[APPLAUSE] KENT FUCHS: Well, welcome to
beautiful and dry Bailey Hall. My name is Kent
Fuchs, and I have the privilege of serving
as Cornell's provost. And I have the great honor of
introducing Cornell's 2013 Olin Lecture. Each year, we have
the privilege here at Cornell of having a
distinguished scholar and speaker who will
speak about world affairs and a topic of
interest particularly to higher education. This lecture series
was established in 1996 by the Spencer T. and
Ann W. Olin Foundation. And the lecture's
become known as one of Cornell's annual
highlights, and particularly a highlight of reunion week. This year, we're
proud to present one of Cornell's own faculty
members, Professor Frederick Logevall. Professor Logevall has taught
at Cornell for almost a decade, and he is both an expert in
international studies and also a world-renowned historian. As the John S. Knight professor
of international studies and also as the director
of the Mario Einaudi Center for
International Studies, Professor Logevall
plays an important role in implementing Cornell's
goal of graduating students who are experts in
global issues and also aware of cultural
issues around the world. The Einaudi Center is
an umbrella organization that has a number of
interdisciplinary programs including area study programs,
such as the East Asia program, the Institute for
African Development and thematic programs that have
to do with international law as an example, and peace
and conflict studies, and also development
programs that affect world issues around the globe. As director of the
Einaudi Center, Fred Logevall has
not only enhanced the work of that
center, but he's also played other important roles
throughout the university and in particular this past year
in serving on a task force that was charged with planning the
future of international studies and engagement at Cornell. This task force was
charged for advancing one of the President's Skorton's
top priorities-- strengthening the university's
international engagement. And I'm delighted to say
that as of July 1 this year, Fred Logevall will be
our new vice provost for international relations. As a historian,
Professor Logevall teaches courses on US diplomacy,
foreign policy, the Cold War, and also the Vietnam War. He's the author of Choosing
War, the Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation
of War in Vietnam, and also co-author of
America's Cold War, the Politics of Insecurity
among other books. Two months ago, Fred was
sitting in my office April 15, 3 o'clock, in a
meeting in which we were discussing his new
role as a vice provost for international relations. And his phone was receiving
a number of messages that were going to voice mail. Fred did not know it,
but those messages were telling him that he and
his book, The Embers of War, the Fall of an Empire and the
Making of America's Vietnam, had just won a Pulitzer
Prize in history. The Pulitzer citation
describes the book as a balanced, deeply
researched history of how, as French
colonial rule faltered, a succession of American
leaders moved step by step down a road
toward full-blown war. The Pulitzer
committee joins a host of other scholars and reviewers
in celebrating Embers of War. Just in the last few
weeks, Fred's study has won the coveted
Francis Parkman Prize from the Society
of American Historians, and was also named one of
the best books of the year by the Washington Post and
the Christian Science Monitor. [APPLAUSE] After today's
lecture, Embers of War will be available in the
lobby, and Professor Logevall will be in the lobby available
to sign copies and meet with each of you, if
you'd like to talk to him. He's a native of Sweden. And Professor Logevall earned
his PhD at Yale University. He has previously taught
before joining the Cornell nearly 10 years ago at the
University of California, Santa Barbara. He joined Cornell's faculty
in 2004 and, in 2007, served as professor of history
at the University of Nottingham and also the Mellon
senior research fellow at the University of Cambridge. Before we bring Fred out to
address you all today as part of the Olin Lecture, I wanted
to welcome to the lecture also his family. We have here in the
audience Fred's wife and also his son and daughter. Danielle is the associate
director for admissions at the College of Engineering. Danielle, could you stand up? And also Emma and Joe? [APPLAUSE] So let's welcome to the
stage Professor Fred Logevall as we hear about the
meaning of the Vietnam War. Fred? [APPLAUSE] FREDRIK LOGEVALL:
Wow, thank you, Kent. And thank all of you for
coming out this afternoon. I'm deeply honored to be
standing here before you as this year's Olin lecturer. I'm immensely grateful to
Provost Fuchs for his kind words. And, as he maybe suggested
a few moments ago, I'm particularly fond of
the provost these days and of his office on the
third floor of Day Hall because a certain
announcement was, in fact, made when I was in there
meeting with the provost. And so I'm looking for many,
many more meetings, lasting for hours, in the future. I'm also just wanting
to say that it's an honor for me to be
stepping in as vice provost for international
relations next month. I've been honored to be part
of this great university as a member of the
History Department and as director of
the Einaudi Center. And now to have an opportunity
to help shape the university's global agenda and to be part
of this great international university is just a
thrill and an honor. Today, however, I'm going
to speak about Vietnam, about the war in Vietnam, which
has been called the defining experience for the United
States in the second half of the 20th century, which was
the longest and bloodiest world conflict during
that half century. It's a war that many
of you in this room have a personal connection with. Some of you were here on campus
during the period of heavy US involvement in the
war, say, 1960, '61 through the departure
of the last American ground forces in 1973. Some of you who are here
from the class of 1973 were on campus for, I
think it's fair to say, the most intense, the most
tumultuous episodes involving the campus. And there's an
extraordinary photo that you may have seen of
a protest at Barton Hall. The specific date
is April 10, 1970. Some of you in
this room, I think, were present on that day. Although if you say to me
after the lecture today that you were also at
Woodstock the previous August, I may be a little bit
skeptical because I think we're up to
about 12.2 million people who insist that
they were at Woodstock. But I want to show
you this photograph, if we could call it up. It's a photo, as I said,
of Barton Hall in-- it's an extraordinary photograph. I'll try to describe
it. [LAUGHTER] Take my word for this. We may or may not get to see it. But what it shows is
a packed Barton Hall. And it shows students
sitting in the front. It even shows, if I'm not
mistaken, two dogs, which reminds us that this
campus once upon a time was famous for letting
dogs roam freely. I think there were even
dogs in classrooms, if I'm not mistaken. But what's remarkable
about the photo for me as a historian is that
it was taken, as I said, on April the 10th, 1970. And this was three weeks
before Richard Nixon announced that US forces would
be attacking targets in Cambodia, an
announcement that spurred intense protests
on this campus and all across the country. But this meeting, this protest
was three weeks before. It was also about a
month before the shooting of anti-war protesters at Kent
State and at Jackson State. And this suggests
to me-- and I'll come back to this a little bit
up toward the end of my talk-- the degree to which
this campus was engaged with this long and difficult
struggle in Southeast Asia for the United States. Cornell connections,
however, to the war go back long before 1970. Professor Lauriston Sharp in
late 1945-- Professor Sharp had served in that part of
the world during the war. He'd continued to
consult in these months after the end of the Pacific
war for the State Department. Professor Sharp warned
his superiors in the State Department-- ah, there we go. Barton Hall, April
the 10th, 1970. It's also, I think, about
a week before that the hall filled again, I believe, on
April 17 for an appearance by a then fugitive
Daniel Berrigan. So Barton Hall events, I
think it's fair to say, were a relatively
common occurrence. But I think it's an absolutely
extraordinary photograph. And I wanted you to get a sense,
if you were not here then-- maybe you came to
campus after or maybe you were here
before-- of what could be seen here on the campus. Professor Sharp
warned his colleagues that the colonial era
was ending-- again, this is late 1945--
that the United States would make a grave mistake if
it backed France in its effort to reclaim control
over Indochina, France having lost control of
Indochina during World War II to the advancing Japanese. But professor Sharp's
warning fell on deaf ears. Later, in 1953, February 20 to
be exact-- February 20, 1953-- a then unknown
Vietnamese, Ngo Ding Diem, who would go on to become South
Vietnam's leader-- he would be America's ally as that leader. He spoke here on campus. Castigating France-- the French
war was still going on in 1953. He castigated France
for clinging stubbornly to colonial rule and called,
here on Cornell's campus, for the United States to
assist his cause as leader among non-Communist Vietnamese. Maybe one or two of you who
are here from the class of 1953 were present for Ngo Ding
Diem's talk that winter day. And then, 10 years after that,
Cornell grads and researchers were among those sent as
military and civilian advisors to the South
Vietnamese government. They were sent by
President John F. Kennedy whose
assassination occurred 50 years ago this November 22. And I want to come back and say
a few more words about John F. Kennedy in a moment. Cornell even played a
role in my own decision to become a
historian of the war. One day in 1988, I attended
a lecture in Eugene, Oregon, of all places given by
Professor George Kahin. And George Kahin had just
published a magnificent book called Intervention, which
was a history of the war. And I mustered up the
courage-- I had not begun my doctoral studies. I mustered up the
courage after the talk to go up to Professor
Kahin and say, Professor Kahin, I'm interested
in becoming a historian, and I'm interested
in studying this war. But you've written
this magnificent book. I laid it on a bit thick. You've written this
magnificent book. Is there anything
still to be done? And I'll never forget. I'll never forget. He said, young man,
intense scholarship on the Vietnam struggle
is only in its infancy. Go to it. Those were his words. It's my only meeting ever with
the great Professor Kahin. This lasted all of two minutes. But I think it's fair to say
that it's one of the reasons that I'm standing
here before you today. And, of course, as
many of you know, he was a giant here at Cornell
in the government department, with the Southeast Asia program,
that he and Professor Sharp, who I already mentioned,
really got off the ground and which today is, I think, the
greatest such program dedicated to Southeast Asian studies
anywhere in the world. How did the war happen? Why did two Western power,
first France and then the United States, lose
their way in Indochina at immense cost? And why did they do so? How did they do so
despite possessing vastly superior military power
vis-a-vis their adversaries, the Viet Minh under Ho Chi Minh. And what should we take
away from the war today 40 years after US
troops left Vietnam? Does the Vietnam analogy-- does
it hold lessons for us in 2013? I think these have been
profoundly important historical questions, which
is why the war, I think, has had such deep resonance
in American political culture for the last several
decades, why it continues to have that resonance today. And I want to consider those
questions in my few moments with you this afternoon. And I'm going to
proceed in three parts. First, I want to consider
this early period. And I'll go through it quickly. In particular, I
want to say something about the French Indochina
War, the war that was fought before the Americans came. I want to say then something
about John F. Kennedy. This is, as I said, the 50th
anniversary of his death. And I think Kennedy is a most
interesting and important character-- figure-- when
we think about the Indochina struggle. I'll also say something
in that same section of the talk about Lyndon
Johnson, who followed him, and Richard Nixon,
who followed him. And I'll offer a
grave conclusion about a-- well, a
determination that I've reached in 25 years of studying
this war, a grave conclusion about the three men and
their policies in Vietnam. Finally, I'll say
something about what I call the permissive context
that allowed the war to happen, a permissive context
in terms of Congress, in terms of the
media, and in terms of public opinion, both elite
public opinion and the broader populace, because I think
it has something to teach us about later American
interventions and, in particular, Iraq. I want to say something
about our recent, or maybe some would say
our current, war in Iraq. But let's begin by traveling
back in time, if we could. Too often, I think
we debate this war, we discuss this war as though
it began in the early 1960s. But, in fact, World War II,
I want to suggest to you, is of huge importance
to all that will happen later in Indochina. And that war, which I'll just
talk about for a few seconds here, that war matters
in three particular ways. And I just want to list them. First, the Viet Minh, which is
the revolutionary organization led by Ho Chi Minh, as
I think we all know. The Viet Minh came out
of the Second World War in a much more powerful position
than it had been going in, which has very
important implications. Second, the Second
World War drastically weakened the colonial powers,
including, of course, France. And that would have very
important implications as well for Indochina. And third, as a result
of World War II, the United States
rose to a prominence, a preeminent position in world
and especially Asian politics. And so what we find from a very
early stage in this struggle is that all of the major
players-- the French, the British, the Chinese, the
Vietnamese revolutionaries, the Russians-- ask themselves
the following question. And it's there in the archives. And it comes up again and again. What will the Americans do? What will the Americans do? This from 1945-- in fact, even
from the war time period-- is on everybody's mind. And it speaks to the
importance of the United States throughout this story. We also need to
give close attention to the French Indochina
War, as I suggested earlier. And that war is at the
heart of my narrative in the book Embers of War
that the provost mentioned. It's a war that begins
in earnest in late 1946 and ends in a crushing French
defeat in the spring of 1954, highlighted by a climactic
defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, one of the
great military encounters of modern times. What we find, I think-- and I
won't talk about the war here today-- but what
we find that is, I think, of particular
interest to us here today is that to
an extraordinary degree, Americans followed in the
path laid down by the French. To study these two
wars in succession, especially if you know something
about the American War going in, is to experience--
to study them in succession is to feel a
sense of deja vu to a degree that I didn't anticipate
when I started the research and to a degree
that I don't think is adequately underscored
in the existing literature. So, for example, the
soldierly complaints about the difficulty
of telling friend from foe and complaints
about the poor fighting spirit among our, as opposed
to their indigenous, troops; the gripes by commanders
about timorous and meddling politicians back
home; the solemn warning against disengagement
as this could dishonor those soldiers who had
already fallen-- this is what social
psychologists would later call the sunk cost fallacy;
the stubborn insistence that premature negotiations
should be avoided. All of these refrains,
which were ubiquitous in 1966, 1967 in
the United States, could be heard also in
France in 1948, 1949. And always, always there were
promises of imminent success, of corners about to be turned. And so when US Commanding
General William Westmoreland in late 1967 exulted that we
have reached an important point when the end begins
to come into view, he was repeating a
prediction made-- in remarkably similar language,
by the way-- he was repeating a prediction made by
French Commander Henri Navarre a decade and a
half earlier in May, 1953. Civilian leaders, meanwhile, in
Paris as much as in Washington, boxed themselves in with their
constant public affirmation of the conflict's importance
and of the certainty of ultimate success. To order a halt and
reverse course would be to call into question
their own judgement and their country's judgement,
to threaten their careers-- don't underestimate the
importance of career to this story, to undermine
their reputations. And so what we see,
again, in the record is that with each passing
year after 1949, the struggle for senior
French policymakers became less about the
future of Indochina, less about grand
geopolitical concerns, and more about domestic
political imperatives, more about satiating powerful
interest groups at home. The main objective, I
think it's fair to say-- and it's a sobering conclusion--
the main objective now was to avoid embarrassment
and to hang on, to muddle through, to
avoid an outright defeat at least until the next
election or vote of confidence. Daniel Ellsberg, who
many of you know, referred to this as
the stalemate machine. And when Ellsberg used
it, it was in the context of the American War. I want to suggest to
you this afternoon that that machine was
fully operational also during the French struggle. Now for a long time,
American officials didn't pay much attention
to the possible links between their own war and
this earlier French struggle. What mattered, these
officials said, was that the French
were a decadent people. The French were a decadent
people trying vainly to prop up a colonial
empire, their army a hidebound intellectually
bankrupt enterprise. Americans, on the
other hand, Americans were the good guys, militarily
invincible who selflessly had come to help the Vietnamese
in their hour of need and then go home. Untainted by colonialism,
possessor of the greatest military arsenal the
world had ever seen, the United States was
the champion of freedom, the engine in the global
drive to stamp out rapacious communist expansion. On the human side, the French
experience with the cupidity, the fence-sitting of their
Vietnamese collaborators, that would not repeat
itself, US officials insisted, at least to
themselves and each other, because this time
the Vietnamese truly had something to fight for. It was, for the most part,
however, self-delusional. For one thing, the
French units usually fought with bravery and
determination and skill. For another, France's war
was also America's war. Washington footed
much of the bill, supplied most of the
weaponry, and pressed Paris leaders to hang tough
when their will faltered. Yes, it's true,
the United States was more committed to
the French more than were the French themselves. Well before the climax
at Dien Bien Phu, Ho Chi Minh and his colleagues
considered the United States, not France, to be
their principal foe. Furthermore, what US
officials for a long time didn't fathom, and then refused
to acknowledge after they did fathom it, is that
colonialism is often in the eyes of the beholder. To a great many
Vietnamese after 1954, the United States was just
another great big Western power as responsible as the French for
the suffering of the first war and now there to tell them what
to do with guns at the ready. The other side, led by Ho,
had opposed the Japanese and driven out the French,
and thereby secured a fundamental
legitimacy, a legitimacy, I would submit to you, that was
fixed for all time, whatever the later governing
misdeeds of the North Vietnamese government-- and
there were many such governing misdeeds. There was a great ruthlessness
on the part of the Hanoi government, especially towards
its domestic opponents. Nevertheless, they,
more than the succession of governments in South
Vietnam, were the heirs of an anti-colonial revolution. Which then brings me to my
second subject, namely JFK, John F. Kennedy
and his successors. I believe, ladies and gentlemen,
that John Fitzgerald Kennedy understood this dynamic that
I've been describing to you, understood it perhaps
better than any other US official at the top
level of the hierarchy with the possible exception of
Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt, during the war, was
adamantly opposed to European colonialism,
colonialism in general, and the French in
Indochina in particular. But certainly among
later presidents and later top officials,
John F. Kennedy understood the
fundamental problems here. I open my book with
John F. Kennedy's visit to Indochina in October of 1951. He was 34 years old. He was on an
around-the-world tour, I think at the
insistence of his father Because he was running-- JFK
was running for the Senate in Massachusetts the following
year, and his dad or he, they wanted him to burnish his
foreign policy credentials. So he was in Vietnam
with his brother Bobby and with their sister Patricia. And I open the book with that
because even then, in 1951 in the midst of the
French war, Kennedy saw through the French
expressions of bravado and optimism. He asked penetrating questions
about whether France, or by extension any outside
power, any Western power, could ever overcome
Ho Chi Minh's cause. He asked, is it
possible to subdue revolutionary nationalists
in this part of the world by force of arms? This is John F.
Kennedy, 34 years old. And if you look at
his remarkable diary-- he kept a diary
on the trip, which is available at the
Kennedy Library-- you see him raising these
questions at the time. After he returned to Boston, he
said in a speech again in 1951, "in Indochina," and
I'm quoting, "we have allied ourselves
to the desperate effort of the French regime to hang
on to the remnants of empire." Later, he said to act
apart from and in defiance of innately nationalistic aims
spells for doomed failure. And he said, finally,
as a kind of aside, that a free election
in Indochina would, in all likelihood,
go in favor of Ho Chi Minh and his communists. So my point here is
that Kennedy's doubts were formed early. And they never went away,
even after he became president a decade later. It's a remarkable thing
about John F. Kennedy, it seems to me, that he
often showed a capacity for nuanced and independent
thought on world affairs, not least on Indochina. He also showed an appreciation
for the vicissitudes of history and for the limits
of American power. From time to time,
he expressed doubts about the ability of the West
to use military means to solve Asian problems, as I suggested. And on several occasions,
notably in the fall of 1961, he resisted the
urgings of advisors that he commit US ground
troops to Vietnam. And always, for Kennedy,
the French experience gnawed at his sensibility as
when he confided to an advisor early in his presidency, if
Vietnam is ever converted into a white man's
war, we would lose it just as the French lost it. But here's the paradox. Here is the paradox, and I think
you know where this is going. This same JFK deepened
US involvement dramatically during his
1,000 days as president. In 1962, vast quantities of
the best American weapons, jet fighters, helicopters,
armed personnel carriers arrived in South Vietnam
along with thousands of additional military
advisors, some of whom secretly were taking
part in combat. By the end of 1962, American
military advisors in Vietnam numbered over 11,000. By the time of Kennedy's trip
to Dallas in November of '63, there were more than 16,000. And in 1964, under
Lyndon Johnson, the number grew to 23,000. And also in '64, Congress voted
to authorize the president to use military force as he
saw fit in Southeast Asia. Then in early '65, the
so-called Americanization of the conflict, as Johnson
sent large-scale ground forces and began a sustained air
war against North Vietnam as well as Viet Cong-held
areas in the south. By the end of 1965,
180,000 US fighting troops are on the ground
in South Vietnam, and the number would
continue to grow, maxing out early in the
Nixon administration at more than 550,000 ground troops. But here is that
sobering conclusion I alluded to earlier. Here is the finding
that I've reached on the basis of 25 years of
doing research on this war. None of these presidents--
not Kennedy, not Johnson, not Nixon-- really
believed in this war. None of them believed that
the outcome in Vietnam was crucial to American
and Western security. None had confidence, I think,
that the war would ultimately be won militarily. Kennedy grew increasingly
wary during 1963, hinting to advisers in
his final months of life that he wanted to withdraw
from Vietnam following his 1964 reelection. Johnson, for his
part, in 1964 began to question the long-term
prospects in the struggle also, even with
major US escalation. He began to wonder about the
war's ultimate importance to American security. And Johnson said, at one point
in May of 1964 in a telephone conversation-- by the way, as
we have a marvelous thing called the White House tapes for
these three administrations. Strangely enough, they
stopped taping after Nixon. But in one of these telephone
conversations, May of 1964, Lyndon Johnson
said-- and this is to McGeorge Bundy, his
national security adviser-- pardon my French-- what in the
hell is Vietnam worth to me? What is it worth
to this country? And it's just one
conversation, but I think if you listen
to all of them, and if you look at what
Johnson said at various points in the year that followed, he
had real doubts, both about the importance of the struggle
and whether it could be won. But like his
predecessor, LBJ was careful to articulate
such sentiments only privately, and even
then only to a select few. In public, he and
his top advisors-- all of them holdovers
from Kennedy-- stuck close to the
received wisdom, insisting that the
outcome in Southeast Asia was critically important
to American interests, that they were committed to
defending their allies in South Vietnam who had been
attacked by external enemies. And by using such an
unambiguous language in public, American
leaders found, just like the
French before them, that backing away could
be extremely difficult. They knew that hawks in
the American Congress and in the American media
stood ready to pounce on them if they were seen
as shifting course. They backed themselves
into a corner. It always amazes
that leaders do this. They paint themselves
into a corner in terms of their public pronouncements. Now, to be sure, Kennedy's
freedom of maneuver and Johnson's
freedom of maneuver had been constrained
already by the choices of their predecessors as
I lay out in the book. By Truman's active support
of the French war effort, by the Eisenhower
administration's move in 1954, a hugely monumental decision
to intervene after the French had been defeated, to
build up and sustain a non-communist South Vietnam
thereby displacing France as the major external power. And Johnson also had the added
burden of Kennedy's escalation that I alluded to earlier. So Johnson faced
that as well when he came in November of 1963. For more than a dozen
years, the United States had committed
itself to preserving a non-communist
toehold in Vietnam. And both men, both
Kennedy and Johnson, feared that to alter
course now, even under the cover of a fig
leaf negotiated settlement, could be harmful to their
credibility, their country's credibility, their
party's credibility, their own personal credibility. They were not
willing to risk it. If this stance speaks poorly
of their political courage, Kennedy wrote a book
called Profiles in Courage, would not apply to himself
in this particular instance. If it speaks poorly of
their political courage, it also had a certain
political logic behind it. But then again, so did
the skeptic's reply. The skeptic said that the
credibility of the United States and of the
Democratic Party and of them themselves would
be hurt much more by getting drawn into a
bloody and extended slugfest in a conflict of peripheral
strategic importance in forbidding terrain thousands
of miles from America's shores. Ultimately, Kennedy and
Johnson and later Nixon found what a long
line of French leaders had found, that in
Vietnam, the path of least political resistance, especially
in domestic political terms, was to stand firm and
hope that somehow things would turn out fine or at least
be bequeathed to a successor. As Democrats,
Kennedy and Johnson felt the need to contend
with the ghosts of McCarthy and the charge that they
were soft on communism. Truman also acted partly
with this concern in mind as, indeed, did Eisenhower. This was not exclusively
a Democratic concern. Nixon as well. Eisenhower's decisions
in 1954, I don't think, can be understood apart from
the charged domestic political atmosphere in which
they were made. But the perceived power of
this political imperative was even greater in the early
1960s as the two presidents, feeling the vulnerability
that all Democrats felt in the period,
feeling the concern about avoiding another "who
lost China" debate stood firm. This concern was
seldom discussed in the major magazines and
newspapers of the period. You won't find it if you go
back and look in newspapers. It's also not the sort of
thing that people put down in documents. You don't want to indicate
that you're doing something in national security
terms because of a concern about a
re-election or because of the worries about domestic
political implications. So it's not easy to find
in the internal record, but I believe it's critical. What I'm saying here is this,
that the three presidents most closely associated with
the conflict in Vietnam, with America's war-- John
F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon-- escalated
and perpetuated a war that they privately doubted was either
winnable or necessary. They sent 58,000 Americans to
die for a cause they did not fully believe in. These numbers, ladies
and gentleman, matter. In addition to those 58,000,
more than 300,000 Americans were wounded in Vietnam with
153,000 cases serious enough to require hospitalization. 75,000 American veterans
were left severely disabled. And while Americans who served
in Vietnam paid a grave price, a conservative estimate
of Vietnamese deaths found them to be proportionally
100 times greater than those suffered by the United States. The most sophisticated
analysis that we have of wartime
mortality in Vietnam-- this one was conducted in 2008
by the Harvard Medical School and by the University
of Washington, a team from both
institutions-- suggested that a reasonable
estimates might be 3.8 million violent war
deaths, combatant and civilian, which is a finding
that I think is consistent with the
Vietnamese government finding from 1995 which estimated
that more than 3 million Vietnamese died, 2
million of them civilians. The numbers matter. I'm not suggesting here,
ladies and gentleman, that geopolitical
considerations were entirely absent from
American decision making. Especially in the early years,
fears of falling dominoes-- should Indochina fall,
it would cause the others to begin to fall-- fears
of falling dominoes shaped US policy, no
question, especially after the victory of
Mao Zedong's communists in the Chinese Civil War in 1949
and the start of the Korean War in 1950. Nor would I deny that
a sense of idealism spurred American leaders,
a belief that the United States had a
commitment to defend the non-communist Vietnamese
against outside aggression, a belief that ultimately the
intervention would be what's best for the Vietnamese, would
serve the Vietnamese people. I don't deny that those
idealistic sentiments existed, but what I would
say is that I think the evidence shows clearly
that these concerns did not drive American policy,
especially in the period of heavy US involvement. If we create a
causal hierarchy-- and I believe we historians
of decision making have an obligation to
do so-- these motives, motivations would not be at
the top of that hierarchy. I submit to you, rather,
that for all the presidents who dealt with Vietnam
in a serious way, from-- this is six
presidents; it's from Truman to Ford-- all of them, Vietnam
mattered, in large part, because of the
damage it could do to their domestic
political position. That was true of the
French leaders before them. I think it's true also of
American leaders later. But it won't do to stop there. And this brings me to my
third and final subject. It won't do to stop there. We can't simply place
all of the responsibility for America's war in
Vietnam on the presidents and their advisers because
the circle of responsibility was wide. The escalation of US
involvement from the mid-1950s and for the next decade
occurred within which what I would refer to as
a permissive context, as I suggested earlier, a
permissive context. The near unanimous
passage in August of 1964 of the Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution, which gave Johnson, as I think you all know, wide
latitude to wage the war as he saw fit, the near unanimous
passage of that resolution should not obscure the fact
that the most respected, most senior democratic
legislators on Capitol Hill privately opposed a
large-scale increase in the American commitment--
William Fulbright, Mike Mansfield, Richard Russell,
Hubert Humphrey, who would go on become vice
president under LBJ. Nor were these Democratic
giants in the Senate alone. Exact numbers are
hard to come by, but certainly in the
Senate, a clear majority of Democrats and
moderate Republicans were either downright
opposed to Americanization or deeply ambivalent
while, at the same time, vocal proponents of taking
the war to the north, to turn North Vietnam,
in other words, of escalating the struggle
were very, very few in number. Publicly, however--
here's the key-- publicly, the vast majority of lawmakers
voiced staunch support for standing firm in the war,
not merely in August of 1964 but in the critical
months that followed. In the press as well,
leading newspapers were disinclined to
ask tough questions in the months of
decision, to probe deeply into administration
claims regarding the situation on the
ground in South Vietnam, and the need to take new
military measures even though-- and we know this,
again, from archives privately these editors
were asking themselves very tough questions, raising
skepticism of the type that they did not really want
to push the administration on. And among the broader
public, finally, apathy was the order of the day. Most Americans, like most
Frenchmen and Frenchwomen before them, most Americans
were too preoccupied with their daily lives
to give much thought to a small Asian country
thousands of miles away. And here is where I see a
connection between Vietnam and our own time. Here is where I see the
Vietnam analogy having, at least for me, special
resonance with respect to Iraq, with respect to Afghanistan. And I want to say just a
few words about the former, about the war in Iraq. At the end of an earlier book
that the provost mentioned, Choosing War, which was
focused on Kennedy and Johnson and the escalation, I
argued that though Vietnam was a war of choice,
an unnecessary war, and was seen as such by
many people at the time, something very much like
it could happen again. The continued primacy
of the executive branch in foreign affairs together
with the eternal temptation of politicians to emphasize
short-term personal advantage over long-term
national interests ensures that the
potential exists. This could happen again. A leader would assuredly
come along, I wrote, who, like Lyndon
Johnson, would take the path of least
immediate resistance and in the process produce
disastrous policy provided that there was a permissive
context that would allow it. Lyndon Johnson's war was
also America's war, I said. The circle of responsibility,
again, was wide. That was published in 1999. Four years after that,
the administration of George W. Bush invaded Iraq. And it did so, I would
suggest this afternoon, within the same kind
of permissive context. In the press, reporters
for leading newspapers in the key months accepted with
little question administration claims regarding Saddam
Hussein's intentions and capabilities. By and large, they failed to
probe beneath the surface, to ask tough questions,
to give serious attention to the views of skeptics. Same thing on Capitol Hill,
most lawmakers of both parties were content to avoid
asking tough questions. Or, if they did ask
those questions, to also make very
clear that they too wanted to be tough on Saddam. Many more legislators voted
against the authorization to use force-- this was
in October of 2002-- than had voted against the
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. So there is a difference there. But, again, the White House
got a very comfortable margin of victory in that vote. Some who voted yes,
especially Democrats, would later claim that they
were not authorizing war, but merely giving
Bush the ability to use coercive diplomacy. And they would
say that they were duped by the administration. A claim, I would
say, that not untrue, perhaps, but doesn't
reflect particularly well on those lawmakers. None of them acknowledged that
crass, political calculation had anything to do with
their votes at that time. And this permissive
context in 2002, 2003 extended also to
the general public. Most Americans in
these months were content to go along with
the alarmist White House claims concerning the threat
posed by Saddam's regime. Few legislators reported
widespread demands from their constituents
for hearings or pressure from their constituents
for more evidence that preventive war was
actually needed against Saddam. University campuses,
by and large, were pretty sleepy places
prior to the invasion. And the costs of this war
in Iraq are monumental. The latest reckoning
that I've seen comes to a staggering
$2.2 trillion dollars. This is a study out
of Brown University. The study also found that at
least 134,000 Iraqi civilians died and that the
death toll could be up to four times higher. An estimated 36,000
US military personnel were also killed or
injured during the war. But here's my final question
to you before I wrap up. Is this permissive
context immutable? And I would say to you
that the answer is no. And the Vietnam experience
again proves it. Consider again, if we could
get the photograph back up, consider again the photograph. This photograph does not suggest
to me a permissive context. We can debate the impact of
the anti-war movement on policy during the Vietnam War. This is something that scholars
get very agitated about. Did the anti-war movement
really affect policy? Some scholars say yes. Some say not so much. But I think the
kind of agitation that we see reflected
in this photograph had an effect over time. There's no question in my mind. It put constraints on what
Lyndon Johnson could do in, roughly speaking, the last
year of his administration. And, by the way, I think Lyndon
Johnson was a hawk on Vietnam right down to the end, which is
one reason I think he preferred to see a Richard Nixon
victory in that election than his own vice
president, Hubert Humphrey. That's something we can discuss. So it put limits on what Lyndon
Johnson could do in 1968. It put limits on what
options Richard Nixon had beginning in January of 1969. I think that's clear
from the record. It's also clear from
this marvelous resource that I mentioned, the Nixon
tapes, the White House tapes. By the way, the other thing that
comes through in those tapes is that Richard Nixon saw
all of his Vietnam options through the lens of
the 1972 election. So this part of America's
Vietnam chapter gives me hope. Even if we do not see today
at Cornell or any other campus the kind of
agitation that we saw in the photograph, the kinds
of intense political engagement that was on display April
10, 1970, Barton Hall. The students and the faculty
who demonstrated against the war at Cornell and elsewhere
didn't get everything right. They tended quite often to
romanticize the Viet Cong. They tended quite often
to romanticize the Hanoi government. They often, I think,
for me at least, exaggerated the supposedly
economic imperatives that they thought
undergirded American policy. So they didn't get
everything right. But many of them-- many of you
in this room-- many of them at various levels of
American society grasped the essentials of the struggle,
drew lessons from that struggle even then that, I think,
have great utility today. First-- here are some
of those lessons-- that the political
utility of force is really quite limited, indeed,
that the exertion of force can be counterproductive. Second, that definitive
victory of the kind that leads to a
surrender ceremony on the deck of an American ship,
that kind of definitive victory in our day and age is rare. And third and connected, that
ambiguous results are going to be the norm, and that
the costs of those results is going to be much greater
in all likelihood than even the most conscientious war
planner is likely to estimate. And fourth, that
for these reasons, the wise statesman is going to
use force only as a last resort and only when truly
vital national interests are at stake. I think that to consider the
long and bloody chronicle of modern history, to consider
big wars and small wars alike, is to acknowledge,
is to see just how important these lessons are. As I conclude, travel
with me once more, this time to 1965,
to the time when large-scale
escalation in Vietnam is just getting underway. Consider a Frenchman, long
since transplanted to the United States, who felt a gripping
sense of foreboding as that year, as
1965 progressed, and who figures
prominently in my book. His name is Bernard Fall. Bernard Fall, over
the previous decade, had become America's
most respected expert on the first Indochina
War, as it was now starting to be called. He was the author of numerous
books and articles noted for their dispassionate analysis
and their informed judgment. And, by the way, Bernard Fall
had his own Cornell connection. He wrote his PhD dissertation
right here in Ithaca. It was a Syracuse dissertation. We'll forgive him for that. But he thought Ithaca would
be a really nice place to write this dissertation, so
he wrote it right here in town. Fall, in 1965,
fully acknowledged that the United States was
immensely more powerful than the French,
especially from the air. But even as he made
that comparison, he doubted that he would make a
decisive difference in the end. The unleashing of massive
American firepower might make the war militarily
unlosable, as he put it. It might make it militarily
unlosable in the short term, but at immense cost, the
destruction of Vietnam. He quoted Tacitus. They have made a desert
and called it peace. Even then, Fall
said, Ho's communists would not be vanquished for in
this conflict military prowess meant only so much. The war had to be
won politically if it was to be won at all. This was the pivotal point
about the French analogy, while Fall maintained
this was the lesson that must be learned. Yet few, Fall thought, even
in 1965, few in Washington seemed prepared to
learn that lesson, seem prepared to
consider closely what the French experience
in Indochina might teach, what it might have
to teach Americans. For as he once put it,
as Fall once put it, Americans were dreaming
different dreams than the French, but walking
in the same footsteps. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] Thank you. Thank you. I would be delighted
to take-- we have a few minutes for questions. And you may commence
firing from all sides. Yes, sir? SPEAKER 1: You did not mention
the powerful military-- chronic military industrial complex that
Eisenhower warned us against, their PACs, their
influence, their money. How did that influence our
decisions and the senators' and congressmen's
decisions on going ahead? Are you aware that
it probably matters in almost every conflict? FREDRICK LOGEVALL:
Yes, the question was about the military
industrial complex, which I did not mention. And I think Eisenhower's
farewell address in early 1961 is an extraordinary farewell
address, arguably the greatest we've had because of his
warning against that complex. He himself helped to create
it, which is the part he didn't mention in the speech. But it's a warning that,
I think, is well taken. Interestingly enough, in the
case of the Vietnam conflict, I think it matters less
than one might expect. And what I mean by that is
that I don't see good evidence that key players in that complex
in the months of the decision, or in the years of decision. If we begin in the mid-'50s and
go to the mid-'60s, I don't see that leading members of that
complex-- and, by the way, Eisenhower originally called
it military industrial congressional complex. But he was a very
smart politician, and he thought maybe
I'll leave Congress out of the description. But I don't think the key
members of that complex helped to drive the decision. In fact, this is what's
interesting about this. I already suggested that
congressional leaders had real doubts about
whether Vietnam was the place to do this. I think that
captains of industry, that leading members
in corporate America and in finance also had doubts. Many of them then benefited
in the end from the war, but I don't see them
as being particularly crucial in the lead
up to that conflict. Let's go over here. Yes? SPEAKER 2: Thank you for the
brilliant lecture and kind of a vindication
for all of us who protested in the '60s and '70s. [APPLAUSE] I appreciate it immensely. And I went to Vietnam
to teach English in '97 in Ho Chi Minh City, the
College of Social Sciences and Humanities. I may go back in
the next year or so. But I wonder about the
facts that I found there. Ho Chi Minh was reported to
have met with-- at the age of 19 as a leader of an immigrant
or expatriate Vietnamese group in Paris, he went to see Woodrow
Wilson asking for support for the Vietnamese
revolution and presenting a constitution they had
written and modeled on our own. So these facts-- or, if this
is, indeed, historic fact, as I believe it is-- indicate
that even a great university professor like Woodrow
Wilson voted five times-- FREDRICK LOGEVALL: I thought
you were talking about me there for a second. SPEAKER 2: Well,
I'm hoping you'll avoid the mistakes of
Woodrow Wilson when you become president of Cornell. FREDRICK LOGEVALL: Good one. SPEAKER 2: Thank you. Thank you. I'm looking forward to it. But in any case,
just to end there, had he made a right decision
to support the Vietnamese at that point, the whole
nature of the next 50 years would have been
substantially different. FREDRICK LOGEVALL: Well, your
mention of Woodrow Wilson is important. And I, in fact, open the preface
to the book with a Ho Chi Minh renting a morning coat,
if you can imagine. This is at Versailles in 1919. He's a little older than
19, but he's a young man. He rents formal wear
because he wants to get an audience with,
yes, Woodrow Wilson. He's read the 14 points. He has heard Wilson speak about
national self-determination. And he says he's going
to be my ally in this. And, of course, doesn't
get to see Woodrow Wilson. Doesn't get to see any of the
other Allied leaders, either. Returns his rented morning coat. And I think you're right to see
this as an extraordinary moment and as a missed opportunity. And Ho-- and this
is one of the things that's remarkable about him. And I detail this in the book. For a long time, Ho
believed that the Americans will be my ally. The United States was founded
in an anti-colonial reaction to Great Britain. This is precisely
what I'm about. And we can say that
Ho Chi Minh was naive, that it took him far too long
to realize that, in fact, no, the Americans are
not going to be my ally. They're going to
be my adversary. But I think I can show
that as late as '47, '48, he thought that the
Americans would come around, that they would oppose
what the French were doing, and they would be his
allies, which, by the way, doesn't mean that Ho
Chi Minh was going to be some kind of a close
friend of the United States necessarily. I think he was a dedicated
communist from the 1920s on. And so I don't want
to fall into the-- I don't want to overly romanticize
his close connections potentially to
the United States. But he believed it. And the Wilson-- that
moment at Versailles in 1919 is an extraordinary. Yes? SPEAKER 2: Thank you. SPEAKER 3: I was a student
of George Kahin's, I believe, when he first
came in the early '50s. Could you please trace his
thinking from that time forward? FREDRICK LOGEVALL: I'm not sure
that I could do justice to it. What I can tell you is that I
think, for me, as somebody who met him, as I said, for a
grand total of two minutes but read his work and have met
many others besides yourself who either studied under
him or worked with him here at Cornell, he is a
hugely important figure in the study of Southeast Asia. Not only of Vietnam,
but in some ways, he's probably known more as
a specialist on Indonesia. and helped make this
Southeast Asia program, as I said, the
envy of the world. I think there was,
to some degree, an evolution in his views. I don't think I
know it well enough. I can see some differences
between his early writings on the war and his later. But I think what's remarkable
more is the consistency. So that what I see on the
subject of Vietnam, which is where I know him
best-- I don't know him as well in terms of
his work on Indonesia-- I think what George Kahin
was writing in the late '60s, very much at the height
of the American war, is very consistent with what
he said in his great book Intervention, which is the one
that I referred to earlier. SPEAKER 3: How about
the early '50s? FREDRICK LOGEVALL: Well, you may
have stumped me there, I think. Are you suggesting that there
is an important evolution here? SPEAKER 3: Yes, I am
because my knowledge, which is only 60 years
old, or 60 plus, tells me that perhaps he was not
so anti at the very beginning. FREDRICK LOGEVALL: Well,
I think that's very fair. And, by the way, he wouldn't
be alone in that regard. I think that hopefully
one of the things we can do as human beings, even
scholars, even historians, is to take cognisance
of new information, to learn from what
we're studying, and to adjust our
views accordingly. I might say that I've changed
my own views a little bit. I think I've come to
realize that we need, for example, to take
non-communist Vietnamese and their aspirations,
their dedication to Vietnamese independence,
we need to take it seriously. They were the losers
in this particular war, but I think it's
nevertheless important for us to acknowledge that they had
their own commitment to this. They were not
successful in the end. So I've changed my views. I wanted to take, Provost Fuchs,
one more question from the top, if we can. KENT FUCHS: Anyone up-- FREDRICK LOGEVALL: Oh,
I thought you were-- no. SPEAKER 4: [INAUDIBLE] FREDRICK LOGEVALL:
Yes, but I think you're supposed to go to a mic. Maybe I can repeat the question. SPEAKER 4: [INAUDIBLE] FREDRICK LOGEVALL: Yes. OK, I'll repeat it. Yes SPEAKER 4: I'm a Vietnam--
Vietnam-era veteran. You know, we've heard
of many atrocities that the US military
did to the Vietnamese. What atrocities did
they do to our troops? Can you comment on that? FREDRICK LOGEVALL: Well, I
think there were certainly terrible things perpetrated on
both sides of this conflict. The question was about
Vietnamese atrocities against US troops, I
think, in particular. And, look, the Viet Minh against
the French, the Viet Cong against the Americans, the
MVA against the Americans were capable of
great ruthlessness. There is no question
about it, the treatment in various prisoner of
war camps and so forth. I think there's a lot
of that on both sides. What I've focused on here
in this particular lecture is the American experience
in Vietnam and more, as you'll recall,
on the decision, the political decision making
than on the war itself. But there's no question that
this went on on both sides. I think we're out of time. I'm going to turn this
back to the provost. KENT FUCHS: Yes. Thank you, Fred. [APPLAUSE] As we leave the building, I
want to remind you Embers of War are out in the lobby. Professor Logevall will
be out there as well. I also wanted to
acknowledge that we had a large number of people
watching this streaming over the internet. And I wanted to thank them
as well as all of you here that are back for reunion. Have a wonderful weekend. And thanks again, Fred. [APPLAUSE]
Bookmarking for morning coffee. Choosing War was a big break from my belief that Vietnam was mostly momentum & path dependence.