The Hill and Wang Critical Issues Series: concise, affordable works on pivotal topics in American history, society, and politics.
Using newly available documents from both American and Vietnamese archives, Michael H. Hunt's Lyndon Johnson's War reinterprets the values, choices, misconceptions, and miscalculations that shaped the long process of American intervention in Southeast Asia, and renders more comprehensible--if no less troubling--the tangled origins of the war.
The Hill and Wang Critical Issues Series: concise, affordable works on pivotal topics in American history, society, and politics.
Using newly available documents from both American and Vietnamese archives, Michael H. Hunt's Lyndon Johnson's War reinterprets the values, choices, misconceptions, and miscalculations that shaped the long process of American intervention in Southeast Asia, and renders more comprehensible--if no less troubling--the tangled origins of the war.
Lyndon Johnson's War: America's Cold War Crusade in Vietnam, 1945-1968
146
Lyndon Johnson's War: America's Cold War Crusade in Vietnam, 1945-1968
146eBook
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Overview
The Hill and Wang Critical Issues Series: concise, affordable works on pivotal topics in American history, society, and politics.
Using newly available documents from both American and Vietnamese archives, Michael H. Hunt's Lyndon Johnson's War reinterprets the values, choices, misconceptions, and miscalculations that shaped the long process of American intervention in Southeast Asia, and renders more comprehensible--if no less troubling--the tangled origins of the war.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429930680 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2011 |
| Series: | Hill and Wang Critical Issues |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 146 |
| Sales rank: | 766,803 |
| File size: | 292 KB |
About the Author
Michael H. Hunt, Everett H. Emerson Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is a leading scholar of U.S.-East Asian relations. Among his many books are Crises in U.S. Foreign Policy: An International History Reader and The Genesis of Chinese Communist Foreign Policy
Michael H. Hunt, Everett H. Emerson Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is a leading scholar of U.S. foreign relations and international history. His most recent books are The American Ascendancy: How the United States Gained and Wielded Global Dominance and A Vietnam War Reader: A Documentary History from American and Vietnamese Perspectives.
Read an Excerpt
Lyndon Johnson's War
America's Cold War Crusade in Vietnam, 1945-1968
By Michael H. Hunt
Hill and Wang
Copyright © 1996 Michael H. HuntAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-3068-0
CHAPTER 1
THE COLD WAR WORLD OF THE UGLY AMERICAN
In 1958 The Ugly American, a lively, anecdote-filled, and relentless indictment of U.S. failures in Southeast Asia, burst on the American scene. This piece of politically charged, reality-based fiction introduced readers to Vietnam and other parts of Southeast Asia already looming in importance in U.S. foreign policy. Across its pages paraded a small crowd of memorable characters, each with a lesson to teach about why communism was winning in the region and how Americans needed to respond.
Written in a breezy, accessible style, the book was an instant bestseller. A Book-of-the-Month Club selection, it went through twenty printings between July and November 1958, claimed a place on bestseller lists for seventy-eight weeks, and within its first three years sold two and a half million copies. Americans of all types read the book, including policymakers such as John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and perhaps even Dwight Eisenhower. The term "ugly American" soon entered everyday parlance to describe ill-behaved, boorish Americans abroad.
This enormously successful book was a collaboration between a recently retired naval officer, William J. Lederer, and a university professor, Eugene Burdick. Through what Burdick called this "message book," they spoke to the faith and fears of a generation whose lives had been deeply marked by the upheaval of World War II and the onset of the Cold War. The book's instant and sustained popularity tells much about that generation of Americans, including the leaders who would make the decision to fight in Vietnam and the public that would support them, at least at first.
Lederer and Burdick built their account on a Cold War premise almost universally accepted by their readers — that communism was a dangerous, monolithic enemy whose fundamental values challenged those of the United States and whose ultimate goal was world domination. But what gave Lederer and Burdick's account dramatic tension was not the familiar picture of cynical, cunning, power-hungry communists but the stumbling, ineffectual, and frequently counterproductive effort by Americans on the scene to combat that menace. In sketch after sketch, The Ugly American showed how American representatives failed their country. Political appointees, foreign-service careerists, and junketing congressmen all too often lacked cultural sensitivity, command of the local language, a sense of urgency, and an identification with "the people" in the host countries. Perhaps the most memorable of these negative examples was Joe Bing. A diplomat assigned to promote an appreciation of the United States, he failed dismally as a result of his cavalier, almost colonial indifference to local opinion and customs. That he nonetheless moved ahead in his career, while more able colleagues faltered, offered the best testimony to the flaws in the U.S. foreign service.
The authors, however, did not leave their readers without hope. Characters such as Ambassador Gilbert MacWhite, World War II and Korean War veteran Major James (Tex) Wolchek, and idealistic engineer Homer Atkins were the admirable heroes of this influential book. With their notable devotion to duty and their effectiveness at promoting U.S. interests, they helped define an exacting job description for American cold warriors going into the field. To be successful, these warriors for freedom had to be paragons of virtue: tough-minded but humanitarian, friends of the ordinary people yet also able to deal with the elite, advocates of American political ideals but also masters of technology and practical know-how. In the authors' own down-to-earth view, the ideal Americans abroad were salesmen — entrepreneurs of freedom and development — who believed in their product and knew their customers.
The overarching theme of The Ugly American, appealing to readers now as much as it did during the Cold War, was that the success of American policy depended in the final analysis on winning hearts and minds. The battles against communism, warned Ambassador MacWhite, would mainly "take place in the minds of men." Or as the authors themselves, writing in a "factual epilogue," put it:
All over Asia we have found that the basic American ethic is revered and honored and imitated when possible. We must, while helping Asia toward self-sufficiency, show by example that America is still the America of freedom and hope and knowledge of law. If we succeed, we cannot lose the struggle.
Southeast Asia, the region to which The Ugly American so insistently drew attention in 1958, had not been even a blip on the U.S. policy radar two decades earlier. Before 1940, Vietnam in particular was a faraway land, submerged (along with Cambodia and Laos) within France's Indochina holdings, with virtually no record of American involvement and no concrete American presence or interest.
World War II brought Indochina into the picture for the first time. Not long after France fell to German forces, Tokyo extracted from French collaborationist authorities permission to send troops into Indochina. The arrival of the first Japanese units in 1940 suddenly made Indochina a priority for President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his close advisers. Most immediately, Indochina figured as a springboard for control of the region's resources — above all, the oil in the Dutch East Indies needed by Japan's fleet and industry. More generally, Roosevelt realized the region's importance to his prime objective, keeping the British in the war against Germany and the Chinese fighting Japan. Japan's southern thrust imperiled the colonial resources and prestige of his European allies and endangered supply lines to China. With the British and the Dutch able to do little to defend their own colonies, Roosevelt himself sought to deter Japan from taking additional steps south, or — better still — to compel Japan to accept a broad, pan-Asia settlement that would roll back Japanese military expansion.
Once the United States entered the war in December 1941, Indochina receded to a place of peripheral strategic importance. But by 1943, as the Allied coalition glimpsed victory, Indochina reemerged, now as an element in Roosevelt's postwar peace plans. The president himself had made self-determination a wartime rallying cry, to be applied across the board in the making of the peace. He had, moreover, condemned France for mismanagement of its colony. Finally, Roosevelt's distaste for Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French resistance to Hitler's Germany, and for the French people and culture in general reenforced his preference for the decolonization of Indochina.
Roosevelt's anticolonial stand was, however, qualified by a paternalism that was common for his generation and that would prove a consistent strand in later U.S. policy. He doubted the capacity of the peoples of Indochina and other "brown people in the East," such as the Koreans, to exercise freedom with wisdom. Roosevelt thus concluded that they required a prolonged period of tutelage, casually citing twenty to thirty years as the time needed to imbue them with a sense of responsibility. To ensure a responsible parent for these children, Roosevelt turned to an idea from the League of Nations days, a trusteeship exercised by one or several of the victorious powers. Under this neocolonial arrangement, the peoples of Indochina could gradually move toward their national birthright.
Trusteeship, the device for reconciling self-determination with paternalistic doubts, proved a dead end. Roosevelt could not enlist a suitable trustee. China, nominally a major member of the Allied coalition, was the American president's first choice by virtue of proximity. But China's leader, Chiang Kai-shek, had his own problems at home with his longtime Communist rivals and so demurred. That still left the United States, but Roosevelt anticipated little enthusiasm among Americans for making a long-term commitment to a distant region without traditional ties to the United States.
Roosevelt's British partner in the wartime coalition doomed the already-troubled exercise in decolonization. Prime Minister Winston Churchill had not fought Germany in order to abandon Britain's empire on the whim of the Americans. Not only was he adamant on preserving British colonial claims but he opposed the dismantling of the French empire, which he regarded as the outer defenses to Britain's own vast imperial realm. If Churchill could stop Roosevelt over Indochina, then he could weaken self-determination's threat to his own imperial vision. In this battle for colonial survival, France's leader Charles de Gaulle enlisted enthusiastically. He too regarded overseas possessions as a natural prize for those who fought on the winning side. Indochina in particular stood out as a symbol of French prestige, the repository of valued natural resources, and the home of a privileged and influential community of expatriates. Roosevelt admitted defeat rather than strain Allied wartime cooperation and perhaps even poison postwar cooperation. He made clear only weeks before his death that he was ready to acquiesce to restored French control in exchange for a simple pledge of ultimate independence.
The Indochina issue underwent a dramatic transformation during the five years after Roosevelt's death in April 1945. Cooperation of the wartime Allies gave way to intense Cold War fears. During those pivotal five years, American officials carried forward the paternalism that had been so marked a feature of Roosevelt's thinking. Though few Americans had studied the region or knew it firsthand, officials still harbored deep skepticism about the readiness of Indochina's peoples to govern themselves. At the same time, those officials proved as reluctant as Roosevelt had been to forcefully challenge the French colonial stake there. While they thought that France was not making even the minimum practical political concessions essential to win "native" cooperation and to create the preconditions for independence, they regarded the future of the region as one for the French to resolve for themselves. Postwar U.S. officials thus proved every bit as reluctant as Roosevelt to get involved — at least until the intrusion of global anticommunism as a third, new, extraordinarily potent element in the Indochina mix. The growing conviction that the Cold War was a global struggle provided the catalyst that transformed Indochina into an important strategic area whose loss would have fateful consequences for the region and for U.S. security.
These crosscurrents in U.S. policy were already evident in Harry Truman's first months in the White House. Roosevelt's successor himself knew virtually nothing about the region and felt no special sympathy for its peoples' demands for independence. Meanwhile, in the State Department, officials based their thinking increasingly on the Europe-first policy of conciliating France. This approach drew support from wartime reports from American observers in China that had described the anti-Japanese resistance in Vietnam (known as the Viet Minh and led by Ho Chi Minh) as a terrorist organization and as a negligible factor in the future of Indochina. Those same reports called for a firm foreign hand, perhaps French, to guide the Vietnamese people toward a nationhood for which they were not yet ready. Americans serving as liaison to the Viet Minh in 1945 offered a notably more sympathetic appraisal of Ho's organization and goals — but to little effect.
When pressed in late June 1945 to take a stance on Indochina's future, the State Department concluded that the independence promoted by Vietnamese resistance groups would produce instability. It also endorsed the resumption of French control. Although it did express hope that France would recognize the need for concessions to the Indochinese and would afford its subjects the opportunity to prepare themselves for eventual self-government, the department discarded the idea of trusteeship and the tattered principle of self-determination and conceded instead outright sovereignty. Consistent with this pronouncedly pro-French policy, the State Department buried deep in its files appeals from Ho Chi Minh to President Truman asking him to honor the wartime promise of self-determination. And the Truman administration watched passively as the French moved to reclaim Indochina, imposing control by force, first in the southern part of politically restive Vietnam and then in the north. By late 1946, Indochina was at war, with the Vietnamese-led Viet Minh spearheading the assault against the French.
By then global anticommunism was beginning to enter the picture. Washington's suspicions of the Soviet Union were gaining focus and force, in turn pushing Indochina toward greater prominence. From his first weeks in office, Truman had countenanced doubts about Soviet intentions that Roosevelt had ignored. By 1946 the Truman administration had privately come to regard the Soviet Union as a menace and communism as a dangerous doctrine of world conquest. In March 1947 Truman went public in a major address to the country. He called for the defense of all free peoples threatened by communist aggression or internal subversion. The Soviet Union had to be stopped wherever it tried to expand. Climbing on the bandwagon, officials concerned with building a European alliance against the Red Army were quick to make the case for Indochina as a critical part of the Cold War. France deserved support, so they reasoned, as an indispensable element in building a solid anticommunist bloc in western Europe, the main Cold War front. Thus the French, locked in a conflict with Ho's forces, and the Americans, in a contest with the Soviet Union, became different fronts of the same war.
This one-war, many-fronts view encountered resistance from U.S. diplomats reporting out of Indochina in mid-1947 to a perplexed Secretary of State George Marshall. Despite the risk to their careers, they questioned the French course in Vietnam and the French argument that the Soviet Union imperiled the region. Viewed from their vantage points in Hanoi and Saigon, Ho seemed a nationalist first and a communist second. He was "the outstanding representative of the native peoples" and a "symbol of [the] fight for independence." In practical politics he had shown himself "a wily opportunist" adept at "straddling the fence." Although the French tried to help their cause by depicting Indochina as part of the anticommunist struggle, they in fact had made a difficult situation worse by driving Ho further to the left and winning him more popular support. Reverting to Roosevelt's policy, these American diplomats urged some form of international (perhaps UN) supervision for an Indochina not yet ready for self-government. Reflecting their own deep-seated paternalism, they feared that premature independence would result in either chaos or a one-party, totalitarian police state.
Influenced by these on-the-scene assessments, Marshall held back from embracing the simple equation of Ho with communism and thus from automatically making Indochina an integral part of global containment. As late as the summer of 1948, Marshall was impressed that Ho had advanced his cause with no Soviet assistance and enjoyed a "large degree of latitude." Practical considerations confirmed Marshall's caution. Resources were scarce, and western Europe and Japan had first claim, far ahead of such peripheral points as Indochina. In any case, throwing good resources into a struggling French enterprise seemed an unwise decision.
In the course of 1949 and early 1950, the Truman administration made the critical decision that Ho was indeed a tool of Moscow — and thus imposed on the region a Cold War logic that led inexorably to U.S. involvement. This decision reflected deepening international tensions. In 1948 the iron curtain had fallen firmly, dividing Europe in two. Then the first successful Soviet nuclear test and the 1949 victory of the Communist Party in China, just to the north of Indochina, had alarmed policymakers with the vision of a Soviet Union on the offensive. These developments also strengthened the conviction that the French, however self-interested and ineffectual, deserved stronger support as an ally on the containment line.
In February 1950, Washington granted diplomatic recognition to a French-sponsored government for Vietnam headed by former emperor Bao Dai. The secretary of state, now Dean Acheson, explained the step to the president in terms of stopping communism in the most vulnerable part of the region. (He melded into his argument the predictable paternalism by stressing that Vietnam depended on France for guidance to self-government.) Ho was, Acheson announced publicly, "the mortal enemy of native independence in Indochina." At the end of the month, a major report prepared for Truman made a formal case for extending the containment line to Indochina. The report recommended a program of assistance to the embattled French, despite the continuing failure of France to formulate a colonial policy more responsive to "the legitimate nationalist aspirations of the people of Indochina" and more supportive of a Vietnamese government able to rally noncommunist nationalists.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lyndon Johnson's War by Michael H. Hunt. Copyright © 1996 Michael H. Hunt. Excerpted by permission of Hill and Wang.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,PREFACE,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
1 - THE COLD WAR WORLD OF THE UGLY AMERICAN,
2 - HO CHI MINH'S BROCADE BAGS,
3 - LEARNED ACADEMICS ON THE POTOMAC,
4 - "THAT BITCH OF A WAR",
5 - HOW HEAVY THE RECKONING?,
ALSO BY MICHAEL H. HUNT,
RECOMMENDED READING,
NOTES,
INDEX,
Notes,
Copyright Page,