Office Hours with Victor Davis Hanson: Korean War / Matthew Ridgway

and welcome back to Malibu California and pepperdine's Graduate School of Public Policy I'm Pete Peterson the brawn family dean of this graduate program and it's a delight to have you back for the fourth and final session of office hours with Victor Davis Hansen if you've enjoyed this seminar series uh or would like to support future public leaders that we preparing here at the school please consider supporting our work by clicking on the link below so we're in finals week here at pepperine and The Graduate policy school and it's uh just great to bring back our uh Giles Ali distinguished visiting Professor Dr Victor Davis Hansen Dr Hansen great to be back with you thank you uh you've been teaching a class on roots of American leadership uh you have explored American leadership through uh the experience es and biographies of a number of military leaders you've mentioned this before but I think it's important especially for those who may not have joined us in the past why is it important that future public leaders who may not be going into the military you know our students are going into a variety of different careers from the policy related media into uh federal government and federal agencies State local government why is it important for future public leaders to learn from these military leaders well usually military leaders and we're studying them always in a context of War they're faced with bad and worse decisions there are no good decisions because people are going to die either way and the question they usually have is how do we obtain strategic political goals at the least amount of blood and treasure and so you can learn uh how realistic they are they're not utopian they're not idealistic in other words they don't demand that they only get their way what they is that they look at the Contemporary environment and they give a realistic appraisal what's possible and then they do a cost benefit analysis of whether it'll work or not and they have to factor in so many other issues moral the moral Edge uh the values and customs and agendas of its their own political bosses so to speak but out of all of those context and criteria I think you can say that uh by studying how they react a political leader can can learn more than just studying um similar careers of political leaders and so many political leaders that we know if you think about it whether it's Dwight Eisenhower or Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill we know them precisely about how they functioned or performed during war when there were no no good choices and you you would think that great leaders sometimes uh would do well in war but as we know in the haste of the United States um and Great Britain I mean Neville Chamberlain was considered a very good Statesman in peacetime and he he didn't perform well under duress and I think you could argue that woodro Wilson was an icon of the left but I don't think he performed well in World War I when he decided not to pursue the German army that uh surren did not surrender but asked for an armis inside France and Belgium and by not pursuing a total Victory I think he set the stage for World War II so uh how a political leader performs when there are no good Alternatives is very important and they can find an alternative if they're if they think about it and they're trained to to think about it so in this fourth and final session of uh this semester we're going to be in uh looking at a a a general that maybe most Americans aren't familiar with uh who fought and led in a war that maybe most Americans may not be fully familiar with uh we are going to be discussing General Matthew Ridgeway and his leadership in the Korean conflict the Korean War um maybe as a a place to start we should give a little bit of background for those who may not be fully familiar with what was happening in 1950 and what led America into the Korean conflict talk a little bit about that we remember that since 1911 or 12 Japan had occupied Korea so when the Japanese empire imploded in August and September of 1945 a lot of the area they control control came under the jurisdiction of the so-called allies and unfortunately that included the Soviet Union Soviet Union had not wanted to help us one iota in the Pacific War but unfortunately under the yta agreements and potam that we reiterated it we allowed them to come in and sort of clean up the spoils so to speak in manua and Korea so even though they said we're we can only handle the German Army on the Eastern Front we can't do a a transatlantic bombing campaign we cannot do uh major ship encounters we can't Supply anybody we can't fight in Italy we can't fight North Africa we can't fight the Japanese but we can destroy the German Army in the Eastern Front we said fine when it was clear the German Army was going to be destroyed then they pledged they would rep pivot and we thought that at the time we were going to have to invade Japan so unfortunately we agreed to that and after the dropping of the two atomic bombs we found that the Soviets didn't want to budge and there was two downsides one was they were funding and supporting Mal zedong's long decades long Revolution and because of their influence he would win that Civil War give us what today we have communist China the other was we made a deal that they would occupy the northern part of Japanese held Korea and we would occupy the southern part and we should and the dividing line would be at the 38th parallel at that time most of the Japanese investment had been in the north and they wanted that it was closer they had a a small border with North Korea and they had a border with China so in their way of thinking we're going to control the northern and the more when we got the more rural South but we did get soul and in that naive period period of 46 and 47 we thought there could be a workable Arrangement and of course Soviet propaganda immediately said the United States is relying on Japanese right-wing fascist enforcers because as soon as the war ended we had 12.3 million people in the military we just collapsed we went down to about a million and we we had the largest Navy in the world and larger than all the Navies combined and we started mothballing just whole fleets of Destroyers and cruisers and battleships and the idea was we have nuclear weapons now so we'll never fight a war again yeah let's let's just put a pin in that because I do think it's important to put ourselves back into that period following the conclusion of World War II with nuclear weapons that there was this general feeling that these Ground Wars and these extended conflicts were now going to be obvious ated by the bomb talk a little bit about how that changed the after World War II the idea was there had been two threats in the world mhm and one was fascism and we had destroyed it for good in Germany Japan and Italy the other was communism and while we hadn't destroyed it we had flipped it so the Soviet Union was on our side mhm then we even you know was Uncle Joe Stalin and we had for 4 years a monopoly on nuclear weapons and so the idea was that we were going to be a partner with Stalin and we had a leftwing Administration um the Roosevelt administration it's last year and then the Democratic Truman Administration Truman got wise after about a year but the idea was at first the United States would not need a conventional military a very expensive one we were spending almost 40% of GDP on the military but we would go back to one or 2% and then we would control the UN With Our Benevolent use of nuclear weapons but after the Spy ring and all of that happened in New Mexico and the Soviets exploded a bomb then we found out that soon Britain would and then France and eventually India China so it there were going to be a lot of nuclear powers and we could see that very early once the Soviets were headed that way but still there were people who said you won't have conventional Wars because obviously one party will escalate or even if it doesn't have a nuclear weapon it will have a patron that does and there were a few voices that said idiot don't you understand since you can never use them you'll have more conventional Wars than you've ever had and they're not going to be decisive because the moment you start to be decisive and threaten the existence of a power it might in desperation take everybody down with and one of these people who warned that was Matthew Ridgeway and and so when Korea broke out the idea was uh we have the bomb but so does the Soviet Union and China doesn't but we had so many more bombs of Soviet Union we thought well we can threaten them and we did threaten them uh Eisenhower at times and MacArthur had actually but those threats were not taken realistically and so we had a proxy war and the Soviets were backing the North Koreans and we were backing um South Korea and they used the Chinese as a proxy as well so we're now into 1950 the North Koreans cross over uh backed as you say by the Soviet Union later of course by China cross the 38th parallel into the South and describe those that first six months of Engagement before we introduced to M was that on June 25th in a surprise attack suddenly this North Korean army that had been trained in China and had been supplied by the Soviet Union and we should make a point here of noticing that during World War II we didn't really know fully what was going on on the Eastern Front we had heard rumors that Uh Russian tanks were better than German and much better than ours and we had heard that some of their fighter aircraft fixed Wing was as good or better than ours and we had heard at the end of the war that they had uh expropriated German jet technology more effectively than we had and you know they had kalishnikov 1947 AK-47 although they were not allowed to use very many or any in their Korean War but we had heard all of this and then when this Army came across trained by the Chinese that had been fighting for 20 years both the Japanese but also the nationalists and it was equipped with topf flight Russian t34 tanks 150 mm artillery and Mig 15 Jets plus and we had disarmed unfortunately Dean Atcheson our secretary of state when he gave a lecture about the American nuclear umbrella that's the new term at the time he inadvertently or advertently he pointed to Japan and Australia but he didn't point to Korea and Stalin got took that well maybe they're not going to fight and Ma came to him and said we've trained these the surrogates of the surrogates said we've trained them so they came in force about 150,000 and they pushed the they destroy the South Korean um poorly organized Sigman Rays Army just collapsed collapsed and we only had about 5 or 6,000 uh constabulary force and we went down all the way to the very southern tip at pan and we called it the pan perimeter and it shrunk to 50 50 miles and they captured most of the American command and it looked like it was hopeless most people in the United States said we shouldn't have been there in the first place Soviets have overrun China Chinese communist have overrun Korea there is no South Korea left and Harry Truman to his credit said uh that son of a blank blank lied to me Stalin and kind of said we have to if we don't take a stand there he will go into Europe MH the problem with that is that the Europeans did not want us to take a stand because they said if you get tied down we have 400 Soviet divisions and they've just eaten up all of Eastern Europe and they're going to come come in so we decided to and Douglas MacArthur had been Pro Consul in Japan and had done a wonderful job he had insisted on women's uh voting rights land redistribution he was enormously popular he he was Regal he was in his 70s he was looking just looking toward retirement he was a five-star general was 1950 he was just about ready you know to hand back Japan and this came and so he got ex excited and said we can still save pan but they didn't have any wherewithal so I mean they went to National Monuments and took Sherman Tanks off or if they found an a new persing tank they grabbed it and they got they brought lawyers out of um retirement the pilot on my father's b29 who had flown 40 missions in uh Japan was in his 50s and he was a merchandiser you know a guy who collected uh not junk but you know habid aseries and they called him out of retirement and he called my dad and said do you want to go back and he said no I've got three kids and I'm farming I'm teaching and he said well I'm going to go back and pilot b29 and of course they couldn't really use them because they had nothing they had a nothing the f80 first panther jet and other ones bans they were not comparable to migs yeah and so we didn't have air superiority um we were threatened constantly with the intrusion of China so it looked hopeless we held the perimeter and then MacArthur went to the Joint Chiefs Omar Bradley and others and said let's have an amphibious Landing behind uh 38 and come in from the north and TR and they thought this guy is nuts we don't have enough people there's en's a terrible place that the tides get so low you can walk out to the ships almost they'll know we're coming and by sheer force of character and reputation we landed over 100,000 troops in September and held long enough and then we started to reinforce Busan and between the hammer and the Anvil we trapped and mostly destroyed the North Korean army retook Soul chased them back to the original counter MacArthur was the man of the year yeah and then what do you do when he said most famously there's no substitute for victory so he convinced everybody that we would take without a lot of reinforcements about 140,000 troops and head northward but the problem was as you look at the map the Korean peninsula the northern part starts to get wider right and more mountainous and the further you go from Soul the closer you get to the yalu river and the Chinese border and the Soviet border and it's November and it's not Vietnam it's cold yeah and we didn't have winter clothing so when we got up by November we had almost won the war we said everybody will be home by Thanksgiving and again just to put a pin on this yeah victory at this point was completely taking the North Koreans and the Communists and forcing them all the way out so taking the entire peninsul I think you could argue that the North Korean army by November early November was no longer combat effective it had been destroyed by the Americans and the South Koreans and we had the bomb and we had told Stalin we would use it and we would we said MacArthur said he would if the Chinese come in we would bomb Manchuria their staging areas right and people started to worry because the Soviets you know in the bomb and there was 4 million Chinese in uniform and MacArthur said they'll never come in because we do have air superi we didn't have air superiority we had more planes by then but we were not able to achieve to destroy this Soviet Pilots were flying m 15 and so what happened unfortunately is sometime in late October earlier November I say sometimes because they started infiltrating and by Thanksgiving we had a half a million Chinese regulars and 150,000 hard trained uh North Koreans and they just swept through right and they were equipped for winter and before we knew it we had the longest retreat in military history in the United States we retreated over 400 miles so the Marines on the Eastern side went to chosan Reservoir and were and were lifted out and then we lost a couple of Divisions and uh about 15,000 men were killed in the retreat and suddenly this thing that was supposed to be over with and MacArthur was a genius right home by Christmas he said they never will invade right they did and and then in late December the commander of the Korean Forces of World War II hero Walton Walker got killed in a jeep accident MacArthur's in his 70s he's the supreme commander of the AA at Pacific Theater but he's not capable he'd only stayed One Night in Korea yeah he was based in Japan almost the entire yeah he stayed and he wasn't not physically able to go there and Walker was dead and people wanted to get out and they looked around and who wants who wants this job nobody wanted it and here's Matthew Ridgeway and he's 55 years old he's been married three times he's had a heart attack in World War II he missed out on World War I because he was a Spanish speaker and they put him down at the Border in World War II they put him in charge of this new 82nd Airborne he' never parachuted out of the plane so he he had learned a parachute in his 50s and then lo and behold he was at D-Day he was at the Battle of Bulge and he had a he was during the Sicily Invasion earlier and he had a Wonderful World War II and everybody thought Matt Ridgeway is solid he's always if you got a bad job he'll do it if you're going to do something stupid like parachute into Rome behind German lines he will be the only guy who say this is stupid don't do it he's Fearless but uh he's stubborn he's blunt and people didn't want to deal with him yeah but for this job they called him and so he he had no warning never been to Asia he didn't know a word of Korea he didn't know anything about it right he was you know he was he had been uh Supreme NATO he would be supreme but he was high up in the NATO command he was uh assistance he would go to be assistant he was St slated to be assistant Secretary of the army he had a pretty good civilian post-war career yeah a life of ease in his 50s probably would have retired in 5 years and they put him right out in the front line let's get into um his leadership style because I again I think what's important about why you chose Ridgeway and I'm going to be drawing several quotations here out of your book The Savior which is one of the books that you used in the class uh this semester is to understand not only the importance of what they did militarily but also the leadership skills things that could be applied for leaders of any sector um and so there's a a chapter which which speaks to the amazing history of Ridgeway in Korea it's the title of the chapter is 100 days in Korea so so much of what happened happened in a very small amount of time 3 months and at the same time some of the skills that he displayed are things that we've touched on on other sessions as well so I wanted to draw here actually from the the epilogue in which you describe some of the things that are held in common by the Savior generals and then uh get your get your Reflections here quote the Savior generals display commonalities of character and disposition that encourage contrarianism of All Sorts professional political and social when Ridgeway arrived in Korea he quickly discovered against the consensus that an invincible Chinese enemy had crushed outnumbered and outgunned Americans led by the brilliant Douglas MacArthur that the American Army was not so much beaten militarily by Chinese and Korean forces as it was poorly equipped for winter weather panicked terribly LED in the field and without confidence in the nature of its Mission so again in drawing out the the the leadership skill element of this that force of will and personality that we touched on both with certainly with theistically but particularly with Patton and Sherman that ability to communicate to those that they are leading that there is the opportunity not only the opportunity but even the promise of Victory talk a little bit about how Ridgeway did that in this context in Korea yeah well he had shown in Europe during the Battle of the Bulge when most people were panicked he did not panic he did not panic at Sicily when the entire division was the air drops were 40% gone casualties so why didn't he Panic is your question and the answer is that he had enormous confidence in his training his intelligence and as a contrarian he he had a suspicion of human nature so that most people come to consensus Ridgeway is saying most people come to consensus because they want to be liked or they want to be uh share uniform opinions but they're usually not usually wrong so the what was the consensus the consensus was we shouldn't have been there in the first place we've had a terrible blow Truman is soft on communism MacArthur if you're on the right S Sherman uh Truman had sold out to Communism if if you were on the left mccarthur was a crazy guy who would get us an a war the country was divided McCarthyism was starting over this issue right MacArthur had met Truman in the Pacific and had assured him that Chinese wouldn't invade he had told everybody they would never invade so this icon was completely discredited old bitter angry and telling reporters that Truman was incompetent if not naive if not sympathetic to the enemy and it was just it was a terrible time so Ridgeway comes in and they said everybody comes to him the captains the lieutenant Colonel May everybody and says we've never fought anybody like this they fight at night they have Bugles they make sounds they play music and when they capture you they brainwash this was the murrian candidate period right and they indoctrinate you and they and they they did yeah and when we capture the prisoners sometimes they'll allow people to be captured so when we bring them back to South Korea they Fint Revolution Within and Insurrection they deliberately they do things that we've never seen before and Ridgeway after about a week he surveyed the entire situ he didn't say much and he said you're all in a collective hysteria there are certain fundamentals that never changed in history we got in trouble because we went too far too fast with too few troops from our supply lines at the wrong time of the year they are doing the same thing we did they're getting further and further from China it's getting colder it's not November December it's January February they are as ill equipped as we were and we are going to learn from our mistakes and they won't so we're all going to get as much winter gear as we can you're all going to get warm food you're all going to get weekly mail deliveries all the people who have been in combat got to get out you're worn out you're demoralized and I'm going to rotate battle commanders every two or 3 weeks and most importantly people that have command responsibilities are not going to be in the rear they're going to be sleeping out on the ground with the troops at the front and I'm going to set an example so he wore a Grenade on one side and he didn't wear two as everybody said but he had a medical kid on the they called him old iron tits and he wore a dick jacket and he slept on the ground he was almost killed a couple of times he's a big guy and amazingly when he would see soldiers they' start griping and he'd say don't gripe I I'm more critical of us than you are and this is what I'm going to do blang blang he made a little booklet and said these guys don't even know why they're here here is why you're here in Korea you're here to to stop communism in Asia and save Japan and save the American effort in World War II you're here to save Europe from Soviet communism you're here to make sure the United States way of life is not endangered and he had it all written out and he and everybody knew it and so it was very radical it was in a month suddenly everybody got excited and then he started to say things like we have have an f86 it's now coming in it is a it is just as good as a mig5 but more importantly our Pilots are better they will restore air not superiority Air Supremacy right and when they do that b29 with Napalm 20,000 tons will be able to fly during the daytime and we are going to wipe out their supply lines as these half million people are down here fighting us and we are going to just he said hang on everybody we're going to lose Soul again just like we took it back I mean it was it changed hands four times four times right so it was South Korean they took it at during the psan campaign we lost it MacArthur took it back and now theyve crossed a 38th parallel again chased us all the way 400 miles and Ridgeway said but this time we're going to have have a series of lines dug in verun like lines with enormous uh heavy in heavy artillery and air support so what we want them to do is come and then we're going to shellac them yeah and wipe out the first three or four waves and then we're going to retreat yeah and then we're going to wipe them out and then we're going to retreat and then they're going to go into soul and disperse and get trapped in there and then we're going to come around the the horns yeah and we're going to cut off all our supplies and then they're going to retreat and we're going to do the same thing in Reverse we're going to be in the offensive but we're not going to go uh in a craze fashion home and go back North yeah and we're going to destroy uh them as an effective comort force and with artillery and armor and air superiority and Superior soldiers in command he did that by March took back Soul yeah and by April he was back may he was back at the 38th parallel so I want to get to this point as well because first and this is a theme that we discussed in some of the other sessions that ability of foresight that all the generals that we've profiled have displayed but it's foresight based on facts on the ground and your outline there Ridgeway understanding hey the reason that we got overextended and had to have this massive Retreat out of the North was we got overextended in our supply lines in unfriendly territory in a bad time of year if this frankly could have been predicted right but now we're seeing the same thing on the side of the the Chinese they've now come back they've now left their base of op operations and they're we see the same opportunity to do to them essentially what's happened to us and we did but at the same time it could have been given the success that Ridgeway begins to experience that maybe if this had been MacArthur it is okay now we're going to go way back all the way up to the north so I just I just wanted to draw out here another trait that you see in savior generals and then again look at the experience of Ridgeway and what I can only describe as Prudence if not wisdom quote most generals assume that every Victory is naturally to be followed by an even greater one but savior generals are philosophers of sorts who worry about the idea of ying and yang Nemesis and Karma and so do not think that a marathon Dara Gettysburg enchan or crushing of Saddam Hussein is necessarily the Final Chapter they instead realize that previously an accustomed Victory often leads to arrogance and in turn complacency or even a sort of paralysis ending in catastrophe overc confidence blinds The Winning Side to the need for constant reassessment and Readjustment to meet Ever Changing conditions on the battlefield so Arthur's still there in January and February and March and he's not doing I mean he's not in command he only stayed One Night in K so he's got this subordinate three star general and he's now captured the imagination of America they can't believe that the war that was lost and then the war that was won and then the war that was lost is now the war that's won and so MacArthur is telling all of the reporters that basically he did this and he's prepared to go north again but this time he's going to play for keeps they're going to drop maybe depleted uranium from fishable materials along the border he's willing to do anything and ridgeway's in an impossible spot because he's praising wway but privately he's making fun of the fact that when ridgeway's getting close to 38 he's not preparing to go north way and Truman is watching all of this and so with the Joint Chiefs and they're thinking MacArthur's too old he's too dangerous and he's this is where we got the uniform code of military Justice came out of this that's article 88 says that no General active or retired can disparage the commander-in-chief and that's what MacArthur is doing and so they there because of Ridgeway they feel that they're in a unique position that they can remove this icon and then bring this guy in who is a hero save South Korea but not get in a war with China or Russia so when they ask him now we're on to um the yo River again and by the way the Joint Chiefs who and I don't think it's speaks very well of them they were against uh when we were losing they said you can't go north when we're winning they say you got to go north and now they're leaving it up to Ridgeway and everybody's pushing him and MacArthur says there's no substitute for victory you have to extinguish the enemy and he's looking at the situation and he's saying well the reason that we got in trouble was we're all the way over here in Asia the country's sick of War we're in a nuclear environment with a nuclear power we've got China with capability you know 600 700,000 700 million people we've got Stalin who's all the way to the German border and we're going to be fighting in their backyard with an American public that doesn't want to fight doesn't even know where we are and how am I going to get more troops and mobilize and then go northward and avoid the mistakes that MacArthur made before when he's my commanding officer so I mean Ridgeway was in this impossible situation where he's saying to MacArthur well let me study this situation but what he wants to say is even if I went there I would have to daily do exactly the opposite of what you did I'd have to get a lot more troops I'd have to not go in in harsh weather I'd have to be very careful and I couldn't boast about we're going to be home for at this date and you would take that as an in ins so he was an impossible situation so at about 20 mi north of the um so-called DMC 38th parallel he stopped and that's where the war stayed and McArthur then is removed uh from theater command in April I think and then Ridgeway then inherits that job and goes to Japan and then they bling in Van Fleet to take hisob job right but the war is now over its active phase so now the Soviets are sending as much equipment the Chinese are sending people and both sides are building up these huge lines along the 38th parall and for the and then from June of 1951 to 52 to 53 that is for 2 years they're each going to be crossing the 38th in offensives kind of like World War I trench Warfare and it's static we're going to lose another 15,000 and it's going to be at the time uh it's very controversial because people are saying we didn't win it's first time America has lost a war and other people said no this is the first war of the nuclear age and we saved um South Korea and the irony is that after Vietnam after Iraq after Afghanistan now people look back back at Korea and they say Kia hyand Samsung we saved it it's a democracy it's a great country the Korean War work yeah and it's still controversial so I wanted to conclude with this third leadership skill that you site in savior generals and again it's from the epilog and but we'll we'll refer back to um General Ridgeway and how he exemplified it but we've again seen it in Patton and Sherman and theistic Le's is their ability to tie their initial military role to some larger cultural factors yeah to understand that this isn't just about winning particular battles this is part of a much larger Mission so just to uh site here first to start with the uh connection to Ridgeway Ridgeway pushed the Communists out of South Korea in the process he taught the West that it could fight and win a distant limited conventional war in the age of nuclear Annihilation these generals saw their tasks as transcending the immediate War they were not just to beat the enemy on a particular day or even a uh given campaign but also to craft a means that would defeat the enemy to the point of winning the war and thereby to provide a blueprint for others to do so as well so this consideration of leadership that it's not just about this particular task it's about reframing the conventional wisdom as you've seen and described Ridgeway obviously did that took a defeated Army in in what was understood to be an impossible so-called situation and in the matter of months completely changed it but also did it with an eye towards setting a template that could be followed by others he did and it's very controversial because he's a very controversial figure to this day because people argue what the ultimate lesson he was trying to convey was ostensibly he was saying when we are in unenviable positions that we didn't want to be in but we had no choice and we're in the age of nuclear weapons and Global communism there are fundamentals that we can return to that will uh achieve our tactical and strategic theater objectives without endangering larger issues of politics economics but survival M okay that's what most people say but when he came out of that he never wanted to get in it again so his Nuance point was look we never went into South Korea we were stuck there because of World War II and we got surprised we do not want to go all over South Korea and that came up almost immediately in the ' 50s because the French were losing in Vietnam and Eisenhower said you know he had campaigned on I'm going to go to Korea and when he got elected everybody thought the beginning of 1953 Ike was going to go north yeah that's what he basically had implied he's going to use nuclear weapons and all of a sudden he looked at this thing and Ridgeway he's going to he didn't like Matthew Ridgeway yeah he didn't give him enough credit I don't think he me even mentioned his Ro Ro in his Memoirs or In Articles he wrote but he he adopted the Ridgeway he didn't go north and then the French came to him and said if you supplies at Den Vin Fu then and are willing to use nuclear weapons you can stop the Chinese fed uh Viet Kong and North Vietnamese and Eisenhower was willing to do it m and then he you know he thought why I better talk to Ridgeway who is now an iconic figure and he was going to be Chief of Staff of the army and NATO commander and he had done such wonders in Korea and nobody thought he would give the advice he did he said don't do it do not get involved in Vietnam if you get involved in Vietnam it's going to be just like the Korean war with Russia and China it's the wrong place it's way over there and the ter rain and the climate is different than Korea you cannot fight a conventional War it'll be Street to street it's much more populated it's not like North Korea right and he was right and so we didn't and then when for 10 years we kept out he's he still prays for giving us 10 years and then when LBJ came in and Kennedy was assassinated in ' 63 LBJ thought it would be kind of like a a Korean police action and at 64 he was ready to send the 500,000 which would become 500,000 and called Ridgeway in he said do not do it please don't do it he said I you don't everybody Praises me for saving career you don't know what I had to go through you're going to get attacked by the left you're going to and you can't win in a conventional sense by going all the way into China and destroying North communist North Vietnam and the right will not be happy unless it's a MacArthur no substitute for victory and you've got a public that'll say why are we in Vietnam and the Europeans will say you're draining our support it's just a mess don't do it and he did it and so here now Ridgeway is in his 70s yeah he's just watching this and he's he's saying you know and then when it's time to bug out that was the word came out of Korea the bugout right they call him back in which Ridgeway said he didn't want to have used yes you know that show the power no bug out right and now Johnson's not going to run for present but he's part of the wise men this group ofal lust and the Bundy brothers and George Kennan and he said everything is connected there's intersection ity and if you bug out and he's very influential uh with Richard Nixon's Vietnamization so if you argue that Richard Nixon by n until Watergate had pretty much got us out of Vietnam we had a viable Henry Kizer Nixon viable South Vietnam that was kind of the advice of Matthew Ridgeway and yet we kind of because of Watergate and we cut off Aid to the South Vietnamese and they didn't win a gorilla they came right down Highway W the conventional war and took back the country but his his advice to Johnson and later to Nixon was the basically the only thing worse than getting yourself in an unenviable position is losing it so it's not what I would have wanted to be in it wasn't in Korea and this time we sort of forced the issue because we didn't inherit Vietnam the French we didn't have to inherit from the French we had to in World War II but my God if we pull out and allow them to take it it's going to do a lot of damage to the United States he was absolutely right well and I guess that will be where we wrap up this session as someone like Ridgeway transitions from leader to advisor to leaders that you had one in Eisenhower who was in the end willing to listen to Ridgeway on Vietnam but that then advice fell on De ears when it came to LBJ and so the importance of listening to experts even in the you know the turbulence of what's going on around you politically uh really does take courage and Prudence it does he had what theistically is also called pronoia he could think of things that would likely happen way ahead of the game but based on current events right he was able to to take these things he did he was very effective because he was not traditionally ambitious so when we say we you say we don't know him right it's because he was not angling all the time to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs by any Fair Reckoning by 19 55 he should have been shair of The Joint Chiefs and by 19 60 uh 61 he should have been secretary defense and in the early 60s he should have been uh an ambassador to Vietnam or something and he never was because what what he was is when everything everybody was arguing with each other and they couldn't get along and nobody had an answer it was always well bring back cranky old Ridgeway and see what the guy has to say yeah so when Reagan got in trouble he said brittberg um Cemetery he he wanted to make a gesture to Germany that all the hostility of World War II was over now we were going to encourage Germany to arm but so he was going to go to a German cemetery and unfortunately they hadn't done the proper reconnaissance and there were W and SS troops buried there so here rean is going to be uh with the Germans and put a wreath on graves that were Killers I mean they weren't toen cop FSS and there was a German lofw officer who's had been horribly mangled burned and he was deliberately picked him and they needed and nobody wanted to go there like are you crazy the media say and then you know rean says well there's always Matt Ridgeway he's in his 80s yeah and they call him up and it's sort of reporting for Duty sir and he goes over there and he's in his late Ag and he he conducts himself with professionalism he saves the day he's not afraid when people you know say well how could you you said look these are our allies now these people need to be they don't need to be reminded of what their fathers did they need to be reminded of what we're going to do with them as partners and he conducted he really saved the day and he was sort of that way multiple occasions he had a very tragic life his third wife and he finally had a a child very uh athletic handsome brilliant kid and he was with some boy scouts and he was walking along a railroad with kayaks yeah scout leader and he was young and a train came by and hit the the kayak and it flipped around and hit his head killed him M and so he lost his only son to a freak accident when he was I think very young I think late te or early 20s and uh his marriages had not gone he finally married a woman he was married to for over 40 years yeah and he had he lived to be 98 years old yeah so Coen Powell famously at his funeral said no man has done more for America America knows owes more to this man than any other man what he was basically saying we would have lost the Korean War and he's a hero in South Korea today he's save the country yeah and without him um I I said we drove over here in your Kia without Matthew Ridgeway you would not have been driving in your Kia that's right that's right uh we would have Kim Jong-un threatening us not with 15 nuclear weapons but probably at two or 300 right CU he would have had the whole Peninsula right and there' not be two million people dead from the Korean War he probably would have killed four or five more or starved them to death and we would have had a terrible problem we have a terrible problem with him now but not anything like would have happened if it wasn't for Ridgeway well we'll conclude on that note yeah um Dr Hansen it has been so great to have you here on campus I'm sure as our viewers uh are probably thinking they're so jealous of your graduate students that you taught I don't know you never know oh I know they have been uh but it's great to have had you here on campus and look forward to continuing our I'm looking at the Pacific Ocean out the window behind you and we're in midwinter and it's about 68° so I'm in a very enviable position well it's wonderful to have you here thank you

Channel: Pepperdine School of Public Policy

Views: 157,668

Keywords: victor davis hanson, vdh, matthew ridgway, korean war, victor davis hanson most recent, pepperdine, victor hanson, south korea, war leadership, general, pepperdine school of public policy, interview, public policy, US history, general matthew ridgway

Id: rHbAJuMRmbM

Length: 52min 26sec (3146 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 19 2023