VIETNAM: THE IMPOSSIBLE WAR

American Entry

	An international conference at Geneva, planned many months before to settle the Korean 
dispute and other controversies, now took up the fate of Vietnam as well.  The United States
was only indirectly involved in the Vietnam phase of the Geneva conference.  Secretary of 
State Dulles, who did not really believe negotiating with communists,  reluctantly attended
(described by one observer as a "puritan in a house of ill repute") but left early; the United
States never signed the accords.  Even so, the Geneva conference produced an agreement to end
the Vietnam conflict.  There would be an immediate cease-fire in the war; Vietnam would be 
temporarily partitioned along the 17th parallel, with the Vietminh in control of North Vietnam
and a pro-Western regime in control of the South. In 1956, elections would be held to reunite
the country under a single government.  
	The partition of Vietnam was, therefore, an essentially artificial one.  But there were,
in fact, real and important differences between North and South Vietnam.  North Vietnam, the 
area now to be controlled by the Vietminh, was the heart of traditional Vietnamese society, the
area where French influence had been the weakest.  Hence the North had remained a reasonably 
homogeneous culture, most of whose people lived in very close-knit, traditional villages. 
Northern Vietnam was also the poorest region of the country--overpopulated, plagued by a 
serious maldistribution of scarce land, and hit by a serious famine at the end of the war.  
The Vietminh had worked effectively to alleviate the great famine and had won strong popular 
allegiance to the regime as a result.  (Later, in the early 1950s, it launched a disastrous
land reform policy, which it soon repudiated.)  The Hanoi government was also strengthened by 
the mass exodus, in 1954, at the time of the partition, of many of the Catholics and others in 
the north who might have opposed them had they stayed.  The North Vietnamese were passionately
committed to the unification of the nation, a commitment with deep roots in Vietnamese history.
	South Vietnam, by contrast, was a much more recently settled area.  Until the early 
nineteenth century, in fact, very few Vietnamese had lived there; most of the sparse population
had consisted of Khmer.  Even in the 1950s, most of its people had been there only three
generations or less.  For many years it had been something like the American West in the 
nineteenth century--the place where adventurous, or opportunistic, or disenchanted people
from the poor, overpopulated North would move in search of a new beginning, and in search of
land.  It was a looser, more heterogeneous, more individualistic society.  It was highly 
factionalized--religiously, politically, and ethnically--with powerful sects all competing 
for power.  It was also more prosperous and fertile than the North.  It was not overpopulated.
It had experienced no famine.  It was the only region of the country producing a surplus for 
export.  
	South Vietnam had no legacy of strong commitment to the Vietminh and much less fervent
commitment to national unification.  It was the area where the influence of the French had been
strongest and where there was a substantial, westernized middle class.  It was, in other words, 
a society much more difficult to unite and to govern than the society of the North.  


	As soon as the Geneva Accords established the partition, the French finally left Vietnam 
altogether.  The United States almost immediately stepped into the vacuum and became the 
principal benefactor of the new government in the South, led by Ngo Dinh Diem.  
	Diem was an aristocratic Catholic from central Vietnam, an outsider in the South.  But
he was also a nationalist, uncontaminated by collaboration with the French.  And he was, for a
time, apparently successful.  With the help of the American CIA, Diem waged an effective campaign
against some of the powerful religious sects and the South Vietnamese mafia, which had challenged
the authority of the central government.  As a result, the United States came to regard Diem as
a powerful and impressive alternative to Ho Chi Minh.  Lyndon Johnson once called him the 
"Churchill of Southeast Asia."
	The American government supported Diem's refusal in 1956 to permit the elections called 
for by the Geneva Accords, reasoning, almost certainly correctly, that Ho Chi Minh would easily
win.  Ho could count on 100% of the vote in the north, with its much larger population, and at
least some support in the south.  In the meantime, the United States poured military and economic
aid into South Vietnam.  By 1956, it was the second largest recipient of American military aid
in the world.  
	Diem' early successes in suppressing the sects in Vietnam led him in 1959 to begin a 
similar campaign to eliminate the Vietminh supporters who had stayed behind in the south after
the partition.  He was quiet successful for a time, so successful in fact that the North Vietnamese
found it necessary to respond.  A new policy emerging from Moscow beginning in 1959, emphasizing
communist wars of national liberation, also encouraged Ho Chi Minh to resume his armed struggle
for national unification.  In 1959, the Vietminh cadres in the south created the National 
Liberation Front (NLF), known to many Americans as the Viet Cong--an organization closely allied 
with the North Vietnamese government.  It was committed to overthrowing the "puppet regime" of 
Diem and reuniting the nation.  In 1960, under orders from Hanoi, and with both material and
manpower support from North Vietnam, the NLF began military operations in the South.  This 
marked the beginning of the Second Indochina War.
	By 1961, NLF forces were very successfully destabilizing the Diem regime. They were killing
over 4000 government officials a year and establishing effective control over many areas of the 
countryside.  Diem was also by now losing the support of many other groups in South Vietnam, and
he was even loosing the support of his military.  In 1963, the Diem regime precipitated a major 
crisis by trying to discipline and repress the South Vietnamese Buddhists in an effort to make
Catholicism the dominant religion of the country.  The Buddhists began to stage enormous 
antigovernment demonstrations; and after Diem launched a series of heavy-handed military actions 
against them--which included several massacres of demonstrators and violent government raids
on their sacred pagodas--the demonstrations grew much larger.  Several Buddhist monks doused 
themselves with gasoline, sat cross-legged in the streets of dowtown Saigon, and set themselves
on fire--in view of photographers and television cameras.
	The Buddhist crisis was alarming and embarrassing to the Kennedy administration  It caused
the American government to reconsider its commitment to Diem, although not to the survival of 
South Vietnam.  Kennedy had greatly increased the number of American personnel and the level of
American assistance to the anticommunist regime, and he was unwilling to permit South Vietnam to
fall.  American officials pressured Diem to reform his government, but Diem made no significant 
concessions.  As a result, in the fall of 1963, Kennedy gave his tacit approval to a plot
by a group of South Vietnamese generals to topple Diem.  In early November 1963, the generals
staged the coup, assassinated Diem an his brother, and established the first of a series of 
new governments, which were, for over three years, even less stable than Diem's.  A few weeks 
after the coup, Kennedy too was dead.  

	
	Lydon Johnson thus inherited what was already a substancial American commitment to the
survival of an anticommunist South Vietnam.  During his first two years in office, he expanded 
that commitment into a full-scale American war.  Why he did so has long been a subject of debate.
	Many factors played a role in Johnson's decision.  But the most obvious explanation is 
that the new president faced many pressures to expand the American involvement and only a very 
few to limit it.  As the untested successor to a revered and martyred president, he felt obliged
to prove his worthiness for the office by continuing the policies of his predecessor.  Aid to 
South Vietnam had been one of the most prominent of those policies.  Johnson also felt it 
necessary to retain in his administration many of the important figures of the Kennedy years. 
In doing so, he surrounded himself with a group of foreign policy advisers--Secretary of State
Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy--who
firmly believed that the United States had an obligation to resist communism in Vietnam.  A 
compliant Congress raised little protest to, and indeed at one point openly endorsed Johnson's 
use of executive powers to lead the nation into war.  And for several years at least, public 
opinion remained firmly behind him--in part because Barry Goldwater's bellicose remarks about 
the war during the 1964 campaign made Johnson seem by comparison to be a moderate on the issue. 
	Above all, intervention in South Vietnam was fully consistent with nearly twenty years of
American foreign policy.  An anticommunist ally was appealing to the United States for 
assistance; all the assumptions of the containment doctrine, as it had come to be defined by
the 1960s, seemed to require the nation to oblige.  Vietnam, Johnson believed, was a test of 
American willingness to fight communist aggression, a test he was determined not to fail.
	During his first moths in office, Johnson expanded the American involvement in Vietnam
only slightly, sending an additional 5000 military advisers there and preparing to send 5000 more.
Then early in August 1964, the president announced that American destroyers on patrol in 
international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin had been attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo
boats.  Later information raised serious doubts as to whether the administration reported the 
attacks accurately.  At the time, however, virtually no one questioned Johnson's portrayal
of the incident as a serious act of aggression, or his insistence that the United States must 
respond.  By a vote of 416 to 0 in the House and 88 to 2 in the Senate, Congress hurriedly 
passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized the president to "take all necessary 
measures" to protect American forces and "prevent further aggression" in Southeast Asia.  The 
resolution became, in Johnson's view at least, an open-ended legal authorization for escalation 
of the conflict.