An Unwinnable War: Why the United States Was Doomed To Fail in Vietnam

Vietnam was a war of choice. Understanding it requires a reckoning with this stubborn fact. The United States was not provoked into war, and none of the Cold War justifications of containment or the “domino theory” required the US military to intervene. If South Vietnam fell to a communist insurgency, the Chinese or the North Vietnamese were not going to “land on the beaches of Waikiki”—as Vice President Lyndon Johnson rather daringly warned in 1961. It was not a war fought in self-defense or for democratic ideals. What motivated the United States to go to war and stay there was a fear of appearing weak.

John F. Kennedy was the first president to fully appreciate the danger Vietnam posed, not to the United States but to himself. Just as Eisenhower had feared Senator Joe McCarthy’s Red-baiters, Kennedy and Johnson feared being tarred as liberal doves by conservatives. Johnson scaled up the war effort out of the same fear, while Nixon dreaded becoming “the first president to lose a war.”

It was a peculiar war from the start, inseparable from the government debates and political calculations that launched it. Kennedy set the tone when he tiptoed in, hoping to “hold the line” until he was safely reelected for a second term in 1964, at which point he planned to “explore all options,” including getting out. His likely opponents in 1964 ridiculed his caution in the matter of Vietnam. After Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, they were even harder on his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Johnson took no comfort from the entirely American irony that he routed Barry Goldwater in the 1964 elections chiefly because the public feared that Goldwater would drag the country into the Vietnam War. And yet the moment LBJ was inaugurated, the braying for an escalation of the war resumed from the right. Ronald Reagan demanded “full mobilization” and a blockade of Haiphong harbor: “I don’t see how a nation our size, engaged with a nation that size, can talk about a ten- or twenty-year war. We ought to go in and get it over with.” Richard Nixon warned that Vietnam would be the issue in 1968 if Johnson didn’t “win the war, and end it.” LBJ’s waking nightmare for the rest of his presidency was that he’d be running for reelection against one of these hawks “with Ho Chi Minh running through the streets of Saigon.”

In the world of the 1960s, America was incomparably rich, commanding 40 percent of global GDP, compared with about 15 percent today. American wealth added to American confidence made anything seem possible. President Kennedy, after all, had pledged in 1962 to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade, and it was done—American astronauts walked on the moon in 1969. Militarily, the United States had fueled and equipped the Allies in World War II and put 16 million troops into Europe and Asia to defeat the Germans and Japanese. No one expected North Vietnam, which armed the twenty-year insurgency in South Vietnam, to pose much of a problem. It was, President Johnson snorted, “a raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country.”

And yet the United States had to fight North Vietnam cautiously. Politicians of both parties talked tough when it came to communism, but the Korean War, waged from 1950 to 1953, made presidents exceedingly cautious. In Korea, American-led forces had effectively won the war by October 1950, at which point Mao Zedong unexpectedly launched 300,000 Chinese troops into Korea and turned a short war into a long one that exasperated Americans, drove President Harry Truman from office, and was terminated with no formal peace treaty and a permanent garrison of American troops on the 38th parallel.

When President Johnson weighed sending American troops, aircraft, and ships to Vietnam in 1965, Korea was foremost in his mind. The Korean War had sunk the Truman presidency, and President Eisenhower had ended that war only by threatening to use nuclear weapons. With big, costly plans for his Great Society and War on Poverty, Johnson wanted to keep the conflict in Vietnam short and cheap. Above all, he wanted to forestall a Chinese intervention that would lengthen the war and suck funds from his cherished domestic programs. Like Eisenhower and Kennedy before him, he yearned to wash his hands of the war. But he didn’t dare.

The consequences would have been severe. Senator Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare had only flickered out in 1954, and Washington in the 1960s was still in the grip of a “China Lobby” inflamed by Mao Zedong’s victory over Chiang Kai-shek in 1949. Henry Luce’s popular Time and Life magazines, which gave busy Americans their worldview, purveyed the opinions of the China Lobby, chief among them the need to prevent any more defeats in Asia to communism. American voters wanted their politicians tough too. They didn’t want Goldwater, but they didn’t want to lose either. Getting out of Vietnam never would have been easy.

And so LBJ launched America’s Vietnam War under the most bizarre circumstances. To fight the war on a low-cost basis without giving China any excuse to intervene, he opted for “graduated pressure” in North Vietnam. Instead of overwhelming the North with military power, LBJ would increase air strikes and ground troops gradually, each added increment theoretically demonstrating to the North Vietnamese the futility of resistance to the richest power in the world, which, the enemy would have to assume, was only getting started. Johnson didn’t come up with this strategy on his own. It was fashioned for him by the presidential advisers he had inherited from Kennedy, chiefly Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy.

LBJ hoped that graduated pressure would also reassure the Chinese and Soviets that he was not aiming at the total destruction of North Vietnam. He hoped that his decision not to attack the neutral sanctuaries of Laos and Cambodia, where North Vietnamese troops and supplies moved on their way into South Vietnam, would serve as proof that Washington sought nothing more than a “free and independent South Vietnam.” Naturally, this graduated pressure strategy succeeded only in persuading Hanoi, Beijing, and Moscow that Washington was not serious. A superpower that shrank from invading or even heavily bombing North Vietnam and that feared the odium of invading the “neutral” sanctuaries of Laos and Cambodia to close the Ho Chi Minh Trail was clearly a superpower fighting with one arm tied behind its back.

Graduated pressure, unfortunately, was never applied in South Vietnam. America’s ally in the war was exposed to the full fury of the American arsenal: B-52s, batteries of field artillery, helicopter gunships, airmobile assaults, and “herbicide operations” with Agent Orange that stripped and poisoned much of the lush green country. Whatever affection the South Vietnamese people had for Americans withered away on a battlefield that spanned the entire country and led to the death of half a million civilians, mainly from American firepower.

The contrast between the deference and delicacy afforded North Vietnam and the ultraviolence unleashed in South Vietnam highlighted one of the war’s great sins—its lack of strategy. Kennedy saw it not as a war but as a problem to be managed. Johnson saw it as a war that had to be artfully contained. “I am going to control from Washington,” he said in 1965, a position from which he never deviated.

Neither JFK nor LBJ came up with a winning strategy, some way to fit military operations to political outcomes. The presidents talked about fighting to create a free South Vietnam, but they knew—and, one or two years into the war, most Americans knew—that the South Vietnamese nation was hopelessly corrupt and divided. As a result, there was no viable strategy, no way to segue from war to peace in an environment where the Viet Cong communists were always more feared and respected than the government in Saigon.

Starting in 1965, General William “Westy” Westmoreland filled the strategic void with his concept of “search and destroy.” Westmoreland reasoned that if he would not be given the forces and authority to defeat North Vietnam and invade the neutral sanctuaries, he would defeat the enemy by killing so many of them that Hanoi would reach a “crossover point,” where American-inflicted casualties would outnumber Viet Cong recruiting and North Vietnamese infiltration.

Search and destroy was what the American military did in Vietnam from 1965 to 1969. In view of its colossal ineffectiveness—only about 10 percent of search and destroy operations actually found the enemy—the body count it did inflict on the communists was a grim tribute to the efficacy of American firepower. An estimated 1 million enemy troops were chewed up by American ground and air attacks during the war.

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Excerpted from The Vietnam War: A Military History by Geoffrey Wawro. Copyright © 2024. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.