The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [176]
In September 1960 the Communist Party Congress in Hanoi called for the overthrow of the Diem regime and of “American imperialist rule.” Formation of the National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam followed in December. Though nominally native to the South, it echoed the call for the overthrow of Diem and the “camouflaged colonial regime of the American imperialists” and announced a ten-point program of Marxist social reforms dressed in the usual garments of “democracy,” “equality,” “peace” and “neutrality.” Overt civil war was thus declared just as a new American President, John F. Kennedy, took office in the United States.
4. “Married to Failure”: 1960–63
The new Administration came into office equipped with brain power, more pragmatism than ideology and the thinnest electoral majority of the 20th century, barely half of one percent. Like the President, his associates were activists, stimulated by crises, eager to take active measures. As far as the record shows, they held no session devoted to re-examination of the engagement they had inherited in Vietnam, nor did they ask themselves to what extent the United States was committed or what was the degree of national interest involved. Nor, so far as appears in the mountains of memoranda, discussions and options flowing over the desks, was any long-range look taken at long-range strategy. Rather, policy developed in ad hoc spurts from month to month. A White House official of the time, asked in later years how the American interest in Southeast Asia was defined in 1961, replied that “it was simply a given, assumed and unquestioned.” The given was that we had to stop the advance of Communism wherever it appeared and Vietnam was then the place of confrontation. If not stopped there, it would be stronger the next time.
As a young Congressman, Kennedy had visited Indochina for himself in 1951, reaching the conclusion obvious to most American observers, that to check the Communist drive South it was essential to “build strong native non-Communist sentiment.” To act “apart from and in defiance of innately nationalistic aims spells foredoomed failure.” It is a dismaying fact that throughout the long folly of Vietnam, Americans kept foretelling the outcome and acting without reference to their own foresight.
By 1956 Kennedy had moved closer to cold war orthodoxy, talking less of “strong native sentiment” and more of dominoes in a variety of metaphor: Vietnam was the “cornerstone of the free world in Southeast Asia, the keystone of the arch, the finger in the dike.” To the usual list of neighbors who would fall “if the red tide of Communism overflowed into Vietnam” he added India and Japan. The current of rhetoric carried him forward into two traps: Vietnam was “a proving ground of democracy in Asia” and “a test of American responsibility and determination in Asia.”
Two weeks before Kennedy entered the White House, the Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev, offered the decisive challenge of the time in the form of his announcement that national “wars of liberation” were to be the vehicle for advancing the Communist cause. These “just wars,” he said, wherever they occurred, in Cuba, Vietnam, Algeria, would receive full Soviet support. Kennedy responded in his Inaugural Address with alarming reference to the defense of freedom “at its hour of maximum danger.”
The first test was, unhappily, a grotesque and humiliating fiasco. Initiated under Eisenhower, the attempt made in April 1961 to liberate Cuba from Communism at the Bay of Pigs was a joint venture of Cuban exiles and the CIA with frivolously insufficient means and overconfident procedures. Though it was not Kennedy’s plan, he was briefed on it before taking office, and given his go-ahead—impelled by the awful momentum that makes carrying