The Atlantic and Its Enemies (36 page)

In November 1968 a presidential election, by a small majority, brought to office the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, whose reputation was for fierce antiCommunism. He seemed to be entirely pledged to winning the war. Nixon’s presidential career was bedevilled from the start by media hostility, which he was extraordinarily clumsy in handling - bullying one moment, cloyingly and with obvious insincerity making up at another, and then, when both tactics had failed, relapsing into paranoia. Nixon was no patrician from the East Coast - quite the contrary, he counted as a weaselly provincial reactionary, and his assistants were charmless effigies of the American virtues. Hanoi sensed blood. Not long after Johnson’s announcement, what appeared to be negotiations on a ceasefire took place in Paris. Johnson had been desperately trying to arrange these, and offered to stop the bombing in return for North Vietnamese acceptance. It was given, as a propaganda gesture, but it was empty, and very irritating. There were indeed endless different ‘peace initiatives’, a ‘charade’ according to Gabriel Kolko: none had any effect. The North Vietnamese were adamant that the Americans should just pack up and go, and they ignored Johnson’s offers. The fact was that they did hold some cards. The North Vietnamese army was battleworthy and ruthlessly led; unlike the South Vietnamese one, it did not have to rely on ethnic-minority conscripts; it had supplies from one or other of the Communist giants; it had safe areas in ostensibly neutral countries only a few miles from Saigon. Besides, the Americans’ hands were firmly tied. They had too few troops for a very complicated political geography, those few often quite untrained, and therefore reliant on aerial bombardment.

But Johnson could not really bomb the essential targets, because he feared the resulting gruesome publicity, and because he did not want to provoke either Moscow or Peking. The fact was that the Americans were anxious not to push China too far: in 1964 she had exploded an atomic bomb, and in 1967 a hydrogen one (though at the time, in the middle of the ‘cultural revolution’, the country was widely in chaos). There were also great difficulties as regards the United Nations, then taken seriously as a ‘forum’ for ‘world opinion’. Even in 1975 only some two dozen of its 144 member states counted as democracies, and from 1945 to 1991 ‘Third World’ states were run, for half of the time, by their armies. Nevertheless, the organization - at least, capable of ‘peacekeeping’ - had some uses and had to be respected. In any case the North Vietnamese could bite back. They had acquired powerful defences, with 250 interceptors and 8,000 anti-aircraft guns, and one American plane was downed for every twenty-five sorties (whereas, later on, in the Gulf War, the figure was one in 700). The US air force bombed forest, smashed villages, and just caused the locals to hate the Americans all the more (a hatred returned with considerable sincerity). But the North also had the vast advantage that there was a safe supply line, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which went through an area of Cambodia that jutted out towards Saigon itself, the ‘parrot’s beak’. The Americans had too few men to cover these long borders, and in any case they were not the light infantry that might have been effective.

To start with, just the same, events appeared to go in Nixon’s direction. In the first place there was the Americans’ always considerable learning curve. After Tet there was a period when the war seemed to be moving the Americans’ way, and a British expert (from his days in Malaya), Robert Thompson, gave sage advice: the war would have to be ‘nativized’ in the sense that the South Vietnamese should take over as far as possible; their army was given training of a sort. Whether this worked is still debated: there is evidence for and against, but the Northern Communists were certainly not popular, as the huge number of refugees always showed. There was also an American programme of ‘counter-insurgency’, ‘pacification’ -
i.e.
a carefully controlled reaction, involving the civilian population. Guerrillas or for that matter infiltrators could only really be countered if their areas of support were liquidated, whether by the physical movement of the potentially supportive population, or by that population’s inclining towards the anti-guerrilla cause. The Americans studied these matters, and had an educated team. Robert W. Komer came in May 1967 to head the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support office, or CORDS, run by men who subsequently made considerable careers in the 1980s and even beyond, when the Right were again in charge in sensitive areas (Komer himself becoming ambassador to Turkey). The programme was called by the CIA ‘Phoenix’, an evocation of a Vietnamese symbolic bird, the Phung Hoan (the equivalent of the Central American Quetzal). One of the great problems hitherto had been the endless targeting of competent South Vietnamese officials, of whom tens of thousands had been assassinated. There was to be a riposte - the careful targeting of North Vietnamese ‘cadres’. In 1970-71, 10,444 of these were killed, generally in fire-fights.

Pacification would have meant an infantry war, and the generals did not want this. For a start, they had too few men to cover the long borders with Cambodia and Laos, and of their 540,000 men, only 200,000 were actually fighting. In fact the Marines did quite well with small patrols; and William Colby, Komer’s successor (in 1968), claimed over 20,000 killed, 30,000 captured and 180,000 defections by 1971. Much of the country did become quiet again, and foreigners could travel by road from Saigon to the coast, where there was a protected holiday resort. The watchword was now ‘Vietnamization’ because the Americans were expecting to withdraw, and Westmoreland’s successor, Creighton Adams, was under instructions to release troops as fast as he could. Vietnamization might have worked: however, one of the decisive elements in this pacification would have been mixed American-Vietnamese units, and Westmoreland was adamantly opposed to their existence: only a few thousand such mixed troops operated in the field. Relations were not good - resentment on the one side, contempt on the other, with linguistic barriers to complicate matters. At any rate, by spring 1970 there was a regular war and not a guerrilla one: the North Vietnamese were able to keep troops in great force in Cambodia and their army held what amounted to a regular front line through the mountainous and jungle territory on the official borderline. From there, they could strike at the old imperial capital (most of it was in reality nineteenth-century pastiche architecture), Hue. By stealth, Nixon - infuriated by the endless nonsense of the Paris talks - decided to strike there, together with the South Vietnamese army, which, Thompson said, was now capable of action. There was much military justification for this, given the North Vietnamese army’s closeness to Saigon, and that it was preparing an attack. The Americans’ attack itself did not go badly - much equipment destroyed, food supplies captured, and US casualties falling from ninety to fifty per week - but there was an explosion of rage inside the USA.

This war had now, in a sense, to be won at home. American opinion was in places violently, hysterically, hostile: 1967 had seen 100,000 march on the Pentagon and there were arson attacks in several universities, including Stanford, where the Institute of Social Anthropology was burned down. The National Guard was called out, and over-responded, in panic: in May 1970 at Kent State University four protestors were shot, two of them girl students on their way to lectures. Four hundred and fifty colleges were closed down. Nixon responded violently to ‘bums blowing up campuses’ and famously got support from building workers at one demonstration in New York (he invited their leaders, ingratiatingly, to coffee at the White House; on another occasion he smarmed at student protestors whom he encountered by chance in the early hours on a visit to the Lincoln Memorial). By 1972 the administration was simply held in derision by almost anyone in the United States who could read and write. At the same time, Nixon alienated his own bedrock supporters.

The opposition to the Vietnam War does not, now, look very impressive. After they had won, in 1975, the Communists massacred a quarter of the population of Cambodia, and threw out the ‘boat people’ from Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of the population, forced onto refugee boats, many sunk or destroyed by Malay or Thai pirates before they reached long-term refugee camps in Hong Kong. At the time, the American opposition was saying that the North Vietnamese were just another version of Tito’s Yugoslavians, potentially neutralist and in effect social reformers in the Henry George sense of one peasant, one plot. There are long lists, of the best writers and scholars in the country, who blundered - and who would, very soon, be disavowed by the very people they thought they were defending. John K. Fairbank of Harvard and
The Cambridge History of China
thought that Mao was ‘one of the best things that has ever happened to China’. The doyen of Asian studies in the USA, Warren Cohen, agreed. His principal target was Dean Rusk, craggy provincial Protestant with a moral sense: who now looks right? Barbara Tuchman said that America was repeating the mistakes of the fourteenth century, when paranoia and the Black Death stalked the land; she wrote in
Foreign Affairs
that Chiang Kai-shek had been wicked, that in China famine had been ‘eliminated’. Marilyn B. Young recycled Leninist propaganda (
The Vietnamese Wars 1945-1990
(1991)) to the effect that peasants with a back garden of rice-land were ‘exploiters’, and ‘concerned Asian scholars’ talked nonsense of the same sort. When the anti-Nixon people took over, their performance was lamentable. The fact was that a million people fled the North when independence came and a further million and a half when the Communists took over in the South. One of the Asian scholars was Chalmers Johnson of Berkeley, who complained of the student opposition that they never took his books out of the library. David Halberstam, who became the veteran journalist in the South, blamed the McCarthy persecution of the ‘Asia hands’ for the American inability to understand what was going on. Even a well-made film such as
The Killing Fields
, about the Cambodian horrors, somehow fails to mention Communism as the cause of them.

Nixon’s response was to withdraw American troops, promising to ‘Vietnamize’ the war. This had mixed results. The Delta was made safe again, but there was now in 1970 a full-scale war going on along the borders, and the North Vietnamese were quite well equipped to fight it - T54 tanks, 130mm anti-aircraft artillery and 350,000 Chinese to back them up. Cambodia was almost safe reserve territory for them, because King Sihanouk, in 1964, believed that ‘all of south-east Asia is destined to become Communist’, and he allowed the Vietcong tacitly to use his port, Sihanoukville, where better-off Cambodians made money from smuggling to the Vietcong. In 1969 Nixon had stealthily bombed the Cambodian trails while the Vietcong trained Khmer Rouge (12,000) as
guerrilleros
, whereat mobs in Phnom Penh sacked the Vietnamese embassy and killed local resident Vietnamese. Sihanouk went to Moscow and Peking to have the Communists taken out of the country and was himself exiled - taking up an alliance with the Khmer Rouge even though they went on to kill some of his children. Nixon deviously supported the man who replaced him, a general by the name of Lon Nol (even the CIA heard about this only when Nixon announced it on TV). The bombing in 1970 shattered just huts, and Nixon had acquired another brittle and touchy ally (when Lon Nol was offered sanctuary in the embassy when it all collapsed he refused, blaming the Americans for scuttling from the scene); an attempt to use South Vietnamese troops broke down when they were ambushed. In February 1971 another effort was made, this time to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail at Lam Son, and this was even worse. The Vietcong knew what was coming, and when the South Vietnamese had lost 3,000 men, President Nguyen Van Thieu ordered a retreat, but without telling the Americans. The retreat turned into a rout, fleeing soldiers clinging desperately to the skids of helicopters, and being torn to pieces by the treetops. There were even anti-American demonstrations in Saigon, and by now the Americans themselves were widely demoralized: to counter the use of heroin, urine tests had to be imposed on the army. In 1972 the North Vietnamese made a great effort to break the South. In March 40,000 men attacked over the 17th Parallel into the DMZ. In the first two weeks, there was a South Vietnamese collapse, made much worse because the roads were clogged by fleeing civilians and soldiers’ families - in fact by now there were 5 million refugees in a population of 17 million. An important base, Quang Tri, fell, and only vast US bombing stabilized the front.

Maybe South Vietnam could have been saved, but by 1971 the chief foundation of the American hegemony was collapsing: in mid-August 1971 Nixon refused to honour the gold bills of the dollar. This opened the way to a general crisis of the West, and in that Vietnam hardly counted, except as a symbol. The man who understood this was Henry Kissinger, who, for want of local solutions, looked for transcendental ones. Since the North Vietnamese were impossible, another dimension would have to be opened up on the board, and, here, geopolitics had its part to play. Kissinger had written an admiring book about Prince Metternich, the chief statesman of the post-Napoleonic period in Europe, when there had been forty years of peace, despite the emergence of international problems that were later on to cause great wars. He came to the White House with a formidable academic reputation, and he had qualities that made him dominant there. He had, in the first place, that central European accent that held lecture audiences spellbound. Hannah Arendt, who lectured in the style of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion, had the same trick, in her case of building castles of long words with an air of having something of vast importance to convey, which none of the audience afterwards could remember. Kissinger by contrast had content. There were, in post-Napoleonic Europe, problems that simply could not be solved on the ground. Of these, later on, Yugoslavia became the classic example, because it just broke up into unworkable fragments but at the same time could not be held together. Metternich knew when to haggle, when to browbeat, when to bore stiff, and it was a success. Kissinger - who was, after all, a refugee from a central Europe that had indeed produced all of the horrors and more that Metternich had foreseen - greatly admired him: the answer to insoluble problems was to internationalize them. That was what, over Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger now tried to do. It was a huge face-saving device: America would get out. She did, and the fall of Saigon at the end of April 1975 was one of the subconscience-entering scenes of the post-war world, perhaps its greatest.