The argument about Vietnam I should have won

It was all Neville Chamberlain’s fault

I lost an argument about the Vietnam war, but I really shouldn’t have. This was in the early 1990’s and my point at the time was that I believed I understood why the US got involved, and then stayed involved, in Vietnam. I was not trying to excuse US actions during the war (which were awful), or US strategy (which was inept). I was only saying that the US policy makers were guided by what they believed were good reasons for US involvement.

The person I was arguing with would not see that I was not favoring the war or US policy. She was rightly against US involvement, but that prevented her from seeing my point about the original thought process behind that involvement.

My point was that during the Cold War everyone in the West was afraid of backing down from the Soviets. Beyond the tactical considerations, Western policy makers were all afraid of looking like Neville Chamberlain in 1938 (“peace for our time”). Instead, they all wanted to be Winston Churchill in 1940 (“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”). The memory of World War II was fresh in everyone’s mind, even into the 1960’s. And each of them had a vivid memory of Neville Chamberlain waving that idiotic piece of paper in the air after arriving home from Munich.

Each of the American actors, from Eisenhower, to Kennedy, to Johnson, and everyone down the chain, viewed the Soviets as the new evil force in the world, much as the Nazis were the evil force in the 1930’s. Appeasement was imprinted in their minds as failed strategy. They believed that fighting back was always and everywhere the correct response. Kennedy put the sentiment into words, "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

Kennedy was more eloquent than most, but they were all thinking, and doing, the same thing. Almost from the end of World War II the Soviets were recognized as a new threat, potentially as bad as the Nazis. Resisting the Soviet threat was what the creation of NATO was about, was what the Marshall Plan was about, was what the Berlin airlift was about, was what the Korean war was about. Everyone was desperate to prevent another world war and just as desperate to avoid looking like Neville Chamberlain while doing it.

So when communist trouble looked like it was popping up in Vietnam in the 1950s, the Eisenhower people send US personnel there to keep things from bubbling over. The Kennedy people continued and expanded the effort. The Johnson administration escalated it to a full blown war. But all of them thought what they were doing in Vietnam was just another facet of the regular containment policy they had all been following since 1946. Each of them thought Vietnam was just another Korea, or another Berlin airlift. And it was, until it wasn’t.

So my point in the argument was not that the American war in Vietnam was right or moral or correctly executed, but that it arose from a framework that policy makers believed to be based on a sound plan of overall containment. The idea is that US leadership didn’t purposely create a catastrophe in Vietnam because of bad intent. The intent was at least rational, and based on a policy that they thought was both working and workable. Instead, the problem was that they completely misread the situation in Vietnam and that is what lead to the disaster

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