The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [195]
By 1964, ten years had passed since America undertook to save South Vietnam after Geneva. Circumstances had changed. The Soviet Union had been faced down in the Berlin and Cuban missile crises; Soviet influence over the European Communist parties was much less; NATO was firmly established. Why then were stakes still considered so high in remote unimportant Vietnam? Communism had made European advances without engendering the hysteria that seemed to infect us out of Asia. If Communist advance anywhere was so to be feared, why did we fling a harebrained strike at Cuba and make our stand in Vietnam? Perhaps, perversely, because it was Asia, where Americans took it for granted they could impose their will and the might of their resources on what a United States Senator, Thomas Dodd of Connecticut, referred to in his wisdom as “a few thousand primitive guerrillas.” To be frustrated in Asia seemed unacceptable. The stake had become America’s exercise of power and its manifestation called “credibility.” Despite old counsel that a land war in Asia was unwinnable, despite disillusioning experience in China and Korea, despite French experience on the very spot where Americans now stood, this perception of what was at stake was overriding.
Reminiscent of British visions of ruin if they lost the American colonies, prophecies of exaggerated catastrophe if we lost Vietnam served to increase the stakes. Johnson voiced this over-reaction in his initial scenario of pulling back to San Francisco; Rusk voiced it in 1965 in his advice to the President that withdrawal “would lead to our ruin and almost certainly to catastrophic war,” and again in 1967 when he drew a picture at a press conference of “a billion Chinese armed with nuclear weapons.” The New York Times’ military correspondent, Hanson Baldwin, voiced it in 1966, writing that withdrawal from Vietnam would result in “political, psychological and military catastrophe” and would mean that the United States “had decided to abdicate as a great power” and be “reconciled to withdrawal from Asia and the Western Pacific.” Fear too conjured visions: “I am scared to death,” said Senator Joseph Clark in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that “we are on our way to nuclear World War Three.”
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North Vietnam was now sending units of its regular army across the line to exploit the disintegration of the South. To prevent collapse of America’s client, President Johnson and his circle of advisers and the Joint Chiefs came to the conclusion that the moment had come when they must enter upon coercive war. It would be war from the air though it was understood that this would inevitably draw in ground forces. Civilian and military agencies began drawing operational plans, but though Saigon’s situation was growing daily more precarious, action could not be initiated yet because Johnson faced the presidential election of 1964. Since his opponent was the bellicose Senator Barry Goldwater, he had to appear as the peace candidate. He took up the chant about “their” war: “We are going … to try to get them to save their own freedom with their own men.” “We are not going to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” “We don’t want our American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys.” When, six months later, American boys were sent into combat with no dramatic change of circumstances, these phrases were easily recalled, beginning the erosion of Johnson’s own credibility. Long