh—long assumed to have been the preeminent North Vietnamese leader all the way to his death in 1969—in fact, lost a great deal of influence around 1960.

The pivotal figure thereafter was Le Duan, a Southern-born revolutionary who remained relatively obscure to Western historians until recent years. Thanks to recent publications, though, it’s clear that Le Duan, a firebrand eager to throw enormous blood and resources into the effort to reunify his country under Communist leadership, dominated decision-making in Hanoi during the peak years of American involvement. Understanding the importance of Le Duan and the hawks who surrounded him helps enormously to appreciate the escalatory pressures that operated on the Vietnamese side, even as Lyndon Johnson and his aides stepped up the American commitment in the mid 1960s. We can now see that leaders on both sides rejected diplomacy and banked on military victory, a tragic convergence of hawkishness that fueled escalation.

The dominance of the hawks in Hanoi does not mean, though, that there were no contrary voices once they were in the driver’s seat. Scholars working with Vietnamese sources have discovered evidence of substantial factionalism within the Hanoi regime throughout the late 1950s and 1960s. Broadly speaking, some high-ranking North Vietnamese leaders, including Ho Chi Minh, prioritized consolidation of Communist rule above the seventeenth parallel and were wary of major expenditures of lives and treasure to bring about reunification. Others, including Le Duan, strongly favored reunification—even at the cost of a major war likely to draw in the United States—over all other North Vietnamese priorities. New studies of the war show that North Vietnamese policy flowed from the interplay of these two points of view. During the late 1950s, the moderate faction held sway, and the result was a period of relative peace in Vietnam. With the triumph of the hawks, however, Hanoi embraced a new war and transformed North Vietnam into a full-fledged police state in order to keep the skeptics at bay.

Third, the new scholarship has shed valuable new light on the nature of the South Vietnamese state that endured from its beginning in 1954 to its collapse in 1975. Was South Vietnam merely a puppet of the United States, an artificial creation doomed to fall apart whenever Washington withdrew its economic and military assistance? Or was it a viable nation with a legitimate government that, absent the onslaught by northern Communists, could have endured as a stable, pro-Western entity into the indefinite future? For many years, the debate was more a matter of polemics than historical inquiry. Opponents of the war argued that the United States hitched itself to a hopeless Potemkin experiment led by venal, authoritarian leaders, while supporters saw South Vietnam as a beleaguered young nation that, for all its faults, was doing its best to resist Communist aggression.

Leonid Brezhnev during talks with Le Duan, October 1975 (via Flickr)

Unsurprisingly, much of the new scholarship rooted in Vietnamese sources has argued for a gray area between these two extremes. Historians such as Edward Miller and Jessica Chapman focus especially on the late 1950s and early 1960s, suggesting that the South Vietnamese government headed by Ngo Dinh Diem possessed a degree of legitimacy and popular support unrecognized by Diem’s critics at the time or since. To be sure, they also point out the government’s inability to expand its base further among the South Vietnamese population. But they show that the South Vietnamese state possessed a remarkable amount of agency that its leaders might have exercised differently. All in all, these historians have helped restore the Vietnamese to the center of their own history.

What do all these revelations mean for how we should understand the Vietnam War in its totality? Clearly, the new work in non-American sources holds implications for primordial questions about the U.S. role in Vietnam. Was the U.S. commitment to Vietnam justified by any genuine security interests in the region? Why did the United States fail to achieve its objectives despite monumental effort? Might different decisions by American leaders have led to a different outcome? Knowing more about the international and Vietnamese contexts makes it far more possible than ever before to form authoritative opinions about questions that cannot logically be answered fully on the basis of U.S. sources alone. But the new work also underscores the possibility of addressing questions that transcend the American experience and viewing the Vietnam War within the context of, for example, decolonization, the international Communist movement, and the Sino-Soviet split. The good news is that, given the range of new and still-to-be-released source material and robust interest in the war four decades after it ended, historians are sure to move forward energetically on both tracks. The boom times may stick around for a while.

Also by Mark A. Lawrence on Not Even Past:

Must Read Books on the Vietnam War
The Prisoner of Events in Vietnam
Changing Course in Vietnam – or not
LBJ and Vietnam: A Conversation

US Survey Course: Vietnam War

July 16, 2016

During the summer of 2016, we will be bringing together our previously published articles, book reviews, and podcasts on key themes and periods in the history of the USA. Each grouping is designed to correspond to the core areas of the US History Survey Courses taken by undergraduate students at the University of Texas at Austin.

On November 12, 2015, Not Even Past and the the Institute for Historical Studies at UT Austin sponsored a roundtable to discuss the Lessons and Legacies of the War in Vietnam. During that month, Not Even Past published a series of articles to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War.

We start with Mark A. Lawrence’s feature article: The War in Vietnam Revisited.

Next, Nancy Bui, the founder and President of the Vietnamese American Heritage Foundation considers the Vietnam War from a Vietnamese American Perspective.

And Janet Davis shares a short meditation on cultural memory and the Vietnam War in two popular films: First Blood and Jaws

Over the years, Not Even Past has published a number of articles on the War in Vietnam by Mark Atwood Lawrence. This rich body of material covers wide range of topics and case studies giving our readers a chance to consider the War from a number of different angles:

LBJ and Vietnam: A Conversation

The Prisoner of Events in Vietnam

Changing Course in Vietnam — or Not

CIA Study: “Consequences to the US of Communist Domination of Mainland Southeast Asia,” October 13, 1950

The Lessons of History? Debating the Vietnam and Iraq Wars

Others have considered the War in Vietnam in relation to broader topics:

Peniel Joseph explains how Muhammad Ali helped make black power into a global brand

Deirdre Smith shares some research on Vietnam between the United States and Yugoslavia.

And, Michael J. Kramer discusses on representing LBJ and power through the medium of dance in The Seldoms Bring LBJ and the 1960s Into the Present in Their Investigation of How Power Goes.

15 Minute History:

America and the Beginnings of the Cold War

The Cold War dominated international politics for four and a half decades from 1945-1989, and was defined by a rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union that threatened—literally—to destroy the world. How did two nations that had been allies during World War II turn on each other so completely? And how did the United States, which had been only a marginal player in world politics before the war, come to view itself as a superpower?

In this episode, historian Jeremi Suri discusses the beginnings of the Cold War (1945-1989) its origins in the “unfinished business” of World War II, the role of the development of atomic weapons and espionage, and the ways that it changed the United States in just five short years between 1945 and 1950.

The US and Decolonization after World War II

Following World War II, a large part of the world was in the hands of European powers, established as colonies in the previous centuries. As one of the nations that came out on top of the geo-political situation, the United States was looked to with hope by aspiring nationalist movements, but also seen as a potential source by European allies in the war as a potential supporter of the move to restore the tarnished empires to their former glory. What’s a newly emerged world power to do?

Guest R. Joseph Parrott takes a look at the indecisive position the United States took on decolonization after helping liberate Europe from the threat of enslavement to fascism.

50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War from a Vietnamese American Perspective

November 23, 2015

By Nancy Bui

Most Americans, including policy makers, and Vietnam Veterans have expressed their lack of knowledge of Vietnam’s history and culture before US’s involvement in Vietnam to fight a war over ideology. The War cost over 58,000 American lives and claimed the lives of over a quarter of a million South Vietnamese soldiers, over a million of North Vietnamese troops and an estimated 7 million civilians from both North and South Vietnam.

The war was over, but the misunderstandings continued. What can we learn from this war? Perhaps, we may want to look at the war from the Vietnamese perspective. After all, we carry the largest cost of the war and suffered unspeakable atrocities long before and long after America’s involvement. The outcome of the War has affected us tremendously and the ongoing process of healing will take us generations.

On May 8, 1965, 3,500 U.S Marines landed in Da Nang, a beach town North of South Vietnam. It marked the year America officially got involved in The Vietnam War by sending ground troops. However, for the Vietnamese, the war had started many years before. After World War II, Ho Chi Minh, an expat who was away from Vietnam for over 30 years, introduced communism into Vietnam. The Vietnamese have had a history of fighting for our sovereignty long before communism arrived. Our people fought the French for our independence from 1885, and we quickly had to fight another war against communists at the same time. In 1954, the Geneva Accords was signed to divide Vietnam into two parts at the 17th parallel. The North belonged to the communist party, and the South belonged to the free Vietnamese.

On May 19, 1959, Ho Chi Minh’s 69th birthday, with help from Russia and China, North Vietnam officially kicked off the invasion of South Vietnam. The South fought back in a Guerrilla War which lasted from 1959-1963. America wanted to end the war as quickly as possible and sent troops to Vietnam. President Ngo Dinh Diem on the other hand, only wanted economic aid, weapons, and training, because he believed that any foreign troops on Vietnamese soil would sooner or later offend the Vietnamese people, as fighting for their sovereignty from foreign invaders was their way of life. The conflict ended in his assassination on Nov. 2, 1963.

After sending troops to Vietnam, the conflict extended into a Total War. The battlefields became bloodier and bloodier. Over half a million U.S troops were in South Vietnam by 1968. Vietnam lost the media war, as public opinion and support for the War rapidly declined, triggering a decade of antiwar demonstrations. America started pulling troops out of Vietnam. By the end of 1972, all combat troops were completely withdrawn. In early 1973, Congress passed the resolution to prohibit any funding of The Indochina War. The US was quick to get involved in the war, but was even quicker to retreat from it.

The South Vietnamese Army fought for over two years without any outside assistance. On the other hand, Russia and China more than doubled their aids to North Vietnam. The South fought to their last bullet and finally surrendered on April 30, 1975. The following two slides offer further information what happened after the war.

Must Read Books on the Vietnam War

November 1, 2015

Must must-read books on the Vietnam War

by Mark A. Lawrence

Christian Appy, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (2015).
The latest in a long line of studies focused on the legacies of the war in the United States, Appy’s book covers everything from film and literature to foreign and military policy.

Pierre Asselin, Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965 ( 2013).
Asselin’s book, rooted in extensive research in Vietnamese records, is one of the first to examine the North Vietnamese side of the decisions that led to a major war in 1965. Scholars will no doubt get better access to North Vietnamese materials in the years to come, but this book is an extraordinary accomplishment, shedding light on matters that have defied study for decades.

William J. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh: A Life (2000).
Duiker’s exceptionally engaging biography draws on material from around the world deftly analyzes the blend of nationalism and communism at the heart of Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary activism.

Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
Logevall’s book is the most influential study on U.S. decision-making during the critical years 1964-1965. It challenges the conventional notion that the U.S. decision to wage a major was nearly inevitable, showing instead that Lyndon Johnson had realistic alternatives to escalation.

Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and the America in Vietnam (New York: Vintage, 1989).
Sheehan, an influential journalist during the early stages of America’s war in Vietnam, examines the life and career of John Paul Vann, an American who spent years in Southeast Asia trying to transform South Vietnam into a viable nation capable of defending itself. Vann’s failure captures in microcosm the problems that beset American policy in the area.

The War in Vietnam Revisited

November 1, 2015

From the editor: This month, we are joining the Institute for Historical Studies at UT Austin to discuss the Lessons and Legacies of the War in Vietnam. On November 12, 2015, the IHS is sponsoring a roundtable on the subject. It is open to the public and you can find more information here. During the month Not Even Past will continue to post articles about the war in Vietnam and we will post an episode on 15 Minute History featuring Prof Mark Lawrence, who is introducing the subject and some of his research on it, below. ~JN

by Mark A. Lawrence

On January 9, 2007, Senator Ted Kennedy stepped to the podium at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., and assessed America’s ongoing war in Iraq in words certain to grab the nation’s attention. “Iraq,” Kennedy declared, “is George Bush’s Vietnam.” The speech came amid ferocious debate in Washington and across the country about the Bush administration’s plan to resolve the war in Iraq, a grueling and bloody affair despite nearly four years of fighting, not by drawing down U.S. troops but through a “surge” in the number of American combat troops in the country. The Massachusetts Democrat insisted that George W. Bush, just like Lyndon Johnson four decades earlier, was responding to frustration by doubling down on a failed enterprise. “In Vietnam,” Kennedy said, “the White House grew increasingly obsessed with victory, and increasingly divorced from the will of the people and rational policy.” In the end, he added, more than 58,000 American died in a quest for unachievable objectives.

A marine from 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines, moves an alleged Viet Cong activist to the rear during a search and clear operation (Wikipedia)

A few months later, President Bush responded in kind as he sought to convince Americans to support his escalatory policy Iraq despite the difficulties that had befallen U.S. troops up to that point. In Vietnam, just as in Iraq, Bush asserted, “people argued that the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end.” In fact, said Bush, the problem in Vietnam was that weak-willed Americans prevented U.S. troops from using sufficient force and forced their withdrawal before they could achieve goals that were within reach. The result was nothing less than human catastrophe: “One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam,” Bush concluded, “is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ “re-education camps,’ and ‘killing fields.’”

Women and children crouch in a muddy canal as they take cover from intense Viet Cong fire at Bao Trai, about 20 miles west of Saigon, Jan. 1, 1966. Paratroopers, background, of the U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade escorted the South Vietnamese civilians through a series of firefights during the U.S. assault on a Viet Cong stronghold. (AP Photo/Horst Faas, via Atlantic In Focus)

This debate demonstrates the intensity of the controversies that still swirl around the Vietnam War nearly 40 years after it ended. Why did U.S. leaders escalate American involvement and keep fighting despite the problems they encountered? Was the war winnable in any meaningful sense if Americans had made different decisions about how to wage it? Did U.S. leaders snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by withdrawing American troops in the early 1970s? Scholars and other writers will likely continue to debate these questions for many years to come.

U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson listens to a tape recording from his son-in-law Captain Charles Robb at the White House on July 31, 1968. Robb was a U.S. Marine Corps company commander in Vietnam at the time. (Jack Kightlinger/AP via Atlantic In Focus)

The dueling speeches from 2007 also underscore the remarkable relevance of the Vietnam War for American politics and foreign policy in the twenty-first century. Both Kennedy and Bush understood that the war could be a powerful rhetorical device to mobilize Americans by tapping into strongly held views about the reasons for America’s defeat. They recognized as well that the war remained a widely acknowledged point of comparison in the United States for thinking about whether and how to mount military interventions abroad. For some Americans, the main lesson of the lost war is that the United States should be extremely cautious about undertaking military commitments in distant, culturally alien places. For others, the key takeaway is that the United States, once it decides to intervene overseas, must fight with maximum force and see its commitments through to the end. Policymakers will no doubt continue to invoke contrasting lessons of the war far into the future.

Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees crowd a U.S. helicopter which evacuated them from immediate combat zone of the U.S.-Vietnamese incursion into Cambodia on May 5, 1970. They were taken to a refugee reception center at the Katum Special Forces camp in South Vietnam, six miles from the Cambodian border. (Ryan/AP via Atlantic In Focus)

The Vietnam War remains, then, both contentious and important – a subject of great interest for scholars but also a matter of enduring significance in politics and policymaking. Studying the war is both a fascinating intellectual undertaking and a valuable exercise in civic responsibility. Yet exploring the history of the war is no simple task, clouded as that history is by generations of polemics and persistent uncertainty about the motives and objectives of leaders on all sides. And then there is the problem of sheer scale. According to one recent estimate, more than 30,000 books have been published about the war, a number will no doubt grow to even more staggering heights as authors gain access to new sources, especially from repositories outside the United States, and open new lines of inquiry.

My books – Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (2005); The Vietnam War: A Concise International History; and The Vietnam War: An International History in Documents (2014) – are aimed at both shedding new light on the war and making its history accessible to twenty-first-century readers. The first book, drawing on sources from numerous archives in the United States and Europe, examines the relationship among France, Britain, and the United States between 1944 and 1950, the years when Western governments first came to see it as a Cold War crisis rather than a war of anticolonial resistance. Likeminded policymakers in each of the three key countries made common cause in order to form an international alliance aimed at defeating the revolutionary nationalists headed by Ho Chi Minh.

Zentralbild, Junge, 28.7.1957, Ho chi Minh in Stralsund und auf der Insel Riems. Der Präsident der Demokratischen Republik Vietnams Ho chi Minh , und seine Begleitung statteten am 27.7.1957 der Volkswerft Stralsund und der Insel Riems einen Besuch ab. Während des Besuchs fand eine Kundgebung mit den Werktätigen der Volkswerft statt, bei der ein Logger vom Stapel gelassen wurde. UBz: Auf einem Minenleg- und -räumboot unserer Nationalen Seestreitkräfte unternahm Präsident Ho chi Minh eine Rundfahrt auf der Ostsee. Inmitten von jungen Matrosen läßt sich Ho chi Minh fotografieren.

Ho Chi Minh with East German sailors, 1957 (Bundesarkhiv)

The second book is a sweeping narrative of the war that, unlike most standard surveys of the subject, attempts to tell the story as an episode not in American history but in global history. It delves into American decision-making and the experiences of ordinary Americans but it also examines the roles of Vietnamese of various political stripes as well as the Chinese, Soviets, and others. The third book collects about 50 primary-source documents reflecting the history of the war from the 1930s until the early twenty-first century. The book, aimed especially at undergraduate students studying the war, is designed to enable readers to draw their own conclusions about controversial matters including the nature of Vietnamese nationalism, the reasons for American anxiety about a communist takeover of South Vietnam, the nature of the South Vietnamese government, the reasons for America’s defeat in Vietnam, and the legacies of the war in the United States and around the world.

Want to read more.? Click here for Mark Lawrence’s must-read books on the war in Vietnam.

The Lessons of History? Debating the Vietnam and Iraq Wars

January 20, 2014

by Mark Atwood Lawrence

Does history offer lessons for the present? This is an old and controversial question, on which historians vigorously disagree. Some routinely try to draw implications from the past for present-day debates, while others suggest that history is too malleable, subjective, and indeterminate to offer much guidance. Indeed, some scholars suggest that the main purpose of history, insofar as it is connected to present-day debates, is simply to remind us of the sheer complexity and unpredictability of events.

Skeptics about the possibility of drawing meaningful, specific, and persuasive lessons from history may be strengthened in their views by the two documents below. Both are speeches by prominent U.S. leaders from 2007, at a time when Americans were fiercely debating President George W. Bush’s plan to increase the number of American troops in Iraq despite persistent failure and frustration in the effort to impose peace and order in the country. In the first passage, part of a speech to the National Press Club in Washington on January 9, Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts proposed legislation to block funding for the increase unless Congress explicitly approved. In the second, Bush defended the surge in a speech to the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars on August 22, by which time Americans were debating whether the increase was paying off.

Both Kennedy and Bush draw on the history of the Vietnam War in defending their positions, but they do so in utterly contradictory fashion. For Kennedy, the Vietnam War taught the need to understand the limits of American power; for Bush, it taught the need to use that power boldly. The starkness of this debate was, of course, nothing new in the annals of American efforts to draw on the history of American involvement in Vietnam in weighing later policy dilemmas. Since even before the end of the war in 1975, Americans have been arguing about the implications for the future conduct of U.S. foreign policy. The answers range across a broad spectrum of possibilities. Policymakers and politicians, journalists and scholars, have invoked the war in Vietnam to warn against action abroad and to urge bold intervention, to decry the influence of domestic politics on policymaking and to highlight the need for greater popular involvement, and to champion counter-insurgency methods and to advocate audacious conventional operations, to cite just three of the most jarring contradictions.

The remarkable malleability of the Vietnam analogy flows from at least two basic characteristics of the war and its place in American life since 1975. First, the Vietnam War was a sprawling event – or, more accurately, long series of events – that persisted over at least two decades and subsumed an enormous variety of experiences. It is therefore hardly surprising that different observers draw conflicting lessons. Much depends on which aspects of the war, in which period of time, one examines and which reminiscences one trusts. In this regard, the Vietnam analogy functions differently from the other historical point of reference cited frequently by U.S. policymakers over the last seven decades: the Munich conference of 1938 that allowed Nazi Germany to annex parts of Czechoslovakia. Whereas the Munich analogy generally carries just one message – appeasement encourages aggression – the Vietnam analogy contains any number of meanings.

Second, policymakers draw different lessons from the war because conflicting points of view are sustained passionately in the larger political culture. Most academic writing on the war advances the view that the political failings of the South Vietnamese state made it virtually impossible for the United States to achieve its objectives, but a larger body of literature – popular studies, battle accounts, and memoirs – points to a wide range of interpretive possibilities. At the same time, ordinary Americans continue to hold an array of basic attitudes about the war. Although majorities of Americans have viewed the war in Vietnam as a mistake ever since the fighting ended, polls show that substantial segments of the population have clung to the idea that the United States could have won if only the military had been allowed to wage the war free of constraints imposed by civilian leaders in Washington. Divisions over the basic meaning of the war are tenacious in part because Vietnam remains a proxy for disputes over fundamental political and cultural values, attitudes that are rarely altered by historical scholarship. Debates over the lessons of the war, that is, tap into deep cleavages about the nature of the American political system, the obligations of citizens toward government, and the validity of traditional patriotic values.

Speech by Senator Edward M. Kennedy on January 9, 2007

The American people sent a clear message in November that we must change course in Iraq and begin to withdraw our troops, not escalate their presence. The way to start is by acting on the President’s new plan. An escalation, whether it is called a surge or any other name, is still an escalation, and I believe it would be an immense new mistake. It would compound the original misguided decision to invade Iraq. We cannot simply speak out against an escalation of troops in Iraq. We must act to prevent it.

Our history makes clear that a new escalation in our forces will not advance our national security. It will not move Iraq toward self-government, and it will needlessly endanger our troops by injecting more of them into the middle of a civil war.

Some will disagree. Listen to this comment from a high-ranking American official: “It became clear that if we were prepared to stay the course, we could help to lay the cornerstone for a diverse and independent [region]. If we faltered, the forces of chaos would smell victory and decades of strife and aggression would stretch endlessly before us. The choice was clear. We would stay the course. And we shall stay the course.”

That is not President Bush speaking. It is President Lyndon Johnson, forty years ago, ordering a hundred thousand more American soldiers to Vietnam.

Here is another quotation. “The big problem is to get territory and to keep it. You can get it today and it will be gone next week. That is the problem. You have to have enough people to clear it and enough people to preserve what you have done.”

That is not President Bush on the need for more forces in Iraq. It is President Johnson in 1966 as he doubled our military presence in Vietnam.

Those comparisons from history resonate painfully in today’s debate on Iraq. In Vietnam, the White House grew increasingly obsessed with victory, and increasingly divorced from the will of the people and any rational policy. The Department of Defense kept assuring us that each new escalation in Vietnam would be the last. Instead, each one led only to the next….

Richard Nixon was elected President after telling the American people that he had a secret plan to end the war. We all know what happened, though. As President, he escalated the war into Cambodia and Laos, and it went on for six more years.

There was no military solution to that war. But we kept trying to find one anyway. In the end, 58,000 Americans died in the search for it.

Echoes of that disaster are all around us today. Iraq is George Bush’s Vietnam.

As with Vietnam, the only rational solution to the crisis is political, not military. Injecting more troops into a civil war is not the answer. Our men and women in uniform cannot force the Iraqi people to reconcile their differences.

The open-ended commitment of our military forces continues to enable the Iraqis to avoid taking responsibility for their own future. Tens of thousands of additional American troops will only make the Iraqis more resentful of America’s occupation. It will also make the Iraqi government even more dependent on America, not less….

This Congress cannot escape history or its own duty. If we do not learn from the mistakes of the past, we are condemned to repeat them. We must act, and act now, before the President sends more troops to Iraq, or else it will be too late….

The heavy price of our flawed decisions a generation ago is memorialized on sacred ground not far from here. On a somber walk through the Vietnam Memorial, we are moved by the painful, powerful eloquence of its enduring tribute to the tens of thousands who were lost in that tragic war that America never should have fought.

Our fingers can gently trace the names etched into the stark black granite face of the memorial. We wonder what might have been, if America had faced up honestly to its failed decisions before it was too late.

Speech by President George W. Bush on August 22, 2007

There are many differences between the wars we fought in the Far East and the war on terror we’re fighting today. But one important similarity is at their core they’re ideological struggles. The militarists of Japan and the communists in Korea and Vietnam were driven by a merciless vision for the proper ordering of humanity. They killed Americans because we stood in the way of their attempt to force their ideology on others.

Today, the names and places have changed, but the fundamental character of the struggle has not changed. Like our enemies in the past, the terrorists who wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places seek to spread a political vision of their own — a harsh plan for life that crushes freedom, tolerance, and dissent.

Like our enemies in the past, they kill Americans because we stand in their way of imposing this ideology across a vital region of the world. This enemy is dangerous; this enemy is determined; and this enemy will be defeated.

We’re still in the early hours of the current ideological struggle, but we do know how the others ended — and that knowledge helps guide our efforts today. The ideals and interests that led America to help the Japanese turn defeat into democracy are the same that lead us to remain engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The defense strategy that refused to hand the South Koreans over to a totalitarian neighbor helped raise up an Asian Tiger that is the model for developing countries across the world, including the Middle East. The result of American sacrifice and perseverance in Asia is a freer, more prosperous and stable continent whose people want to live in peace with America, not attack America….

[The Vietnam War] is a complex and painful subject for many Americans. The tragedy of Vietnam is too large to be contained in one speech. So I’m going to limit myself to one argument that has particular significance today. Then as now, people argued the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end.

The argument that America’s presence in Indochina was dangerous had a long pedigree. In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called The Quiet American. It was set in Saigon, and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism – and dangerous naivete. Another character describes Alden this way: “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.”

After America entered the Vietnam War, the Graham Greene argument gathered some steam. As a matter of fact, many argued that if we pulled out there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people.

In 1972, one antiwar senator put it this way: “What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos, whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they’ve never seen and may never heard of?” A columnist for The New York Times wrote in a similar vein in 1975, just as Cambodia and Vietnam were falling to the communists: “It’s difficult to imagine,” he said, “how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone.” A headline on that story, dateline Phnom Penh, summed up the argument: “Indochina without Americans: For Most a Better Life.”

The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution. In Vietnam, former allies of the United States and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.

Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. There’s no debate in my mind that the veterans from Vietnam deserve the high praise of the United States of America. Whatever your position is on that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like “boat people,” “re-education camps,” and “killing fields.”

There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today’s struggle – those who came to our soil and killed thousands of citizens on September the 11th, 2001. In an interview with a Pakistani newspaper after the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden declared that “the American people had risen against their government’s war in Vietnam. And they must do the same today.”

His number two man, Zawahiri, has also invoked Vietnam. In a letter to al Qaeda’s chief of operations in Iraq, Zawahiri pointed to “the aftermath of the collapse of the American power in Vietnam and how they ran and left their agents.”

Zawahiri later returned to this theme, declaring that the Americans “know better than others that there is no hope in victory. The Vietnam specter is closing every outlet.” Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility – but the terrorists see it differently….

If we were to abandon the Iraqi people, the terrorists would be emboldened, and use their victory to gain new recruits. As we saw on September the 11th, a terrorist safe haven on the other side of the world can bring death and destruction to the streets of our own cities.

You May Also Like:

Mark Lawrence on why LBJ committed to the war in Vietnam

Review of The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era (2022)

In the Shadow of Vietnam: The United States and the Third World in the 1960s

This is Democracy: Vietnam War Legacies

Legacies of the Vietnam War

Studying the Vietnam War: How the Scholarship Has Changed

US Survey Course: Vietnam War

Recommended Reading:

15 Minute History:

50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War from a Vietnamese American Perspective

Must Read Books on the Vietnam War

The War in Vietnam Revisited

The Lessons of History? Debating the Vietnam and Iraq Wars

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