Clearing up historical misconceptions about the “Vietnam War,” America’s most foolish military intervention, 50 years after its end.

The very name Americans usually give the war—“Vietnam”—is misleading. It was fought not just in Vietnam but all over Indochina; certainly, the Vietnamese Communists sought to control the whole region. 

Avoiding the correct designation seems to suit some on both the right and left. Defenders of the war disliked anything that associated the American effort with the “bad colonialist” French and their defeat in the First Indochina War. Indeed, distaste for the French and the earlier war was such that the U.S. Army neglected to learn even the purely military lessons of that struggle,  ignoring even the frank and accurate after-action reports passed on by the French. The left, meanwhile, has been embarrassed by any hint of the Vietnamese Communist Party’s imperial ambitions, and, perhaps worse, that, after all the blather about “peace,” there was in fact a Third Indochina War after the Americans left, between Vietnam, Cambodia, and China. 

Many critics have insisted that America was lured into the war by the “Cold War mentality.” That idea was skillfully skewered by General H. R. McMaster in his excellent book Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam, and is incompatible with the fact that many veterans of the Truman administration, and others who were usually hard-liners on Cold War matters, from Dean Acheson to Senator Richard Russell, were anything but enthusiastic about major intervention in Indochina, or Southeast Asia in general. In fact, the American government rejected sending ground troops to Indochina in 1954 and to Laos in 1961 and 1962.

A more common explanation for America’s involvement, but just as erroneous, has been the “domino theory,” allegedly invented by the Eisenhower administration in 1954. This supposed theory was a specific prediction that if Indochina, or just South Vietnam, fell under Communist control, the whole of Southeast Asia would inevitably follow, probably with dire results elsewhere. That idea confuses the rigid dogma common in later U.S. presidential administrations with Eisenhower’s much more flexible approach. While Eisenhower gave the “domino theory” its name, its real origin, in various versions, was in the preceding Truman administration.

It’s true that on April 7, 1954, Ike publicly spoke of defeat in Indochina as likely to result in the toppling of other countries, like a series of dominoes. But he had qualified that idea the day before in the National Security Council (NSC), and he and Secretary of State Dulles almost immediately did so in public, suggesting that a collapse of that sort could be averted by counteraction. Dulles remarked, in the NSC on Nov. 24, that while he was not optimistic about the futures of “Free Vietnam,” Laos, or Cambodia—those countries were not really of great importance, save as jump-off points for further enemy advances. Nor were events in Indochina a model or test case for what would happen in the rest of the world, as many later insisted, if only because the French had “messed up the situation so thoroughly.” 

Another misconception is that the Second Indochina War was caused by the Americans and South Vietnamese breaking the “Geneva Accords” that supposedly ended the earlier war. There were no such “accords.” The first war was ended by three military armistice agreements (which were not even negotiated at Geneva): one for Vietnam, one for Laos, and one for Cambodia. The Vietnam armistice “temporarily” split that country into two zones, in which the Communist and Franco-Vietnamese forces were to be regrouped until elections could be held—the timing and nature of which were unspecified—and Vietnam reunified. 

The multilateral public conference at Geneva in 1954 was supposed to settle issues in Indochina and arrange permanent peace in Korea, but did no such thing.   Unable to admit that, it issued a pretentious unsigned “Final Declaration” calling for elections in Vietnam in July 1956. Hardly binding even on its authors, the declaration was specifically rejected by the Americans and South Vietnamese, and the South Vietnamese government refused to hold elections. It has not been much noted that, at Geneva, the Americans and British had been ready to have elections in Vietnam as long as they were supervised either by the United Nations or a group of neutral states—but the Communists rejected this!

Neither side fully complied with the armistice, but the Communists’ violations were far bigger. When more people fled to the South than they expected, they cracked down and prevented further departures. They also broke the terms of the armistice agreement that limited the size of their military forces and equipment, increasing their army from seven to 20 divisions, more than twice the size of its South Vietnamese counterpart. 

The Communists did not expect that they would have to wage a long guerrilla war to unite Vietnam under their rule. They were not alone in thinking that South Vietnam was such a shambles that a simple coup, or a conventional invasion from North Vietnam, would do the job. But the Ngô family achieved the unexpected feat of pulling the South together under an authoritarian regime. After that initial success, however, the South struggled. Unable to reconcile its non-Communist opponents, curb corruption, or build a competent army, the Ngô regime failed to govern well. It was unable to imitate the successful land reforms that had taken place in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. The limited reform it did enact was not even fully carried out and, if anything, backfired. The land issue was the most important source of Communist appeal among the South Vietnamese peasants, who made up an overwhelming majority of the population. 

As the weaknesses of the Ngô government became clear, the Vietnamese Communists saw a renewed chance of victory. Since the Soviets and Chinese were indulgent as long as they were not too deeply involved, the Vietnamese Communists decided in 1959 to initiate guerrilla war in the South, and the Second Indochina War began. Whatever the wisdom of American involvement or the conduct of that war—and very little can be said for either—the United States did not start it. 

We might note, here, the conspiracy theories about President Kennedy and the war, that he intended to limit American involvement and that he even intended to withdraw American forces, and that he was assassinated because of this. To the contrary, Kennedy vastly increased the American presence from a few hundred men in a military advisory group to 15,000 in limited combat. By uncritically backing the increasingly incompetent Ngô regime (with which the Eisenhower administration had become disenchanted), Kennedy blew whatever chance there was to defeat the Communists without the massive deployment of American troops in 1965. He eventually turned against the Ngôs, not because of their real faults, which had been obvious for years, but because of the false idea that they were persecuting the Buddhists! 

Firmly believing the most unqualified version of the domino theory, Kennedy did expect to get America out of Vietnam by 1965, but only after the war was won. Until his death, Kennedy and almost everyone in his administration remained under the delusion that the war was going well. He had replaced the military men opposed to a major intervention in Southeast Asia (Army Chief of Staff George Decker, Marine Commandant David Shoup, and Pacific theater commander Harry Felt) with men far more favorable to it. 

One reaction to the war has been to fix the blame for what went wrong on one particular president. In contrast to Kennedy, whose record has been fantastically whitewashed, the favorite target, of course, has been Lyndon Johnson. Johnson made many terrible mistakes, it’s true. Faced with the choice of letting South Vietnam fall or bombing North Vietnam and committing massive ground forces, LBJ made the worst blunders of all. His politicized, short-sighted decision-making and the bad advice of deluded advisers sank any chance that America had of winning the war. It is important to note, however, that no president comes off well in the handling of Indochina. Eisenhower comes off the best, if only in the sense of being the least bad. But Johnson was not solely to blame. To call it “LBJ’s war” is yet another evasion. 

Johnson became a classic “guilty scapegoat.” Everyone is familiar with the idea of an innocent scapegoat. But there are also guilty scapegoats—men who make so many mistakes that they get all the blame for things that go wrong. One of LBJ’s faults was merely that he listened to the incompetent civilian advisers he had inherited from Kennedy. Their bad ideas included the idea that America must exercise force as a form of “signaling” its strength to the enemy; that the enemy would lose the will to fight and give up; and that civilian “experts” could successfully micromanage the war from Washington. 

Johnson did not want the war. For him, it was an annoying distraction from his beloved domestic reform program. He actually cut the military budget in 1964. But he eventually felt pressed to act in Vietnam, after putting off decisions about it as long as possible. In addition to the pressure to act he got from his civilian and military advisers, he feared losing in Vietnam would wreck his “Great Society” plans. 

As the war dragged on, it suited many to forget that LBJ’s decision to commit ground forces and to bomb North Vietnam was not immediately unpopular. Johnson’s military plans, like Kennedy’s, were at first accepted by a majority of Congress and the public. As opinion turned against the war, many politicians running for cover would misleadingly claim that they had been deceived by LBJ, had not known things that the administration had told congressional committees in executive session, or had been against he war all along.

What is often regarded as the key deception of the war is the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which essentially gave Johnson a blank check for military action. The common narrative about this is, once again, misleading. The resolution passed by Congress was actually titled the Southeast Asia Resolution. It was not motivated by, but just referred to, the military confrontation between U.S. and North Vietnamese forces in the Gulf of Tonkin on Aug. 2 and Aug. 4 of 1964. It is now known that the Aug. 4 incident did not actually happen, though Johnson believed it had. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and some of Johnson’s other advisers were dishonest or evasive with the public and Congress about the incident. But the basic issue in the resolution was backing the defense of Southeast Asia and deterring—or fighting—the North Vietnamese Communists, and not what had happened in the Tonkin Gulf. Whatever they said later, only a few congressmen then disagreed with LBJ on the principal issue.

Self-deception, wishful thinking, and plain confusion were not limited to the civilians. Johnson, like Kennedy, distrusted the military leaders. They failed to sufficiently impress upon LBJ the unwelcome news that the war was bound to take very large forces and a long time—perhaps half a million men and five years.

Self-deception, wishful thinking, and plain confusion were not limited to the civilians. Johnson, like Kennedy, distrusted the military leaders. They failed to sufficiently impress upon LBJ the unwelcome news that the war was bound to take very large forces and a long time—perhaps half a million men and five years. They never seem to have taken account of the warnings given by two war game simulations in 1964 showing that victory was far from assured. 

Anyone who thinks that the armed forces were well-led during the war, and defeat was due solely to civilian misjudgments, should read the memoirs of professional officers who served in it. General Colin Powell and others who later rebuilt the U.S. Army, were under no such delusions. The accounts of Air Force officers like Colonel Jack Broughton and combat pilot Marshall L. Michel III are particularly damning. 

The nature of the war is often misunderstood or oversimplified. There have been two basic narratives, rarely reconciled. First, and originally, that it was overwhelmingly a guerrilla war between the South Vietnamese government and the Vietcong, who were largely locally recruited Southerners directed and aided by the North. This view of the war, propounded by historians like Andrew Krepinevich and Larry Cable, tends to overlook the slight point that, in the end, the Vietcong were not victorious. They were fought to a standstill.  It was an invasion of conventional forces from the North that finally overwhelmed South Vietnam.

The other view, which seems to work backward from 1975, pictures it as basically a conventional war, and waves away or minimizes the guerrilla aspect of the conflict. This view is loosely associated with the political right and seems to be common, though hardly universal, among professional soldiers, notably Harry Summers and Dave Palmer. It is, perhaps, reinforced by a tendency of much writing on the war to focus on large-scale operations that are of a conventional sort, or which can be shoehorned into that category, such as the battles of Ia Drang, Khe Sanh, the Tet offensive, the Cambodian campaign of 1970, and of course, the fighting from 1972 on. 

In reality, the Second Indochina War combined both guerrilla and conventional fighting in a way that was different from other wars, including the First Indochina War. In many ways, the efforts of the guerrillas, though not successful in the way the Communists originally expected, paved the way for the North’s victory by wearing out the patience of the Americans, not to mention the war-weary South Vietnamese. The distaste for the “guerrilla” aspects of the war, and the war as a whole, exacted a great price later. 

In Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. Army in particular had to painfully relearn lessons that should have been absorbed in Indochina, but these had been forgotten in the belief that the struggle there had been unique and nothing at all similar would be undertaken again. Chief among these is that the Army could just stick to conventional warfare. Curiously, while Afghanistan and Iraq did differ from the Second Indochina War in many ways, some of the behavior of Johnson’s civilian advisers was mirrored by characters in the Bush administration, notably Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. His behavior was perhaps even more bizarre than that of Robert McNamara. 

It is popular to say that all wars are stupid. Maybe so, but the Second Indochina War was unusually stupid. It was the stupid war par excellence. It was neither necessary nor inevitable—and it was probably not unwinnable. As we now know, it was not necessary for our side in the Cold War to hold off the enemy in Indochina. The domino theory was erroneous, as some suspected all along. Even if Indochina had been important, with a minimum of common sense in the late 1950s and early 1960s, South Vietnam might have been strengthened to the point that the Communists might not have been able to undertake war in 1959, or would have been beaten without the need for a massive American intervention. Had that intervention been better directed after 1965, the war might well have been won. 

It has been amply noted that most, and probably all, of the arguments made “for” the war were foolish. Certainly this is true. It is less often pointed out that, while there was a hard core of sensible and entirely justified reasons to oppose the war, much of what was said against it was also foolish, contradictory, or worse. 

For example, while quite a few people correctly pointed out that the domino theory was wrong, other opponents of the war, such as Walter Lippmann and Hans Morgenthau, argued that all Southeast Asia would inevitably fall under the domination of the Chinese Communists and that any attempt to stop this would inevitably lead to war with China, and perhaps even with the Soviet Union. This view was quite as absurd as those arguing that military intervention was necessary. Other critics objected to America’s backing of South Vietnam’s undemocratic government, or to the supposed efforts to impose American values on an alien society. 

To describe those who opposed the war as part of a unified, coherent anti-war movement is another oversimplification—even a delusion. Opponents of American policy ranged, in motive, from patriots who regarded the war as a mistake, to far-leftists who rather obviously wanted an American defeat and who even enjoyed the war, thinking it was a wonderful opportunity to “expose” America as an evil society and to turn people against it. 

For that matter, many of the people who turned from backing the war to opposing it never really understood it at all and sometimes changed their minds for frivolous reasons, or the collapse of their fantasies that the war could be managed without much inconvenience and ended quickly.  Senator Thruston Morton, describing his change of mind, remarked that he had favored bombing North Vietnam, “I thought that once  we  started, the war would be over in six months.”