- I'm Alan Gravel, I'm
the Board Chairman of the
Atlanta Vietnam Veterans
Business Association Foundation.
And we welcome you here
today, appreciate you coming.
As is our custom with AVVBA
events, we want to start today
with the Pledge of Allegiance.
So if y'all will stand.
I pledge allegiance,
- [All] To the flag of the
United States of America
and to the Republic for which it stands,
one nation under God, indivisible,
with liberty and justice for all.
- Thank you, be seated.
You didn't come to hear me talk,
so we'll keep this short.
But I do have a few things I need to say.
One is that early on in
putting this together,
we were able to believe
in the possibility of it
because the Atlanta
History Center stepped up
and made this venue available for us,
and we thank them very much.
The second person who, second
organization that stepped up
and gave us a green light
to head forward was Synovus.
They generously contributed to allow us
to hold this symposium without utilizing
any of our funds that are
earmarked for memorials
or for scholarships for Iraq
and Afghanistan veterans.
So we appreciate their participation.
(audience applauding)
Corporate values of
Chick-Fil-A are so well known
that I doubt any of you are surprised
that they're furnishing lunch today.
(audience laughing)
Not reluctantly or begrudgingly,
but generously and with
revealing a deep commitment
to the values that made
this country great.
(audience applauding)
We wouldn't be here today without the help
of our speakers and our moderator,
RJ Del Vecchio with the Vietnam
Veterans for Factual History,
and the speakers Bob Turner,
Michael Kort, and Mark Moyar.
No amount of money or
coercion or persuasion
could get these men to travel
as they have to come here
unless they were deeply committed
to the accuracy of history
and to helping to
correct some of the myths
about the Vietnam War.
We thank them very much.
And lastly, many members
of AVVBA have helped
to put this thing together
and other organizations,
and I can't name all of you,
but I have to name a few people.
And first of all, Jim
Dickson and Rob Knowles,
John Butler, Bob Hopkins,
those have participated.
(audience applauding)
They worked hard for four
or five months putting this together.
So without further ado, I
wanna introduce our moderator,
RJ Del Vecchio with the Vietnam
Veterans for Factual History
and he will run the show
for us today, thank you.
(audience applauding)
- Thank you, Alan.
Actually, I wanted to talk for a moment.
I'm at the age where
finding myself standing
amongst a bunch of people who'll stand up
and say the pledge of allegiance
is still heart warming.
And it reminded me of something.
I do a lot of high school lectures,
and last fall I was at a high school
and we were saying the
pledge of allegiance,
and one student did not
stand up in the front row,
but just sat there.
And I looked at her and
didn't say anything.
Later she came up to me
because she wanted to assure me
she didn't mean to disrespect me.
And I said thank you very much,
but why would you not stand and say it?
She said, "Well, because
I'm not a hypocrite."
And I said, how is it hypocritical.
She said, "Well, we don't
have perfect liberty
"and justice for all."
And I thought for a second and I said,
well of course you're exactly right.
We didn't have perfect liberty
and justice for all in 1776,
we didn't have it yesterday,
we don't have it today,
and we won't have it tomorrow.
By the way, what nation
anywhere at any time ever has?
We are human beings, we are fallible.
If your criteria for
what's okay is perfection,
you're going to be disappointed.
What's important is what is good.
And this country is good.
When we say the pledge of allegiance,
it's not an arrogant
claim of our perfection,
it's a statement of our ideals,
of what we work towards, what
we have always worked towards
and made progress for,
for the last 200 some odd years,
and we're still making
progress towards it.
And I said, there is so
much more in our history
that we should look at.
And acknowledging our flaws and faults
and mistakes and imperfections,
there's so much more to look at
that we can take pride
in rather than shame.
And this country is worthy of our respect,
our affection, and for
some of us even, our love.
And therefore, I'd ask you
to reconsider it next time
you wanna hear about the
pledge of allegiance.
(audience applauding)
Okay, ladies, gentlemen, fellow
veterans, welcome guests,
all gentle beings, good morning.
Kính Chaò Quí Vị́
(speaking foreign language)
(audience applauding)
We are here as guests
of the AVVBA Foundation
as part of continued
service to the nation.
A lot of us veterans
remember that we took an oath
to support the country, our nation,
and we're still involved in doing that,
and probably will be
until they put us in a box
and stow us away some place.
They wanna provide well founded inputs
on the history of the Vietnam War.
Every major human event
ends up with being described
in later times across a range of ways.
And after all, huge events like wars
have layers of complexities.
So different people will
examine different aspects
often from different viewpoints.
Perceptions and biases will affect
what is thought and written.
Sometimes there's room to see
the same event in different ways,
even when good people consider
the same set of facts.
But there's always the possibility
of misperceptions, biases,
incomplete information,
and inaccuracies entering
into the accounts
that are drawn up.
And arguments arise about
what is the truest version of history?
The most significant
event of the 20th Century
was World War II, a war
of perhaps the simplest
and clearest moral imperative ever known.
Yet there has been a bitter
dispute among historians,
of a few, over the use of atomic bombs
to end a specific war in which
some type of rules are necessary
and the worst war crime ever,
and that Harry Truman was
a terrible war criminal.
This was eventually effectively rebutted
by the facts as shown not in allied records,
but in the record of the
Japanese Imperial Council.
But it was interesting that
debate went on for a while.
In fact, there are still some people
who still hang onto it
even though the data
from the Japanese is perfectly clear.
The conflict with Vietnam
certainly has complexities
and has been reported and written about
by a large host of people
with a very wide range of viewpoints.
Often for those who have
strong emotional positions
on what they perceived,
sometimes from those who
have been very active
in their opposition to,
or support of the war.
The strong emotions of the time,
which was also a time when
other major cultural changes
were taking place in the nation,
were inflamed by dramatic
images of all sorts.
Men executed in the streets,
monks burning themselves up,
little girls running naked
and burned by napalm,
all kinds of destruction,
POWs signaling torture with their eyes,
a war brought right to
everyone's living room.
How to make sense of all of this now?
The only answer, even
acknowledging that people
can interpret the same text differently,
is to try to go to the most
solid, verifiable facts
that you can find.
Forget all the things that everyone knows.
Put aside the dramatic images
and look for the facts as
best they can be found.
Examine how those who have
done, the careful research
and who appear to be reasoning
as objectively as possible
with their analysis.
Today you will hear from three
of the most qualified
professional historians
there are in the field.
As they speak, you may have questions
that come to your mind that you would like
to have them answer.
Please fill out the question
cards that are available.
We only need your name
and which presenter,
if you pick one, that
you wish to question.
After the lunch break, we will reconvene
and go through the questions and answers
and provide responses.
For some of the comments.
we not only have
the three distinguished historians
who will be presenting today here,
we have a number of other historians here,
both American born
and Vietnamese born.
So some questions you may
bring up later this afternoon
might be answered by someone else
who is even closer to that subject.
Also, I think it's
important to understand,
this was not our war.
This was the war between South
Vietnam and North Vietnam,
in which the south had
no designs on the north,
but the north was determined
to conquer the south
under the banner of communism.
We were allied to the south,
and while 58,000 Americans
died in the conflict,
over 250,000 South
Vietnamese military died.
Many more were wounded, and
tens of thousands civilians
were assassinated as part
of the terror campaigns.
We only have a few books
from South Vietnamese authors
which present their own view of events,
and they certainly deserve
to be considered, as well.
With that, I will thank you for coming,
and all of the AVVBA groups
for having the initiative
to set this up and all the
work your members have done
to make this a reality.
Your first speaker, Dr. Robert Turner,
who has truly a unique set
of experiences and qualifications.
He published his first
commentary on the Vietnam War
as a Letter to the Editor
in the Paris Edition
of the New York Times in August, 1964.
We're talking way back, okay?
He wrote a 450 page
undergraduate honors thesis
on the war in 1966, '67.
He was the director of research for
the National Student Committee
for Victory in Vietnam.
He took part in more than 100
debates, teach-ins and panels.
He doesn't take part
in many of them anymore
because nobody on the
other side is willing
to get anywhere near him in a debate.
He spent five different periods in Vietnam
between '68 and '75, right to the end.
Served twice there as an Army Lieutenant
and a Captain on detail from MACV
to North Vietnamese/
Viet Cong Affairs division
of the American Embassy.
He's written several books on the war,
many articles, presentations,
and again, nobody wants to argue with him.
We had a conference held by
VVFH a couple years ago in DC.
We invited all kinds of
famous antiwar people
to participate, and we heard back
-- [Pause].
(audience laughing)
We're still waiting to hear back.
(audience laughing)
With that, I will turn you
over to Dr. Robert Turner.
(audience applauding)
- First of all, to all the
Vietnam veterans in the group,
thanks for your service and welcome home.
(audience applauding)
I have an unusual perspective on Vietnam,
having spent years in
the early days of the war
traveling around the country
and debating professors
and leaders of SDS and
other organizations.
I was involved in over 100
debates and similar programs.
Every time I heard the
same litany of arguments,
all of which were false
save for the argument
that war is a horrible thing
and good people get killed in war.
Nobody likes war, but if you
don't stand up to aggression,
we learned in Munich that
the cost can be far greater
once you empower the aggressors.
There was a big debate in the 1960s over
whether we were protecting South Vietnam
from foreign aggression, or
interfering in a civil war
and propping up a dictator and so forth.
The good news is, that's
no longer debatable.
After Hanoi published its
official history of the war,
translated into English by a member
of Vietnam Veterans for Factual History,
there cannot be any question.
They documented in tremendous detail that
on May 19, 1959, Ho Chi Minh's birthday,
Hanoi made a decision to
open the Ho Chi Minh Trail
and start pouring troops,
supplies, and equipment
and weapons down through Laos and Cambodia
into South Vietnam down
the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
This was as much aggression as
any other war we have ever fought,
even though it was covertly,
a covert aggression.
It was not until five years
later on August 7, 1964,
that Congress enacted the equivalent
to a Declaration of
War, what we today call
an authorization for the
use of military force,
empowering the President
to use armed force
as he did deem necessary to
protect the protocol states
of the 1955 SEATO Treaty.
Those states were the state of Vietnam,
which we knew as South
Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
That's right, Congress authorized the use
of force in Cambodia at
the time it did Vietnam,
despite that fact the critics complained
when we sent troops into Cambodia,
which helped us win the war.
Some people tried to argue, wait a minute,
Vietnam was only temporarily divided
at the Geneva Conference,
and so it was perfectly permissible
for one zone to use force
reunite the country.
See that doesn't do very wall
when we recall the Korean War
on June 25, 1950, North
Korea invaded South Korea.
The United Nations Security Council met,
denounced it as an
international aggression,
and empowered the United States
to lead an international
force under the UN flag
to protect South Korea.
You cannot make a credible legal case
that the Vietnam War was either
unconstitutional or illegal.
And if you have doubts about that,
our center hosted a
conference on April 29, 2000,
on the 25th anniversary
of the Fall of Saigon,
and we decided we would repeat
the old Vietnam debates.
And so we contacted the
very best international law
and constitutional law scholars
who had opposed the war back in the '60s,
and said, hey let's get together
and re-argue those issues.
But in light of the evidence we now have,
what the Hanoi has provided us,
we went more than six deep in each area
before anybody would touch it.
They can't make the case.
We did finally find two
very lightweight people
to debate it, and this
book has the transcript
of those debates.
I debated the constitutional law issues,
my opponent made an opening statement,
and when his time for rebuttal came,
he basically said that's all I've got.
It's just the idea that
it was an illegal war
is absolutely wrong.
Now another major point, we
did not lose the Vietnam War
on the battlefields of Vietnam.
We did not lose a single
major battle during the war.
This is less a commentary
of the lack of courage
and ability of our opponents than it was
the fact that we had superior air power,
and any time they decided
to stay and fight,
we clobbered 'em and we destroyed them.
But by 1968, the National
Liberation Front slash Vietcong,
which had been a creature
of Hanoi from the beginning,
virtually ceased to exist.
They had been destroyed
by the Tet Offensive
in the May 1968 offensive.
And old, late friend
of mine, Harry Summers,
wrote a book called On Strategy
and in the beginning he
opens with this exchange.
"You know you never defeated
us on the battlefield,"
the American colonel said.
And that colonel was
Harry Summers, by the way.
The North Vietnamese colonel responded,
"That may be so, but
it's also irrelevant."
And both men were right.
I worked in the North Vietnam
Vietcong Affairs division
of the embassy during
my two military tours.
They created a job called,
Assisted Special Projects Officer
for me, and Douglas Pike
worked in that same office.
Three times, we alternated
between the two of us.
And Doug wrote, "I believe
future historians will say
"not only could the war have been won,
"but that we had it won."
Bill Colby, and old and dear friend,
while he was a CIA station chief
in Saigon in the late 1950s
came back and he was a number
three civilian in Vietnam
throughout much of the war,
went on to be the director
of Central Intelligence,
the head of the CIA.
He wrote a wonderful book
called Lost Victory
and he used to come down every year
to speak at my Vietnam War
seminar at UVA Law School.
And he noted that the big test
was the Spring '72 offensive,
also known as the Easter Offensive,
although not by the North Vietnamese.
They didn't care much about Easter.
But Bill Colby says, "On
the ground in South Vietnam,
"the war had been won."
I think he is exactly right.
That's a photo of Bill and my colleague,
John Norton Moore who is
the leading international law
scholar supporting the war.
Another old friend of
mine, Robert Elegant,
wrote a fascinating article
called "How to Lose a War",
you can find it if you Google that title,
it's been copied and put on the internet.
And he says, "South
Vietnam and American forces
"actually won the limited
military struggle."
John Lewis Gaddis is a
professor of history at Yale.
He wrote a two part series
for foreign affairs,
and he said, "Historians now acknowledge
"American counter-insurgency
operations in Vietnam
"were succeeding during the
final years of the war."
Sadly, we lost the support
of the American people,
and that was not enough.
John Gaddis is often
referred to as the Dean
of American Diplomatic Historians.
After the war ended,
Hanoi admitted it had lost
more than a million troops in the war,
nearly four times the total
lost of the South Vietnamese,
American, and ally forces combined.
Now why was it important to go to war
and protect South Vietnam
from communist aggression?
After World War II, General
Eisenhower was concerned
that the American people
would not tolerate
spending large sums of money on military.
And he decided to cut
back our ground forces,
but we were already
overwhelmingly overpowered
by the Soviet Empire.
They had far, several times
more tanks than we had,
more artillery pieces, more divisions,
but Ike said after Korea,
"We don't wanna match China man for man
"in a land war in China.
"What we want to do is deter war,
"and we're going to do that by responding
"to future aggression at a time
"and manner of our own choice.
"And Mr. Khrushchev, in
case you're not listening,
"look around Moscow and see
what you wanna' see glowing
"for the half-life of Uranium 235.
"Don't mess with us."
And it worked with Khrushchev.
He backed down, he said,
"Now is not the time
"for armed struggle."
But that's where our
friend Mao Zedong comes in.
An also the other thing that came in
is Eisenhower's strategy worked great
when we had an overwhelming
preponderance of nuclear power,
but the communists, they
had a few nuclear weapons,
but nothing that could match us.
But as Moscow's arsenal increased,
then the issue became, is
America really going to trade
New York and Chicago and
Atlanta to save Saigon?
And that was very dubious.
But Mao came along and said,
yes, in appearance the
imperialists are very fierce,
but we are going to use people's warfare,
what Moscow called Wars
of Mass Liberation.
We are going to send in
advisors and money and weapons
to train guerillas who will
then fight among the people,
they would live among the people,
work among the people,
and when appropriate,
take up arms and fight.
So if you decide to use nuclear weapons
for every guerilla you kill,
you're going to kill hundreds
of totally innocent people.
The Americans are not that foolish,
and their allies are not that foolish.
They would never tolerate that,
and thus Mao said, nuclear
weapons are irrelevant.
And Vietnam became a test case of this.
Indeed, Lin Biao, the Vice Chair of
the Central Committee of
the Chinese Communist party
wrote a very important,
gave a very important speech
that was published in a document called
"Long Live the Victory of People's Wars"
in which he said, "The
future of the world revolution
"will be determined on the
battlefields of Vietnam."
He said once the Vietnamese have proven
that American counter-insurgency
techniques will not work,
then we will have many Vietnams
all over the third world.
Che Guevara, Fidel Castro's
top military advisor,
said, "The future of the
revolutionary struggle
"in the Americas will be decided
"on the battlefields of Vietnam."
Moscow and Beijing had a big
feud going on at this point.
And one of the issues was
whether it was appropriate
to move to armed struggle.
Khrushchev said no, Mao said yes.
Had we walked away from
Vietnam in 1964 and 1965,
we would have proven that Mao was right,
that we did not have an answer
to these kinds of threats,
and we might actually have
seen the reunification
of the communist empire
with Moscow saying,
okay, you don't have to worry
about American intervention.
Throughout the third world,
there were dissident
groups who wanted power.
If they saw that by
siding with the communists
they could get power, they would think,
okay, we'll get their money and their guns
and their training, and
then when we get power,
we'll throw them out.
Never happened that way
because the communists
always made sure they
got the key ministries,
like the Defense Ministry
and the Treasury.
The Interior, of course, in this country,
the Interior Department takes
care of our national parks.
In most of the world,
it's the internal police.
And there's not a single case where
a group accepted the aid of communists
and the communists did not
come out on top after victory.
Now another point I'm
not going to dwell on,
but very important, we fought
most of the Vietnam War
with one hand tied behind our backs.
And that totally undermined
deterrence, it encouraged Hanoi,
it demoralized the hell out of our troops,
and it turned many
Americans against the war.
In 1968 in the New Hampshire primary,
McCarthy almost got a
majority of the votes.
It shocked everyone and
it led LBJ to decide
not to run for reelection.
And it later turned out that
a majority of the people
who voted for McCarthy went on to vote
for George Wallace and Curtis LeMay.
They were superhawks casting protest votes
over our no-win policies in Indochina.
Another old friend of mine, Bob Elegant,
and Bob and I were on a panel at
the Texas Tech Vietnam Center that
Steve Sherman put together,
I think, two years ago,
talking about the media in Vietnam.
And Bob wrote an excellent article called
"How to Lose a War".
If you Google that title in quotes,
you'll find it's been put on the internet
by at least two groups,
and it is a damnation
of the role of the media and undermining
public support for the war.
And candidly, I shared that view.
There were some outstanding
journalists in Vietnam,
but there also were an awful lot of hacks
that had no idea what was going on
and there were a number
of people who went there
because they thought the
war was a horrible thing.
We can discuss this more during Q&A.
Now it's important to
understand Hanoi strategy.
They understood they could not defeat
the United States military in a war
and they never intended to.
They had a multi-faceted struggle.
See, Americans tend to think that,
if you've got a military
problem you go to the Pentagon,
an economic problem you
go to treasury or commerce.
The communists understood that
struggle is like an orchestra.
You've got your percussion
and your strings
and your horns and so forth,
you play them all together.
And they understood that
in addition to the military struggle,
there is also the political struggle,
which was critical in Vietnam.
When they went to war
against France in 1947,
the Viet Minh had a very
effective propaganda campaign
inside France telling the
French people to oppose the war,
to block troop trains, and so forth.
And they defeated the French,
they won the battle of Dien Bien Phu
in the sense that they overran it.
But they suffered several
time more fatalities
than the French did, even
counting the French troops
who died on the forced
march back to Hanoi.
To say that Dien Bien Phu was
in any meaningful sense a military victory
for the Viet Minh is simply not true.
But it was an incredible political defeat.
It brought down the Laniel
Government in Paris.
The Chinese advise is, the
whole game here was logistics.
Everybody knew, Dien Bien Phu
was surrounded by mountains,
but it was all triple
canopy jungle and so forth,
there's no way you could
get artillery in there.
And thus, small arms fire was not going
to have an effect on the base.
It might occasionally pick someone off,
but you're shooting at a mile away or so.
But Giap organized tens
of thousands of laborers,
they built roads, they
took apart artillery pieces
and strapped them onto
bicycles and so forth,
and it was a brilliant logistics move.
They put the artillery
the Chinese had given them
after China fell to Mao,
and they put it on a direct fire mode
firing straight down the
mountain into the air field.
Dien Bien Phu was totally dependent
upon aviation for resupply.
Once you put a few big
craters in that airfield,
nobody's gonna land there more than once,
let's put it that way.
And so the Viet Minh dug tunnels
to right outside the French perimeter,
and when the French dropped,
parachuted in supplies,
as often as not it missed the target
and a hand went up and dragged it down,
and the Viet Minh had
dinner for two weeks.
The game was over.
Le jeux sont faits,
as the French say.
And then the Chinese
military advisors say,
hold it, yep, hold it.
We will tell you when to take the camp.
And the French and European newspapers
day after day, front page stories,
Dien Bien Phu still holds on.
And the day before the Geneva Conference,
which had been discussing Korea,
took up Indochina, they
overran Dien Bien Phu.
Banner headline, Dien Bien Phu falls.
The Laniel Government fails.
Pierre Mendes France a socialist
worked with the communists
and set up a coalition
after promising to
bring peace in Indochina
within 30 days or he
would resign his position.
The reason they beat the French
was because of political warfare.
Now I talk about this in my 1975 book,
Vietnamese Communism.
If you can find a copy of that,
you're luckier than I am.
There's not a lot of copies out there,
but it has a lot of information
on this whole history.
They did the same thing to us.
They used propaganda.
Moscow, Beijing, Havana all helped in.
And I heard these same arguments
in virtually every debate and program.
The US first got involved to
restore French-colonial rule
after World War II.
Absolutely not true,
we actually prohibited
American merchant ships
from carrying troops
or supplies from France to Vietnam.
We favored liberation, or the freedom,
the end of colonial rule.
They said that we violated
the Geneva Accords.
Not true at all, we didn't
sign anything at Geneva,
nor did South Vietnam, on the issue
of the so-called reunification
elections in 1956.
Our positions spelled out very clearly
was that we would only support elections
if they were supervised
by the United Nations
to ensure that they were conducted fairly.
You have to remember that North Vietnam
had a majority of the population.
Molotov, the head the Soviet Delegation
and co-chair of the Geneva Conference,
said that would be interfering in
the internal affairs of
the Vietnamese people
to have supervision.
Ho actually had some bogus
elections in the north
where there were soldiers
at the voting booths
to help people mark their ballots.
He never got below 99.98% of the vote.
No senior party leader
got below 98% of the vote.
The idea, as the New
York Times said in 1956
in an editorial, to subject
the South Vietnamese
to a communist controlled
election would be monstrous.
I spent five years starting
in '74 working in the Senate
as National Security Advisor to a member
of the Foreign Relations Committee,
and I saw firsthand the
delegations that visited us
protesting the war and so
forth and how opinions turned.
I wanna talk to you very briefly
about a few of the myths.
We were told Ho Chi Minh was
the George Washington of Vietnam.
On September 2, 1945, he issued
a declaration of independence that began,
"All men are created equal,
"and they were endowed by their creator
"to certain inalienable rights,
"among which are life, liberty,
"and the pursuit of happiness."
I come from Thomas Jefferson's University,
so all of our people know the
Declaration of Independence.
And it was very effective in
confusing a lot of Americans.
But the reality is, Ho
was an old Stalinist
with a long history of working as an agent
of a communist international.
He spent 30 years, he left Vietnam in 1911
and did not return until May of 1941,
when the Comintern sent him back
to set up the Viet Minh front.
Here's actually a
photograph of him known as
Nguyễn Ái Quốc(speaking foreign language)
Gave a speech in favor of joining
the Third International, the Comintern,
the Communist International.
It was said Ho was a potential Tito,
which is absolutely absurd.
Viet Minh radio in 1949 denounced Tito
as a spy for American Imperialism.
When Ho in January of 1950 asked the world
to recognize Vietnam, he would love to
have had American recognition.
But Tito was perhaps the first country
to respond positively, Yugoslavia.
Hanoi took note of their
offer of recognition
and did not establish
diplomatic relations.
Now scholars on the other side said,
well hell, he wanted
his country to be free,
he had to have some patron soviets.
Stalin and Tito were in a feud,
of course he was going
to side with Stalin,
the guy that could help him out
with the weapons he needed
to free his country.
The problem with that is,
even after Stalin died
and Moscow made peace
with Yugoslavia and Tito,
Khrushchev actually went to
Belgrade and hugged Tito.
North Vietnam continued
to denounce Yugoslavia,
Tito, and revisionists.
At a Third Party Congress
in 1960, May of 1960,
First Secretary Le Duan noted,
"Modern revisionism
remains the main danger
"for the international
communist movement."
And he said that "the
revisionists represented
"by the Tito clique in
Yugoslavia were the great threat.
"If we want to lay bare the aggressive
"and bellicose nature of imperialism,
"the communist parties
must necessarily direct
"their main blow against revisionism."
The Pentagon Papers.
I actually did a pamphlet
in 1972, I think it was,
called "Myths of the Vietnam War:
"The Pentagon Papers Reconsidered".
And I used the Pentagon
Papers to shoot down
every one of the arguments the
antiwar movement was making.
The Pentagon Papers say Ho
Chi Minh was an old Stalinist
trained in Russia in the early '20s,
and for three decades a leading exponent
of the Marxist-Leninist.
The Comintern sent himm all over
the world to do their bidding,
he was a Comintern agent.
He was not a Nationalist.
The NLF was a total
puppet of North Vietnam,
but they did a brilliant job of convincing
American College Students that
it was an independent movement
that just wanted freedom and an end
to colonial and foreign rule.
George Kahin and Lewis, I knew Lewis,
we were both at Stanford
in the early '70s,
they say the NLF was not Hanoi's creature.
And abundant data have been
available for Washington
to invalidate any argument
that revival of the war
was precipitated by
aggression from the North.
Again, going back to the Third
Party Congress in May of 1960
they passed a resolution to
ensure the complete success
of the revolutionary
struggle in South Vietnam,
"our people there must
strive to bring into being
"a broad National United Front."
That's the Vietcong, the
National Front for Liberation.
Here's a photo of Chairman Ho on the right
and Le Duan, who
succeeded him, on the left
at the Third Party Congress.
And then Hanoi announced the creation
of the National Liberation Front.
By some resistance fighters
in Ben Tre in South Vietnam.
This was totally bogus.
The NLF never was independent of Hanoi.
I've got a number of slides
I'm gonna cut through
because of time, but the point is,
Hanoi repeatedly acknowledged that
the NLF was their creature.
And Colonel Bui Tin, who
was the Deputy Editor of,
I think it was Nhân Dân
(speaking a foreign language),
or maybe it was Nhân Dân
(speaking a foreign language),
one of the top Newspapers
in North Vietnam said
the NLF was set up by the communist party
to carry out a decision made
at the Third Party Congress.
In May of 1984, "Vietnam Courier" bragged
about the decision to
open the Ho Chi Minh Trail
and to start sending troops and supplies
through Laos and Cambodia
into South Vietnam.
But again, the official party history
totally destroys any idea that the NLF
was other than a North Vietnamese puppet.
So the international law debate is over.
We have tried time and
again to get someone
to defend the position
the antiwar movement
took in the '60s.
No one will do it.
The Vietnam Veterans for Factual History
rented a room at the National Press Club
the day before the 50th anniversary of
the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution,
we wrote more than two dozen of
the surviving antiwar leaders
from around the country
and said, come join us,
let's debate the arguments
that you all used to turn
the public against the war.
We wrote Tom Hayden, Daniel Ellsberg,
we even included Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden
in case they wanted to join us.
Nobody agreed to do it.
Most of them ignored us.
One professor at Clemson who
had been antiwar in his youth
wrote us, and we actually
listed the arguments.
"Nobody believes that stuff anymore."
Again, in 2000, our center
tried to redo these debates.
We could not find any
serious person to debate us.
Did we violate the Geneva Conference?
Absolutely not.
First of all, we didn't
agree to anything at Geneva.
There were two documents,
the Cease Fire Agreement
negotiated only between the
French and the Viet Minh,
the South Vietnamese and
everybody else was excluded.
And by the way, when that was negotiated,
it was after Paris had already given
right to control foreign
relations to the State of Vietnam.
So Paris had no power to commit
South Vietnam to anything.
But again, the key at Geneva is,
we and the South Vietnamese
said any reunification elections
must be supervised by the United Nations.
One of the most popular bits
of evidence against the war
was a quotation from
Eisenhower's Mandate for Change.
It wasn't even a full sentence.
They quoted Ike as saying
that he had not spoken
to anyone knowledgeable
about Inodochinese affairs
who did not agree that
had an election been held
at the time of the fighting,
which was no later than '54,
Ho Chi Minh would have
received 80% of the vote.
And that's where they stop the quote,
but Ike went on to say over Bao Dai,
which explained the feeling
prevalent among many Vietnamese
they had nothing to fight for.
Bao Dai was a French
puppet living under Rivera.
The French gave him a casino to run,
they gave him a Ferrari to drive around,
and he signed whatever
they put in front of him.
He totally betrayed Vietnam.
We could have run Mickey Mouse against him
and gotten 98% of the vote.
So, that's simply wrong.
Between 1954 and 1956, North Vietnam went
through a very strained
period of communist reforms
trying to destroy religion,
collectivize land, and so forth.
It actually led to a peasant uprising
in Ho Chi Minh's home province.
Truong Chinh, the Secretary General
of the party had to resign
and make a self-criticism
and say we made errors.
They did not make errors.
They intended to murder
tens if not hundreds
of thousands of land owners.
And we know that because
they used Chinese advisors,
and the Chinese had
killed perhaps millions
in their land reform.
They embraced the Chinese slogans,
but once they had gotten rid of the people
they wanted to get rid of,
they then said, oh this was
all a mistake, we're sorry.
What about freedom of the
press in South Vietnam?
We were told it was a total
dictatorship and so forth.
This is a quote from an article
by an old friend of mine,
Dan Sutherland, who appeared
with me on the panel
at Texas Tech two years ago.
Dan was a distinguished journalist
and was the Bureau Chief of
"Christian Science Monitor" in 1970
and he notes that under its
new press law, South Vietnam
had one of the freest
presses in Southeast Asia.
Which is true.
Some of you who made it in the Saigon.
I'm sure you saw the little mama-sans,
which were sitting out on
the corner in the street
and set out a few copies
of 10 or 20 newspapers.
And people would go by and
say, let me have one of those,
and they would give them a paper then.
When I left in 1971,
there were 43 daily newspapers in Saigon,
many of them very hostile
to the government.
Just one quote from July 1970, Tin Sang,
the most popular
anti-government newspaper.
"The Vietnamese people have been fed up
"with this senseless war.
"It's high time that all
foreign influences be withdrawn
"to let the Vietnamese
decide their own fate."
Now that last part was
right of Hanoi's playbook.
"Let the Vietnamese
decide their own fate."
There were book stalls all over Saigon,
with an incredible array
of English language,
as well as other books.
Among the books I found on sale,
Che Guevara, you remember him?
Castro's right hand man, or left hand man,
however you want to put it.
How about Vo Nguyen Giap's,
People's War People's Army,
"The Official Insurrection
Manual for the National
Lberation Front,"  sorry,
for the Viet Minh,
openly on sale in Saigon.
Nobody lived in fear of censorship.
What about the Tiger Cages?
Perhaps you heard about these tiny little
underground tiger cages that were so short
the Vietnamese prisoners
could not stand up,
and ultimately they lost
the use of their legs?
Well I actually visited the
Tiger Cages in May of 1974.
They were not subterranean at all.
They were two story facilities.
This is me standing up
with a, I had a yard stick
or a measuring device with me,
and the tiny little cages
were three meters long,
a meter and a half
wide, three meters tall.
I'm a fairly big guy, but
I didn't have to squat
to go inside of it.
What we're talking about here
is just under 10 feet long
and 10 feet high.
Mythology, but it was widely accepted
by the American people.
By 1972, the enemy was on the ropes.
The VC, almost a non-entity,
Nixon authorized the
Chairman of the Joint-Chiefs
to use effective military
force for the first time.
Linebacker II bombing, 12 days of bombing
over North Vietnam,
including hitting Hanoi
at high value military targets.
Hanoi's will was broken.
If you read Admiral Stockdale's book,
he talks about how the POWs
were cheering the bombing,
and he said the attitude of
every Vietnamese guard changed overnight.
"All of a sudden they
would bring us coffee
"and they were very
attentive to our needs.
"They knew they were finally
in a way with a superpower."
Hanoi ran out of SAM two missiles.
We still had lots of B-52s.
And they pleaded for us to
go back to the peace talks,
and they signed an agreement
on January 27, 1963.
And Nixon and Kissinger thought
they could keep the peace
by using the carrot and stick.
If you cooperate and do not
engage in further aggression,
we will help rebuild your country
just as we did Germany and
Japan after World War II.
If you wanna play games,
we've still got B-52s
and we'll play games and
we'll hit you harder.
It had, I think, a
reasonable chance of success
despite some flaws with
the Paris Agreements.
But, Congress came in and snatched defeat
from the jaws of victory,
they threw in the towel.
Under pressure from the Peace Movement,
they passed a law in May of 1973 saying
no funds may be obligated or
expended to finance directly
or indirectly combat
activities by US forces
anywhere in Indochina.
In the air, on the ground, off the shore.
At that point, the game was over.
The Americans had betrayed their promises,
and Pham Van Dong, the
Premier of North Vietnam
responded, "The Americans
won't come back now
"even if we offer them candy."
We had totally bartered away
or frittered away our credibility.
Hanoi kept only the 325th division
to protect the capital city
and sent the rest of its army
behind columns of Soviet-made tanks
into Laos, Cambodia, and
primarily South Vietnam.
Those tanks would have been
shooting fish in a barrel
to our aircraft had we
been allowed to respond.
You can take an AK-47
and wrap it up in a cloth
and drop it in a rice field
and pick it up a month later
and it'll fire with the first shot.
Doesn't work with T-60 Tanks.
You can't hide them.
But Congress had made it illegal,
and I would argue that
this statute, by the way,
was illegal, as well,
but that's another issue
and that's the core of my work.
I'm a Nation Security Lawyer.
I've written multiple books
on the War Powers Resolution
and for decades I've taught
a course on war and peace
looking at where wars come from.
And so anyway, on the 30th of April,
a Soviet-made tank crashed through
the Presidential Palace gates
and accepted the surrender from Big Minh.
And notice, they're
flying the Vietcong flag,
keeping up the facade even though
this was North Vietnamese armor.
The Vietcong didn't have any armor.
This is a photo I took
as I evacuated Saigon
with a bunch of refugees.
Let's talk briefly about the human costs.
We do not have precise
figures on everyone who died
in Vietnam during the war.
But there is a good chance that
in the first three to four years,
quote "after liberation,"
more people were killed
by the communists in Indochina than died
in the previous 14 years
of war, it's close.
Millions, clearly, died in South Vietnam
and Cambodia and Laos.
Tens of millions of others were consigned
to a Stalinist tyranny that remains
among the worst human rights
violators in the world.
My late friend Rudy Rummel estimated that
400,000 boat people died while trying
to flee communist Vietnam.
Maybe it's only 300,000,
maybe it's 600,000.
It was a very large number.
These people just got on
unseaworthy boats and sailed away
praying they would find land
and a chance at freedom.
Lewis Sorley, one of the
leading scholars on the war,
Johns Hopkins PhD, Vietnam veteran,
estimated that as many
as 250,000 former army
of the Republic of Vietnam
and South Vietnamese officials
died in reeducation
camps around the country
where many were kept for over a decade.
Another 1.5 million were forced to move
to new economic zones
to basically clear land
and set up new villages,
where many died of starvation,
disease, and abuse.
I've seen estimates that approach 50,000.
I don't think anyone has
really good figures on that.
Tremendously important was Cambodia.
In 1974, I went to Cambodia
as a Senate staff member
and flew on a Porter, you may
remember the old prop winged
that could land in about 100 feet
and take off in about 100 feet.
And we would go town to
town, dropping off mail
and supplies and we literally,
we'd just corkscrew down
from right over the town
and land on the dirt road
in the middle of the town
because the communists had
.51 caliber machine guns
that were in range of the airport.
It's a beautiful country,
wonderful people.
And Pol Pot and his friends
slaughtered too many of them.
Yale University did a major study
and their estimate was that
approximately 1.7 million
Cambodians lost their lives under Pol Pot.
That's more than 20% of the
entire population of Cambodia.
One of the worst human rights
tragedies of the last century.
Rummel says it was the
worst per capita per man
Genocide in the 20th Century.
National Geographic today ran
a story on the Killing Fields.
It noted, "bullets were too
precious to use for executions,
"so axes, knives, and bamboo
sticks were far more common."
I was challenged to a debate
by former Senator Mike Gravel,
the guy who leaked the Pentagon Papers
and was running for President
back some years ago.
And I had said something
negative about him
in a very late-night email,
and the next morning I woke up,
there was a challenge to
debate me from Gravel,
And he came down to UVA
and we had a debate.
Now let's just say I haven't
gotten a Christmas card
from him since then.
(audience laughing)
I went back and I photocopied
from the Congressional Record.
He was the first one to move
to cut aid to South Vietnam.
No, I'm sorry, to Cambodia.
And he said, "I don't care
if they kill each other
"with knives and axes,
"but it will not be
with American bullets."
And then I put up some of these quotes
that they did, in face, kill each other,
or kill the innocent people of Cambodia
with knives and axes and so forth.
The same National
Geographic article noted,
"As for children, their
murderers simply battered them
"against trees until
they stopped quivering."
That's what the antiwar movement did,
a direct result, did not have to happen.
Well we didn't stop the killing,
surely our abandoning of South Vietnam
helped in the human rights area?
Freedom House was set up in
the early days of World War II,
co-chaired by Eleanor
Roosevelt, the First Lady,
and Wendell Willkie the Republican who
had lost to the President during the war.
Every year they'd publish a book
called Freedom in the World,
and in 1978 here's their conclusion
about the Socialist Republic
of Vietnam, communist Vietnam.
"Comparatively, Vietnam is
as free as Korea, North,
"less free than China."
Doesn't get much worse than that.
The success of people's wars,
our surrender, our abandonment
encouraged the communists
to become more aggressive.
The Soviets moved roughly
50,000 Cuban troops into Angola.
That led to a major civil war that cost
at least half a million lives,
and Congress used the same
language to cut off funds
to try to help the
non-communists in Angola.
I worked in the Senate at the time.
I actually wrote the Griffin Amendment
that tried to keep aid alive,
but we just didn't have the votes.
The Soviets invaded Afghanistan,
brought in the puppet from Moscow.
Another estimate 1.3
million died in addition to
creating the Taliban, and a guy
named Bin Laden, and others.
They unleashed communist
movements in Latin America
since the Nineteen Teens, the
Latin American parties
were told do not use armed struggle,
you're too close to the United States.
They won't tolerate it,
nor will your government.
After we bugged out of Vietnam,
they changed that and said go for it.
And that led to major revolutions
in El Salvador and Nicaragua.
Nicaragua quickly fell to the communists,
and the Soviets provided them through Cuba
with vast amounts of
weapons, include M-16 rifles
we left behind in Vietnam.
Schafik Handal, the president
of the FMLN in El Salvador,
the communist group, went to Moscow
and we intercepted some
of the communications
and he wanted western weapons.
He said, if we have AK-47s they'll say
we're communist guerrillas.
And Moscow said we don't have
a supply of western weapons,
but our friends in Vietnam do,
and we'll pay your way there
and if they agree to provide them,
we will ship those weapons
from Vietnam to Cuba
where they can be smuggled into Nicaragua
and then out to the guerrillas.
And many of the M-16s used by
the guerrillas in El Salvador
were weapons we left behind in Vietnam.
Indeed, at one point they
captured an 18-wheeler
with a false top to it that
held hundreds of M-16s,
of ammo, of grenades, all
sorts of other weapons
that was going from
Nicaragua into Honduras
on its way to El Salvador.
Iran seized the American
Embassy in Tehran.
I do not think that would have happened
had we not frittered away
our credibility in Vietnam.
This is one that's very close to me
because the commander of the
American marines in Beirut,
was a dear friend of mine,
he'd been a neighbor, Jim Garriety.
When President Reagan agreed
to work with Great Britain,
France, and Italy to send
in a peace keeping force
just to keep things peaceful
so the various factions
could try and negotiate
an agreement in Lebanon.
Everybody welcomed this
that had any interest in it,
the neighboring states and the groups.
But Congress said, this comes under
the War Powers Resolution,
you must announce publicly
that you are sending
these troops into combat,
which would have totally
undermined the mission,
and get Congressional
approval to continue it.
Two Democrats voted with President Reagan
to allow the Marines
to stay for 18 months.
As soon as the debate ended,
Chuck Percy, the chairman of
the Foreign Relations Committee
and Republican, announced if
there are any more casualties,
we can reconsider this vote at any time.
The bad guys heard about that,
and on Friday the 21st of October,
US News went to press with the issue
that was gonna come out on Monday,
and that issue had an article,
it was just a little blurb,
US Intelligence has intercepted a message
between two Muslim militia groups,
"If we kill 15 Marines,
the rest will leave."
Sunday morning, the 23rd at daybreak,
a Mercedes truck filled with
a very sophisticated weapon,
a sheet of marble on the bottom
to make a shaped charge directed upwards,
very high-tech explosives wrapped around
canisters of oxygen to
increase the explosion.
They blew up the Battalion
Landing Team Headquarters
in Beirut killing 241 Marines.
President Reagan, to his credit,
said, "We're not leaving",
and a few weeks later of course we left
under tremendous pressure from Congress.
Vietnam also led to a number
of unconstitutional laws,
including the War Powers Resolution,
which I've written two books on,
one with a forward by John Tower,
the chairman of the
Armed Services Committee,
the other one forward by Jerry Ford,
the President, former president.
Were our efforts worth it?
I think the answer is yes,
because Vietnam was seen as a
test case by too many people.
In '64, Thailand and
Indonesia were basket cases,
ripe for revolution, and
China was funding guerrillas
in both countries.
Indeed, China was funding guerrillas
and training them and supplying them
throughout Southeast Asia and as far away
as Mozambique in Africa.
By holding on for a decade,
we bought time for Thailand and
Indonesia to become stronger
and for the PRC to turn inward during
the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
during which Lin Biao
crashed in a helicopter,
they tell us, and by the time that ended,
they were no longer exporting revolution.
Had we abandoned Indochina in '64,
my guess is we would
have soon had the option
of using nuclear weapons,
the only way we could possibly have dealt
with several Vietnams,
they're just too expensive,
or losing the Cold War
one country at a time.
If you have any doubts about
the evil nature of communism,
"The Black Book of
Communism" was written by
some of very left-wing
European intellectuals,
many of whom had been active communists,
and would realize what
an evil system it was.
And their conclusion was
that during the 20th Century,
80 to 100 million people died
as a direct result of communism.
We have repeatedly extended
an invitation to anyone
on the left who wants
to debate the morality,
the legality, the policy
wisdom of our war in Indochina.
Nobody has accepted, not a single one.
The offer remains open.
For those of you who served in Vietnam,
thank you for your service, welcome home.
(audience applauding)
And let me stop there.
I do look forward to
questions after lunch.
- Let's check on one detail
that would be nice to know.
Just out of curiosity, would everybody who
is a Vietnam veteran please stand up?
(audience applauding)
And just out of curiosity,
do we have any other veterans here?
All right.
(audience applauding)
'Cause there were people after us.
(audience laughing)
(man yelling indistinctly)
Thank god for them.
Just out of curiosity, who
came the furthest to get here?
There's some people from California.
Anybody from any place
further than California?
- [Man] It's further than California.
- I don't see anybody.
Okay, I guess the
California guys have got it.
Where's the Australia guy?
I don't see him.
(audience laughing)
All right, the next speaker
is Dr. Michael Kort,
who is from up in Boston area
who has got an interesting background
and that originally he was part of
what we call the Orthodox school,
but he has this terrible problem.
He hasn't adjusted to academia;
he's kept an open mind.
(audience laughing)
One can only sympathize.
So he eventually started
reading other materials,
and he read Dr. Moyar's Book,
and that started him reading other stuff.
And he has since kind
of come to a different
kind of reasoning about
the history of the war.
His book is one of the best
new books ever on the war.
The Vietnam War Reexamined.
There's a copy on the table out there.
And if anybody wanted to get one,
there's a lot of fairly
good books on the war,
but his is one that I
particularly liked personally.
I have to say it's well worth
acquiring and going through.
It packs a lot and it's pretty readable
and it's just really an
outstanding piece of work.
And with that, I will
turn it over to Dr. Kort.
(audience applauding)
- Excuse me if I stare
down a little bit for this,
'cause I have to deal with
that light in my face.
It's a great honor for me to
be invited to this symposium
by those of you who fought this war
and especially by those
of you who continued
in the decades since then to
try to set the record straight.
Thank you for inviting me.
My task today is to give an overview,
a summary of the debate over the war,
especially as it goes between
the so-called orthodox
and revisionist schools.
I can't cover the whole thing, obviously.
So what I'm going to try
to do is the following.
First, give a very quick
overview of the debate,
then outline quickly the orthodox view
and the revisionist view,
then turn to the revisionist view
and cover some key premises of that view.
And then having done that, I
wanna focus on a few things,
can't focus on everything
and you've already heard
a brilliant exposition
of the revisionist view.
But I wanna look a little at
the American military effort
in Vietnam as a whole,
talk about Rolling
Thunder and why it failed,
talk a little about the ground war,
especially between '65 and '68,
and disagreements about that.
And then last talk about the situation
as it existed in 1972
between what is called
the Lost Victory, Colby's
term, and Black April,
the end of the war.
The debate over Vietnam is multifaceted.
It goes in many different places,
but I think it comes down
to two basic questions.
The first, was it in
America's national interest?
Was it in America's national
interest and correct
for the United States to
get involved in Vietnam
and ultimately, with
its own military forces,
in order to save South Vietnam,
to apply the American Cold War policy
of containment of Southeast
Asia to stop the spread
of communist influence, and
of course, Soviet influence?
Secondly, once we got involved
in that war, was it winnable?
And specifically when
one talks about that,
was it winnable at a price much less
than was paid in defeat?
The orthodox view was called that
because it got there first,
in part because of many of the journalists
who covered the war, like David Halberstam
and Neil Sheehan and others.
And then because it was
picked up in Academia
and so many of this, most
really of the scholarly books
initially were written by
academics following Halberstam,
Karnow, and the others.
And very importantly, they
wrote the textbooks, too.
The orthodox view answers
both questions in the negative
and this became, as we
know, the accepted view
or the conventional wisdom, as
one historian has called it,
both in the country as a whole
and even more so in academia
where the primary version
was the war was a
mistake, it was a tragedy,
and it was unwinnable.
Because of the textbooks
that are out there,
and most of the people who teach the war,
anybody who goes to college today
is unlikely to encounter
anything else but this view.
And one other thing is that over time,
in academia especially,
an intolerance developed
towards challenges to this.
Nothing could better illustrate
that than when Mark Moyar's
book came out, his brilliant
book Triumph Forsaken.
And the abuse that he
faced after publishing it.
The revisionist view answers
both of the questions
I just outlined positively.
The argument is that the United States,
first question, that the
United States got involved
in Vietnam for a good reason
in the context of the Cold War.
I'll talk more about that.
And the second premise,
which essentially tends
to explain what went
wrong, is that we did so
without a real strategy for victory,
and therefore we forfeited
chances at various points
that would have brought
victory at a cost far less
than was paid in defeat.
Both orthodox and the
revisionist camps are very large,
and so there are
disagreements between them.
And I'm actually going
to talk about one of them
within the revisionist
narrative which concerns
the argument that the United States,
revisionists will argue
that the United States
did have different options,
different military options
it could have used to win the war.
One of the problems is that
they don't always agree
on what those options were,
and in dealing with that
what for me was supposed
to be an 18 month project
turned into more than three
years to get finished.
Let me now talk and turn
to the orthodox view
and try to summarize it very quickly.
The war, of course, was a mistake.
We shouldn't have done it,
and once we got into
it, it was unwinnable.
It's based on a couple of premises,
some of which you've heard about already,
and heard them debunked already.
One is that Ho Chi Minh and his comrades
represented the only legitimate view
of Vietnamese Nationalism.
And the second crucial premise
is that the war in the south,
although it ultimately was directed
and controlled from Hanoi,
began as a response to the
injustices and inequalities
of the Diem Regime.
The first premise has remained
relatively consistent over time,
although since Mark
Moyar's book in particular
and others, Diem is now given
more credit as a Nationalist.
The second premise has not done as well.
Initially it was, of course,
the war began as rebellion in the South
under Southern leadership
and not as a result of Hanoi,
and in fact, even for a
time against Hanoi's wishes.
After the war it became impossible
to maintain something like that,
and we got different versions of this,
one of which coming from one
of the leading biographers
of Ho Chi Minh, we get
something like this;
"It was a genuine revolt
based in the South,
"but organized and
directed from the North."
Which if you listen to that,
(audience laughing)
I don't have to continue on that point.
It's kind of like saying
in the Korean War,
it was a genuinely based in the South
but organized and
directed from North Korea.
It's obviously an oxymoron
and I'm glad you all saw that right away.
(audience laughing)
This view, just to go on a little bit,
prevails in the textbooks.
I just wanna mention
two textbooks that are,
I think, are the two leading textbooks.
But the first one I
know is the best seller,
it's by George Herring.
It's called America Longest War.
And if you read that,
what you learn is this,
"The American effort,"
and these are quotations,
"is doomed from the start.
"The only hope for stability in Vietnam
"was revolutionary
change," and containment,
our policy since 1947, "was misplaced,
"and that pretty much is
clear without debate."
Another book by a guy
named George Donaldson
It's called Vietnam, America's Ordeal
And I'll be referring to a lot of people
during the course of this talk,
says that "the effort to South Vietnam
"was doomed to fail from the outset.
"South Vietnam," and this is a key point
that I'm gonna come back
to and end with, actually.
'Cause I think it's at the
heart of the orthodox case.
"Could never become a viable nation state,
"only communist triumph could
bring peace to South Vietnam,
"and," of course,
"containment was misplaced."
Ho Chi Minh in this narrative
is a nationalist first,
as well as a communist.
One of the latest things
I read on that was
that he was a communist
because he was a nationalist.
You've already heard some about that.
Indochina was not strategically
important in the Cold War,
it did not merit American intervention.
There's a rejection of the Domino Theory,
and you've already heard
about that from Bob Turner,
that it was invalid that the
fall of one communist state
wouldn't necessarily lead to another,
and you've already heard
the criticism of that.
And it's something Mark
Moyar also does in his book.
Further, the United
States did not appreciate
the strength and determination
of North Vietnam.
We hear a lot about that,
or the communist guerrillas in the South,
or that the Marxist program that they had
had strong nationalist content,
and therefore was very popular.
Further, we didn't appreciate
the weaknesses of our allies,
or clients, as the word goes in Vietnam,
beginning with Diem and his successors,
and therefore did not
grasp their vulnerability
to an insurgency that, at its core,
was provoked by inequalities
in South Vietnam.
Again, I mention this
'cause it's so important,
South Vietnam was an American creation
and lacked legitimacy and viability,
and beyond that the United
States should have understood
the limits of its power.
In terms of the 1968 to '73, and again,
I'm gonna summarize real quickly,
the United States,
especially from '65 to '68
and even after that, fought a
destructive war of attrition
that could only lead to stalemate
and there's never really
a consideration of
were there any options?
The bombing of South Vietnam
could not break that stalemate
and simply added to the destruction.
In that area, if you look at least
at what some revisionists say,
there are people who will agree with that
in terms of how a bombing
should have been done.
Especially when we talk to North Vietnam,
the bombing of North Vietnam could not,
and I'll get into this a little bit more,
could not convince the North
Vietnamese to stop their effort
to conquer South Vietnam, why?
Because they were so determined
and nothing was going to stop them.
In terms of Tet, and I'm
not gonna talk about this,
I'm sure most of you know
a great deal about it,
what did it demonstrate?
Because of the 100 attacks,
it demonstrated the futility
of the American effort,
communist losses, despite the fact that
the loss they suffered so
severely were replaceable.
And from 1968 to 1972, yes
there was some improvement
in the military situation,
but basically the flaws
with South Vietnam could not be corrected.
And that basically is
the orthodox perspective.
Let me turn now to the
revisionist perspective,
and I wanna begin by a few basic premises.
First of all, you gotta look at it
within the context of the Cold War.
Containment was a valid
and necessary response
to the communist threat
and Vietnam was one
of several fronts in which
the Cold War took place
in which containment had to be applied.
This goes back, the
argument is nothing new.
I won't mention, I'm gonna
mention a couple of writers.
The first is Guenther
Lewy who wrote the book,
America in Vietnam,
and he pointed this out.
He says, "The fear of
communism in the '50s and '60s
"was not irrational, the
threat to Western Europe
"in the 1940s, right after the war,
"and 1947 brought forth
the policy of containment."
And then as a result of
one, the communist victory
in China in '49, the Sino-
Soviet Alliance in 1950,
and of course the Korean War in 1950,
containment was extended to Asia.
"It's true", says Lewy, "that Vietnam
"was not strategically vital,
"but its importance becomes
clear when you look at it
"within the context of the Cold War."
And not just a war, what was the Cold War?
Let's define it for a second.
And the person I'm gonna use is somebody
who didn't write a word about Vietnam.
His name's Martin Mailia,
he was an absolutely
brilliant historian of Russia
and the Soviet Union,
which is my basic field.
And this is what he said,
he's just a great writer.
"The Cold War was the third World War
"that never took place, but
the stakes were just as high
"as in the two World Wars."
Michael Lind who wrote
"Vietnam, a Necessary War",
goes a little bit further
than that and he says,
"The Cold War was the third
World War of the 20th Century."
On one level, a struggle
between the United States
and the Soviet Union
for military supremacy,
but more important that its core level,
a struggle between
communist totalitarianism
led by the Soviet Union, and
Western democratic capitalism
led by the United States.
It was at its core an
ideological struggle.
That said, it differed
from the two World Wars
that followed, mainly militarily.
The weapons that were
available, of course,
by after World War II
were nuclear weapons,
but first of all, you could
not fight this struggle
in the main front which was Europe,
because in Europe if you did it,
it would lead to nuclear war.
And one thing both sides understood,
even when Stalin was alive,
was that you cannot fight a nuclear war.
So that meant that the struggle
was shifted to peripheral areas,
and especially in Asia.
Mao Zedong who knew something about this,
pointed out that there
were three fronts in Asia,
Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam.
And then what Michael Lind has described
in a very nice, pithy little quote,
"These areas," he said, "were,"
let me just grab it down there.
"These areas," he said,
"were not contested
"because they were important,
"but they were important
because they were contested."
And why were they
important in this context?
And for that we've gotta go back
to something Bob Turner
mentioned, which is Munich.
The conference in 1938 where
the French and the British
caved in to Hitler and essentially
sacrificed Czechoslovakia
which at the time was non-strategic.
Yet it was sacrificed in the hope that
this would appease Hitler
and war could be avoided.
As everybody in this room knows,
the Munich Settlement led directly to war,
and that is the lesson of Munich.
The lesson of Munich is, you
have to stand up to aggression
before you get to general war.
That is what President
Truman did in 1947 in Greece.
He did it again having to
send American combat troops,
as we all know, in Korea in 1950.
And so that was the lesson of Munich
that is essentially a part
of the revisionist narrative.
The Domino Theory is valid,
at least in certain cases.
We've heard about that already today.
Further, we've heard a lot
about this already today.
Ho Chi Minh was really not a nationalist,
at least not in the generally
understood sense of that word.
He was a loyal agent of the Comintern,
the communist international from the 1920s
through basically his entire career
until he returned to Vietnam in 1941
and took over that struggle directly.
The second thing is, is really
he was not a nationalist,
a communist because he was a nationalist.
When he became a communist,
he essentially abandoned nationalism,
started killing Vietnamese nationalists,
from the very beginning and
has the blood of thousands,
tens of thousands of them on his hands.
That's not much of a nationalist.
In this narrative and the narrative,
the revisionist narrative,
Diem is much better than advertised.
Again, this is Mark Moyar
did about as much as anybody
to make that clear.
His book was revelation, certainly to me.
And so are people like
Nguyun Van Thieu later on.
I want now, let me just get this,
to go a little deeper on this point,
and this is really about
the validity of nationalism
beyond what Ho Chi Minh represented.
And I want to point something out
that, what essentially I think
you can say, Diem represented.
If you look at the first map over here,
it shows you, and I'm really
now talking about some things
that were pointed out
very well by a historian
at Cornell named Keith Taylor.
The Vietnamese expanded
southward over several centuries,
then we get to the South.
There are all the way
to the South into 1757,
and the point that's been made about this
by people who have looked at it is that,
as the Vietnamese expanded south,
those who moved south became different
than people who lived in the North.
They moved south, they lived
under different conditions,
and what Taylor says is,
"The War of 1954 to 1975
reflects two different visions
"of the future of the country
"that have deep historical roots."
So what you've got is
the people moving south,
getting further away from
their original homeland,
living under different conditions,
and developing a new outlook on life.
This was intensified,
people talk about Vietnam
as always been united,
by the defacto existence
of two separate states
for about two centuries
from the late 1500s into the 1700s,
officially there was a dynasty,
but you really had two separate states.
You look at the map, oddly enough,
divided at the 17th parallel.
And this existence of these two states
intensified the differences.
The people in the south over time
became more individualistic, less passive,
more self-reliant, and open to new ideas.
Ultimately Western ideas
and ideas of democracy.
So really, and this was an
important part of the narrative,
is that you certainly
had alternate versions
of legitimate nationalism
and I would argue,
far more legitimate
than the communist one.
Let me turn now to the
American military effort
and give an overview of that.
In the revisionist narrative,
it's not a matter of a hopeless war,
but how the United States
government managed the war,
and the limits it placed on the military
it assigned to fight this war,
which I think a lot of you in
the audience know a lot about.
This grew out of the
concept of limited war,
an idea that certainly made
sense in the nuclear age.
What did limited war at initially meant,
if you would have asked
General Matthew Ridgeway
Who commanded our troops in Korea
after McArthur is removed,
it meant a non-nuclear war.
But there was no contradiction
between limited war
and using decisive military
force to achieve an objective,
to achieve your objective.
The contrast is, is
when certain theorists,
mainly civilian ones, got ahold of this.
And what you had instead of
using decisive military force
was using means less
than a specific level,
and a decisive military victory
was not gonna be achieved or even sought.
These folks drew on what
is called systems analysis,
which in turn draws on what is
called cost-benefit analysis.
And when applying this to war,
you got what was called
the rationalist approach,
which of the main exponent of that
in the American government
was Robert McNamara
The Secretary of Defense
under Kennedy and Johnson.
And let me now just go
over what this means.
The actors in a military
conflict, we're told,
act rationally, therefore
the United States
should apply pressure, if it
applies pressure carefully
on North Vietnam and in a calibrated way,
we could show them, and
this was the thinking,
that the war was not in their interest.
This in turn allowed the United States
to apply maximum pressure
at minimum risks,
the term was graduated pressure.
Then Hanoi would calculate
and stop supporting
the Vietcong in the South.
The rationalist approach
assumed that communists in Hanoi
thought like the bureaucrats
in Washington, DC.
(audience laughing)
And that graduated pressure,
initially by air power,
and then eventually when that
didn't work by sending troops
became the way that we,
became basically our approach.
And although, again, air
power was the primary there.
Let me, just have a sip of water.
Let me tell you what H. R. McMaster,
who many of you heard of.
He was for a while, as you may know,
the National Security
Advisor to President Trump.
This is what McMaster said about this,
"McNamara and his
colleagues were convinced
"that the traditional
military methods and force
"were unsuited to the current
realities that they faced."
McMaster points out that JFK's basic idea
of flexible response,
his basic foreign policy,
assumed was different
than graduated pressure.
Flexible response meant
applying military force
at the necessary and appropriate level.
Graduated pressure, what we did,
meant starting low and
gradually increasing pressure.
McMaster points out that
doing this in 1964 to 1965
led to the introduction
of American combat troops,
and as he puts it, precisely
what it was designed to avoid.
In terms of South Vietnam,
we in the most familiar term
that we hear is, gradual escalation.
What do some revisionists
commentators think about this?
I wanna begin with Colonel Harry Summers,
author of On Strategy.
And as Summers put it, it
had a devastating effect
on the United States military effort.
Admiral U. S. Grant Sharpe,
who was the over-Commander
of US forces in the Pacific
during the mid-'60s,
put it this way,
"It turned American pressure
bombing on North Vietnam,"
as he puts it, "into a series of nibbles
"that permitted then the North Vietnamese
"to build their defenses and
anticipate every move we made."
General Philip Davidson who was a top aide
to General Westmoreland then
wrote Vietnam at War said,
"the gradual escalation
played into the hands
"of General Giap, who wanted
to fight a long, drawn out war.
And that "the signals we were sending,"
you're supposed to send signals
with graduated pressure,
"were signs of American weakness."
And of course as the war dragged on,
as we all know, support for it went down.
The best summary of it
comes from a gentleman named
Lieutenant Colonel Robert E Morris.
This is what he said
about the American effort,
because of graduated pressure,
"It wasn't even gradual escalation,
"that is the gradual increase of force,
"but rather escalation and deescalation.
"On-again, off-again, knee-jerk reactions
"that varied with the intuitive whims
"of Lyndon Johnson And his advisors.
"It was," says Admiral Sharpe,
"a Strategy for Defeat."
And so the whole, the
basic American approach
was problematic because of
what went on in Washington.
What I wanna do now is cover,
I wanna move on and I
wanna cover several things.
First I wanna talk about Rolling Thunder.
Then the ground war, and then again
from lost victory to Black April.
I'll begin with Rolling Thunder.
Everybody agrees that it failed,
revisionists and orthodox both.
They don't agree on why.
According to the orthodox analysis,
North Vietnam was not
suitable to strategic bombing
inherited from World War II.
It had an agricultural economy,
supplies came from outside,
and so its ability to wage
war could not be limited
and crippled and damaged
as it was, of course,
when we bombed industrialized countries
like Germany and Japan.
Intervention was futile.
The guerrillas in the
South at least initially
didn't need the supplies from the North,
although most orthodox
historians will admit
that after this was only
at the very beginning.
By 1965 the Ho Chi Minh
Trail was important,
and by 1970 or '71, it was vital.
Also in terms of the bombing,
we hear this all the time,
the North Vietnamese
were just too determined
to be discouraged.
What's the revisionist response?
First of all, North
Vietnam was vulnerable,
and second, what I'll
spend most of my time on,
the response is an effort to explain
the real reasons that this failed.
Dale Walton, Who wrote The Myth of
Inevitable U.S. Defeat in Vietnam,
does a real good job of turning
the whole orthodox statement
position on its head.
He points out that North
Vietnam was very vulnerable
to bombing, it had to
import all of its materials,
all of its raw materials basically,
from either the Soviet Union or China.
Had we, we had the means to do this,
closed down the port of Haiphong
And other ports, we could
have almost crippled
the Soviet Union's ability
to supply North Vietnam.
Attacks on the railroads, on the highways,
and the mining internal
waterways, properly done,
could have seriously limited
communist China's supplying, as well.
And attacks done on
infrastructure beyond what we did,
but really the whole
infrastructure of North Vietnam,
according to Walton,
and I think he's right,
could have crippled North
Vietnam's ability to wage war.
Explaining the failure
is more complicated.
Let me begin with a message,
graduated pressure was
designed to deliver a message
that the North Vietnam can't win the war
and it's not in their interest
due to careful calibration.
Well one of the things that did,
especially with the
pauses that took place,
is that it had the opposite effect.
It strengthened North
Vietnam's determination.
What they saw in it was American weakness,
so that was the first thing.
Graduated pressure also allowed
the North Vietnamese to prepare.
They knew where we started, and again,
if you look here you can see on this
how we gradually moved north
and the dates are there.
So well, you didn't have to be a genius
to know what was coming and
when we were going to be coming.
So it allowed them to prepare,
it allowed them to
disperse their resources,
and allowed them to get
ready for the next attack.
And perhaps worst of
all, graduated response,
graduated pressure let
the North Vietnamese build
a very effective and modern
and up-to-date air defense system.
What were called rules of
engagement made all of this worse
and compounded the problems,
and they were of two types, operational,
geographic and operational.
You can see it on the map,
and I actually wanna use this one,
it's a little bit better.
But we can start here.
First of all, geographically,
at least initially
and you can see it from
the map here, right there,
key areas were out of bounds.
And initially the 19th parallel
Nothing above that,
then the 20th parallel.
Even when these restrictions were removed,
certain areas were
restricted and prohibited.
And you see it clearly here
by looking at the doughnuts.
These maps are both pretty much the same,
but even then, even when the restrictions
geographically were removed,
you have these other
restrictions, as well.
Operationally, targets that
the military wanted to hit
were not permitted by Washington.
Usually because they were
designated civilians,
at least by Washington.
Other military targets
near civilian areas,
they were restricted too or
they couldn't be hit at all.
The rules of engagement
were often changed,
they were complicated,
and sometimes it was hard
for our pilots to know
exactly what they were.
Above all doing this,
or maybe not above all,
but also doing this,
what this did was prevent
the implementation of air force doctrine,
which called for damaging
enemy forces and infrastructure
by hitting vital targets
in their heartland.
You could not do this.
For the rules of engagement violated
two key military principles, security,
never give your enemy an advantage,
and obviously surprise.
It was very easy to
know what was going on.
All of this was done
against military advice
and it became, and if
you read the memoirs,
a very, very sore point with
senior military advisor officers.
General John McConnell, who was
the Air Force Chief of Staff
during part of this time, wrote that
the Rolling Thunder failed
because of restrictions
placed on the Air Force.
I'm gonna cite two analysts,
two colonels who analyzed this later.
One was a guy named Joseph Cerami,
And he wrote that, "The
slow squeeze succeeded
"only in preventing the obtainment
"of American strategic objectives."
And I wanna read one more
from that I cited in my book,
said rather well, this
man's name was Ellsworth,
Colonel Ellsworth, and he said this,
"President Johnson showed
he did not understand
"the inherent nature of air
power as an offensive weapon.
"Bombing halts and cease
fires hindered a continuous
"and concentrated
strategic bombing campaign.
"They allowed the North Vietnamese to
"reconstitute their forces,
reestablish their line
"for supply, and generally
outlast the American effort."
Again, perhaps worst of all,
it allowed the building of
the air defense network.
And how this could be done,
why we would allow such a thing
might escape most of you,
and it's really tough to explain,
but apparently it had
to do, at least in part,
with the signals we were sending.
Back in 1965, back when they
started building these things,
Westmoreland wanted to bomb 'em.
And he had a meeting with one of
the Assistant Secretary
of Defense, McNaughton
And McNaughton said to
him, No, you can't do it.
They're not gonna be used.
Soviets are just trying to
pacify the North Vietnamese.
And this was reflected in
a memo that McNaughton wrote
to McNamara, which I assume
McNamara agreed with.
This is what he wrote.
"We won't bomb the sites,
"and that will be signal to North Vietnam
"not to use that."
(audience laughing)
Two orthodox historians who wrote the,
Leslie Gelb and Richard Betts
Who wrote the book,
The Irony of Vietnam,
they were orthodox
historians, but as they wrote
kind of simply, McNaughton
turned out to be wrong.
(audience laughing)
The ROEs did other things.
We weren't, our pilots
weren't allowed to attack
under all sorts of
different circumstances,
and one incident where
Navy Pilots came across
more than 100 SAMs being
transported by railroad cars.
They were not allowed to hit them,
they couldn't fire on SAM bases until
they were wired upon themselves.
As one pilot put it, "We
had to fight them all,"
this 111 SAMs I think
it was, "one at a time."
Making matters worse,
and you can see it again
from these maps I have behind me,
the SAMs, many of the SAMs were located
less than 10 miles from Hanoi.
In that case they were safe,
they're within that doughnut there,
but they had a range of 27 miles.
Which meant obviously our planes
attacking targets there were exposed.
And I wanna read what General
William Momyer has said.
He was the head of the Seventh
Air Force from 1966 to 1968,
and I have a couple of quotes from him,
but this is the first.
As he put it, "The SAMs
could hit us whenever we came
"after one of the significant
targets near Hanoi,
"but our rules of engagement prevented us
"in most cases from hitting back."
Couldn't attack the main MiG
Base, 20 miles from Hanoi
until 1967, all of this was from Momyer
And not until 1966 was
he allowed to attack
the whole air defense system,
the radars, the anti-aircraft,
the SAMs, the MIGs
Systematically, but even
then he couldn't attack
the whole thing.
As he put it, "I was
never allowed to attack
"the entire system."
One of the reasons for
this is that Johnson
apparently feared that
this might bring China
into the war or even the Soviet Union.
But a number of revisionist historians
who have written about this,
and Mark is one of them,
have pointed out that the chances for this
were very, very low and
were knowable at the time.
And other historians, and there
are two Chinese historians
I've read on this, not gonna
mispronounce the names for you,
have said essentially the same thing.
So we outsmarted ourselves, it seems.
All of this of course interdiction,
you know keeping the stuff from
going down the Ho Chi Minh
Trail was very, very difficult.
I'll go back to Momyer and
there he is with Johnson
and there's the famous
quote about the outhouses.
Momyer wanted, as he put it,
he wanted to bomb,
he wanted to close the Port of Haiphong,
to bomb the railraods,
to really stop it all.
But the Navy was not allowed under Johnson
to attack Haiphong, and the Air Force
while allowed to bomb at
least some of the railroads,
was not allowed to bomb
the largest bridges
crossing the Red River, crucial river,
because of the fear of
civilian casualties.
And this is how Momyer sums it up
and I certainly can't do it any better.
Effective, oh yeah here it is.
"Waiting until the enemy has
disseminated his supplies
"among thousands of trucks,
sand pans, rafts, bicycles,
"and then to send our
multimillion dollar aircraft
"after these individual vehicles,
"this is how to maximize
our cost, not his."
And that's what,
(audience applauding)
I just wanna sum up Rolling Thunder now.
The fact that we hit, in
the end, almost every target
that was originally
JCS Listed, 94 targets,
in the end and did massive destruction,
really is in many ways irrelevant.
And Walton points this out.
"Johnson did not allow
the most lucrative targets
"to be hit, the key
industrial infrastructure,
"the Port of Haiphong,"
of course, "key bridges,
"and for that matter
the seat of government."
The bombs and here I'm following a book
called Gradual Failure
by Jacob Van Staaveren
Which I think is the definitive book
on 1965 Rolling Thunder,
"The bombs fell on less important targets.
"Our combat pilots took
risks over and over again
"by striking relatively
unimportant targets."
You've heard a little about Mr. Pike
Who was our leading
expert on the Vietcong,
and in 1983 he was at a conference,
and I think some of
the people in this room
might have been there, where
Pike was asked about this
and he said, "You know if
we'd have done what we did
"with the Christmas bombing in 1965,
"there's a good chance we could
have ended the war in 1965."
Bui Tin, who has been mentioned,
the Vietnamese colonel, the
North Vietnamese colonel
who accepted the surrender
in Saigon in '75,
and then eventually defected,
he wrote and he wrote this.
"Expanding in slow stages didn't worry us.
"We had plenty of time to
prepare, it wasn't a problem."
And John Correll, who the
Air Force Association,
he's a leading member of
that, put it this way,
I think it's the best epitaph
that I can come up with.
"Rolling Thunder was not built
to succeed, and it didn't."
(audience laughing)
Let me turn now to the ground
war, search and destroy.
And here, really I'm gonna
spend most of my time
talking about the disagreement
among revisionists,
because it is significant.
The debate among revisionists
is over the importance
of the guerrilla insurgency
versus the assertion
that what the United States faced
was a standard invasion,
a conventional war.
In other words, what kind of
war was North Vietnam fighting
to conquer South Vietnam?
I wanna stress here that the revisionists
who talk about guerrilla insurgency
and drawing its strength
from peasant discontent
are not making the same argument
as the orthodox historians,
who essentially argue that
we had no alternative.
Yes we fought this ground war as we did
between '65 and '68, but
there was no alternative.
The revisionists are
revisionists precisely because
they argue that we did have options.
The ones who will argue
for counterinsurgency
and emphasize counterinsurgency argue
that we did have options.
Basically what they are,
are critics of search and
destroy and General Westmoreland
And this was centered, for those of you
who are in the Marines,
although you have Army people
who criticized it, too.
Anyhow there are two poles in this debate,
as I see it, both by Army colonels.
One is represented by Andrew Krepinevich,
who wrote The Army in Vietnam,
and the other was Colonel Harry Summers,
who wrote On Strategy.
And let me try to go through
it as quickly as I can.
How am I doing time wise, okay?
The argument for focusing
on counterinsurgency
among revisionists goes
back to the beginning.
Colonel Lansdale who
was an Advisor to Diem,
John Paul Vann,
who many of you have heard of,
and later David Hackworth.
What Krepinevich blames is
what he calls the Army Concept,
the idea of conventional
war using massive firepower
inherited from World
War II and the Cold War.
And he argues the United
States should have focused
first and foremost on the internal threat,
the guerrilla insurgency.
Not just on main force
large guerrilla units,
but on the smaller ones and on
the political infrastructure.
He argues that this caused
us to miss the opportunity,
to miss opportunities,
to do counterinsurgency,
and had we done this, we
could have done this at a cost
low enough to permit a
continued presence in Vietnam.
Others who have argues
something similar to this
are Guenter Lewy, in his
book that came out in '78,
Lieutenant Colonel John
Nagl, who wrote a book
called Learning to
Eat Soup with a Knife",
in which he blamed what he
called "the institutional
"culture of the Army" and the use of
what he called "the hammer
of firepower and divisions?"
And I think it's fair to say, Lewis Sorley
Who pointed out that General Abrams,
Creighton Abrams learned
from these mistakes
and did much better.
The other pole is from Colonel Summers.
And what he writes is this.
He writes, "The United States responded
"as if it was an insurgency
and made a mistake."
and he calls search and destroy
"an intense form of counterinsurgency."
"We turned our attention," he says,
because of sources in the North,
"To the symptom or the screen."
The source with North Vietnam,
we should have isolated the battlefield,
we should have cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail
with American and ARVN
troops at the 17th parallel.
And also, he says, we
should have at least used
the threat of invasion
to deter the offensive
and force the North Vietnamese
to keep their armies
on their side of the border.
The flaw in what we did, he argued,
was we allowed the North
Vietnamese to control the war.
This put us on the strategic
defensive waiting on events.
Now, here's something I think,
at least that I found interesting.
Isolating the battlefield,
of course, is not a new idea.
General Westmoreland drew up plans in 1964
the JCS, Joint Chiefs of
Staff supported this in 1965,
and what emerges, I think in this,
is that the idea of
isolating the battlefield,
it's not an either-or
debate between people like
Krepinevich and people like Summers.
And in fact, it brings them together.
And my example of this
is, and there he is,
Colonel Victor Krulak, the Marine leader,
very famous person, very interesting guy,
who was a strong critic of Westmoreland
And search and destroy.
He told Averell Harriman,
the Assistant Secretary
of Far Eastern Affairs early on,
and the quote is up there.
Harriman says, "What do I do?"
"Mine and destroy the port of Haiphong,
"destroy the rail lines,
destroy the power,
"fuel, and heavy industry."
This is again from somebody
who is talking about counterinsurgency.
The well know PROVN
Study, P-R-O-V-N Study,
which also advocated more
attention to counterinsurgency,
also, as Andrew Birdle, an
expert on counterinsurgency
has pointed out, recommended that
the bulk of American forces should go
against the base areas, as he put it,
and the lines of communication.
Meaning base areas, the
safe-zones in Laos and Cambodia,
where the communists
could always retreat to
when they had to, and
lines of communication,
obviously the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Bui Tin, always useful, said Hanoi
was thinking about this.
And as Bui Tin wrote,
"The greatest fear in Hanoi
"was that we would cut just a small part
"of the Ho Chi Minh trail."
He quotes one person telling him,
"I'm scared to death
they're gonna do this."
And that guy was the general in charge
of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
It gets a little more
complicated, actually,
when you look at this, when you look at
the thinking of some
other military historians.
And I wanna talk about a
man named Dale Andrade
Who I found very interesting
and I wanna talk a little
about what he said.
And what this does is it
muddies the waters a little bit,
a distinction between counterinsurgency
and conventional warfare.
What Andrade writes,
and I think convincingly,
is that what we faced is
not simply a guerrilla war
or a conventional war, but as he calls it,
"simultaneous guerrilla
and main force war.
"And to ignore one or the other," he says,
"was doomed to failure."
That's why he defends what
General Westmoreland did
after he got there in June of '64.
He said, [unclear], says Andrade,
"Westmoreland had to respond
to the main force units
"he faced in 1964 when he took over.
"What he faced," says Andrade,
"was a perfect insurgency.
"A guerrilla war,
"supported by troops and supplies,
"as we know, from North Vietnam."
This, of course, is
critical of Krepinevich,
but it's also critical of Summers
who criticizes Westmoreland for
doing too much counterinsurgency
with search and destroy.
Says Andrade, "Westmoreland had to do it
"given the military situation.
"Yes, it was attrition, and
yes it couldn't bring victory."
But now we come to the key point
that I started with earlier,
what's the roots of this?
"The roots of this", he
says, "were in Washington."
They on what Andrade
calls the strategic limits
that our military was faced with,
"They could not go into Cambodia,
"they could not go into Laos,
"and North Vietnam," at
least in terms of any kind
of ground action, "was
off limits, as well."
A political scientist
named Christopher Gacek,
who studied this calls then
search and destroy the residual strategy.
That is what was left.
Says Andrade, "All this," the
restrictions from Washington,
"gave the North Vietnamese
an unbeatable advantage."
And then he ups it further.
And then he says, when you
add in the support from China
and from the Soviet Union,
you had an unprecedented advantage.
The North Vietnamese, as I think everyone
in this room knows, could
attack South Vietnamese
and our soldiers over and over
without the threat of
significant retaliation.
That said, it can be argued,
and I think there's something to this,
that all of it worked anyhow.
And why is that?
I think that comes when
you look at the reason
for the Tet Offensive,
which essentially was
a change in the strategy of North Vietnam.
And you don't change strategies
if things are going your way.
Basically by 1966, '67, Hanoi
was frustrated and worried.
And among the people who
have written about this,
in some detail historians are James Wirtz,
Colonel James Willbanks has written
a number of books on Vietnam.
General Davidson, and interestingly,
another historian, Colonel Gregory Gaddis
Who basically supports
the orthodox position.
And even he writes that by 1966,
Hanoi had lost the
initiative in South Vietnam.
Bui Tin, always again,
always come back to him,
writes that "by 1967," in Hanoi they felt,
"that something really
spectacular had to be done."
Therefore we get the Tet Offensive,
a huge gamble, and as Bob
Turner has pointed out,
and published as well,
a gamble that failed.
I'm not gonna discuss Tet.
You've already heard a lot about it.
What I wanna do now and
the last major thing
I'm going to cover is to turn to
what I call going from lost victory,
so it was during Colby's
term, to Black April,
The Fall of South Vietnam.
And what I wanna look at is
what was achieved very briefly
between 1968 and 1972,
and what we can learn
from the Easter Offensive.
And again, even among revisionists,
there's no unanimity here.
There are some differences of views.
The orthodox, however, say this.
The reason for, and so one is the reason
for the 1972 Spring Offensive.
And what that is, just to review,
it was, and you can see it there,
a three-pronged invasion,
strictly conventional,
no different than what happened in Korea.
Northern troops hitting from the north,
then the middle, and the south,
and attack on South Vietnam,
strictly conventional
with modern weapons, tanks,
artillery, the whole bit.
Why did they do this?
The fulcrum for balancing the debate
on what was achieved anyhow is the reason
that they launched this offensive.
The orthodox give external reasons.
They say North Vietnam, because
of the American Nixon's policy
of Detente now improving
relations with Russia primarily,
but also with China, in 1972,
they were worried that
they might lose support
as Detente developed,
in other words external.
They assume the internal situation really
hadn't improved in any significant way.
Revisionists see significant improvement,
but don't always agree
on precisely how much.
Echoing people like John Paul
Vann and Sir Robert Thompson,
the British expert from that time,
Lewis Sorley, William Colby,
Rufus Philips, and others
see great and significant
improvement in Vietnamization
Turning over the war, pacification,
rooting out the Vietcong
infrastructure in the countryside.
And there are other who can talk me out,
Mark can certainly could
talk more about this.
General Davidson is a little less,
is somewhat less optimistic,
and there are others
who see it the same way.
I think that the case for
significant improvement,
for dramatic improvement, is
strengthened when you look at
the North Vietnamese decision
to launch the invasion of 1972.
And again, this was a
real change in strategy,
and you don't change strategy
unless your old strategy isn't working.
And I wanna cite several
supporters of this,
the first is Robert Thompson,
who was the British expert who defeated
the communists in Malaya,
way before Vietnam.
And he said right after
the invasion took place,
this was a result of the
success of Vietnamization
and pacification causing the
North Vietnamese to invade.
William Colby, in his book
he writes about a trip he took
with actually John Paul Vann,
And they drove across
the whole Mekong Delta
on motorcycles, they had somebody up above
just to make sure.
But they said it was a different world.
You could cross the whole Mekong Delta now
and you could be safe and it was peaceful,
and it was to get rid
of that different world
that the North Vietnamese
launched their invasion.
Third, and this is an orthodox historian,
his name is William Turley,
but he's better than some
of the others, I think.
And he quotes Le Duc Tho,
who was the chief negotiator
at palace for years, on
the North Vietnamese side.
And the memo right before the invasion
saying that this was to
defeat Vietnamization
Sorley quotes more from him,
and describing the
situation in 1969 and 1970,
and this is what Le Duc Tho said.
"Our bases were weakened,
our position shrank,
"our main forces," get this, "decimated."
That's from an Orthodox...
Well, that's from Lewis Sorley.
And fifth, somebody was start
studied this in great detail,
Colonel Willbanks, and he informs us that
in the debates in Hanoi,
some people wanted to
wait for us to leave.
It would, the Americans are going,
why don't we just wait?
Others were worried about Vietnamization,
about the increasing strength of the ARVN,
the South Vietnamese army,
and the success of pacification.
One of them was the boss by now,
Le Duan, and he argued that waiting,
despite the fact the
Americans were leaving
will make it more difficult
to conquer South Vietnam.
If the situation was
dramatically better in 1972,
what can we learn from
the Easter Offensive?
And again, there is some disagreement
even within the revisionist camp.
First of all, the orthodox, they write
you needed American support
to defeat this invasion.
Which we did at just enormous
cost to the North Vietnamese.
They had 100,000 casualties,
greater part of their very
modern force that they sent in.
But still, the orthodox argument goes,
what this shows if you
needed American support,
the situation was hopeless, it
hadn't been approved enough,
that's that.
Among the revisionists,
you get these comments,
and they vary one from another.
Summers called it disastrous
for North Vietnam,
as it was, but then he writes,
and a lot as he has with Tet,
a tactical defeat for them militarily,
but a strategic success because
it undermined American will.
I'm not going through this again.
Davidson sees pluses and minuses,
but he writes this was a very
severe test that they passed.
Although he said the real
test would come later.
Dale Andrade writes this,
and it kind of brings things together.
He said, "Yes, the ARVN
needed American fire power.
"There's no question about that."
Colby and Sorley are the most positive.
Both use a variation of
the phrase the war is won.
What they mean by that, and I'm gonna now
be talking about Sorley
What they mean by that is that
with a proper American
support, the war was won.
The South Vietnamese could have held out,
and what he does to
strengthen this argument,
and I think it's pretty compelling.
He says, look at the other two countries
that were divided by the Cold War,
West Germany and South Korea.
And our support for them never ended.
In fact, we kept 300,000
troops in West Germany
'cause West Germany
couldn't defend itself.
And we kept 50,000 troops in South Korea,
then gradually somewhat less.
We didn't end our support for them,
even with American troops.
What are we expecting
South Vietnam to carry on
without American support?
And he's very scathing about this.
Of course, as everybody
in this room knows,
that support was not forthcoming.
Not just in terms of
American forces leaving,
but because American aid decreased.
And that brings me to the last major issue
I'm going to talk about,
which is the causes
or blame for Black April,
what happened in 1975.
And if you'll look at the two maps,
the strategy is basically the same
except in '75 they succeeded.
What do the Orthodox say about the reason?
They don't deny that to some extent the,
to paraphrase Colonel Willbanks' Book,
that we abandoned Vietnam,
to some extend we did.
Even Orthodox historians will
accept that, some of them.
But the main problem, they say,
was that South Vietnam was hopeless.
If problems hadn't been fixed,
it was still not viable.
Revisionists, for the
most part, reject this.
And those who assign more
blame to the South Vietnamese
generally say this is because
of things we have done before
or failed to do before.
In other words, by 1975,
our failures up 'til then
made the situation untenable.
What I wanna do is just
focus on one thing,
on one thing.
I wanna focus on the question
of aid and what happened.
And the relative aid
given by the United States
and the Chinese and the Soviet Union,
but especially the Soviet Union.
Orthodox Historians will say this,
one of them says both sides were famished
'cause aid decreased.
Another, and this is Turley actually,
he's saying while you can't fully compare
the money numbers and value.
There's no doubt, as he puts
it, about American generosity
as compared to the Soviet Union and China.
I think there are enormous
problems with this.
And what I wanna do is again,
just focus on the
question and the numbers.
Because it's not just a
matter of how much you gave,
it's a matter of need.
What did each side need after 1973?
Soviet aid did decrease
in 1973 and into '74,
when at the end of the year it spiked.
Well, there's good reason for that,
North Vietnam needed much less aid.
The Americans were no longer in the war,
there was no air war to be fought.
And fully, a third of
all the aid North Vietnam
got from the Soviet Union was
the sophisticated equipment
to maintain their air defenses.
Once, and it's more than a third
if you count all the ammunition,
the air defense ammunition.
Once the North Vietnamese
didn't have to fight that,
they didn't need all that aid,
and what they were able to do in 1975
is send a lot of these anti
aircraft stuff down south
where they took a heavy toll
on the South Vietnamese air force.
So they needed much less.
The person who does the
most thorough job of this
was gentleman Colonel William LeGro
Who wrote a book called
Vietnam from Cease Fire to Capitulation.
And he points out something
else in terms of needs.
North Vietnam he said
was on the offensive.
It could accomplish its objectives with
much less ammunition and
equipment than the south
because it could focus,
it could concentrate on selective targets.
The South Vietnamese, and
you can look at the border,
had to protect a huge area
and now without the Americans,
populated areas, bridges, roads,
and this 800 mile flank
exposed to the North Vietnamese
its western border there an 800 mile flank
which was, it had a lot of mountains
and very heavy vegetation.
Meaning that the South
Vietnamese further that,
the Ho Chi Minh Trail gave
the North Vietnamese interior lines.
The South Vietnamese had to
move their troops very quickly,
unlike the North, and for that
they required expensive equipment
that was very difficult to maintain.
Helicopters, planes, and the rest.
That's why George Veith, who
wrote the book Black April,
that covers this in great detail,
writes, I think trying to be polite,
that making money comparisons
between the aid we gave
and the aid the Soviet
gave, and everybody else
we decreased our aid and
inflation ate away at a lot of it,
to make money comparisons, as
he put it, is disingenuous.
Go beyond that, after 1973 we
no longer could have advisors
to the South Vietnamese army,
but before the 1975 offensive,
North Vietnam's leading generals
went to the Soviet Union
with a study, how to
combine and work together
with infantry, armor, and artillery,
a flaw that they had demonstrated
in the 1972 offensive.
The American aid cut further
and was based on a cease fire
that never materialized, I
think as everybody knows.
Instead we had what one
French expert called,
"the most murderous
truce," continued fighting.
And result of the cuts,
as General Davidson put
it, was devastating.
That the ARVN collapsed in 1975
is hardly a surprise
against this background.
George Veith' book, which
really deserves reading,
is interesting because he argues that
the South Vietnamese did a lot better
than they're usually given credit for,
even by revisionists,
and his book therefore
makes very interesting reading.
Certainly it did to me.
I have one more point, and then I'm done.
You've heard this already from Bob Turner.
The regime that took over
Vietnam in 1960, 1975,
especially when you look at
Cambodia and everything else,
and what it did and what it was like,
its inefficiencies, its
brutalities, and all the rest,
is often used by
revisionists, as it should be,
in the debates to discredit
the orthodox case.
I wanna go a little bit further, though,
to what I consider the
heart of the orthodox case.
And that is, again, that
North Vietnam had legitimacy
because of all the stuff
I talked about before,
and that South Vietnam, and
now I'm quoting these folks,
or one of them in particular
wrote a textbook on it,
was a pseudo-nation, a
counterfeit creation.
Is this true?
Well, all these years later,
if you look at a map today,
you're gonna find a lot of
countries like South Vietnam.
You're gonna find countries with
bigger problems than South Vietnam.
What are they doing there if
South Vietnam was not viable?
Was an American creation?
What about communism?
Well back in 1975, communist countries,
and I mean countries
with communist systems,
economic systems, governed
or ruled about a third
of the world's population.
What do they rule today?
Real communist systems,
you've got two countries left.
You've got Cuba and you have
the dystopian North Vietnam,
oh excuse me, North Korea.
Not the rest, where's the Soviet Union?
It is defunct, it is as
one of its two founders,
Leon Trotsky put it in denouncing others,
it has been consigned to
the dust bin of history.
Communist China is on the map.
They called it The
People's Republic of China,
but there's no socialism there anymore,
there's no communism, they
have what we would call,
I think, state capitalism.
I teach a lot of students from China
and there are a lot of
'em in America these days,
and when you talk about socialism in China
they just kinda smile, they know.
They're not supposed to say anything,
but no one tells you, these are
very wealthy kids, you know.
(audience laughing)
And by the way, they all speak perfect,
unaccented, colloquial English.
They've spent large parts of
their lives outside of China.
It's really interesting.
They call it the Socialist
Republic of Vietnam,
but as we know, at about the time
they junked socialism in
China or communism in China
in the 1980s, they did
the same in Vietnam.
You don't have it anymore, it's gone.
They can call themselves that,
but there is no communism there.
It was swept away in Eastern Europe,
in Laos they say they're
socialist, but they're not.
Cambodia's a monarchy again.
What happened?
Well it turns out, I think at least,
that it was communism that was not viable.
It collapsed on its own
because it could not provide
for its citizens a sufficient way of life,
and acceptable way of life,
at least when compared to capitalism.
And people in these countries
found out about this.
How this is relevant to the
orthodox and revisionist debate,
I can't necessarily say.
But I can say this,
if Ho Chi Minh and his comrades
won the battle for Vietnam,
they lost the battle to
establish communism there,
and that at least for me is
one of the primary reasons
to reexamine the Vietnam War.
Thank you very much.
(audience applauding)
- We're gonna go right to the
next speaker, Dr. Mark Moyar.
Dr. Moyar already is the
youngest historian here.
And even though, by our
standards, he's a punk kid,
(audience laughing)
he's been doing a great
job on this history,
and inspired a lot of other
people, including Dr. Kort.
And his main book only
takes Vietnam up to 1965,
there's a copy of it you can
see out on the table there.
He's finishing up the next chapter,
or the next major volume on this.
Gonna be finished within the next year?
Finished with in the next year,
and we're all looking forward to that.
And it's gotten him tremendous attention,
I think that he's probably been slammed
by more historians than any
other historian we know.
It's interesting, they have
a meeting in which people
talked about his book.
There's a whole book about the meeting,
which is interesting in which a number of
other historians comment about his book,
some of them very favorably,
some of them unfavorably.
And it's interesting to look
at the unfavorable ones.
I've read it and the favorable ones
are all very well written,
the unfavorable ones, they
pick on stupid minor stuff
and he rebuts them very nicely.
So he's a real historian,
he's done really well,
and we're looking forward
to more work with him.
And I'm gonna shut up
and let him talk himself.
(audience applauding)
- Thank you, Del, for that introduction.
I also wanna thank the VVFH,
Vietnam Veterans for Factual History,
for helping organize this and the AVVBA,
as well as Synovus And Chik-fil-A.
So thank you all for
bringing this group together.
And some of the things I was gonna say
gave been well covered by other speakers,
so I'll skip past some of it.
Gonna start off just talking about
a couple of general issues.
So people sometimes ask me,
they say, "How did you get
interested in Vietnam?"
So for me it started off
with a high school teacher
named Peter Scott who
was my English teacher.
And he was extremely
thoughtful, articulate,
virtuous, the model of
someone you'd look up to.
And my generation, most of
what we knew about Vietnam
was from "Apocalypse Now"
or "The Deer Hunter."
(audience laughing)
Or we saw sort of TV stories
with you know the disheveled
veteran who is homeless
and just eventually commits suicide.
And so this to me just really struck me
as there was an incongruity there.
I then took a course in
college on the Vietnam War,
and it was incredibly one-sided,
which to me also raised
a lot of questions.
University is supposed to be a place
where you hear competing opinions.
(audience laughing)
So then I started to do
my own research on it,
and realized that a lot of
this one-sided research
coming out was deeply flawed.
And I'll also point out to you,
a lot of you probably now have grandkids
who are in high school or college.
I actually have two high
schoolers and a college student.
Chances are very good they're
not gonna get the right,
they may not get any
information about Vietnam,
and if they do it's probably
gonna be pretty flawed.
And so I don't rely on those folks,
don't rely on our educational system,
'cause unfortunately it
is not going to give them
what they need to.
So try to find, the books out on the table
are great resources
you can offer to those.
So also just a bit more
about, so Triumph Forsaken,
the book that was mentioned,
I originally planned to write a history
of the whole war, from '54 to '75
and over a five year period.
But as I got into it, historians,
if you're gonna do something that big,
you typically do more of
what we call a synthesis
where you will rely heavily on books
other people have written
on more narrow topics
'cause you can't necessarily look at
all the data for everything.
But as I started getting into it,
and then I realized so much of
the other literature out there
was flawed or is missing information
that I decided to basically do
all the primary research myself.
But that meant far more
work than I had anticipated.
So the first volume, Triumph Forsaken,
which only goes up to '65
took seven years to write.
This next one goes through '68,
and I've gotten pulled
in lots of directions,
but it's been on and
off for about 13 years.
But I think that's what you have to do
if you want to really get
to the heart of the matter.
'Cause there's so many
people with axes to grind,
and there's also just a lot of information
that has been found.
You don't, I think, need to,
an explanation about the partisanship
that goes on in the
study of the Vietnam War.
A lot of it does concern
big political issues,
foreign policy questions, and you've heard
about those already.
I'm gonna go into more depth
on military side of things,
and you've heard some about that,
but I'm gonna go a bit more
detail on some of these things.
Which its less obvious perhaps,
what the bias might be there,
but there is a general
tendency on the orthodox side,
I think, to portray the
conduct of the ground war
as essentially foolish, reflecting that
this was just the biggest disaster.
And I certainly do not buy that.
I do tend to be closer to the position
that was mentioned of Dale Andrade,
where it's not an either-or between
was this conventional war,
was this counterinsurgency,
it was both and it changed over time.
One of the big problems
that I think you encounter
with studying the Vietnam War
and your average person who
knows something about it,
the tendency to think it was basically
the same kind of was for
15 years, 1960 through '75.
In fact, it starts off as a guerrilla war,
that's what a lot of people think,
but it becomes increasingly
conventional over time.
And becomes by the end
almost entirely conventional.
I'll mention, too, so one of
the most important developments
in studying the history of the Vietnam War
has been the translation of
history as from the other side.
And you've seen a couple
mentioned already,
but Merle Pribbenow,
former CIA translator,
has been instrumental for me
and a lot of other historians,
in providing sources from the other side,
which in many cases are quite candid.
Now officially during the
war, the North Vietnamese,
you know every battle was a
glorious victory for them,
but in these subsequent accounts,
we see actually a fair amount of candor.
Not always, but sometimes.
And you really actually see that
they had enormous problems on many fronts,
a lot of what they were
trying to do did not succeed.
And so we now know that when Westmoreland
was talking about his success,
he wasn't some crazy fool
who didn't know anything,
but in fact there was a real basis
for what he was saying.
We're gonna run through a little bit,
to understand the controversy
over how the war was fought,
I think its worth going back a little bit
to the start of the war,
the end of the previous war in 1954
and the development during
that relative period of peace
from '54 to '59, because during this time,
this is when South
Vietnam starts developing
its security forces.
And at the time, people are thinking more
about the Korean War model.
The South Vietnamese with our assistance
formed seven conventional divisions
and they would come under attack
for failing to anticipate
this guerrilla war.
Because guerrilla war
you would prefer to have
lightly armed militia units
that can secure the population.
I disagree with that.
The argument that wad made initially,
which I think holds true throughout,
is that your country cannot
lose a war to guerrillas.
It's gonna lose to conventional forces.
And Mao himself talks
about this very clearly.
Guerrillas who have AK-47s
are not going to conquer
a city of a million
people that is defended
by machine guns and artillery.
And so you have to be
prepared for that eventuality.
If you just build a militia force,
your enemy will have capitalize on that.
It's also I think a fallacy
that conventional forces
cannot fight in small unit patrolling.
And probably a lot of you actually did
a lot of small unit patrolling
and know that big battalions
can also break down
into small units and do
militia type operations.
The President Diem at the time,
he understood the dual
nature of this threat
and he also asked the
US to support militias.
And at the time, the US
Ambassador, Durbrow
who is not very sympathetic,
he says actually the Vietcong
aren't a big threat to you,
so we don't really need to
fund these militia units.
I also think the bigger problem,
we get caught up a lot
of times in organization,
fundamentally, and I've
done other work on this
and it goes across all conflicts,
the biggest question or
biggest challenge you have
in fighting this type
of conflict is getting
the human capital and
getting the leadership.
Because South Vietnamese
units, without exception,
throughout the war,
fundamentally their quality
was a reflection of the
quality of their leadership.
And when President Diem
takes charge in 1954,
he inherits a pretty small
pool of good human capital.
The French didn't build a large
and capable officer corps,
it was somewhat large,
not necessarily capable.
And so Diem actually
goes through a process
of building a new generation,
but that's a period,
that's gonna take him about seven years
before it starts to bear fruit.
Even so, the late '50s,
communists have not yet
resorted to armed insurrection.
For the most part they are
relying on political subversion.
They think Diem is weak.
It turns out Diem is stronger
than they bargained for,
and so that leads to the decision in 1960
to start an armed insurgency,
which is based on the model that Mao used
in the Chinese Civil War.
And as you heard alluded to,
there was a lot of
misperception in the west
that this was sort of spontaneously
grown from the ground.
But we now know, again, partly from
the North Vietnamese accounts,
that it was led by several
thousand communists
who infiltrated from the
North back into the South,
and they provided that leadership,
which on their side,
as well, was critical.
I will say, too, I think
their successes were more
about leadership and
organization than about ideology.
And for many of them they didn't really
understand Marxist ideology necessarily,
and certainly when they went to the South,
they didn't preach that to the peasants.
They preached to them something
that was very contrary to socialism,
which is that we're fighting
for you to own your land.
We're here for that purpose,
and then of course after
the war they take the land.
But at the time, that's
what they're saying.
So initially the militias
in 1960 are weak,
they're unfunded, so South Vietnamese Army
has to come into the war to start doing
some of the counter-guerrilla operations.
'60 to '61, the war is going
pretty well for the Vietcong.
'62 there's a stunning turn around,
and I've documented it some.
It's something that gets overlooked,
especially because there's
people who have a lot of reasons
to dislike the President
Diem and the American effort.
But communists themselves admit that
there was a massive turn around.
A lot of it has to do
with this new generation
of leaders coming in,
strategic hamlet program
was actually quite successful in
cutting off the VC's
access to the population.
Now if you look,
and if you've seen the Ken Burns series,
this is the only thing really
they show from this period,
the one battle that the
Vietcong did pretty well,
which was the Battle of Ap Bac,
which was featured heavily
in Neil Sheehan's book,
The Bright Shining Lie
And in that book, Sheehan relies basically
on John Paul Vann's Account
that it was the South
Vietnamese who screwed this up.
And despite his best advice,
now I went back and the Triumph Forsaken
has a whole chapter on this battle.
A lot of the big mistakes
that were made there
were actually committed
by John Paul himself,
and he lied to the press to
try to push the blame off
onto the South Vietnamese.
And so Vietcong do pretty well,
there's various mishaps.
In any war, you're not
gonna win every battle,
and if you look through most of '62, '63,
it's actually going pretty
well for the South Vietnamese.
As things are going well militarily,
we suddenly have the Buddhist crisis
in the middle of 1963,
which I think was certainly
abetted by the communists.
There was a big dispute
within the US government,
should we support this or not?
I won't go into all the details here,
but there is General Harkins,
the Senior US Military
commander keeps making the point
that the war is going pretty well,
there's some in the press
are questioning that.
But really it's, at
the time it's portrayed
we need to overthrow the government
because it's becoming unpopular
over this Buddhist issue.
Now later on, much later after the coup,
it becomes this huge disaster.
People will try to claim, oh
well the war wasn't going well,
but in fact I don't think
that is really the case.
So coup happens November of '63.
Contrary to predictions
of this great new era,
the coup leaders end up purging many
of the best people from the
government in South Vietnam.
They disarmed strategic hamlet militias,
and then the war goes south very quickly.
We then have, moving into
1964 you have Lyndon Johnson
talking about how he's the peace candidate
and he's not gonna send
Americans to South Vietnam.
We have the Tonkin Gulf incident where
there were two attacks, well
certainly one attack, maybe two.
And this goes back to some
of the academic theories
that Dr. Kort was mentioning
in his excellent talk.
There was a this idea,
we just needed to do one little strike
and we will send a message
to the North Vietnamese,
and they will say, ah-ha,
the Americans mean business
'cause they did this one little strike.
But it turns out we know now
the North Vietnamese saw that as weakness.
If you were gonna hit us, why
didn't you use all your power?
So the combination of
that, Johnson's statements,
and this decline in the
South Vietnamese government
will then lead in the end of 1964,
just after Johnson's reelected,
to a decision in Hanoi to
undertake a conventional invasion
with first entire North
Vietnamese Army division.
And they're counting on the Americans
basically sitting on their hands
based on what they're seeing.
Now of course, we know after the election,
Johnson decides he does
need to fight for Vietnam.
I do think for the right reasons.
He believed in the Domino Theory
and couldn't let it go.
But that period in early 1965,
there are a large number
of conventional battles
that kind of get overlooked.
And this, I think, gets the question
of was it a conventional war?
By early 1965 it's very
much a conventional war.
And you've got 2,000 North Vietnamese
attacking one location.
You're not going to defeat
that with light infantry.
So you need the South
Vietnamese conventional army.
They start taking heavy losses,
which is then what compels the
United States to intervene.
June of '65, Westmoreland says basically
they're going to lose this
war to the conventional forces
of the enemy if we don't intervene.
The US does come in.
Initially we're basically
backstopping the South Vietnamese,
but August of '65,
Westmoreland decides that
US units need to get in, in a bigger way.
First real big battle
is Operation Starlight,
which I know we have at least one veteran
of Operation Starlight here.
Is any Operation Starlight
veterans wanna stand?
I knew we got Phil, yeah.
So thank you.
(audience applauding)
Okay and so a lot of people
think the Ia Drang Valley Battle
was the first big one,
'cause they've got the movie
and the book and all that,
but Starlight, there are
several others early on
where, and people really
weren't quite sure
how things were gonna work out.
And I think the Americans
were pretty confident,
but a lot of people has
seen the North Vietnamese
just winning one battle after another,
and they thought well maybe the Americans
are going to take the hit here.
But in fact, the Americans
do inflict heavy losses,
and this will be a
recurring theme of the war.
So by '65, you have a big debate over
what should the United States strategy be.
Westmoreland says we're
gonna have to fight
a war of attrition, essentially.
And this then gets back to the point
that was made earlier that
there are not other
good options out there,
you can't go outside the country.
I do tend to think it was
the best of rather limited options.
Basically his thinking was,
we will through this
strategy of attrition,
we will wear down the communists
and buy time for South Vietnam
to get back on its feet.
And to do that, we're gonna use
search and destroy operations,
which we're gonna send our big units out
to look for the enemy
wherever we can find them.
North Vietnamese also pursued
a strategy of attrition,
but their objective is basically
to erode America's will
so that eventually the United States
will get tired of casualties,
just like the French got tired
and they want to go.
Now initially, there's actually
a fair amount of criticism
from the US Marine Corps of Westmoreland's
search and destroy strategy.
The Marines are up in I Corps,
and at the time I Corps is
actually not the hot bed
that it will become.
They wanna focus on the coastal areas.
They don't see a need to go out into,
to go after the big enemy units.
And there's this idea that
the combined action program,
which would put a Marine squad with
a popular Force platoon,
can actually win the war because
you're just focusing on the population.
What often gets lost is that by early '66,
the Marines change and they suddenly,
it's all of a sudden big
NVA Units coming to I Corps.
They start to recognize
that they can't just sit
in their coastal enclaves.
And so General Walt, the
Senior Marine commander,
in fact starts sending out his battalions
to go get the North Vietnamese before
they can get to the population.
'Cause once they get into the population,
then your ability to fire power
is going to be much reduced
and they're also going
to be able to fight you
where and when they want to.
And Westmoreland also made the argument,
which I think was largely valid,
that the pacification
was best left largely
to South Vietnamese forces,
because they had the linguistic skills,
they had ties to the villages,
and so there was, I think, a logic to say
we're going to let the Americans
do most of the fighting
out in the more remote areas,
and the South Vietnamese
to do pacification.
There's also a lot of mythology about
the effectiveness of search
and destroy operations.
So the book I'm completing now,
I've gone through a huge
number of these battles
to see exactly what happened.
And an overwhelming majority of cases,
the Americans inflict far greater losses
on the North Vietnamese.
A lot of this has to do with the fact
that America has this great
air and artillery capability
they can bring down.
But we even see in a lot of cases
where air and artillery wasn't used,
the Americans are usually quite effective,
and they take measures to ensure that
they're not vulnerable
to the North Vietnamese.
Now in the Ken Burns documentary,
which I'm guessing a lot of you have seen,
there is the period on '66 and '67,
which I happened to be working on
when this was coming out and
I wrote some things about it.
But he basically looks at
all hundreds of battles,
let me find the six
ones where the Americans
take the most losses, and then
we're gonna throw those out
and make it look like that
is the representative sample,
which I thought was very dishonest.
But even in these battles,
the Americans do better
than the North Vietnamese.
But people make mistakes,
so sometimes accidents happened,
sometimes things go awry.
Like it's, I think, worth noting
how just one-sided that is.
Something else, too, I would mention
that a lot of Westmoreland and others
took a lot of heat for
the so called body count
where progress was measured based on
the number of enemy casualties
and a lot of critics would say,
well this was a people's
war and it's not a big deal
how many of the enemy you kill.
And I'd say that's more
true in a guerrilla war,
though it's not totally true then.
But it's certainly not true
when you get to a conventional war.
If you have 50,000 troops,
you're gonna do a lot
more in conventional war
than if you've been knocked down
to 25,000 troops through attrition.
Move on to, so you've already heard
a lot of the discussion between
the civilian and military
leadership on strategy.
The Joint Chiefs and Westmoreland
from the very beginning
are pushing for other
options that they see
as a way to achieve
success much more quickly.
Invasion of the North is
one option that's floated.
Going into Laos and Cambodia
are also frequently mentioned.
And as you heard, there was a
fear of Chinese intervention,
which was largely unfounded.
There was also at the
time, for a long time
there were disputes over how much help
was really coming through
Laos and Cambodia.
And for a long time, CIA was maintaining
there wasn't much coming through Cambodia.
And finally that was resolved in 1970,
in the invasion of Cambodia
and suddenly realized massive supplies
that were actually coming
in through Sihanoukville.
There is, on the question
of Rolling Thunder,
that's also from the beginning,
the Joint Chiefs and others pushing
to reduce the restrictions.
Also, one thing I found very interesting
is President Eisenhower
was very forthcoming,
former President Eisenhower.
We have a lot of records of him saying
you need to unshackle
the bombing campaign,
you need to do other things.
And you know this is the
former Supreme Allied
Commander in Europe talking
to President Johnson
and Secretary McNamara, who don't really
have a military background,
and it is a bit surprising
how little heed they paid to him.
But even, and despite all these problems,
search and destroy inflicts
very heavy losses on the enemy.
And then one of the myths about the war
is that Hanoi was infinitely patient
and they were gonna wait us out.
Well, it's pretty clear
now from their side,
by the middle of '67, they
had become very impatient
and they see that they are
taking these heavy losses
and not getting much in return.
So this is what leads them to the idea
for the Tet Offensive.
They are going to go into the cities.
People are gonna rise
up in support of them,
and that's gonna force the
United States to leave.
Of course that's not how Tet works out.
The people don't rise up,
the South Vietnamese
rally, the North Vietnamese
take very heavy losses.
One thing that's not as well known
is that there's two subsequent
offenses in May and August
which are called, sometimes
referred to as mini-Tet,
but they were also very large in scale.
And they were actually,
one of the Vietnamese communist commanders
advised against it, but Le
Duan was still convinced
that this would work.
So those also end in stunning defeat.
So by October of '68,
North Vietnam is really
in very bad shape militarily.
So this will then set the stage for
improvements and pacification.
In November of '68, the
accelerated pacification program
starts and they find that
already at the beginning
the enemy is much weakened.
At the same time, the
South Vietnamese government
is making a lot of headway.
President Thieu is pretty
vigorous in trying to fix
some of the internal
problems, leadership problems.
But I think he's also another person
who gets the raw deal from history.
There is a quote from
one American diplomat
that when Thieu came to power
that he was the bottom of the barrel,
along with someone else.
And that's kind of what gets thrown in,
but in fact the record at the time
says almost all the Americans thought
Thieu was highly effective, he was really
the right person for the job.
As this is happening, General
Creighton Abrams comes in
to replace General Westmoreland.
Some of my friends, especially
my friend Bob Sorley
viewed this as a crucial turning point.
I tend to think it's not as big a deal
because Abrams comes into
a situation very different
in that communists have just lost
these massive numbers of casualties,
and they themselves
decided to shift strategy.
But Abrams certainly
does a good job on that.
Del, how we doing on time here?
- [Del] Okay.
- Okay, all right.
Well I will,
yeah a lot of this has been covered,
so I'll just a couple
points I wanted to make
on the question of the Easter
Offensive, you heard about.
So it's true they got a lot of help
from American air power,
but our own forces
could not have succeeded
without American air power.
So given the nature,
and you've heard about
this massive exposed flank
that South Vietnam had,
you can't defend that without the mobility
that air power gave you,
or allow you to strike the
enemy at will when you need to.
Let me just skip forward.
I wanted to make a plug
for VVFH Publications,
there's a new one that
I was fortunate enough
to contribute to, and talking about
the question of polarization
of our society coming out of Vietnam.
I do think that much of the polarization
that we continue to see in this country
goes back to Vietnam.
And if you look at up until 1967,
the war was pretty popular
on college campuses,
and then when the drafty deferments ended,
at that point you see this sudden rise
in opposition to the war.
And people like Michael
Medved and Jim Webb and others
have made the point, I think correctly,
that it wasn't that people
were against the war
and that's why they
were against the draft.
They were against the war because
they didn't wanna get drafted.
And I think ever since then you've seen,
not everybody in that category,
but certainly within academia,
a lot of people who didn't go to Vietnam
then had a reason to say it was a bad war
because, if it was a bad war,
then it was okay that I didn't go.
So anyway, I cover that subject in there.
There's more to read.
I just wrap up reiterating something
Del mentioned early on is that,
Vietnam remains a critical
part of our history.
And I think how we think about Vietnam
says a lot about how we think
of ourselves as a people.
And I think it supports,
if you understand the Vietnam War,
how it was done, it was
not this huge blunder.
It wasn't contrary to
our national interests,
I think it was in our interests.
Unfortunately, we didn't
fight the way we wanted to.
But I think it supports
the idea that, in fact,
there's something special
about the United States.
It's something that Americans
should feel proud of,
and something that should
make our younger generations
believe that it's a
country worth fighting for.
And so that's why I
think it's so important
that we're having this discussion today.
So I will stop there and will look forward
to your questions after lunch.
(audience applauding)
- Well now we know who the
brave people are who came back.
Congratulations.
I want to start off with a
comment by a special guest.
One thing that I think
not everybody understands,
I know not everybody
understands, but I'll mention it,
I have met and know a lot of veterans
from people who were there from '63
to people who were there in '75.
And a lot of people
there in the early years
came out with a fairly
negative impression of ARVN.
There as a point in time in which
a lot of the Southeast military
were not heavily competent.
And there was selling of commissions
and there was corruption, et cetera.
They always had some good units.
The ARVN Marines, the ARVN special forces,
the ARVN rangers, et
cetera, the First Division.
They were always really good units.
And at one point, you might have said
early in the war that
there was probably 30%
really good units and
maybe 40% mediocre units
and maybe 30% not so good units.
Well Vietnamization really worked.
Well of course the biggest thing was Tet.
Most people don't understand that
Tet changed a lot of
stuff in South Vietnam.
A lot of people there had been kind of
a little bit on the fence,
like maybe it won't be so bad
if we're under Ho or whatever.
And what happened during Tet,
especially the massacres in Hue,
took everybody off the fence.
The ARVN did not have to draft anybody
for the next eight months because
there were so many volunteers who joined.
And everything started changing,
the training changing, things got better.
By the early '70s, Vietnamization
was really working,
the units had gotten much better.
Here's a little known fact,
the government distributed
several hundred thousand weapons
to the local villages, to the PF,
the Popular Forces, and Village Forces.
And it's like, wait a second.
The government's giving weapons
to the people in the villages,
what does that tell you
about how things are working?
And it's fact in the battle of '72,
some of the PF and the forces
actually beat the hell out
of some of the NVA forces.
Okay, so things changed a lot,
they got a lot more competent.
I do charity work in Vietnam,
and one of the tragedies is that,
of the disabled veterans I see,
a lot of them are old Vietnamese Marines
who were badly crippled
before the war ended.
Because there are hardly
any Vietnam Marines
left alive who were fighting at the time
of the end of the war.
Because most of them fought
to the death up in I Corps.
They just fought in the mountains
until they were all dead.
So for those people who
didn't fully appreciate
the fact that the South
Vietnamese did have
really good soldiers,
they were good allies,
and they fought hard and died
for their country, they did.
Whatever negative impressions we have
from earlier parts of the
war, some of the confusion,
it's something to be put aside
and remember the way
things really worked out.
On that note, we have some
Vietnamese guests here
who would like to say a few words,
so I'm inviting them up.
- Del, as they come up,
let me just add to that.
I'm so glad you said that.
If you look at the
American Revolutionary Army
in the first couple of years,
they weren't really impressive.
If you look at the South Korean Army
in the first couple of years,
some of you probably dealt
with South Koreans in Vietnam,
and they were incredibly good soldiers.
The South Vietnamese military,
the big issue was leadership.
Bad political leadership,
they didn't perform as well.
That's also true of US troops.
You get good leaders, you get good troops.
But I have the greatest
respect for the ARVN
and various other elements
of the South Vietnam forces,
and we betrayed them.
And I think we owe them our
thanks and our appreciation.
So thanks for making that point.
(audience applauding)
- I'm so emotional to stand up here.
I don't know what to say.
My name is Hai Cao.
I am a Vietnamese-American,
so first of all,
I would like to thank you, the organizers,
and the speakers, the panel, the speakers,
Professor Turner, author Michael Kort,
and author Moyar, and especially Al,
the moderator who allows us a moment
to say what I'm about to say.
Ironically, today we have a
group of Vietnamese people
attended here, but they
represent the three generations.
I am Hai Cao, I was about the
late teens during the war,
after 1965 when the war ended.
But sitting in here there were people
who were adult working
involved in the war,
like Mrs. Yung Krall
that's very well known
to you guys here, she's an author.
Mrs. Yung Krall.
(audience applauding)
And then in the same generation
with Mrs. Yung Krall,
was a former professor
in Vietnam, Mr. Ky Vu.
Mr. Ky, please you stand up.
(audience applauding)
And of course, like I said, I
was just a student at the time
but there was particularly
one person in our group today,
she wasn't even born
during the Vietnam War.
(audience laughing)
She was like a, were born
after the end of Saigon,
Vietnam War, she was born
six, seven, months after that.
And she's here today to
represent not only us,
the three different generations,
but also represent the Vietnamese-American
community of Georgia, and the USA.
So we just wanted to be here,
and oh by the way, I
forgot to introduce her.
Dai Mei, her name is Dai
Mei, please stand up.
(audience applauding)
We, I have the privilege to represent
the three generations of Vietnam
and to tell all of you, the
Vietnam War Vets of America,
that we, unlike all of
the things you heard
or you say or people say and
you saw the Vietnam War movie
of Ken Burns, we really,
genuinely, all of us
appreciate for your sacrifice,
your family's sacrifice to participate
in the war to help us.
And that's why we are here today
to express again our
deep, sincere appreciation
for all the things you did for Vietnam
and for the people of
Vietnam, thank you very much.
(audience applauding)
- Well we asked for questions,
and dammit we got questions.
(audience laughing)
I tried to sort through them, and wow.
I'm going to do the best we can
to get through some of these.
I said there were other
historian experts here,
and we're gonna defer to
one of them right now.
"What about the Soviet
financing through cutouts
"of peace movement, the
America-France Committee,
"resistance movements that
exist internationally,
"what about what happened with that?
"Was there, in fact, support from overseas
"for the antiwar people?"
And Dr. Roger Canfield
Is uniquely qualified
to answer that question.
- [Roger] That was my question.
- Yes, come on up here
and hopefully you do well.
(audience laughing)
(Roger mumbling)
- Through a great deal
of money laundering,
the short answer is yes.
We had Agent Solo, who was an FBI double
who carried all the money
for the communist party.
We had the Orthodox Church in Russia,
which had money that was passed out.
We had the Soviet support
of the conference on Vietnam
and a whole bunch of other conferences.
There was a Russian, a
couple of Russian people,
about three different ones,
and I'm bad at Russia and
I've got 7,000 footnotes.
I don't remember the details,
but one of them said that
they spent more money
on the political side than
they did on the military.
I think that's a little exaggerated,
but it was a big number.
(audience applauding)
- And let me say this, I
have known a lot of people
back then and since then
who are antiwar people.
Many of them were, in
fact, very sincere people.
I have met Quakers that I swear to god
you could kill their
children in front of them
and they would just pray for you.
Not me, but okay.
(audience laughing)
However, what's important
is it didn't matter
how many of the troops, in
a sense, were so sincere.
Much of the leadership
of the antiwar movement
were not antiwar, they were pro-Hanoi,
they were pro-communist.
Tom, what's his name?
I remember, yeah, went to Paris
and took his orders from
a woman colonel I think,
I forgot her name, and came back
and said I got my orders
from the people over there
who represent the NLF, okay?
So the people at the top were in fact,
I hate to use the word treasonous,
but I can't think of a better one.
Yeah, yeah, close enough.
But on the other hand, I
sought to respect the fact
there were and are sincere antiwar people.
But they were what Lenin used to love
to call useful idiots.
And it's hard to believe, but you know
we still have some of those today.
(audience laughing)
- Hey Del, can I make a comment?
So well first thing, the antiwar movement
I would say, for one
thing, it actually may
have strengthened support for the war
because it alienated so many people.
But on the Soviet side I think
what's even more interesting
is 1968, they are actually trying
to influence our presidential election.
Which you know, sometimes we think,
oh no that's something new
that a foreign power would
try to influence our election.
And it Anatoly Dobrynin
in his memoirs said
they had offered Humphrey
to finance his campaign
because they viewed Humphrey
as better than Nixon,
and Humphrey apparently said no thanks,
I don't need your money.
But that shows you the
extent to which they went.
You know there's also a lot of suspicion,
I don't know that it's
ever been fully confirmed,
but when there's this move towards peace
before the election a lot
of people think the Soviets,
well we know the Soviets
are encouraging this
to have a bombing halt right
before the '68 election
because it'll help Humphrey,
and it gets short circuited because
President Thieu sees through it.
It's not because of Anna Chennault was,
I think it was out from under him,
but President Thieu saw that
there was this last minute effort
to throw the '68 election to Humphrey
by starting a bombing pause
four days before the election,
but Thieu, again, was able to push back
and Nixon ends up winning.
But again I think that's one of
the most fascinating Soviet stories to me.
- I would just add the
story of Jane Fonda,
who keeps getting arrested everyday.
But Jane Fonda went to Hanoi,
she made broadcast over radio Hanoi
directed at American
sailors in the Tonkin Gulf
telling them that they should
refuse to follow orders
because the bombs they're
being ordered to load
are really loaded with poison gas
and that under the Nuremberg Principles,
if you load the bombs you may be tried
after the war and executed.
If that's not treason,
the word has no meaning.
(audience applauding)
One other example being of
Vietnam Veterans Against the War
that John Kerry made famous,
John Kerry made famous,
the executive director of that,
and somebody has to remind me of his name.
He was a Black Panther.
- [Man] Al Hubbard.
- Hubbard, Al Hubbard.
Al Hubbard portrayed himself
as an Air Force captain,
medically retired pilot who
had a bad scar on his back
from having been wounded
while landing at De Nang.
Actually he was an enlisted E5.
He had gotten the scar on his
back from a soccer injury,
and FBI records revealed
that when he went to Hanoi
and to Paris, the communist
party of the United States
picked up the tab.
I don't know any more about it than that,
but they don't usually do
that just as a charity effort.
So when he was exposed as a total fraud,
as far as I can tell he vanished.
But he was sitting next to Kerry on
"Face the Nation" or "Meet
The Press" in April of '71.
And there were a lot of anti-Vietnam War people
were as patriotic as anyone in this room.
They had been told that our government
was propping up a dictator
and blocking free elections,
and there was no reason to be there.
And they didn't want their government
to be doing bad things,
and I think our government
failed by not responding to them.
There were a small
number of us going around
responding to them, but for the most part,
the State Department used a request
for a State Department
spokesman on campuses
as a way of punishing
people who had screwed up.
They would take somebody
who was disfavored
and make them go out to
Iowa or Kansas or somewhere.
They were not experts on Vietnam
and they did a horrible job.
And it was really tragic because
the people of Vietnam paid the price,
and the sacrifices of our brothers,
and a small number of sisters, were
I won't say in vain because
I believe very good things
came out of lasting 10 years,
but we had the war won at the end
if Congress had not thrown in the towel.
I don't have any doubt that Hanoi
would have had to back off basically.
Because both Beijing and
Moscow were pressuring them.
They had bigger fish to fry with America,
and they were talking about
pulling back and waiting.
And the correlation of
forces in South Vietnam,
people in South Vietnam about
the time of the Tet Offensive
realized they didn't wanna
live under communism.
They heard the stories about
the mass graves in Hue.
I was up in Hue in '71 when
they were digging up mass graves
and that got the attention
of a lot of Vietnamese.
The Vietcong used an awful lot of terror
to get support, and the
people didn't want that.
So I think everything
was really going our way
until Congress threw in the towel.
(audience applauding)
- As an additional comment to the stuff
that was said already this morning,
I lived in Singapore in 1980.
And the Singaporeans had no doubt,
we had conversations, they had no doubt
that we had saved them.
They basically said, they
would have gone across Laos,
Cambodia, they would have taken Thailand,
they would have come down Malaysia,
and we'd all be communists by now.
But you blunted the drive
of that whole thing,
which is true.
I mean the North Vietnam lost
1.4 million men in the war.
They lost more going to Cambodia,
they lost more in that
little war with China.
And they were so exhausted,
nobody was going anywhere after that.
So the whole thing fizzled out,
but the people who live there,
they really were quite sure that
if we had not stopped them in Vietnam,
if we had not exhausted them,
they would have kept on going.
Next question that came up,
this was marked for you, Dr. Turner.
How might the balance of power with China
be different today if
South Vietnam had remained
a sovereign western allied
nation, like South Korea?
- It's a good question.
I will start off by saying,
had we won, you know
McNamara in his memoir said
he wished he had favored
abandoning Vietnam in '64,
not responding to the Tonkin
Resolution and so forth.
Had that been the case,
I think the world would
have changed tremendously.
China, at that point, was
funding supporting training,
arming revolutionary
forces in South Vietnam,
Laos, Cambodia, Thailand,
Indonesia, Malaysia,
and again as far away as Mozambique.
Had we given up in Vietnam,
they would have taken Vietnam
and I think we would have
found ourselves facing
a dozen or more Vietnams.
We could not possibly
have won a dozen Vietnams.
Financially it's just too expensive,
short of using nuclear weapons.
So we would have basically
faced the choice,
do we use nukes and try to
protect these countries,
or do we allow the communists
to take over the world
one country at a time?
I think it is tremendously important,
and an awful lot of third world countries
did not want communism, they wanted power.
Most of them were not democrats really,
but they would support us if they thought
we would protect them.
But once they saw us
abandon South Vietnam,
all of their incentives
were to cut the best deal
they could with the
communists, hopefully survive,
and maybe even share
power for a few years.
So I think the world would have
gone to hell in a handbasket
very quickly had we
walked away from Vietnam.
I think we could have
easily lost the Cold War
or had to fight a nuclear war over it.
So obviously had we prevailed,
and South Vietnam become a free
and independent democratic state,
the Chinese wouldn't have liked that.
They didn't like much
of what happened anyway,
as it turned out.
They also underestimated the Vietnamese
and they got their nose bloodied.
But I think strategically this was
an incredibly important war.
Those who said there was
no reason to be there
I think are just fools.
It's just this was the test case,
all the senior communists said that.
And once we gave up in Vietnam,
who would listen to us?
And then the question
is, do we go it alone?
Do we use nukes?
I don't see a good outcome.
I would go as far as to
say when Jimmy Carter
was defeated in the 1980 election,
that also might have kept
us from losing the Cold War,
because we were losing all
over the world under Carter.
And Reagan came in and stood firm,
and turned things around,
and before he left town,
there was no Soviet empire.
And it didn't have to happen that way.
- If I could add, so until recently
I served in the Trump Administration
and one of the biggest things
that's happened in the--
(audience applauding)
I think one of the
biggest changes we've seen
in foreign policy, probably the biggest,
is a shift in policy towards China.
And I think belatedly
our country has realized
the threat that China poses on
the national security world.
We've seen a major shift
away from the Middle East
and terrorism towards
competition with China.
And what happened in Vietnam, I think,
has a lot of relevance still today.
If you think of if Indonesia or Malaysia
had looked like North Korea today,
what that competition would be like
or if we'd even be competing?
And one of the things, if
you've been following the news,
as we have been putting tariffs on China
because of their unfair trade practices,
we're shifting that
production to other countries
in Southeast Asia, so
they're a big asset for us.
They are also themselves organizing,
many of them, to resist China,
which is a huge threat,
I mean China has become very sophisticated
in using non-military power.
And if you think of the fact that
even our own basketball
officials are afraid
to criticize China, I
think that shows you how.
And you think I you're living in Asia
that much closer, there's
tremendous pressure.
And so I think it's gonna be a struggle
that's with us for a long time,
and one we have to be vigilant about.
- Which we pick up and something
actually was said earlier,
I think by Professor
Kort, about how Vietnam
has become more capitalist and so forth.
The Pew Research Foundation
does polls every year
all over the world.
And one of the recent polls,
they asked people all over the world
what they thought if the United States.
As you might imagine,
we're hated in Russia,
we're hated in Iran, and
a lot of other countries.
You know what country
gave the United States
the most powerful recommendation,
or applause if you will,
of any country in the world?
Vietnam, Vietnam.
So whether you say we had
it won and threw it away
or you say we lost the war,
in the end, I think we've won.
I think the Vietnamese
people love the United States
and I could see them being an ally
at some point not too far off from now.
Which I think would be great.
Just because I feel, my
dad fought in World War II
and now the Japanese and
Germans are close friends.
I think that's wonderful, so
I would love to see Vietnam.
Vietnam is a wonderful opportunity
for a George Washington
to lead that country to human freedom.
And I would love to see that happen.
I'd love to see it happen in my lifetime.
- [Man] A real George Washington.
- Yes, exactly.
- [Man] Not a fake one.
- Somebody who would lead them
to a free, independent country
where people have rights
and I think it would be a wonderful thing.
- There's two questions
up here that I actually
am in a position to answer fairly well.
They're about the industry and resources
and riches of Vietnam
and how important it was
to us or to the French.
The French were classic
colonialists, imperialists.
They were not enlightened.
They were not as good
occupiers as the British were,
in some ways, okay?
They did bring some benefits
to Vietnamese society.
We owe the written Vietnamese language
to a Catholic Priest who made it up.
We know the ao dai, we owe
the ao dai to French fashion,
actually, which is oddly enough.
They did have, Michelin has a whole bunch
of rubber plantations there.
They had some mining interests there.
And none of that meant a damn thing to us.
We had no economic interest in Vietnam.
Malaysia was the largest
producer of natural rubber,
which happens to be my field
of specialty in the world.
Now the second largest,
Thailand surpassed them.
We could buy all the
natural rubber we wanted
form Malaysia for a lot less money
than it would have taken
to get it out of Vietnam,
and the French wanted it in any case.
So we had no economic
interest in going to Vietnam.
That was never part of it.
In fact, while we were there,
again one of the things that doesn't seem
to get covered very well by,
oh I don't know Burns or anybody else,
I forget how many
hundred schools we built,
dental clinics, medical
calls, improvements,
dug wells, paved roads.
We invested millions
and millions of dollars
and a lot of our people's energy
in helping the Vietnamese southern society
in lots and lots of ways,
that people still remember
to this day there.
Actually what's funny,
having traveled there
and having friends travel North Vietnam,
we are much more popular in South Vietnam
than we are in North Vietnam.
(audience laughing)
That's partially because
people of the south
can resist the brainwashing
to some extent.
In the North, brainwashing
is even more complete.
I have friends who go there as tourists,
and I always tell people
it's a great country to go to
as a tourist stop, it's a good place.
Okay, just be a tourist
like you were a tourist
in Germany in 1934 whew
you wouldn't ask to visit
that little place up in Dachau, you know?
And you wouldn't want to bother them with,
can I see a synagogue?
You'd leave it alone.
But if you go to Vietnam
and you're a tourist, everything's fine.
If you say one word about
politics or anything like that,
things become less friendly.
Having personally been
busted by the chief or police
of the entire province in Hue
for the terribly illegal
act, by his standards,
of giving money to people he doesn't like,
crippled old army veterans,
I can tell you that it's
not quite a free society.
You wanna stay above that.
But my friends say, well you go there
and you see all these kids going to school
and they're all so pretty,
they have these little red scarves on.
Isn't that nice?
And I said yes, there's a reason.
If you don't show up in school
with a little red scarf,
you don't go in.
It's not complicated, it's simple, okay?
And you will not advance in your grades
if you can't recite the
poems of Ho Chi Minh,
if you can't sing the songs
of the communist party.
You get brainwashed until
right through high school
and into college.
I have met Vietnamese
kids who have moved here
when they were 13, and they
told me when they were 16
that it took them two years
to start getting the crap
out of their heads that
got pushed into it, okay?
So it's there, but we are more popular
in the South than the North.
Because up North still are,
some of the Marines I know
are married to Vietnamese,
and the ones who are married
to Vietnamese from the North
don't enjoy going to visit the relatives.
(audience laughing)
Okay, next question.
In any case, that takes care of that one.
Let's see.
Here's a good one.
"Search and destroy was a
failed strategy, somewhat,
"what do you think the outcome would be
"if we had launched an offensive
against North Vietnam?"
Or in my case, I would
say even if we threatened
an invasion of North Vietnam?
Mark?
- So, the one thing to keep,
I would say two, search
and destroy were tactics
that we used in pursuit
of an attrition strategy,
which was limited by the parameters on it.
There's a famous saying by Napoleon,
"If all you ever do is play defense,
"you're eventually going to lose."
And so I do think we could
and should have gone into North Vietnam.
So one of the points I make,
the French didn't have an easy war there,
but at the peak of the French war
they only had 100,000
troops in all of Vietnam.
And if you actually went into the war,
North Vietnamese could flee to the hills
or China or some place
and fight you from there,
but they lose their ports,
they lose their railroads,
they lose access
to most of the population.
And so if you went in and were
able to control those things,
it's a much better, it's a much easier,
much, much easier war to fight.
You're not fighting 500,000
conventionally armed troops.
- And the next question is
also addressed for you, Mark.
"An NVA commie me and told me in 1970
"the two biggest mistakes the US made
"were killing Diem and not
cutting the Ho Chi Minh Trail."
What do you think?
- I agree on both those points.
The coup that overthrew Diem
was unmitigated disaster
and as I said, the war was
actually going pretty well
'til that event took place.
It was immediately followed
by these massive purges,
including some of the best people
got pushed to the side and it took years
to recover from that.
And as far as Laos, yeah I agree.
And Michael I know mentions
the comments we've seen
from the North Vietnamese side that
they were terrified of this option,
and that would have
really undone everything
they were trying to do.
And one of the things, too, I point out,
there's several different
sources from different sides
that all, in about '64, '65,
they all said three or five
American divisions could
block the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Later when you get to
Operation El Paso in 1968,
planners said you could
do it with two divisions,
just the First Calvary
and the ARVN airborne.
So it was certainly feasible.
Again, maybe not ended the war,
but it certainly would
have allowed us to fight
under very different conditions
that would be advantageous to us.
- Let me just add something on Diem.
Because he was hated by many Americans
who thought he was just
an American puppet.
If you read the Pentagon
Papers you find out
he was nowhere near a puppet.
He stood up to the Americans.
We said you're gonna face
a Korean-style invasion
over the 17th Parallel,
so you need a big American-style army.
And Diem said, no I'm
gonna face a guerrilla war,
I need a smaller, more elite
counter-guerrilla force.
We said, if you want money
you're gonna do it our way.
So he had to give in to us on that,
but he was not an American puppet.
But the most interesting experience,
I talked about Diem, I had
dinner with Tran Van Do,
who was the State of
Vietnam representative
at the '54 Geneva Conference
and Vietnam's foreign minister
under Diem for a while.
He and Diem had fought together,
they fought against
each other politically,
but he had the greatest respect for him.
And that's what I found for
most of the South Vietnamese
that I met who had known him.
But I was driving back from
My Tho to Saigon in one evening
with Bui Cong Tuong, sitting next to me
in the front seat of my Chevy suburban
that belonged to the embassy.
And just out of curiosity I asked him,
what did you think of Diem?
Bui Cong Tuong was, in my view probably
the most important political
defector in the entire war.
He was the head of education and cultural,
propaganda and training for
what they called Ben Tre province,
we called it Thuan Hoa Province.
That's where the
revolution allegedly began.
And he said, "When we heard on the radio
"that Diem had been killed,
"we thought it must be
some sort of a trick,
"for surely the Americans
would not be foolish enough
"to allow anything to
happen to Ngo Dinh Diem."
He said, "We senior
communist party members
"viewed him in the same
camp as we did Ho Chi Minh,
"as a great Vietnamese patriot.
"But because he would not
accept the party's leadership,
"we had to use our propaganda apparatus
"to denounce him as a
puppet," and so forth,
but in fact he said,
he was very respected.
Not in the least corrupt,
although his brother was,
and a real patriot.
Was not a Jeffersonian democrat.
He was a little bit weirder in some ways.
He did hire his relatives.
John Kennedy hired his relatives.
But he was a genuine
patriot who was respected,
and even the leading French scholars
during their period there,
wrote about him for his
competence, his integrity.
So he was a good guy,
and when part of our
problem was the Brahman
Henry Cabot Lodge, US
ambassador from Boston
could not stand the idea
that this local president somehow thought
he was superior to the American Proconsul
who was used to giving
orders for Asians to follow.
And the fact that Diem stood up and said,
"I appreciate your advice,
I appreciate your help,
"but I am the President of
the Republic of Vietnam,
"and I will decide what
we do and what we need."
Lodge could not stand that
and they plotted to overthrow him.
And it was, in my view, and
Bill Colby shared this with me.
I talked to him and he said it was perhaps
the most serious blunder
of the entire war.
- There have been a couple of questions
about whether this
presentation will be available,
or whether the slides will be available.
There is going to be produced a video
of this morning's presentations,
then that's up to AVVBA.
So someone there can talk
about it later, perhaps,
but it will become available
at some point in time.
- We'll told them we'll have it posted up
on YouTube or something.
But if there's enough interest,
we can make it available.
- Yeah, its even condensing it down
with the breaks and everything,
you're talking about two
and a half hours of talking,
and you're not gonna
put two and a half hours
up on a YouTube thing.
It would have to be in sections.
I'm hoping to get a
really nice DVD out of it
that could be distributed to schools
and maybe get used, if we
can get it to anywhere.
We would send it to some colleges,
but then they would probably
trash it, of course.
(audience laughing)
So that's that one.
Okay.
- The slides themselves can be put up.
Yeah, on a website somewhere,
if somebody wants to do that,
I certainly have no objection
and I'll give 'em a copy.
- Yeah, Dr. Turner's slides
are on the VVFH website.
So if you go to WWW.VVFH,
Victor Victor Foxtrot Hotel,
I still remember.
(audience laughing)
.ORG, you can find your way to that stuff.
Question for Dr. Kort, when
the B-52s went into the North
in December, were they subject
to kinds of restrictions
that the other aircraft
had been subject to?
I think we know the answer to that, but--
- Yeah, President Nixon removed
most of the restrictions.
And so in the words of one of the two,
there are two generals named Palmer
who wrote books on Vietnam.
I'm trying to remember which was which,
as one of them said,
Linebacker II wasn't
Rolling Thunder, it was war.
(audience laughing)
And I think,
and as we end, and there's
one other thing I might say.
It's not part of the question.
Linebacker II suffered from accusations
that it was indiscriminate bombing
that killed many civilians,
et cetera, et cetera.
But if you go to one of the people
I cited in my talk this morning,
Mr. Turley, who again was
an orthodox historian,
he will tell you that
it wasn't that at all.
That every effort was made
to hit the military targets
that were important and
that given the scale
of the bombing and everything else,
it took extraordinarily
few civilian casualties.
And I think its important
to be aware of that,
that the effort to avoid
civilian casualties continued
even when the restrictions that
made things so difficult in having
an effective bombing campaign
were finally removed.
- Let me comment on that.
The actual number given by
the authorities in Hanoi
of civilians killed during the bombing
between Hanoi and Haiphong
was something like 1,500.
- There were antiwar
people in Hanoi at the time
from American who tried to talk them
into claiming tens of
thousands of fatalities.
In fact, it was an incredibly
low number of fatalities,
1,400 and some odd by
their official count.
And not all of those were the
result of American bombing.
Every time you fire a SAM
missile in the air and miss,
something called gravity plays a role,
and it comes down to
the ground and blows up,
and people can be killed.
But we really went out of our way,
'cause every military operation
has restrictions on it.
There's something called
the Law of Armed Conflict,
you cannot intentionally target
civilian targets, for example.
And we tried very hard to avoid that
in both North and South Vietnam.
Indeed, the Saigon representative
of the International
Committee of the Red Cross
sent a letter to General
Westmoreland in 1966,
after Westmoreland had
said we were going to give
the full protections of the
third Geneva POW convention
to all Vietcong members,
other than those captured
while committing acts of terrorism.
We were gonna give them
the full protection of the conventions,
which they did not even
arguably qualify for.
And the Saigon rep of the ICRC said
never in the history of
warfare has a country
gone to greater efforts to protect
the rights of their enemies.
So all this crap about
we were routinely committing war crimes
and bombing civilians
and so forth, it's BS.
Now one reason the casualties were so low,
is Hanoi had a pretty
good air defense system.
They had little spider holes
in the sidewalk, basically,
and when the siren went off,
you crawled down in them and
pulled the cover over you,
and if it's not a direct hit,
you walk free an hour later.
But we really tried very hard to comply
with all the laws of Armed Conflict.
And My Lai was worse than you read about,
but it was really an exception.
There were some war crimes.
Anytime you take 2.7 million people
and take 'em to a foreign country
where Grandma's not there to grab 'em
by the ear if they misbehave,
you're gonna get some
people who misbehave.
You're gonna get some rapists,
you're gonna get some people
who just gratuitously murder people.
And we court marshaled a number
of people for such crimes,
but it was never our policy
to cover up war crimes
or not to comply fully with
the Law of Armed Conflict.
- Just for interesting statistics,
we hit a town in Germany,
- [Man] Dresden.
- Dresden, with a quarter of the tonnage
we dropped on Hanoi and Haiphong
and killed over 30,000 people.
That was carpet bombing, okay?
What went on in Hanoi and Haiphong
was the direct opposite,
of taking enormous pains.
What was interesting was they were trying
to sell some French journalist
how terrible the bombing was,
and they drove them down to show them
a destroyed military installation.
Across the street from it
was a bunch of apartment buildings.
They had their windows blown out,
but they were untouched.
And the French were like, wait a second,
we've seen bombing damage
in France from World War II,
this doesn't look anything like that.
The tour got cut short right after that.
Another question, let's see.
Oh, this is one for Dr. Kort again.
"Your book, Vietnam War Reexamined
"has high intellectual
honesty and balance.
"How has it been received in
today's academic community?"
(audience laughing)
- There've been a,
I haven't yet encountered
the vitriol that Mark did,
but that's because I don't think the book
contains any of the
revelations that Mark presented
when he wrote his book.
But one review, quite uncivil.
Another that at least
was civil, disagreeing.
And largely for other places,
what they do is largely just ignore it.
So that's basically been
the reception in academia.
- There is a question
that was for anybody,
which I think I can probably answer.
"In your knowledge and opinion,
"do you believe the US is doing well
"in the humanitarian mission
of recovering personnel
"in Vietnam, why or why not?"
I'm involved in this because
I know a number of POWs who
have been involved in this,
and we've talked about it at length.
If the question is, did we
get all of our POWs back
at the end of the war?
The answer is absolutely not,
we did not get everybody
back, there's no question.
The question is, how
many did we not get back?
There are people who say there's 1,200
and I'm afraid that's nonsense.
There's not 1,200 people that
were alive and left behind.
There were certainly
some number between 40
and maybe 80 or 90 or 100
that we didn't get back.
We know of, during the Linebacker bombing,
one of the B-52s came down and
the entire crew was captured,
and they showed up at one of the POW camps
where one of the POWs I know saw them.
He saw the entire crew,
which is like 12 or 13 guys.
And the next day they were gone,
and they were never heard from again,
they were never listed as being captured.
And what everybody believes
is they were sent to Russia
someplace where they
would interrogate them
about how B-52s worked.
So we didn't get everybody back.
Interestingly enough, we didn't
get everybody back in Korea,
most people knew that,
and the Korean POW Family Association,
when the negotiations were going on,
tried to tell our negotiators,
whatever you do, don't
just take these people
at their word, bargain much more carefully
and get lists of names
and who is really there
and all this good stuff.
And they were ignored because everybody
was in a hurry to get
it over and done with.
So they accepted what Hanoi told them,
and they took the people that we got,
and I'm glad we got them all back.
But there's no question we
didn't get everybody back.
And at this point in time,
we're never gonna know the full truth,
at least not that I can tell.
We have been getting the
bodies back more and more,
they cooperated with that.
Of course they cooperated with that
because they basically
sell them back to us.
Because I knew guys who were on the teams
going in to look at the stuff
and they do these things like,
you have to hire a bunch of
Vietnamese laborers to help you.
You pay them $50 a day.
The government pays them $5 a day.
You have to rent Soviet helicopters
to take your people some place.
You pay thousands of dollars
for the Soviet helicopter
to take your guys some place
that are part of the background
cost of the government.
Okay, so it's a money
raising scheme for them,
but we have been getting
more and more remains back.
And a lot of stuff was lies.
There were people that they
said they hadn't captured.
One of my classmates who had disappeared,
they said they hadn't captured him.
Later on they got his body back
and he had been processed
and embalmed by the North Vietnamese.
They had him the whole time,
and just didn't admit
that they ever had him
until they gave his body back.
So no, we haven't got everybody back.
We've tried fairly hard.
Not hard enough.
I think it's kind of scandalous that
both two of our senators, who
I will not name right now,
were part of,
I said I wasn't gonna name
'em, I'm glad you did.
(audience laughing)
Were part of legislation that said,
we're gonna close the books on this stuff
and not go anywhere with it.
So the sad news is, we
didn't get all our guys back
and it pains me to think of,
whether it was 40 or 80 Americans who,
I believe by now are long dead,
who suffered total
despair and died in Russia
or Cuba or somewhere else.
But that's just the way it is,
and it's a tragedy, okay.
Trying to find something that's current.
Here is a question that I'm
not sure who should answer.
"How corrupt was RVN government,
"was that part of the problem
"of their not being able to survive?
"And secondarily, did we use
the Vietnamese traditional
"fear of China effectively?"
Who wants to field one of those?
- I can comment on both of those.
So on the corruption
issue, as Bob mentioned,
Diem was widely viewed
as being not-corrupt.
Part of his appeal was that this notion
of being an aesthetic father figure,
he also didn't marry,
and that supported that.
Ho Chi Minh cultivated that,
and we have sensed learned he actually had
a couple wives that he
tried to keep secret.
But it was a premium in Vietnamese society
for having that appearance of somebody
who is not rewarding themselves
through public funds.
Now there are different views in Vietnam,
as in much of the world,
what we view as corruption isn't
necessarily quite the same.
People also like point out, Lyndon Johnson
was a pretty corrupt fellow himself.
So we sometimes overlook the
corruption in our own society.
There were certainly others,
and I think to some extent it's inevitable
whenever the US pours
huge amounts of money
into another country,
there's gonna be corruption.
There was, now one
thing that's interesting
to point out, too.
Some of the Vietnamese who were corrupt,
were also very good fighters,
but some of them were not.
They did clean up their act,
I think, towards the end
as our presence declined.
One thing, too, I wanna mention
and this came up to some degree earlier,
but in terms of the quality of
the ARVN and their leadership,
there was, there were several coups,
a series of coups in Vietnam thereafter,
if you were the Chief of State,
you had to think about
who was gonna be loyal
to you in a coup,
and that would sometimes
undermine efficiency.
What I would point out, too,
and I'm guessing there's
some Civil War buffs here,
but if you look at our own Civil War.
This is more on the northern side,
so I'm not sure if this
resonates as much in Georgia,
but in the North one of the things
you always hear complaints
about is the political generals.
Lincoln was appointing these politicians
who were not good generals
to leadership positions.
And he did that to get
support from the states.
So it's also something
inherent in a civil war.
One other point I wanna make about ARVN,
since it came up.
So by 1968, they had lowered
the draft age in South Vietnam.
If you look on a per capita basis,
the South Vietnamese Armed Forces in 1968
are equal to US Armed
Forces at 18 million troops,
which is one and a half times
what we put together in World War II.
So they certainly went all the way forward
in terms of mobilizing their country.
In the China-Vietnam part,
one of the points I make in
Triumph Forsaken is that,
we have exaggerated the
historical animosity
between China and Vietnam.
And if you look back in history,
for 1,000 years prior to the Vietnam War,
there's only three wars
between China and Vietnam.
And those were basically
instigated by the Vietnamese.
And for the most part, there's actually
a lot of agreement and cooperation.
And when the French come in,
in the late 19th Century,
they actually appeal to China
for help because they
are a vassal of China,
and China comes in and fights
the French and then loses.
But if you look at Ho
Chi Minh's early career,
he's also very close to the Chinese.
And I think the falling out
between China and Vietnam
has a lot to do with the Vietnam War,
because as we intensified the war,
that the Vietnamese had to rely
increasingly on the Soviets
'cause they had the advanced
anti aircraft weaponry,
among other things.
And so you see a falling out
starting in the late '60s.
But I think we shouldn't assume
that this is an inevitable fact.
Right now this is a big issue, too,
because I think there's
a lot of people counting
on us using Vietnam as a
counterweight to China.
I'm not sure we can count on that,
especially as you mentioned,
Vietnam is not a free society.
They're not South Korea or Indonesia,
and so we need to be careful.
And I think it's certainly possible
that they could turn
depending on who is in charge.
Ho Chi Minh throughout
his life was pro-Chinese,
but he dies in '69, and
he, Le Duan by this time
has taken over and he's
much less amenable to China.
So again, China right
now is very aggressive
in cultivating the
elites of Southeast Asia.
They're doing a lot of
what we used to do more of,
which is bring those people
to China on scholarships
to increase their sympathy for China.
So we have to be, now
hopefully we can get Vietnam
to be a bulwark against China,
but I don't think we can
assume it's inevitable.
- I have a question from one
of our Vietnamese guests.
I'm gonna throw this
out to all three of you.
"Did the US purposefully
abandon South Vietnam
"and let the Vietcong
take over the country?
"Why withdraw and give
up at the last minute?
"Would the outcome have been different
"if the US had stayed a lot longer?"
I have some opinions about that--
- I hate to sound like Bill Clinton
and say it depends on
the definition of US.
(audience laughing)
But I think Nixon deserves praise
for his efforts to save South Vietnam.
There was a time when a
lot of American officials
felt like the effort was lost.
And so we should cut our losses.
There were a number of people who,
for reasons of moral
courage, said no to that,
and Richard Nixon was one of them.
Another one was Graham,
US Ambassador to Saigon,
Graham Martin who was
a good friend of mine.
I was actually in the
embassy in the final days
when Graham came out of his office
and saw I was out there and
said come in for a minute.
And for about 45 minutes he unloaded me
on all the pressure he was
under to abandon South Vietnam.
Now Graham had lost a son in Vietnam,
and he cared about it.
But he was also a very moral,
he was a Southern gentleman.
He was from South Carolina, I believe.
And he was not going to
abandon South Vietnam.
He delayed the evacuation of Americans
and took great criticism for it
because he felt that when he did that,
it would seal the fate
of the South Vietnamese.
He wanted to give them some chance
to try to negotiate some sort of deal.
I have Vietnamese and
American veteran friends
who feel like Nixon
totally betrayed Thieu.
He didn't have any choice,
Congress controls the purse strings.
Congress, the election
of 1972 brought to power
a lot of people that
might not have been able
to spell Vietnam or find it on
an outlined map of the world,
but they knew it was evil
and we wanted to cut our ties with it
and bring our boys home, and so forth.
And they ultimately had the votes.
They cut the aid back dramatically,
they prohibited the use of any US troops.
Now my professional field
for the last 32 years
has been National Security Law.
I have written multiple books
about the War Powers Resolution.
And I wrote a 1,700 page doctoral thesis
on national security and the Constitution.
And it goes back to the
early debates on this.
I don't think Congress had
the power to do what they did.
They had every right to deny new funds,
but to pass a law saying
you can't use funds
we've already appropriated,
that interferes with the command,
which the Supreme Court
has repeatedly said
belongs exclusively to
the Commander in Chief,
to the President.
But I think there were some
great people at the end
who with courage stood
up and tried to prevent
what happened from happening.
But there were also a
lot of people who said,
hey the orders have changed, salute,
and screw the Vietnamese.
I hate to use that language,
but that's essentially what
it was and it was tragic.
I was there at the end,
I watched Americans make promises
and then go to the airport
and fly back to the states.
My Vietnamese interpreter, Nguyen Van Qui,
was dying of cancer in
their what used to be
Third Field Hospital, you all remember,
was the Seventh Day Adventist hospital,
(speaking foreign language)
and I went in to see him one day,
and the doctors came and they said,
well we'll see you in the morning.
And he went to the airport and flew home.
Everywhere I turned, some
Americans were betraying
Vietnamese who had relied upon us.
USIA told their Vietnamese
employees to assemble
at a certain park in Saigon
where rescue helicopters would be there
to take them to ships.
Instead, the Americans
went to a different park
and were evacuated.
So I think the final days were,
call it Black Sunday or Black
April or whatever you want,
it was one of the few times in my life
when I felt shame to be an American.
And I think that story needs to be told,
but I think a lot of
people tried very hard
to carry out our promises
to the Vietnamese.
And there were some people who served
very bravely at the end trying to get out
everybody they could.
I brought out the wife
of a friend of mine,
who was the Public Affairs
Officer for the embassy,
and a Vietnamese woman I had worked with
who had a Masters Degree
from Michigan State
and I knew she'd do fine.
And I said she was my fiancee.
And as soon as I got to a refugee camp,
I pulled up my US Senate ID card,
and I said I need to go back to Saigon.
I was gonna bring another fiancee out.
I figured, my government was betraying,
(audience laughing)
my government was betraying its word,
I was gonna betray mine, too.
And they told me, "Sir, they're
evacuating the last people
"by helicopters as we speak.
"Nobody's going back."
And I still feel guilty
that I couldn't do more.
I tried hard.
I went back during the orphan lift,
because the governor of Michigan,
I was working for a Michigan senator,
and the governor of Michigan declared
an open door policy and said, "Any orphans
"you can bring back from Indochina,
"we will find homes for."
And I talked to Graham
Martin and I said, look,
we've got flights full of rice going
into Phnom Penh every morning.
Let me go in there and
fill them up with orphans
and bring them back.
And I found a group of stewardesses,
cabin attendants they call 'em today,
who knew how to change
diapers and feed formula,
and they said, "We will go with you
"and take care of the babies
and the kids to do that."
And I still have a telegram
the embassy sent to Phnom Penh
saying "Robert Turner Staff
Aid to Senator Griffin
"wants to come to Phnom
Penh to explore possibility
"of rescuing orphans."
I also have a hand written
note from George Jacobson
saying, "Mr. Turner,
not possible to travel
"to Phnom Penh at this time.
"Will explain later."
I immediately walked over to the embassy
and as I turned the corner,
there was a Saigon Post,
you know one of those
little mama-san stands
with all the newspapers.
Banner headline, Phnom Penh Falls.
Two days later, Khmer
Rouge begins the Killing Fields.
And I still have trouble
when I go to graduation
and an Asian student
walks across the stage,
and I think about the hundreds of kids
we might have gotten out of Cambodia
that might be doing that
in the United States today.
It breaks my heart.
(audience applauding)
But you know,
lot of bad things happened at the end.
I wasn't smart enough soon enough.
But anyway, a lot of people
fought hard at the end
to save South Vietnam.
I think Jerry Ford was one of 'em.
I think Nixon was one of 'em.
I think Graham Martin was one of 'em.
And these people will
always be heroes to me,
despite the faults they had.
Nobody's perfect, but there were people
who just said hey, we
have marching orders.
Yeah, screw the Vietnamese, let's go home.
And to their credit, there
were a good number of people
who wouldn't buy that,
and I'm proud of 'em.
- Well Del gave me the stage,
so I am gonna preemptively
make you guys a promise.
We've only got a half
hour left for questions
and there's no way we
can get through them all.
So I will promise you that
I will put all the rest
of the questions up on our website.
And the answers, too, of course.
(audience laughing)
Here's an interesting one for you guys.
I don't know if you
can answer this or not.
"What can any of the speakers tell us
"about Operation Popeye seeding clouds
"to make it remain more to
hamper NVA VC operations?"
- So I can talk about that.
This is part of the debate
over the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The military had been repeatedly pushing
to put US ground forces into Laos,
and every time they tried to do that,
the US Ambassador in
Laos, William Sullivan
started screaming bloody murder
and coming up with every
reason under the sun
why we shouldn't do that.
Yeah, we had this
neutralization agreement,
which the North Vietnamese
never respected.
We pulled our troops out in '62.
They were supposed to
pull theirs, they didn't.
So this drove the military
crazy, justifiably.
Never fully comprehended why
Sullivan actually did this.
He claimed that there was benefit
to having the Laotian
government on our side.
I don't really think that's true,
'cause their armed forces
were almost nonexistent.
I mean the good fighters were working
for the CIA at the time.
So anyway, this came up
during one of the iterations
of the Joint Chiefs calling
for heightened bomb,
or for excuse me ground
operations in Laos.
Sullivan came back, there was Popeye
and the other one was,
I think, Commando Lava.
And together these chemicals would,
they'd induce rain and then
they'd turn the roads to mud,
and he said, if we do
this we're gonna gum up
the Ho Chi Minh trail.
We don't need to put force in
because we have these chemicals.
And I think at the end of his telegram
when he talks about this,
he says, "Make mud, not war."
So anyway, so those programs were,
they were used to some extent
but they never achieved that purpose
of stopping traffic on
the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The North Vietnamese had
built all-weather roads
because they'd always had problems
with the rainy season and mud.
So it was a gimmick that
did not achieve a strategic purpose.
- Just as a reference,
by the end of the war,
I know that Hoi Tran was
one of the pilots we knew,
who a Southeast pilot,
and they were bombing Ho Chi Minh Trail
and they would find convoys
of 200 trucks at a time
going down the trail.
And there were photographs of a truck park
in North Vietnam that
had 5,000 trucks in it.
People think that we spent
way too much money in Vietnam.
The Russians and the Chinese spent
a great deal of money in Vietnam.
And whether you measure
it by dollars or not,
if you measure it against
their gross national products,
they may have spent
more money than we did.
But they supplied thousands of trucks,
1,500 tanks at least, many
hundred pieces of artillery,
better than anything we
got the South Vietnamese.
Oceans of fuel, millions of uniforms,
millions of AK-47s.
Just incredibly amounts of supply,
more than we ever left to the South.
So they invested well,
and as Bob Sorley once said,
in a sense the bad news
was that the Russians
were more consistent,
faithful allies than we were.
Question here, "Has any research shown
"that JFK wanted to avoid
putting more troops in Vietnam
"and was opposed by the State Department,
"in particular his ambassador?"
- On the periphery of that,
we have the Miller Center at
the University of Virginia,
which is a center that does
a lot of oral histories
on presidents and so forth.
They have an interview with Bobby Kennedy,
the attorney general, shortly,
and Kennedy's closest advisor,
shortly before his death.
And they asked him, it has been
said that President Kennedy
was planning on pulling
US Troops out of Vietnam
after the election, is that true?
Response, no.
I think if Kennedy had
been secretly planning
to abandon his commitment,
his brother would have known about it.
And so there are a lot
of pro-Kennedy people
who came up with this line,
this fantasy, oh Kennedy
wasn't gonna allow
Vietnam to go on.
If he had lived he
would have ended it all.
And I don't see any reason
to believe that's true.
Kennedy was dedicated to Vietnam.
Kennedy as a Senator in 1956
had given a major speech
to the American friends of Vietnam
talking about Vietnam
basically being the keystone
to the Archway or something.
The finger in dyke, if you will,
and it was imperative for us to stand up
against communism in Vietnam.
And I just can't imagine that
he would have abandoned that view.
The assassination if you
will of Ngo Dinh Diem
was mostly engineered by
some rather low level people
in the State Department, Roger
Hilsman and a few others.
They went to Dean Acheson,
the Secretary of State,
and said the President
has already approved this.
And that's how they got
Acheson to sign off.
They went to the President
and basically said,
Acheson is recommending this,
and he went along with it.
And when the coup took place,
and Kennedy was briefed,
was told in the Oval Office
Diem has been killed,
people said his face turned red
and he had to leave the room.
I was never a big Kennedy fan,
but I think he was a decent man
who understood the threat of communism.
He knew Diem, both were
of course Catholics.
He had been introduced to Diem
by it was Cardinal Spellman.
And he wanted to see South Vietnam safe.
To his credit, Kennedy understood that
we were going to face an
unconventional warfare challenge
and he beefed up the special forces.
My last army assignment
before I went to Vietnam
was working directly for
Lieutenant General Billy Yarborough
William Yarborough, who had
created its special forces
under Kennedy, and we spent a lot of time
talking about Vietnam and other things.
He was the only flag officer I ever met
who I thought really understood
unconventional warfare.
We remained lifelong friends
'til he died in 2005.
But I think Kennedy
basically was right on this.
I think he had some people around him
who resented the face that this little guy
thought he was the President of Vietnam
instead of the subordinate
to the American Proconsul.
And I think I blame Henry Cabot Lodge
for a lot of things that went wrong.
The ambassador before
Lodge, Fritz Nolting,
was a colleague of mine
when I taught in the UVA
was now the politics department,
and we were good friends.
And he was totally cut out of the loop
because he was too pro-Diem.
He had the greatest respect for Diem,
and then they brought in Lodge
and the young Turks in
the State Department said,
"Let's get rid of Diem," and
that almost lost us the war.
- Can I comment on that?
So I'd say two things, one,
Kennedy, when he comes into office
there's less than 1,000 Americans there.
He increases that number to
16,000 and he talks repeatedly
of why Vietnam is so important.
And he specifically says he
screwed up the Bay of Pigs,
he screwed up Laos, he
needs a success somewhere.
So he is definitely
committed on those grounds.
The other thing I'd say is,
if you fast forward to 1965
and what Kennedy would have faced,
there is enormous pressure
from other countries in Asia
for American intervention.
This is something that often gets lost,
but you have pretty much every country
in Southeast Asia saying,
if you leave Vietnam,
the whole region is going.
You even have the US
Ambassador to Japan is saying
Japan is gonna go.
So I can't imagine Kennedy
just pulling out in '65.
- "There's an interesting
rumor that the Unites States
"rejected a communist Vietnamese surrender
"during the 1972 Haiphong Port blockade.
"Is that a myth?"
My best guess is, but I'll
let one of you answer.
- [Robert] Never heard of it.
- Pardon me?
- [Robert] I've never heard of it.
- Yeah, I've never heard of it either.
But second question is,
"Was Watergate the main cause
"that democratic control
of Congress passed the law
"to force the US to stop
aiding South Vietnam."
- [Mark] Dr. Kort hasn't answered
anything for a long time.
- Okay no, Congress hated Richard Nixon.
He was not part of the in-crowd,
he almost always needed a shave,
and he was determined
to defend South Vietnam.
They, many in Congress wanted
to see South Vietnam go down.
I mean it was sad.
I admit I spent five years
working in the Senate,
including the last two years of the war,
and in the Reagan Administration
I was the acting Assistant
Secretary of State
for Legislative Affairs.
Spent a lot of time up on the hill dealing
with senators and so forth.
They did not understand at
all what Vietnam was about.
They were visited left and
right by antiwar groups.
They would go home and give speeches
and some hippie would stand up and say,
"Why are you killing babies?"
And they just wanted to get rid of it.
They didn't understand it,
they had no love for Nixon,
and the reason they
were, you may have heard
in the last months that
Nixon was impeached.
It's not true, the House was preparing
to impeach him when Nixon resigned.
Ironically, my boss,
Senator Griffin played the,
I think a decisive role
in Nixon's decision.
I was in the office on
Saturday for my own reasons,
and a woman, one of the typists,
was exchanging faxes with the senator
who was back in Michigan.
And she came running into my office
and said, "Look at this."
And the text said, "It's my opinion
"that the President will
be impeached by the House."
And he had put a little
caret under just before that
and said, "If he does
not choose to resign,
"the House will impeach him."
And the Monday morning
or Monday afternoon,
Washington Star had a banner headline,
Griffin to Nixon: Resign.
Now I didn't see anybody mention the fact
that my boss Bob Griffin
and Vice President Jerry
Ford were best friends.
They had been neighboring
congressman for years,
and I have often wondered
if Griffin was motivated
by the fact that let's replace
Nixon with my best friend.
But at any rate,
(audience laughing)
had there been no Vietnam War,
I don't think Nixon would
have been impeached.
They were angry at him for not
letting them control the war,
for continuing the war when they thought
we should abandon the Vietnamese.
And again, I think Nixon was not perfect,
he used some bad language.
Not nearly as much as LBJ did,
but I think he was a man of honor
who felt it was important not to allow
the communists to win,
and he fought very hard
and in the process he really
offended members of Congress.
And they wanted his scalp.
So I don't think that what Watergate did,
and by the way, I knew a
guy who was a senior player
in the Nixon Whitehouse who told me
that they had information
that Cuba was providing funds
to the Democratic National Committee.
And the reason they broke into
the Watergate headquarters
was to try to find evidence of that.
And they bungled it,
and the alarm went off,
a cop found an unlocked door,
and that led to the
whole Watergate Scandal.
I never saw a bit of evidence
that Nixon approved of it,
authorized it, or anything else,
but he did cover it up.
He did try to protect his people.
He thought that Eisenhower
had been wrong when he,
one of Ike's aids, except that
it was called a Vicuna coat,
some sort of a fur coat.
Sherman was his name, I think.
Sherman Adams, and Nixon felt that
Ike should have protected him.
And he tried to protect his
staff from the plumbers,
and that's what was going
to lead to his impeachment.
There's no question,
the votes were in the
House to impeach him,
but the House never voted
because he resigned first.
But Watergate was a convenient excuse
to go after him, but the
real underlying reason
they were outraged over
his efforts in Vietnam
when they were trying to abandon Vietnam.
And his secret bombing,
the Presidents have conducted bombings
for years without telling Congress.
Not one person in Congress was told,
we're going in on D-Day,
which was why we won at D-Day.
(audience laughing)
But anyway, I'm sorry go ahead.
There was a second part to that.
- [Del] No the first part was that legend,
which we did not believe.
- [Robert] Oh no, I've never heard of it.
- Simple question, "Are
there any female authors
"of books on Vietnam?'
There's only one I know if, a nurse?
- [Robert] Frankie Fitzgerald,
she wrote Fire in the Lake.
- Yeah, there's Fire in the Lake
by some person which we don't care for.
And there was a nurse,
[Lynda Van] Daventor?
- [Man] Ms. Hang.
- Yeah, I was gonna say, she was not a,
she was too young to
be in the war, but yes.
Lien-Hang, the book
"Hanoi's War" is quite good.
Is there something else you wanted?
- Yeah, there's not
many war books by women.
- Going back to the '60s in
terms of reporters there,
there was a reporter for
the New York Herald Tribune,
Marguerite Higgins, and yes.
Very, very good book.
She died very young and
her book's been forgotten,
and that's very unfortunate.
It makes very good reading.
- Yeah, and also Ellen Hammer,
"Death in November", yes,
is also an excellent book on the coup.
- Yeah Ellen Hammer did at least two.
- "Death in November".
- "Our Vietnam Nightmare".
- Yeah, yeah, and she was great.
She was really a, I'm
trying to find a nice way
to say what I'm thinking,
but she was more manly than
a lot of the guys over there.
(audience laughing)
She would go anywhere,
she was gutsy, she stood up.
She was pursuing the truth
and in the best tradition,
I think she was one of
the best journalists
we had in Vietnam in the entire war.
- I bet if you did a search
for quote female authors
and unquote, Vietnam, names
would start coming up.
Here's a question, and
we were just talking
about the other night,
"When military advisors
"ignored by Johnson, why didn't
the military Joint Chiefs
"have the courage to resign in protest?"
Well we've had a long
discussion about that
because a lot of us
thought they should have,
and other people have written
books saying they should have.
And the answer is apparently
that they thought about it
and decided that they would do more good
if they tried to stay in their jobs
and maybe talk LBJ into
being more sensible,
which didn't work out well at all.
Personally, as I voiced
my opinion last night,
it takes a lot of nerve to sit there
and say I'm a General or
a Joint Chief of Staff
and I'm resigning now
and ending my career.
And I think they were partially
just too chicken to do it.
I wish they had, they
might have done some good.
- Yeah, I talked to Charlie Cooper.
Charlie was, I think he
retired as a three star,
but at least a two star Marine.
- [Man] Three star!
- I thought so,
but as a Major, he was an
aide to General Wheeler,
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs,
and they had been insisting
on meeting with the President.
They went over, Charlie's job was to carry
a map of Vietnam on a plywood board
and put it on an easel
that was supposed to be
in the Oval Office.
He got in the Oval Office,
there was no easel.
LBJ said, you can stand
over there and hold the map.
So he was a fly on the wall.
And he claims that LBJ
very cordially greeted
all of the Chiefs, said
"What can I do for you?"
and the Chairman said, "Mr. President,
"we feel strongly we are totally
"mishandling the Vietnam War.
"We need to be more
firm," so forth and so on.
McNamara's cutting everything back.
And he said LBJ then said,
"Well Wallace Greene,
"the Commandant of the Marine Corps,
"Now, General do you agree with this?"
And he went to the others.
And then he turned his back
on them for several seconds,
and he turned around and
exploded in profanity,
saying they were trying
to cause World War III
and they could get out
of his blanking office,
and just he was a famous bully.
But he bullied these guys,
and as they rode back in
the car to the Pentagon,
they discussed resigning,
and they finally decided if we resign,
he will appoint yes-men,
and our ability to change things will,
it would be cowardice for us
to abandon this position now
and let him turn it over to yes-men.
And so they decided to stay.
I don't know if that was
the right decision or not.
I've studied this.
I wrote, sorry, Charlie
Cooper gave me a copy
of a letter he had received
from Admiral McDonald,
the Chief of Naval Operations
one of the Joint Chiefs.
And it said, "I read your article,
"you got it exactly right,
thanks for telling it."
I sent a letter to Wallace Greene,
the Commandant of the Marine Corps.
I got a very shaky letter
back on my letter responding
and he said, "Forgive my bad handwriting,
"I've recently had a stroke.
"But I was there, and everything he says
"in this article is true."
And Wallace Greene had
a tremendous reputation
as a man of integrity.
I talked to HR McMaster
when he was a major,
and he said I can't prove it,
but I believe it happened.
And one last thing, Drew
Pearson or Jack Anderson,
had a column later that month saying
the Joint Chiefs had tried to pressure
the President into starting World War III.
So to me the Whitehouse
certainly leaked the story.
Nobody can document the meeting,
but I think it happened.
- Here's a comment, we
talked about the other day.
"There's been a legend going around that
"Dean Rusk or someone was
always telling the Swedes
"or the Swiss, depending on
which legend you've heard,
"about the oncoming bombing plans
"so that they could pass it on to Hanoi
"so that they would avoid
civilian casualties."
And that come under the heading
of bull puckey, I think.
Or something along those lines.
We had a long discussion about that,
I don't know if anyone wants to comment.
But the bottom line is,
none of us believe that.
Good, trying to get through some more.
(audience laughing)
We're running out of time here,
so I'm just trying to get through
a few more questions while we can.
Let's see.
This one I think has been answered,
"Was the Gulf of Tonkin
Incident really happened
"or was it, what was the truth?"
There is no question that
the Maddox was attacked.
There's no question whatsoever.
There were bullet holes,
there were recordings.
And for that matter, in
the War Museum in Hanoi,
there was for a period of
time a torpedo tube displayed.
I've seen pictures of it,
with pictures of the
Naval officers above it
who got medals for attacking the Maddox.
- Yeah, that's absolutely clear
and when McNamara went to Hanoi,
I think it was in '99,
General Vo Nguyen Giap
confirmed the first attack occurred.
The second attack, there was
strong evidence it occurred.
My current view is it
probably did not occur,
but I have spoken to people
who were on the Turner Joy
who have sworn to me it happened.
And I don't question
their sincerity at all.
The question is, it was
relatively primitive sonar,
so they could have been interpreting wake
from the other American destroyer
as being from a boat, and it
was a high phosphorus content
that I've been in the North Sea.
And you see trails, like
almost a luminescence
that might easily be seen
to be torpedo trails.
And so I don't know if
the second one occurred.
But one thing that is absolutely certain
is it was reported to Washington
as if it had occurred,
and we also know that when
the first attack was reported,
LBJ's response was let's not over-react.
Maybe this was just a freelancing skipper.
We don't wanna, you know?
And when the second one occurred,
he says, "We have to act."
And so they bombed.
But the most important thing is,
the Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution had very little
to do with those minor
exchanged in the Gulf of Tonkin.
It had to do with an
effort that Hanoi started
May 19, 1959 to overthrow
its neighbor by force.
If you read The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution,
it talks about this long campaign
to overthrow South Vietnam.
We went to war in South Vietnam
for the same reason we
went to war in Korea,
to stop communist aggression.
And whether or not, neither
or both attacks occurred,
there's no evidence that they were staged.
There is considerable
proof that at one point
NSA realized that one
of their interpreters
had mistranslated an intercepted document
and a major and somebody below
him decided to cover it up.
They didn't want to get in trouble for it.
That's not some government
scheme to lie to the people
or anything like that.
So we didn't need that attack to justify
going to the aid of South Vietnam.
They were being attacked regularly.
December 24th of that same year, of '64,
they blew up much of the Brinks,
was it Brinks BOQ?
A VC dressed as a South Vietnamese officer
drove into the Brinks
compound with a car bomb,
said he was looking for
major something or other,
who they happened to know had just rotated
and gone back to the States.
They said, oh, we don't
see, he didn't answer.
You know, whatever, told him to park it
and they'd lead him out.
It blew up, it killed a bunch of people.
There were front page photographs
of bloodied Americans.
If we needed an excuse, the
blowing up of American plays.
There were all sorts of incidents,
if we needed that straw
that broke the camel's back.
But the Gulf of Tonkin
was not a major part
of the Vietnam War, it
was just one incident.
- Separate question, "How open
has the existing government
"in Vietnam been in providing
history about the war
"or access to their archives?"
We know that there's been some access
and you could talk about that.
- They've allowed very limited access
to the Western researchers
that have gone in.
I have seen very little to come out
that would be of strategic interest.
But most, they have published quite a bit.
They published something
called Party Documents
that has a lot of information about
their strategic decision making.
They have pushed a lot of unit histories,
division histories,
other battle histories.
And in varying degrees of usefulness,
but in terms of actual documents,
like if you think of our
foreign relations series
it has meetings of
National Security Council
and memos between the Joint Chiefs
and the Secretary of Defense.
I don't think anything of that sort really
has come out and I don't
know that we'll see it
for quite a long time.
- By the way, related to
that just real quickly,
there was a brief period
where the Russians
allowed Western scholars into the archives
to get KGB materials,
and you know who the scholar is.
The man at Hopkins.
- [Mark] Steven Morris.
- Yeah, Steven Morris, who was originally,
I think, an Australian, got
access to a lot of that.
And it's fascinating, but
then they tightened it up.
- And the Chinese let some things out.
A lot of them can be
viewed on the Cold War
International History Project website.
I don't know that anyone
has actually written
the story of that, but my sense is
they published those to make
the Vietnamese look bad.
Because most of it is meetings
between the Vietnamese and the Chinese.
So I think they've been trying
to shape the history of that.
- By the way, quickie,
one of the questions was
"How did that girl react
when I talked to her
"about the Pledge of Allegiance?"
And the answer was, she
said, "Thank you very much,
"but I'm sticking to my convictions."
There's a Biblical quote that goes,
"There are none so blind
as those who will not see."
I did my best.
However, other kids in the
room heard my discussion.
So it did some good,
it got spread around a little bit.
Next, we're running out of time here.
Next question for Dr. Kort,
"Can you elaborate on
the revisionist thinking
"that a blockade of North Vietnam
"would not have caused the Soviets
"or Chinese to enter the war?"
Yeah.
Can we justify the idea that
blockading North Vietnam
would not have caused
the Chinese or Russians
to enter the war.
- One thing I can cite is an interview,
I F Stone had an
article interviewing Mao.
And Mao repeatedly said that he was not,
that China was not going to get involved
in fighting like this unless
the United Stated invaded
China and attacked China.
So there is also the matter of,
Mark has written about this, as well,
and so have other people that for China,
they didn't wanna get entangled
with the United States.
They wanted to keep things limited.
Some of the Asian scholars,
which I didn't mentioned their names,
report that Mao, the
Chinese told the Vietnamese
unless China is attacked,
you guys are going to
have to deal with this
without our troops.
So there seems to be, again,
there was always that possibility
and you always had to consider it,
but as a number of people have said,
the risk seems to have been quite low.
- We also did experiment with it.
December of '72, we shut down
Haiphong Harbor with mines.
And the Chinese did nothing
and the Russians did nothing
except not let their ships go there.
So pretty good answer.
- We're out of time.
One last question that
anybody can comment on.
What do we think about the fact that
Cam Ranh Bay is now a
US Navy Port of Call?
(audience laughing)
- [Man] That's true!
- I don't see any down side to it at all.
It gives us access, we need access.
It promotes a better
relationship with the Vietnamese.
I'm all for that.
- It is important to note
that the official position
is that they will never allow Cam Ranh Bay
to be an official base
of any outside nation.
I think we're out of time.
We have a few more questions left,
but I think it's been
a fairly good exchange.
And thank you everyone for coming,
and thanks to the speakers.
(audience applauding)
- We appreciate everybody coming.
We promised the History Center
we'd turn lose of the room
at 2:30 'cause they
have a wedding tonight.
So thank you very much,
appreciate your attendance.
(light electronic music)
(radio tuning)
