HISTORY ARTICLE SUMMARIES

“It Was Vital Not to Lose Vietnam by Force to

Communism”: Leslie Gelb Analyzes the Roots of U.S.

Involvement in Vietnam

During World War II, the U.S. collaborated with the resistance group the Vietminh and

their leader, Ho Chi Minh, in their fight against Japan. In the postwar period, however,

the U.S. feared Communist expansion into Southeast Asia. In 1954, as France withdrew

its forces in defeat, the Geneva Accords established the countries of Laos, Cambodia, and

Vietnam. Vietnam was partitioned into north and south sectors until elections to be held

by 1956. Fearing a victory by Ho Chi Minh, the Eisenhower administration collaborated

with the South Vietnam leadership to prevent elections and subsequently sent military aid

and advisors. Under President John F. Kennedy, the number of “advisors” increased to

more than 16,000, some of whom engaged in counterinsurgency efforts and actual

combat. Although Kennedy opposed large scale U.S. involvement, his successor, Lyndon

Johnson, began regular bombings and escalated troops to more than 500,000 by 1967.

Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, scaled back to 39,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam by

September 1972, but initiated bombing raids into Cambodia in 1969 and sent ground

troops there in 1970. The U.S. and North Vietnam reached a cease-fire agreement in

January 1973, and the South Vietnamese regime fell in April 1975. More than one

million people died during the war, including an estimated 925,000 North Vietnamese,

184,000 South Vietnamese, and 57,000 American soldiers. In the following excerpt,

Leslie Gelb, a State Department official during the Vietnam War and Defense

Department official afterward, offered an insider’s appraisal to a Senate committee of the

reasons for the U.S. involvement.

CAUSES OF THE WAR: THE RANGE OF EXPLANATIONS

Central to this inquiry is the issue of causes of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. I have

found eight discernible explanations advanced in the Vietnam literature. Different

authors combine these explanations in various ways, but I will keep them separate

for the purpose of analysis. I will, then, sketch my own position.

The Arrogance of Power

This view holds that a driving force in American involvement in Vietnam was the

fact that we were a nation of enormous power and like comparable nations in

history, we would seek to use this power at every opportunity. To have power is to

want to employ it, is to be corrupted by it. The arrogance derives from the belief

that to have power, is to be able to do anything. Power invokes right and justifies

itself. Vietnam was there, a challenge to this power and an opportunity for its

exercise, and no task was beyond accomplishment.

There can be no doubt about this strain in the behavior of other great powers and in

the American character. But this is not a universal law. Great powers, and

especially the United States have demonstrated self-restraint. The arrogance of

power, I think, had more to do with our persisting in the war than with our initial

involvement. It always was difficult for our leaders back in Washington and for

operatives in the field to believe that American resources and ingenuity could not

devise some way to overcome the adversary.

Bureaucratic Politics

There are two, not mutually exclusive, approaches within this view. One has it that

national security bureaucrats (the professionals who make up the military services,

civilian Defense, AID, State and the CIA) are afflicted with the curse of machismo,

the need to assert and prove manhood and toughness. Career advancement and

acceptability within the bureaucracy depended on showing that you were not afraid

to propose the use of force. The other approach has it that bureaucrats purposefully

misled their superiors about the situation in Vietnam and carefully constructed

policy alternatives so as to circumscribe their superiors, thus forcing further

involvement in Vietnam.

The machismo phenomenon is not unknown in the bureaucracy. It was difficult, if

not damaging, to careers to appear conciliatory or “soft.” Similarly, the constriction

of options is a well-known bureaucratic device. But, I think, these approaches

unduly emphasize the degree to which the President and his immediate advisers

were trapped by the bureaucrats. The President was always in a position to ask for

new options or to exclude certain others. The role of the bureaucracy was much

more central to shaping the programs or the means used to fight the war than the

key decisions to make the commitments in the first place.

Domestic Politics

This view is quite complicated, and authors argue their case on several different

levels. The variants are if you were responsible for losing Vietnam to communism,

you would: (a) lose the next election and lose the White House in particular; (b)

jeopardize your domestic legislative program, your influence in general, by having

to defend yourself constantly against political attack; (c) invite the return of a

McCarthyite right-wing reaction; and (d) risk undermining domestic support for a

continuing U.S. role abroad, in turn, risking dangerous probes by Russia and China.

There can be no doubt, despite the lack of supporting evidence in the Pentagon

Papers, about the importance of domestic political considerations in both the initial

commitment to and the subsequent increase in our Vietnam involvement. Officials

are reluctant, for obvious reasons, to put these considerations down in writing, and

scholars therefore learn too little about them. It should also be noted that domestic

political factors played a key part in shaping the manner in which the war was

fought—no reserve call-ups, certain limitations on bombing targeting, paying for

the war, and the like.

Imperialism

This explanation is a variant of the domestic politics explanation. Proponents of this

view argue that special interest groups maneuvered the United States into the war.

Their goal was to capture export markets and natural resources at public expense

for private economic gain.

The evidence put forward to support this “devil theory” has not been persuasive.

Certain groups do gain economically from wars, but their power to drive our

political system into war tends to be exaggerated and over-dramatized.

Men Making Hard Choices Pragmatically

This is the view that our leaders over the years were not men who were inspired by

any particular ideology, but were pragmatists weighing the evidence and looking at

each problem on its merits. According to this perspective, our leaders knew they

were facing tough choices, and their decisions always were close ones. But having

decided 51 to 49 to go ahead, they tried to sell and implement their policies one

hundred percent.

This view cannot be dismissed out-of-hand. Most of our leaders, and especially our

Presidents, occupied centrist political positions. But Vietnam is a case, I believe,

where practical politicians allowed an anti-communist world view to get the best of

them.

Balance of Power Politics

Intimately related to the pragmatic explanations is the conception which often

accompanies pragmatism—the desire to maintain some perceived balance-of-power

among nations. The principal considerations in pursuing this goal were: seeing that

“the illegal use of force” is not allowed to succeed, honoring commitments, and

keeping credibility with allies and potential adversaries. The underlying judgment

was that failure to stop aggression in one place would tempt others to aggress in

ever more dangerous places.

These represent the words and arguments most commonly and persuasively used in

the executive branch, the Congress, and elsewhere. They seemed commonsensical

and prudential. Most Americans were prepared to stretch their meaning to

Vietnam. No doubt many believed these arguments on their own merits, but in most

cases, I think, the broader tenet of anti-communism made them convincing.

The Slippery Slope

Tied to the pragmatic approach, the conception of balance of power, and the

arrogance of power, is the explanation which holds that United States involvement

in Vietnam is the story of the slippery slope. According to this view, Vietnam was

not always critical to U.S. national security; it became so over the years as each

succeeding administration piled commitment on commitment. Each administration

sort of slid farther into the Vietnam quagmire, not really understanding the depth of

the problems in Vietnam and convinced that it could win. The catchwords of this

view are optimism and inadvertence.

While this explanation undoubtedly fits certain individuals and certain periods of

time, it is, by itself, a fundamental distortion of the Vietnam experience. From the

Korean War, stated American objectives for Vietnam were continuously high and

absolute. U.S. involvement, not U.S. objectives, increased over time. Moreover, to

scrutinize the range of official public statements and the private memos as revealed

in the Pentagon Papers makes it difficult to argue that our leaders were deceived by

the enormity of the Vietnam task before them. It was not necessary for our leaders

to believe they were going to win. It was sufficient for them to believe that they

could not afford to lose Vietnam to communism.

Anti-Communism

The analysts who offer this explanation hold that anti-communism was the central

and all-pervasive fact of U.S. foreign policy from at least 1947 until the end of the

sixties. After World War II, an ideology whose very existence seemed to threaten

basic American values had combined with the national force of first Russia and then

China. This combination of ideology and power brought our leaders to see the world

in “we-they” terms and to insist that peace was indivisible. Going well beyond

balance of power considerations, every piece of territory became critical, and every

besieged nation, a potential domino. Communism came to be seen as an infection to

be quarantined rather than a force to be judiciously and appropriately balanced.

Vietnam, in particular, became the cockpit of confrontation between the “Free

World” and Totalitarianism; it was where the action was for 20 years.

In my opinion, simple anti-communism was the principal reason for United States

involvement in Vietnam. It is not the whole story, but it is the biggest part.

As of this point in my own research, I advance three propositions to explain why,

how, and with what expectations the United States became involved in the Vietnam

war.

First, U.S. involvement in Vietnam is not mainly or mostly a story of step by step,

inadvertent descent into unforeseen quicksand. It is primarily a story of why U.S.

leaders considered that it was vital not to lose Vietnam by force to Communism.

Our leaders believed Vietnam to be vital not for itself, but for what they thought its

“loss” would mean internationally and domestically. Previous involvement made

further involvement more unavoidable, and, to this extent, commitments were

inherited. But judgments of Vietnam’s “vitalness”—beginning with the Korean

War—were sufficient in themselves to set the course for escalation.

Second, our Presidents were never actually seeking a military victory in Vietnam.

They were doing only what they thought was minimally necessary at each stage to

keep Indochina, and later South Vietnam, out of Communist hands. This forced our

Presidents to be brakemen, to do less than those who were urging military victory

and to reject proposals for disengagement. It also meant that our Presidents wanted

a negotiated settlement without fully realizing (though realizing more than their

critics) that a civil war cannot be ended by political compromise.

Third, our Presidents and most of their lieutenants were not deluded by optimistic

reports of progress and did not proceed on the basis of wishful thinking about

winning a military victory in South Vietnam. They recognized that the steps they

were taking were not adequate to win the war and that unless Hanoi relented, they

would have to do more and more. Their strategy was to persevere in hope that their

will to continue—if not the practical effects of their actions—would cause the

Communists to relent.

Source: Statement by Leslie H. Gelb to Senate Committee on Foreign Relations,

May 1972.

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