Ep 194: Mark Moyar on the Vietnam War

Mark Moyar, William P. Harris Chair of Military History at Hillsdale College and author of Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965-1968

Aaron MacLean:

Fifty years ago this week, Saigon fell. The images are seared into America's collective memory. Perhaps none more so than the iconic photograph of desperate civilians attempting to board a helicopter on the roof of 22 Gia Long Street in the final hours of the Republic of South Vietnam. It was the final moment of a military and policy catastrophe that had been a generation in the making. What actually went so wrong in America's war in Vietnam? Let's get into it.

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Hi, I'm Aaron MacLean. Thanks for joining the School of War. I'm delighted to welcome back to the show today Mark Moyar, the William P. Harris chair in military history at Hillsdale College, author of numerous books. He served in government. He's taught in numerous places. And for some years now, he has been focused on the war in Vietnam. He's the author of Triumph Forsaken, the first of a projected trilogy covering the early years of the American War in Vietnam. The author of Triumph Regained: the Vietnam War in 1965 to 1968, which we touched on in a previous episode. And I assume there ... I don't want to ... this is asking somebody how their thesis is going, but we are all looking forward to a third volume at some point. I hope that's going well.

Mark Moyar:

Yes, I'm working on the third volume, and it will go from '69 to '75. It's a very research-intensive project, so I've still got some time to come, but it will be out eventually.

Aaron MacLean:

So, we're talking just a few days before the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, and I wanted to talk about the war, in general, today just to set the scene but also to get there in the end. And a theme of your work throughout the whole project has been litigating this debate against what you've called the orthodox view of the war. And you say you side largely with another view, the revisionist view of the war. What is the orthodox view of the war in Vietnam?

Mark Moyar:

The orthodox view arose really from the anti-war movement of the Vietnam War itself. And the two most fundamental premises of that school of thought are that, first of all, the war was an unnecessary war. It wasn't fought for key strategic interests of the United States. And that, number two, that the war was unwinnable, so that no matter what the US could have done, it was doomed to failure. And so, the revisionist position, which I take, says the opposite, that, in fact, there were vital US interests at stake. So, strategically, it made sense, and that the war could have been won had different courses of action been taken.

Aaron MacLean:

And I suppose this orthodox view also probably nests within a particular take on the Cold War, where the argument would run something like American fears about Communists. The global ambitions of communism in the 1950s into the 1960s are overblown, that the domino theory was ridiculous, that the NSC 68 perimeter security strategy of Eurasia was a ridiculous strategy, impossible to resource, and deeply ideological. And then, the Vietnam argument nests within that.

Mark Moyar:

Yes, that's right. And as part of that, the idea that ... There's the question of whether there was a ... there was a global, international communist effort, which is central to the Cold War, and my take on it and on Vietnam is that the Soviets and the Chinese are in tandem for the early part. They start to diverge, but you still have both of them supporting the North Vietnamese. And so, that whole premise that there's some sort of mindless, anti-communist hysteria going on is incorrect. And so, I believe that there is a real threat to all of Asia during the 1960s, and the US fights to stop that threat. At first, we fight in Korea for a similar reason, and then in Vietnam, we go in and send troops in 1965 because the Johnson administration believes in this domino theory that if Vietnam falls to communism, you're going to see many, if not all, of the other Asian countries fall to communism.

Aaron MacLean:

I guess if I were to take the side of the orthodox view, particularly on the question of the domino theory, a stronger form of that argument would go something like, well, we did, in fact, lose/abandon the Vietnamese, such that in 1975, Saigon does dramatically and spectacularly fall. And the rest of the dominoes didn't go. The Pacific did not turn red, as it were, after that. So what say you to that, Mark Moyer?

Mark Moyar:

Yes, and I do take that argument head-on and try, and in Forsaken and also the next book because that is this standard argument: "Well, the dominoes don't fall in 1975, therefore the domino theory was false." And so, my response to that is that the world is vastly different in 1975 than it is in 1965. And in fact, many of those differences are the result of American intervention. One of the biggest things that happens in that period is you have Indonesia flipping from pro-communist to anti-communist, and that had everything to do with American intervention in Vietnam. You also have the Cultural Revolution in China, which decimates China and turns it inward and will ultimately lead to a break with North Vietnam. And so, you have, in 1975, a distinct lack of the unity in the communist camp we had seen, the alliance between China and Vietnam's fracture. They will later go to war in 1979. And you also have other countries in the region have become much stronger, and people like Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore say explicitly that American intervention bought time for the rest of the region to strengthen itself so that it was no longer vulnerable to the predations of the communists.

Aaron MacLean:

So, what is the evidence for your assertion that, essentially, the Americans were right to take the imperial ambitions of global communism, whether in its Maoist or Stalinist and Soviet form, seriously, and to identify countries like South Vietnam or South Korea before it as vital interests? We've had, over the years on the show, people on both sides of the broad question. Sean McMeekin recently came on and made an argument that I think would probably sit comfortably next to yours. We've had, on the other side of things, Max Hastings, who takes a dim view of such things. In the Vietnamese context, the Max Hastings conventional view would run something like: Ho Chi Minh is really a Vietnamese nationalist. The Vietnamese, like so many other East Asian countries, are struggling against European imperial yokes. And the Americans, for bizarre reasons, inherit this imperial war and misconceive of it fundamentally as an ideological struggle when it's really a internal Vietnamese struggle in which we take the side of the criminals and the thugs. Your view of Ho is different, and your view is that he is connected to some sort of broader, I guess, originally Maoist, vision. Can you give evidence of that?

Mark Moyar:

Yes, and we've learned quite a bit more about Ho Chi Minh in the last few decades because this was a common argument and still is made by a lot of the orthodox school that Ho Chi Minh is really a nationalist. He's not part of some broader international communist movement. But we know clearly if we look, some of his own writings as a young man. He talks about this, how he was converted to Leninism, how he revered Leninism, how he waited in line for hours in the cold and got frostbite, waiting to see the body of Stalin, excuse me, body of Lenin after he had died. And he goes on then to spend much of his career outside Vietnam, organizing international communist movements in other countries. And he serves in the Chinese army in World War II, the Chinese Communist army. And we know that once he actually is in power, he imposes a system of government that is very similar to that of other Marxist-Leninist countries.

And he's also been clear on this too, that he does not think countries should be putting their national interests ahead of the global international communist movement. And in fact, he and other Vietnamese communists are very critical of Tito in Yugoslavia who does try to take a more nationalist view. And when the Soviets crushed the rebellion in Hungary in 1956, the Vietnamese communists applaud. And so, this is largely a fiction and wishful thinking of people who are trying to criticize American policy and to gloss over the real nature of Vietnamese communism. And the other thing I like to point out too is that while this South Vietnamese government that comes in 1954 is sometimes caricatured as a neo-imperialist project, its leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, is actually a very serious historical figure. And even people who are not tied to the Revisionist Movement who have done a lot of research on him have come to the same conclusion about him. And he actually is more of a nationalist. He is more reluctant to follow his great power bosses, and in fact, he's overthrown in 1963 because the Americans decide he's not pliant enough.

Aaron MacLean:

Well, let's linger on that. To me, my far less informed view than yours, but my view nevertheless, is that episode in the fall of '63, the coup that leads to Diem's assassination along with his brother, is the pivotal moment. That's the hinge moment of the entire American war. And it happens before most Americans, I think, are even aware there was a war in Vietnam in terms of just the conventional casual understanding of the war. And my own view, again, I'm curious to know your response to this, as a non-professional person who is nevertheless interested in the war, if only for personal reasons, my dad served there three times on three different tours, to include one in these very early days in the Diem days. And then my mom, as 19-year-old girls are wont to do, she took a job as a secretary working for the US Army in Saigon and showed up right after Tet.

And my other fun family history fact is that the famous photographs of the helicopters taking off the roof in '75, which is relevant for our anniversary recording today, which, as you know, Mark, is not actually the embassy building, but an apartment building nearby. My mom lived in that building in '68 and '69, some years before.

Mark Moyar:

Oh, wow.

Aaron MacLean:

Anyway, I have a long-standing interest in Vietnam. And my view has been, for a long time, that after the coup, we, America, had a weaker hand that we then often played poorly, and the whole thing ended up an enormous mess. And I don't think that that's necessarily contrary to the Revisionist view, but do you agree? Is it your view that '63 is the hinge year, or what would you say to that?

Mark Moyar:

Yes, I think that's the single greatest mistake the United States makes. And that is an affair that I researched in great detail because there has been so much misunderstanding and misinformation. And one of the biggest reasons for that is that we get a lot of the orthodox account of that period from David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan in their award-winning books. We got the Best and the Brightest and Making of a Quagmire from Halberstam and Bright Shining Light from Sheehan. And they are very critical of Diem and try to claim that he's on his last legs. Things are falling apart in 1963. And you have to actually go and ... What I found from looking at it is that Halberstam and Sheehan are not merely reporters. They're cheerleaders for having a coup in 1963, and they've bought onto this false notion that we're going to get some better regime in after.

And so, once the coup happens with their encouragement, and then it goes south, they have to justify why they supported this coup. So, their excuse is, "Oh. Well, things were really going terribly." What I found is that actually, no, in 1963, the war is actually going pretty well, and it drops, goes off the cliff as soon as the coup happens because the government's paralyzed. You have all these purges, and we know this. We've got confirmation of this now from the North Vietnamese because they observed exactly this. And so, it takes several years, really, for that government to recover. And in the meantime, we have the North Vietnamese seek to capitalize on this weakness by invading in early '65, thinking the US is not going to come in because LBJ has announced he's not going to send American boys. Of course, LBJ does send American boys, and then we have a bigger war in the middle of 1965 onward. And again, unfortunately, the Johnson administration doesn't manage that well either and misses some big strategic opportunities.

Aaron MacLean:

Well, let's just stick with the coup for a minute. I mean, there's this strange American tick, habit of being substantially more hostile to our friends than to our enemies. And you see this frequently. Maybe you could associate it with one party more than another, but you see it a lot. The notion that we would coup our own partner, objectionable as he may be in some ways, and I guess part of your case is he's actually not as objectionable as Halberstam and others were making out, in the hopes that we'll then improve our hand. We'll do better. Seems like a ... I don't know. If that's all you knew, if that was the full pitch, that was the headline that you were aware of, it seems like a stretch. It seems like a risk. And Kennedy thought it was a risk, right? I mean, talk about the actual decision-making behind this and how it went down.

Mark Moyar:

Yeah, it's very convoluted. So, Kennedy originally, before he's president, is a big supporter of South Vietnam. He supports Diem. And then he comes in, and he makes a huge mistake by selecting Henry Cabot Lodge to be ambassador because Henry Cabot Lodge is from the opposing party. And Kennedy actually does this as a political ploy that he can ... if things don't get better, if it's just a hassle, he can make Lodge take the blame, and he can also keep Lodge out of the United States. Well, it ends up backfiring because what happens is Lodge himself decides to listen to these journalists who want a coup, so Lodge becomes the biggest advocate of the coup. And Kennedy doesn't find this out until a few days before the coup. And at this point, he's too afraid to pull Lodge because that would then be something that Lodge could exploit politically.

So, he basically sits there. At the end, he actually ... The last two days, Kennedy's sending messages to Lodge saying, "Let's put a halt on this coup planning," and Lodge blows him off and basically pretends he can't do anything. And Kennedy's actually despondent after the coup because he also didn't expect Diem was going to get murdered. They thought maybe he'd get sent out of the country. So, Kennedy has ... a few days after the coup, these mournful recollections, and he is just extremely frustrated. And you mentioned this idea of being tough on our friends and soft on our enemies. Kennedy knows that one of the principal architects in Washington of the coup supporters is Averell Harriman, and he is known for doing this as a regular policy. And he seemed to have kind of a soft spot in his heart for the communists. He was always going easy on them. He pressured our right-wing al lies in Laos into accepting a phony neutralization deal that was a disaster, and he was always very imperious and condescending with our allies. And yeah, it's just an unfortunate tendency that, again, particularly some of our politicians have gravitated toward. And it usually does not end well when we are tough on our friends and soft on our enemies.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah. And the actual details of the coup are harrowing. You say that the general thought, which I take to include amongst some of the senior Vietnamese plotters, is that Diem is going to be sent into exile. Instead, he and his brother are just murdered in the back of this truck after they're arrested. Kennedy is shot himself just a few weeks after. And a lot of the pretext for the coup is this, or if you're Halberstam and Sheehan, and others, substance reason for the coup is this oppression of religious freedom, oppression of Buddhists protesters against the regime. And there is indeed a kind of political liberalization that happens after the coup, and it does not track well with the fortunes of South Vietnam facing this communist assault, right?

Mark Moyar:

Yeah, that's right. There was this idea that the South Vietnamese government is being too repressive, and a new government will be nicer, and then you won't have all these protests. Well, what happens is that when they liberalize, this just encourages more protests by these same groups. Diem had made this very case because he had, at some point, tried to be more accommodating. And what happened was you had more intensive protests and people denouncing the government. And in a society like this, government can't tolerate that. And you look at North Vietnam. They never tolerated big public denunciations of the government. And so, what happens ultimately is that the successor governments are facing such pressure, they are made to look weak, and they lose face, in Confucian terms, if the government is simply tolerating this rampant opposition. So they end up cracking down even harder than Diem ever had, ultimately, in order to restore order. But it was another fallacy of the coup proponents that somehow, if only we could bring in a government that's more tolerant of dissent, that everything's going to get better.

Aaron MacLean:

And so, '63 turns to '64, and a real crisis develops where it looks like the communists are going to succeed, which then leads Johnson to deploy American troops in force in '65. And the reason why I asserted a few minutes ago that this is just a weak hand is, even if you played every move brilliantly after that, which we did not, now you're doing a large deployment of American ground troops on the Eurasian mainland. For an uncertain period of time, there are going to be casualties. Even if it's going well, it's presumably not a problem that's solvable in a few months. And you have to know yourself. And we've both lived through our post-9/11 wars. There's a ticking clock for that kind of thing. And the American people have to believe they're fighting for a vital interest, and they like to know they're winning. And if either of those things is questionable, American support starts to collapse pretty quickly. So that's why it seems to me it's a weak hand, and, well, I guess this is where it gets complicated, and this is where the specifics of your view, I think, are complicated. I guess I'm open to the conventional notion that we then played the hand pretty weakly, somewhat influenced by the fact that we lose spectacularly in the end. I presume you have a more nuanced take. What is your take?

Mark Moyar:

Yes. Well, there is a view, again, coming from the Orthodox position, that once you have the US troops in there, that you are going to see a slow erosion of public support. You do see some erosion. One thing I mentioned that a lot of times doesn't get enough attention is that Johnson himself bears a lot of the blame because he deliberately avoids trying to sell the war to the American people because he's focused on his domestic agenda. And he will even admit this late in his presidency that, yeah, we probably should have tried to stir popular passions and patriotism to get the people on board with this. But there are some opportunities that he misses on, which, again, a lot of people ignore because if you take the argument the war was unwinnable, as the orthodox vision does, these other options aren't really important. But there are several that get proposed to him. Some of them start before he sends in troops.

One is a much heavier bombing of North Vietnam. This gradual escalation he puts in sends the wrong signals. So, North Vietnamese have been avoiding invading South Vietnam because they've been afraid of the US, so this gradual escalation reduces that fear along with Johnson's statements. You also have proposals to either go into North Vietnam or into Laos with American ground troops. And these aren't just fringe theories. These are pushed by people like former President Eisenhower and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and we now have more information available that indicates to us that yes, these would have been good options because the option we end up pursuing is the strategic defense if you're just staying in South Vietnam. And that means the North Vietnamese can indefinitely keep sending troops in, and no matter how many of them you kill, they can still keep sending them. And it's a bit like, as you know, in the case of Afghanistan, you had the Taliban hanging out in Pakistan. And so, no matter how many were killed coming in Afghanistan, you could regenerate and send more troops in. And the American people and most people, in general, realize that you probably don't want to be in a situation where you're just indefinitely fighting this attrition war, and there's no way to win decisive victory.

Aaron MacLean:

There are a couple of interesting points that you've made in your work that I want to emphasize here. One is, I mean, you're basically supportive of Johnson deploying the troops in '65, and you argue that actually, this is the critical domino-stopping moment. The dominoes actually were teetering, and that Indonesia is the principal domino that was going to fall, and that Johnson's intervention in '65, whatever happens next actually does stop that. And I guess you have no less a friend than Lee Kuan Yew in that argument. Lee Kuan Yew famously basically made this case years later.

And then, the other thing that I think is interesting about your work is if we take the level of conversation down from grand strategy to strategy and warfighting, you actually stick up for Westmoreland a fair amount. And there's a version of the Revisionist case which would lump Westmoreland in with all the people making the mistakes and say, "Actually, it's all Creighton Abrams. It's all counterinsurgency. If we'd just done counterinsurgency throughout in a deliberate fashion, this attrition-based search-and-destroy stuff would've been correctly seen as beside the point, and if anything, maybe counterproductive." So, let's take those in turn. One, that the '65 intervention, in your view, was actually critical, grand strategically critical, and two, that Westmoreland gets a bad rap, which I will confess, I'm more skeptical of the second one. The first one, the case seems strong to me. The second one, I think I need some arm-twisting, but over to you.

Mark Moyar:

Yes. Well, the option of sending ground troops in in '65 is, in my view, certainly far better than the option of pulling out because I think the evidence is very clear that you would have seen much, if not all, of Asia, even possibly Japan falling or succumbing to communist pressure because you would've had ... the US had already been there for years and had lots of forces. And so, if the Americans pull out ... there's an idea sometimes of, "Well, we could have made a stand in another country like Thailand." But if you're Thailand, you just saw the Americans make this huge commitment, lots of damage to the country, and then the Americans bail out. You're not going to want to accept an American alliance after seeing that happen. And so, again, the troops, I think, could have and should have been used better once they were there, but it was certainly better to protect South Vietnam rather than let it fall.

And then, once you're there, I think that Westmoreland does the best with the limitations that are imposed on him. And this is an area where, as you said, the Revisionists disagree. Colonel Harry Summers' position was a bit closer to mine in arguing we really should have extended the frontiers of the war. Lewis Sorley, who just recently passed away, he was a good friend, but we differed on Westmoreland. And what I say with respect to Westmoreland is the biggest criticism is that he was too focused on search and destroy. He didn't pay enough attention to pacifying the villages. And I think that's largely misguided for a couple of reasons. So first, he actually does not de-emphasize pacification. What he does say is that we should let the South Vietnamese deal with this because they can deal more effectively with the population. And Americans don't speak the language. They may not be very welcome, so let's send the Americans out into the jungles and the mountains to look for the insurgents.

And so, the Americans are out doing a lot of ... not exclusively ... they do a lot of this. And so, people question. Well, you really need to focus on the population. This is an insurgency. Part of the point there is this is actually a largely conventional war by the time American troops show up. You can't have a village militia platoon fighting against a North Vietnamese Army battalion. And it worked out well for the militia platoon. And when it happens, the North Vietnamese clean house. So you need these bigger American units to deal with the larger North Vietnamese units that are roaming around. And it's a lot better if you fight them in remote areas because if they get to the cities, what happens? And the most devastating example of this is Hue in 1968. The North Vietnamese get into the city, and you basically have to destroy the city in the process of evicting this big North Vietnamese force. And you've also given the North Vietnamese the initiative, and so it actually works out better militarily if you are out fighting them and keeping them away from the population, and that allows you to make progress in pacification.

Aaron MacLean:

A lot of the art that comes out of Vietnam, some of it very good, novels by Karl Marlantes, Jim Webb's Fields of Fire, they cover these large conventional operations that ... in both those cases, Marines, but obviously, plenty of soldiers out there too. And there's this sense of futility that interlaces a lot of it. I guess let's think about that for a second. If you think about Marlantes and Matterhorn and his chronicling of the Marines' experiences up there or close to the DMZ, you're fighting over these meaningless pieces of terrain. They only take on tactical meaning. Beyond that, they don't really matter to anyone. They're pretty far away from population centers. They don't have any real value intrinsically.

You're playing this numbers game. You're trying to report up the body count all the time, and that leads to all manner of dishonesty and B.S., which Marlantes is a brilliant chronicler of. And I don't take to his account to be particularly left-coded. This is an authentic soldier's, or Marine in his case, reaction because nothing ever seems to come of it. You're going to go fight over this hill. You probably win. Most of the time, the Americans win. And then what? Now you have the hill, and maybe you move to another hill, and you fight again, and you report up basically, Fugazi numbers about how many North Vietnamese soldiers you killed, and on, and on, and on, and on you go. And that is a bad recipe for morale and, ultimately, not a great strategic recipe either, it would seem, in retrospect.

Mark Moyar:

Yeah, the morale is an interesting question because morale is actually quite high among the American units in the early years. As the war moves on ... and Nixon, in some ways, is a better war manager, but he doesn't do a great job of explaining to the Americans sometimes why it is we're still fighting because he's focused on reducing the American presence. And there comes a point in time, and this is thinking about when Marlantes is there, Americans start to think, "Well, we're getting out of this. Why are we still dying? We'll let the South Vietnamese deal with this." And you see similar problems in Afghanistan and Iraq, I think, which you, of course, know very well. This idea that people are filing false information, you have that, although I think it's also worth remembering that you hear the same thing in lots of wars, even in World War II, which we think of as the Great War.

You have this conflict between the guys on the ground and number-crunching bureaucrats and self-serving commanding officers. I think a lot of it is a function of leadership that if you have ... even Marlantes, in his book, has the virtuous officer and the toxic leader. And that's, I think, a timeless problem we have, that if you have good leadership, they will be able to sustain the morale, and they will be able to conduct a war even in difficult times. When you don't have that is when you run into problems, which is why I've spent a significant amount of my career railing against toxic leadership because it is, I think, so debilitating. And you can never get rid of it entirely, but certainly, some organizations are better at doing that than others.

Aaron MacLean:

So, LBJ turns over to Nixon. Things are, I'll use the word stalemate. I don't know if you would sign up for that. This seems stalemated in '68. We know as people who analyze military affairs that the Tet Offensive is a huge disaster for the communists. That's certainly not how it's perceived in the United States. And in the end, that matters a lot. And Nixon's own attitude and strategic vision of Vietnam is always complicated. I've had the opportunity to talk at some length to Kissinger about it over the years before he passed away. And one of the points he would repeatedly make, he would say this publicly too, is Nixon gets blamed in the record for the Vietnam War, which is ridiculous considering everything you and I have just spent the last half hour discussing.

I don't remember Richard Nixon having a role in virtually any of it because he didn't unilaterally end the war upon taking office in 1969. Having run as somebody who was going to wrap the war up, which, I guess it's more complicated than that, and you can tell us how it's complicated. He does not run as somebody who is going to achieve final victory in Vietnam. He runs as somebody who's going to end the war. And then he wins, and on January the 21st, 1969, he does not end the war. The war continues. Tell us about his actual attitudes and his campaign positions, and how they start to translate into policy.

Mark Moyar:

Yeah, well, he had been pretty hawkish.

Aaron MacLean:

Tell us about Nixon's actual campaign positions and his actual strategic vision and how all this translates into policy starting in '69.

Mark Moyar:

Yeah, so Nixon had been very hawkish earlier in the war. In '65, '66, and '67, he and a lot of other Republicans are saying that the Johnson administration really needs to take the gloves off, needs to hit the North Vietnamese much harder. But when you get to '68, he senses that at least to get elected, he's going to have to take a somewhat more restrained position. And he's running in the primary facing Ronald Reagan, who wants this tougher line. But Nixon, I think, is a politically savvy guy. I think he senses that the best way to win is to take a more restrained approach, and so he makes vague promises about peace with honor. It's not quite clear to the public what he means, but he ends up winning, and he is running to the right of Humphrey in the general election, who is seen as being more willing to give in.

But Nixon, during this time, during '68, is talking about he does have plans to end the war. And part of this is using overwhelming force. And he has in mind the end of the Korean War in 1953, where Eisenhower comes in and threatens destruction, and this seems to convince the North Koreans to give in. So Nixon's planning to do this. He's also thinking that he will be able to increase the strength of the South Vietnamese. So what happens is there's a period in February '69 that hasn't gotten a lot of attention, but Nixon himself talks about how this is the greatest mistake of his presidency. There's a North Vietnamese offensive that takes place. And Lyndon Johnson had suspended the bombing of North Vietnam shortly before he left, so Nixon's faced with a choice of do we restart the bombing because the North Vietnamese said we would ease off if we did that. So, Nixon is encouraged by some of his advisers to bomb, but then others, including Kissinger, saying, "Well, no, this could be an obstacle to peace. And right now, we have a honeymoon with the press."

The press had never been very happy about Nixon, but his talk of ending the war has made him some goodwill. So he doesn't bomb. And then later reflects that this squandered his ability to push the North Vietnamese around because now they realize he's like LBJ. He will not get tough. He will talk tougher than he will act. And so then, he ultimately has to shift towards Vietnamization, basically gradually turning the war over to the South Vietnamese while removing American troops. And this is a viable strategy in a variety of senses, but it will end up running into trouble because, ultimately, when the Americans leave, of course, we can't maintain our commitments.

Aaron MacLean:

So, Nixon's attitudes weren't totally determined by American domestic political demands, or at least that's been my take on it. There was something authentically, call it realist, for lack of a better word, in his view of the role that the Vietnam War should play or ought to have played perhaps in American grand strategy, that there was an overinvestment of resources, that there had to be a recalibration of sorts. And part of his desire to accept something other than total escalation and further investment of resources, accept something less than that was part of this view of recalibration, which was part of his broader view of the need for détente and the need for a rebalancing of US-Soviet relations. Help me think through all of that.

Mark Moyar:

Yeah, so he certainly does still believe that the domino theory has validity, so he's not ready to pull out quickly, but he does see, in the early 70s, the world's changing. There's opportunities to work more closely with the Soviets and Chinese and to play them off against each other, and Vietnam will become an important part of that. Initially, he seems to be able to actually use this triangular diplomacy to get the Soviets and the Chinese to put pressure on the North Vietnamese to back off. Later on, it becomes problematic because it will be ... the idea that we can improve our relations will actually encourage Nixon and Kissinger to reduce their commitments to South Vietnam, which will contribute to the final fall, though, ultimately, it'll be Congress who plays the greatest role in pulling the plug on our allies.

Aaron MacLean:

Well, let's talk about that because, in some ways, successful Vietnamization with ongoing limited American support that nevertheless maintains South Vietnamese independence, I mean, that's just kind of getting back to the early 60s, what could or should have been in the early 60s without this unfortunate, but you would argue necessary, interregnum, really started by Johnson in the face of real crisis in '65. But in part, because you also make the point, you attribute the Cultural Revolution and a lot of Chinese trouble at home in some ways to Johnson's intervention in '65, which I've not been following the scholarly journals on this, but I'm going to assume that's a controversial point. But there are opportunities now to try to restart and go back a decade, and it doesn't work out. Is it Watergate? Is it just the fall of Nixon in the end that kills it? Walk us through the dynamics that ultimately lead to the failure of Vietnamization.

Mark Moyar:

Yeah, well, so in 1972, you have this big Easter offensive by the North Vietnamese 14 divisions, and American ground troops, at this point, are gone. You have American air power, and the American air power will help ensure the defeat of this offensive, but it's really a watershed moment because it does show the South Vietnamese really have some real capability. Now, of course, American air power is important, but you can't just fight off 14 visions with air power alone. The South Vietnamese ground forces generally equip themselves well. I mean, not all of them, but it's clearly, I think, the proof that Vietnamization has some viability to it. And so, you will have then, as '72 ends, Nixon is thinking about politics and striking a peace deal that will get the US out, but there's a couple of critical points on this peace deal.

One is, do we let the North Vietnamese keep their troops in South Vietnam? The South Vietnamese are very opposed to this. And then, the other one is, do we leave a residual American force? And that's particularly important when you think about what's going to deter the North Vietnamese in the long run. Ultimately, Nixon and Kissinger decide they're going to give in on both these. You're going to take all US forces out and not make the North Vietnamese withdraw, which I think a lot of people have probably properly criticized them for because the US is in a strong position after the Christmas bombings of 1972. But the Americans do promise that they will continue aid, and they will bring in air power if the North Vietnamese violate this agreement. Now, again, Watergate is very crucial in withdrawing and ultimately preventing us from living up to those promises.

But the residual force issue is also interesting because ... and it's worth comparing to Afghanistan. What we saw in Afghanistan, even with a small American force, the government was able to hang on, and it had a deterrent effect. And as soon as you pull those troops out ... Afghanistan's collapse was very rapid. South Vietnam, they actually are able to hold on for a few more years without US forces. But it would've, I think, certainly given the North Vietnamese greater pause if there had still been US troops there after '73.

Aaron MacLean:

What would've the correct American strategy from the start look like? I assume you'll say, in part, Kennedy should have intervened more strongly to stop the coup back in '63. What is the parallel history where ... Because we seem to have a habit of making the same kinds of mistakes, there are just alarming, tragic parallels between Vietnam and certainly Afghanistan. I guess I could argue Iraq as well, but Vietnam and Afghanistan both share this shocking finale: the fall of Saigon 50 years ago almost to the day, and then the fall of Kabul in '21, where so many people who fought on the American side essentially lose everything, literally everything in a lot of cases. And you have these disastrous blows to American prestige, which I'll leave it to you to explain the consequences in the 70s. And 2021, I mean, is visible for all to see. We have the full-scale invasion of Ukraine following shortly thereafter, and not exactly a happy period for American foreign policy. What should we have done, very big picture, better?

Mark Moyar:

Mm-hmm, yeah. Well, certainly, we should not have supported the overthrow of the South Vietnamese government. That was a huge colossal disaster. Also, I think limiting our ground troops to within South Vietnam was also a critical flaw. South Vietnam, potentially, instead, if we kept up the aid, they could have kept going. But the US could have, and even in ... As soon as Kennedy gets in the White House, Eisenhower is actually telling him, "Put American troops into Laos even if our allies won't." Because if the North Vietnamese just have unfettered access, their position in South Vietnam is going to be terrible. The South Vietnamese are going to get outflanked. Kennedy doesn't do that. He thinks we can avoid doing that. And for all his talk about flexible response, he's actually very cautious. But then again, when the war heats up, there's the US military again saying "go into Laos." And some of them are saying "go in North Vietnam," which I think, actually in hindsight, probably would've been the best option because we know the Chinese were not going to come in. So that was always the issue that kept Johnson from going into North Vietnam was that he was afraid we're going to see what happened in the Korean War, where we went in North Korea and then the Chinese came in.

And now the generals and the Intel community keep saying, "Well, this is not 1950 anymore. The Chinese don't want to come in. They don't want to fight us, so we can go in." The US had gone into Hanoi and taken Haiphong. Now, the counter-argument as well is the North Vietnamese then could have taken to the hills like they did against the French. And yes, that's true, they could have, but that's a very different and much easier situation to handle because having Hanoi and populous areas of North Vietnam gave the North Vietnamese massive resources. They had the Port of Haiphong. They could bring in supplies. And again, it is, I think, disturbingly similar in some ways to Afghanistan where you have Pakistan essentially serving as this area that we are unwilling to go into.

Now, Pakistan is also a bit trickier because you have Pakistan with nuclear arms. But I think as we look at these things, certainly, policymakers didn't pay enough attention to the prospect of a conflict where simply we are, as the saying goes, mowing the grass. You're just going to constantly feed people in from another country, and we're going to be stuck in a prolonged conflict of trying to stop them, and that the American people will become impatient. If we were the Romans, maybe we could get away with that, but the Americans don't want to do that forever. And so, either you go in and hit the head of the snake, as Eisenhower once called it, or you find another way. I mean, ideally, you get allies to do it. Now, again, if we hadn't overthrown Diem, it would've been a lot easier to rely on our allies to do this.

Aaron MacLean:

All of these are opportunities early on. By the time we're into the Nixon presidency, you see the wheels start to come off, especially towards the end, because it's just all been going on too long, as far as the American people are concerned. And you point out it's the Congress in the end that pulls the rug out from the South Vietnamese. I mean, the Congress is a reasonably decent stand-in for American attitudes. It is, on some level, an actually representative body. And there's just this sense that after all these years, there've been so many promises that a successful end is near. The successful end has never come. And by the 70s, really, this perception has set, in particular on the left, that we are wrong. And that's a valence that doesn't really exist in the mid-60s, but by the time you're in the late 60s or in the 70s, this notion that America is actually on the wrong side of an unjust war has powerfully taken hold, not just amongst radicals, but really mainstream institutions of the country. And at that point, all these other questions are salient. All these other prospects are fighting against that force.

Mark Moyar:

Yes, and it's really unfortunate. I mean, again, I think Nixon could have done a better job to sell the people. Now, there is ... I think if you look at the numbers, I mean, the 1972 election is an excellent example. Most Americans, I think, still don't want to lose the war, but you have the liberal wing of the Democratic Party who are fine with this. And they put up George McGovern. Now, McGovern gets clobbered in the election because the average American is not in the same place as the liberal Democrats are. But the liberal Democrats, of course, occupy positions of great influence around the country. They're able to use this to their advantage. And then Watergate ... I mean, it's interesting too. A lot of the Democrats were themselves the ones who got us into the war, and so it is rather peculiar that it's the Democrats now who are pushing us out.

And I do think part of the problem is, fundamentally, you just have partisan politics getting in the way. And I think we've seen that again more recently, where some people will oppose the war simply because they don't like the President who's in charge. I think we saw some of that with the Democrats during the period of George W. Bush. And I think even you can look at some of the Republican opposition to Ukraine is simply because the Republicans did not like Joe Biden and some of the other Democrats, and so there was ... I will say too, some of the Democrats will still try to claim that they didn't really have responsibility. We did keep up a certain level of aid to South Vietnam, but it is clear that a lot of them believed essentially that this was no longer a war worth fighting, and our allies were corrupt, and the North Vietnamese actually were pretty good people, which is all very hard to sustain. And it's interesting to think about with this anniversary coming up that you don't see many of the anti-war people talking much about the end of the war. And at the time, a lot of them said, "Oh, this is going to be no big deal." They didn't foresee the reeducation camps, or the millions of boat people dying, or the Khmer Rouge. Lots of disasters came that these people assured us were not going to happen.

Aaron MacLean:

I'm confused. I thought that we were on the wrong side of the war and that once we finally left, the good nationalist Vietnamese, who we had been wrongly opposing, would introduce a more just regime than the one that existed in South Vietnam. You're telling me that that's not what happened, Mark?

Mark Moyar:

Yes, that is correct. I mean, we know close to a million people were put in re-education camps. Of course, the people who supported us leaving said, "Oh, there's only a few South Vietnamese who really buy into this idea of independent South Vietnam." The North Vietnamese clearly see that most of the educated population in South Vietnam is a threat, so a million of them go into the camps, and probably 150,000 die before they ever come out. We also have several million boat people leave. I think between 200 and 600,000 of them die at sea. And then our departure also paves the way for the Khmer Rouge, who also get soft-pedaled by a lot of Americans. The US-supported government in Cambodia is corrupt, so probably just as well they leave. Of course, again, the Khmer Rouge come in and are even more vicious. I mean, killing in between 1.5 and 3 million people, often for the most ridiculous reasons, and so it's worth keeping all of that in mind as we think about this warring context.

Aaron MacLean:

I'm sorry. We moved through it really quickly, but the low estimate for boat people ... these are South Vietnamese fleeing the communists. The low estimate for the boat people who died at sea is 200,000?

Mark Moyar:

Yes. I think most of the estimates are in the 200,000 to 600,000 range. It's really tragic. There was an actually really good movie called When Heaven Falls, something to that effect, a Vietnamese movie. It gives you a graphic depiction of what happens. But these people are in little boats. A lot of them get attacked by pirates. A lot of them simply can't cross a massive ocean to get where they-

Aaron MacLean:

It's the South China Sea. It's huge.

Mark Moyar:

Yeah. So, yeah, another tragedy, which, again, you never had the South Vietnamese causing these mass exoduses of people for reasons of political persecution.

Aaron MacLean:

And then, sorry, just quickly, because we could do many other episodes on it, but how does the fall of South Vietnam lead to the crisis in Cambodia? Just draw that out because the Killing Fields ... we should do an episode on that. But in a way, this is kind of a domino that falls, but just explain what you mean there.

Mark Moyar:

Yes. Well, the Cambodian government changed in 1970 when Sihanouk is ousted, and Lon Nol comes in, and the US Nixon administration provides its support to help maintain itself. And you have North Vietnamese forces that are in there, and they've been in there using it as a sanctuary to come fight American South Vietnamese. So the Americans and South Vietnamese actually launch an operation and go in, clean some of them out. But the Cambodian military is pretty weak, and they're dependent on American assistance and also help from the South Vietnamese. So once the South Vietnamese are on the ropes, they can't help them anymore. And the aid is declining to South Vietnam, and the US can't really keep up aid to Cambodia either, and so it becomes clear that Cambodian government is not going to survive. And so this opens the door for the Khmer Rouge, who come into Phnom Penh just a couple of weeks before the fall of Saigon and soon thereafter begin their murderous regime. Ultimately, they're so murderous that the North Vietnamese will actually go in in 1978 to put an end because, among other things, they're killing a lot of the ethnic Vietnamese who live in Cambodia.

Aaron MacLean:

Mark Moyar, we've only scratched the surface here, but part of me thinks that a better understanding of this period would be salutary because so many of the issues and the controversies, or maybe the dilemmas is a better word, that it raises seems so strikingly similar to questions that we face today. I really appreciate you coming on the show.

Mark Moyar:

It's great to be with you, Aaron.

Aaron MacLean:

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