De Gaulle’s decision to reestablish France’s colonial rule in Indochina had provoked an immediate confrontation with Ho Chi Minh’s aspirations for an independent Communist Vietnamese government. And though the United States had supported Ho against the Japanese during the war and even had military representatives on a reviewing stand in Hanoi when Ho declared Vietnamese independence in September 1945, Washington quickly deferred to French insistence on support for control of its Indo-Chinese colonies—Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. From September 1945 to November 1946, an uneasy truce marked Ho’s relations with the French: they controlled Vietnam south of the seventeenth parallel, and Ho enjoyed limited dominance in the north, where he governed a nominally independent state as part of the French Union.
Neither side, however, was content with the arrangement. Paris would not agree to anything that meant independence for Vietnam or an end to colonial rule, while Ho was determined to achieve full sovereignty for his country. In November 1946, after a series of attacks by insurgents aiming to compel a grant of independence, a French naval bombardment of Haiphong, the principal port city in the north, triggered a full-scale rebellion against French rule.
Although unable to suppress Ho’s insurgency, the French created a puppet government under Bao Dai in Saigon, which depended on French military power to hold off Ho’s Viet Minh Communist opposition. At the end of 1949, however, when the Chinese, eager to expand Communist rule to Indochina, began providing advisers and increased military aid to Ho’s forces, it threatened to end French control. Having already spent $1.5 billion trying to suppress the rebellion, Paris resolved to meet the challenge and lobbied Washington for financial and military aid.
In 1950, the outbreak of fighting in Korea strengthened Mao’s determination to aid Ho’s rebellion in order to ensure a friendly regime on China’s southern border. Over the next two years Ho’s Viet Minh, supported by continuing advice and matériel from the Chinese, fought a series of engagements that gave the Communists substantial control of northeast Vietnam. Expanding their operations to northwest Vietnam in the first half of 1953, the Viet Minh and Chinese saw the end of the Korean fighting in July as an opportunity to focus on ousting France from all of Southeast Asia.
At the start of 1950, the Communist victory in China had convinced American planners that the defense of Southeast Asia was vital in the worldwide contest with Moscow and Peking. If the Communists were to seize control of the region, a National Security Council directive declared, “we shall have suffered a major political rout the repercussions of which will be felt throughout the world.” In January 1950, Soviet recognition of the Viet Minh as the legitimate government of Vietnam confirmed Washington’s view that France’s battle against Ho’s insurgents was crucial to preserving all of Southeast Asia from Communist domination. In March, the Truman administration began an expanded program of aid to France in its battle for control of Indochina, especially Vietnam, much of which was now under Viet Minh control.
During the next three years, neither Paris nor Washington could find a solution to France’s eroding power in the region. While determined to maintain colonial rule in Southeast Asia as a demonstration of its standing as a world power, France had neither the resources, the unity of purpose, nor the strategic plan to maintain its hold on a Vietnamese population eager to rid itself of a Western colonial master. The Truman and then Eisenhower administrations saw saving Vietnam from a Communist takeover as essential to preserving from communism not only all Southeast Asia but also other Third World countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Yet, like the French, the United States could not find the means to reach its goals. Washington wanted no part of continued French colonial rule, which Paris refused to relinquish, and which U.S. policymakers believed would undermine America’s appeal as an advocate of self-determination for all peoples. Consequently, neither Truman nor Eisenhower would agree to take over the fighting from the French. Pleas from Paris for the use of U.S. airpower and, at the last moment, ground forces to rescue the French from defeat were ruled out as too likely to involve the country in another unpopular conflict like Korea and give Moscow and Peking talking points with other colonies battling to free themselves from Western colonialism.
The struggle for control of Vietnam was the object of distorted assumptions by all the belligerents. The Vietnamese Communists sold support for their cause to the Chinese by promoting the belief that their victory against the French and the Americans, who, in spite of everything, were financing and supplying French forces, could be seen as a triumph over all Western colonial control and for Communist insurgency everywhere.
The Chinese did not need much prodding from Ho to see Communist rule in Vietnam as not simply a defensive barrier on their southern border but as having the wider implications Ho suggested. Having fought the United States to a standstill in Korea, the Chinese now hoped to build on that with a Communist victory in Vietnam and possibly Cambodia and Laos. More importantly, they assumed that Communist success in Southeast Asia would stand as a clarion call to all Asians to follow China into the socialist camp. The Soviets, though less invested in the Korean and Vietnamese conflicts, nevertheless shared the hope that world revolution was a distinct possibility and that preserving Kim’s Communist regime in Korea and helping Ho claim victory in Vietnam were part of the larger proletarian reach for world power.
The dream of communism spreading around the globe was a grand illusion: the sort of false belief that revolutionaries, whose autointoxication is essential in motivating them to risk their lives for a cause outside themselves, always cling to. It is the conviction of those promoting the true religion, the ultimate answer to human dilemmas, the triumph of man over his own nature and the failed forms of governance that have been tried throughout history.
The French and Americans weren’t much different from the Chinese or the Soviets in their illusory thinking. For French citizens, struggling to regain their sense of national pride after their humiliating defeat in World War II, holding on to their empire seemed essential if they were to maintain any sort of standing as a great power. For the Americans, who saw Communist gains in Europe and Asia as an indication that democracy and capitalism were in retreat and faced catastrophic losses everywhere, Vietnam and Southeast Asia took on exaggerated importance.
Neither the Vietnamese nor the Chinese nor the Soviets nor the French nor the Americans were realistic about what a Communist government in Vietnam would ultimately mean. It did not signal the collapse of French power; to the contrary, France’s release from its military and economic burdens in Asia and Africa freed it to be a more productive and prosperous society. De Gaulle’s conviction that the loss of empire would threaten France with a renewed sense of defeat that would make it vulnerable to Communist control proved to be dead wrong. It was a misreading of events that he himself came to acknowledge.
Moreover, Ho’s victory in Vietnam did not presage Communist rule across all of Southeast Asia or any other part of the world. It was strictly a homegrown movement that could not even extend its influence to its closest neighbors.
Like so much else in the years after World War II, assumptions by the world’s most astute and powerful leaders were deeply flawed. Churchill, who had his share of misjudgments, sensed the missteps animating the postwar generation when he said in 1947, “It would be a great reform in politics if wisdom could be made to spread as easily and as rapidly as folly.”
EPILOGUE
Dost thou not know, my son, with what little wisdom the world is governed?
—Count Oxenstierna, Swedish statesman, 1648
Almost four hundred years later, Oxenstierna’s query seems rhetorical. The more perplexing question is: Why can’t a world with so many intelligent and thoughtful people do better? Part of the answer may be that people do not want to face up to how badly their leaders performed or how much people believe that national failings by their leaders reflect poorly on themselves: Holocaust deniers, a Russian
government currently trying to depict Joseph Stalin as the architect of victory in World War II without reference to his annihilation of opponents, real and fancied, and Japanese nationalists refusing to acknowledge the Nanjing massacres or the grievances of Korean “comfort women” are cases in point.
A collective amnesia or reluctance to learn from past miscues is another part of the equation. Was the German philosopher Hegel right when he said that the only thing we learn from history is that we never learn? His cynicism seems largely vindicated by the history of the first half of the twentieth century. Political leaders and governments around the world certainly did not take much knowledge from the horrors of the two world wars.
Hitler, delusional to the end, could not imagine how universally despised he would be. And the German masses marched in lockstep with him until their country lay in ruins and they had suffered total defeat. Even the military plotters of 1944 who tried to assassinate the Führer and fend off Germany’s collapse acted not out of protest against Hitler’s crimes but to spare the Fatherland from additional suffering.
Stalin went to his grave with no misgivings about the horrors he had perpetrated against his own people, let alone the misery he had inflicted on all Europe by facilitating Hitler’s initial aggression in 1939–40. His postwar crimes were continuing acts of faith in his messianic convictions about communism and Russia. And the passivity of the Soviet masses in stoically accepting the fictions Stalin and his Politburo collaborators presented as gospel remain puzzles no historian probably will ever fully explain.
Nor have only villains like the Führer and the Red Czar, as some called Stalin, been excoriated for policies and actions that produced so much human suffering. China’s lethal combination of Chiang and Mao cost the lives of millions as well. Lesser dictators like Kim Il Sung and Syngman Rhee, who were also architects of national and international misery, albeit on a smaller scale, have come in for their share of justifiable opprobrium.
The desolation caused by far more honorable and well-meaning leaders like Charles de Gaulle and Harry Truman should not be overlooked: de Gaulle’s efforts to reestablish France’s colonial empire and Truman’s decision to cross the thirty-eighth parallel in Korea led to bloodshed and losses that could have been avoided. These leaders’ affinity for earlier truths or misappropriations of history—national standing measured by its global reach and the need to see every aggressor as another Hitler—were of limited use in deciding what would serve their national interests post-1945.
The distressing news is that wretched acts of leadership did not abate entirely in the years after 1953, when Stalin’s death and the end of the Korean War gave the world glimmers of hope for a better future. To be sure, nations have not had another catastrophic worldwide conflict since then. Ironically, the deterrent has been less an aversion to war than the existence of nuclear weapons that could destroy nations and jeopardize human survival. But despite the documented crimes of Hitler and Stalin, mass killings have not disappeared. Earlier offenses against humanity formed no inhibition on Cambodia’s killing fields, for example.
The men at the helm of several countries in the last six decades have taken a number of wrong turns. France’s misadventures in Algeria; the Anglo-French-Israeli missteps in the Suez attack; Nikita Khrushchev’s provocation of the Cuban missile crisis, which brought the world to the brink of a nuclear war; the Chinese Communist government’s Cultural Revolution and the repression of dissidents in Tiananmen Square; the failure of Pakistan and India to avoid the 1971 conflict, and subsequent tensions that led them to build nuclear arsenals; the Soviet Union’s destructive intervention in Afghanistan; the Balkan strife of the 1990s, with its episodes of ethnic cleansing; the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has made the Middle East a constant source of world troubles; the 1994 Rwandan genocide visited on Tutsis by Hutu militias, and the world’s failure to intervene; the more recent genocide in Darfur, Sudan; and the Iranian and North Korean obsessions with acquiring nuclear weapons that pose threats to international stability are some of the most glaring examples of the disasters and difficulties more rational leadership and better understanding of past missteps by government chiefs might have prevented.
The United States, the dominant global power for the last sixty-five years, has not been innocent of actions that violate human rights and cause suffering: Eisenhower’s use of the CIA to topple popular governments in Iran and Guatemala; John Kennedy’s unleashing of Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs to bring down Fidel Castro; Lyndon Johnson’s failed war to rescue South Vietnam from Communist control; Richard Nixon’s and Henry Kissinger’s four-year extension of the Vietnam War and their aid in ousting Salvador Allende’s democratically elected government in Chile; Ronald Reagan’s machinations supporting the contras in Nicaragua; and George W. Bush’s determination to spread democracy across the Middle East by overturning Saddam Hussein’s rule in Iraq are case studies in actions that ultimately served neither American nor international well-being.
It would be extraordinary if we could discern a common pattern in all these miscalculations by U.S. and foreign leaders. But the best we can say is that these disasters were not the result of inevitable forces beyond human control; rather, they were the consequence of bad judgments and a misuse of historical experience by decision makers, who more often than not acted with the support of national majorities.
The errors of the pre-1953 years, however, have not gone entirely unrecognized. To the contrary, U.S. and foreign leaders since that time have partly compiled a record of sensible actions that rested on rational calculation and a realistic reading of the past and the present. A balanced assessment of these recent years makes it clear that blunders were not the only distinguishing feature of the period. A recounting of some of the brighter moments may provide clues to what has gone into wise governance.
John F. Kennedy’s successful resolution of the Cuban missile crisis is a striking example of effective and constructive leadership. Kennedy’s military advisers favored a bombing campaign and an invasion to assure the elimination of the missile sites Khrushchev had decided to build in Cuba. Because the emplacement of nuclear missiles on the island would reduce America’s significant advantage in the nuclear arms race with Russia and incidentally undermine the president’s political standing at home and abroad, Kennedy could not allow it to go forward. Persuading the Russians to remove the missiles without military action that could lead to a wider war presented Kennedy with a grave challenge. Just how grave would only become known later, when it was learned that U.S. military steps would likely have led to a nuclear exchange costing millions of lives and devastation to a part of the United States and most of Russia’s principal cities.
Kennedy saw military action as a desperate last resort. He believed trying a blockade of Cuba or a “quarantine,” which was less likely to be described as an act of war, should be a first step. The Joint Chiefs were dead set against it. Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, warned that without a military response, the United States would lose credibility with its allies. Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay dismissed a blockade as “a pretty weak response,” which provoked Kennedy’s dismissive remark about the “brass hats” and their affinity for a war that would kill all of them.
When Khrushchev backed down, Kennedy wisely instructed his staff not to betray any hint of gloating—a provocation to Soviet credibility and pride could lead to a later war. Similarly, he rejected additional plans for an invasion, which Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara put before him in case the Soviets did not honor a promise to remove their missiles. Kennedy continued to see an invasion as carrying huge risks: “Consider the size of the problem,” he told McNamara, “the equipment that is involved on the other side, the Nationalists [’] fervor which may be engendered, it seems to me we could end up bogged down. I think we should keep constantly in mind the British in the Boer War, the Russians in the last war with the Finnish and our own experience with the North Koreans.” G
iven his concerns about getting “bogged down” only ninety miles from U.S. shores, would Kennedy have been as ready as Lyndon Johnson to put hundreds of thousands of ground troops into Vietnam?
Kennedy has been much praised for his resistance to using unnecessary force and his rational decision making, which resolved the crisis and spared the world from a nuclear holocaust. It was a model of wise statesmanship. But it is not a blueprint for how to act in some future crisis with its own special attributes—except to emphasize that the components of Kennedy’s success were a realistic grasp of current considerations and of relevant historical analogies.
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were similarly rational in reducing the long-standing tensions between the United States and China by traveling to Beijing for reconciliation talks. Nixon, the principal architect of the policy shift, had a personal history as a tough-minded anti-Communist. His understanding that no one in the United States, including the conservatives most likely to object to a conciliatory initiative toward Beijing, could accuse him of appeasement was a piece of political realism that made all the difference in allowing him to go forward with so bold a move. In addition, his realistic assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of continuing hostilities with a nation of over 800 million people, who were at odds with America’s other great Communist adversary, the Soviet Union, was crucial in convincing him that improved relations with China carried substantial benefits for the United States.
Expanded trade with China was one goal of a new day in dealings with Mao’s government. But more important in Nixon’s thinking was the strategic value the United States could gain from better relations with Beijing: Nixon shrewdly calculated that Moscow was bound to see friendlier U.S. dealings with China as a threat to Soviet security, which was jeopardized by severe tensions with a nuclear-armed China allied to the United States. Nixon’s understanding that Sino-Soviet differences contributed to a long history of tensions between the two countries convinced him that the Soviets would respond to his China initiative with proposals for reduced Soviet-American tensions. Within months of traveling to China, Nixon went to Moscow, where he and Soviet leaders reached arms control and trade agreements that amounted to a détente in their formerly strained relations.