This review appeared in the September 2007 issue of
The American Spectator. To subscribe to our monthly print
edition, click here.
Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War,
1954-1965
By Mark Moyar
(Cambridge University Press, 542 pages, $32)
A GOOD FRIEND VISITED Vietnam some years back, and returned telling
me about his tour of the underground tunnel systems that the Viet
Cong had built for protection against American bombs. The intricacy
of the tunnels reinforced for him the image of the Viet Cong as an
implacable foe that would fight America forever if necessary, no
matter what the cost. “We were never going to win that war,” he
insisted, knowing that I still didn’t buy it.
Buying it is easy, though, when the orthodox Vietnam narrative
is so embedded in our culture. It goes something like this:
Vietnam, an ancient Southeast Asian civilization, had fought
against outside intruders, primarily the Chinese, for most of its
history. In the 19th century the French arrived and became the
country’s rulers. Only after World War II did the Vietnamese throw
off the colonial yoke, winning a long war against the French in
1954. That struggle was led by Ho Chi Minh, a Vietnamese
nationalist whose goal was a unified, independent Vietnam. Ho was
also a Communist, but ideology was only a means to an end. If the
Americans had embraced Ho, he might have become an Asian Tito, a
Communist leader working independent of Soviet or Chinese
influence. But the United States instead threw its support to South
Vietnam, propping up a corrupt and often brutal dictator, Ngo Dinh
Diem, whose repressive tactics brought discredit to the
anti-Communist cause. Misreading the importance of Vietnam,
foolishly buying into the domino theory, myopic about the
distinctions in the Communist world between the Soviets and
Chinese, and unable to understand that it faced a nationalist foe
that would not surrender, the United States escalated its
involvement. Even with enormous commitment of troops and resources,
the U.S. suffered the nation’s first defeat in warfare, sparking a
social and political upheaval at home and providing a cautionary
lesson for the uses of military force. And all that for a country
that wasn’t vital to the United States’ policy goals. Vietnam was
the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.
You had better sit down, because Mark Moyar says you’ve got it
all wrong. Here goes:
Vietnam was indeed dominated by China, but the Chinese allowed a
fair amount of autonomy in exchange for tribute, and the two
countries fought only three wars in the nearly thousand years
before the troubled 20th century. Ho Chi Minh was never going to
become an Asian Tito, because Ho was a Communist above all,
dedicated to the goal of international revolution. He adhered
closely to Chinese directives, and also received considerable
support from the Soviet Union. The corrupt dictator that America
supported, Diem, was a near-great man, a leader of formidable
intellect and political courage. But because he was such a staunch
nationalist, Diem was always clashing with his sponsor — the U.S.
— even though he knew that he could not prevail without American
assistance. The American war planners understood early on that
Communism was not a monolith, and that the potential for a split
existed between the Soviets and Chinese. They focused on the danger
of falling Asian dominoes, a concern borne out by the intentions of
the Chinese and North Vietnamese, as well as the political
fragility of many countries in the region and their leaders’ fears
of a U.S. abandonment of South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese and
their allies were susceptible to discouragement when the U.S. took
strong action. Vietnam was not “a foolish war fought under wise
constraints,” writes Moyar, “but a wise war fought under foolish
constraints.”
Moyar, an associate professor at the U.S. Marine Corps
University in Quantico, is not the first to argue from what has
become known as the revisionist position, but he has the advantage
of much newly available source material from both sides of the
conflict. Triumph Forsaken is the first of an
expected two-volume study. It ends at July 1965, when Lyndon
Johnson announced the first large-scale increase of U.S. combat
troops — a point at which, in Moyar’s view, the best chances for
American success had already passed, though victory was still
within reach.
The U.S. failed in no small part because we viewed the
Vietnamese through Western eyes-not a surprising fault, but
terribly damaging nonetheless. The main source of discord between
Diem and the U.S. was Diem’s refusal to be as democratic as the
Americans wished, even though Diem presided over a traditional
culture that revered authority and did not have democratic
traditions. “You may find that South Vietnam is not quite America,”
Diem protested to a reporter, with typical understatement. The
Americans felt that Diem’s authoritarianism cost him political
support, but Moyar points out that the Vietnamese tended to side
with the strongest ruler, one who had “moral prestige” and brought
order.
THIS CULTURAL DIVIDE was best demonstrated by the Buddhist uprising
of 1963, which played such an important role in destroying American
support for Diem. New information from the North Vietnamese
indicates that the protest movement was significantly infiltrated
and spurred on by the Communists. The protests’ leader, Tri Quang,
was likely a Communist operative, though North Vietnam has never
conceded this. The self-immolation of monk Quang Doc — the iconic
photos of which so shocked the West — may have been coerced by the
Communists, Moyar suggests. Military raids on the pagodas restored
order and put down the unrest, but key figures in the Kennedy
administration, as well as American journalists like the young
David Halberstam, were disgusted by Diem’s tactics. Both, in their
own ways, worked to make a coup inevitable.
The main plotters against Diem in Washington were Averell
Harriman and Roger Hilsman at the State Department and Michael
Forrestal of the National Security Council, who collaborated with
the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, Republican Henry Cabot Lodge.
President Kennedy appointed Lodge ambassador in part to get him out
of the country, as he was widely viewed as a potential rival in
1964. To avoid partisan charges from Lodge about his conduct of the
war, Kennedy gave the ambassador a wide berth — and Lodge made it
wider through his brazen freelancing and misapplication of
presidential directives. Working with South Vietnamese generals,
Lodge helped engineer the coup that ousted Diem from power, and
killed him, in November 1963, just weeks before Kennedy’s
assassination. Ho’s reaction was telling: “I can scarcely believe
that the Americans would be so stupid.”
David Halberstam, whose The Best and the Brightest is a
cornerstone of orthodox history of the war, died this past April.
He was lauded in the New York Times, the paper for which
he had reported from Saigon, “as a gifted storyteller who was
determined to tell his readers the truth.” For Moyar, Halberstam’s
devotion to truth was slipshod at best, though he certainly was
good at telling stories, many based on information from corrupt
sources, including Communist agents. Halberstam’s relentless
undermining of Diem in the New York Times included
inaccurate battlefield reports, gross exaggerations of both the
size of the Buddhist population in Vietnam and government violence
against the protesters, and false reports of dissension within the
army’s officer corps. His work, Moyar argues, affected the
generals’ confidence in Diem, especially since they saw the
Times as the organ of the American government’s position.
In truth, opinion was more divided back in Washington. Kennedy, who
comes off as weak and not in charge of policy, was despondent when
he got news of Diem’s murder. Lyndon Johnson later said of
Halberstam, “That man is a traitor… they give Pulitzer Prizes to
traitors nowadays.”
The elimination of Diem is the original sin in this book, and as
Moyar would have it, of the entire Vietnam War, coloring everything
that followed.
Yet even after Diem’s demise, Moyar makes clear that the U.S.
still had many options in 1964 and 1965. Johnson, however,
frittered away precious time with “proportionate” responses to the
North’s increased belligerence, and the Communists began to take
the president at his word that he wanted “no wider war.” Only in
July 1965 did he feel forced to make his move. By then, allies like
General Marjadi of Indonesia, among others, had urged him along,
telling him that “Asia respects power, and has no respect for
weakness or for strong people afraid to act.”
Johnson spoke with another general in 1965 — former president
Dwight Eisenhower, who gave him prescient advice: “When you go into
a place merely to hold sections or enclaves,” he said, “you are
paying a price and not winning…. This is a war, and as long as
[the North Vietnamese] are putting men down there, my advice is ‘do
what you have to do!’” The old general disliked the idea oflimited
war, and preferred to “go after the head of the snake instead of
the tail.” If the South Vietnamese suffered without Diem, the U.S.
sorely missed the guidance of an Eisenhower, whose strength and
judgment were not nearly so common as he made them appear.
Any book with as relentless a catalogue of mistakes as this one
invites the question of hindsight. Moyar discusses U.S. reluctance
to take more aggressive action against North Vietnam in 1964-65,
fearing that it would provoke the Chinese into sending combat
forces and create another Korea. Johnson was haunted by Douglas
MacArthur’s erroneous prediction that the Chinese would not get
into the Korean fighting. Moyar’s scholarship indicates, however,
that the Chinese dreaded another Korea even more than the Americans
did (emboldened by U.S. timidity, they would eventually send
divisions to protect North Vietnam). Johnson’s concerns, Moyar
writes, were “based not on real evidence of China’s current
intentions and capabilities, but rather on a general fear of
history repeating itself and the recognition that an enemy… can
react in unpredictable ways.” True enough. But Moyar might have
acknowledged history’s tragic dimension by noting the difficulty of
making high-stakes judgments in real time, hindered by imperfect
information and painful memories of the recent past.
In our own time, of course, Vietnam is the painful recent past,
and the orthodox view has colored many interpretations of our
current difficulties in Iraq. It is unlikely Vietnam can teach us
much, though, if our understanding of the conflict is still so
incomplete. Orthodox Vietnam historians, Moyar writes, tend to
dismiss revisionists as politically motivated, since the issues
surrounding the war, in their view, have long since been settled.
The New York Times has not reviewed Moyar’s book, even
though it is a major work that makes clear that this is not the
case. Triumph Forsaken throws down a mighty challenge to
orthodox historians; they should engage Moyar instead of ignoring
him. As they ought to know, truth is its own reward, but it can
also be damn practical.
