thank you everyone for coming we'll see a lot of first-time faces we're delighted to have you this is the department of history's seminar series and we invite scholars from other places to come and talk to us about other things every now and then and I happy to see everyone here you know everything has its story its origin story and the origin of our speakers arrival here they began when I was in third grade my mother was a volunteer at our local library it was a mobile home on the side of the road and she would always take me with in the afternoons and so I developed this real love of going to the library every week and I still do every week I go down to the Kingston Frontenac library and as I was thinking about this I'm magnetically drawn to three genres of new books they have autobiographies of entertainment figures biographies of coaches and what I like to call big fat books about war and I was there last year and stumbled upon a big fat book about war written by Frederick Loewe's of all it's called embers of war the fall of an empire and the making of America's Vietnam and I saw that book and I thought well it's big it's fat it's got pictures I mean it's about something I know nothing about which is the origins of the Vietnam War and the tail end of the French Empire in that part of the world and so I read it wanting to fill in a blank so to speak in terms of my own knowledge but other things jumped out one was the the deep the destruction without explicitly doing this of categories there are no North Vietnamese or South Vietnamese or Americans or French it's all much more much more complicated and and so what I thought was a fairly simple imperialistic conflict turned into a much more complicated internecine struggle but then to take that complexity and distill it into a simple accessible sophisticated narrative I thought was a real feat and I thought this is someone I would like to hear talk so when when the seminar speaker organizer series organizer was putting the roster I said I think that that guy down at corn had a lot of he ought to be invited up here to come and speak and we're delighted to have professor Frederick log of all here with us today he's not a stranger to Canada he got his BA at Simon Fraser 1986 PhD at Yale in 1993 and taught UC Santa Barbara and and began teaching at Cornell in 2004 where he's a professor of history and also vice provost for international affairs he's published widely in US history broadly speaking with books on terror the Cold War and Vietnam of course his book embers of worth it I found in the library a little more than a year ago it's a great book it won the Francis Parkman Prize it's one of the top honors that the American Historians give to books in the field also won the Pulitzer Prize which means it stands out nationally I'd also like to thank him not just for speaking today but also for giving a keynote address we have beginning tomorrow the mcgill-queen's conference which our grad students organized in partnership with McGill and Professor logo wall has also agreed to give a keynote speech at that conference tomorrow that'll be at 4:15 in the reception hall of the Agnes Museum and it would be called the uses of history political leaders in the past so thank you credit for doing double-duty on your visit today but today's talk is intriguing enough it's the mystery of the Vietnam War why thank you for that introduction absolutely wonderful to be with you and grateful to everybody involved in making this happen and who in particular it's been so good to to coordinate with you and to be back this is actually my second visit to Kingston in just about six or seven months my son is applying to college as we say in the States and so we wanted to see he wanted to see Queens so we came all four of us came this summer he loved it he applied if any of you have friends in the admissions office I gather it works a little differently in the in Canada in the u.s. that actually could make a maybe more of a difference but he's crossing fingers and toes let's say about about Queens so I'm going to talk about the Vietnam War it's exactly 50 years ago that it began in a serious way for the United States it became a large-scale war under Lyndon Johnson I'll talk quite a little quite a lot about Johnson today on March 8th so it'll be 50 years ago on what is that Sunday the first u.s. ground troops came ashore at Danang off the coast of South Vietnam March 8th 1965 just a few days before that Johnson had opted to commence sustained bombing of North Vietnam and of enemy-held areas in the south and by the end of 1965 so by December of 65 we had a hundred and eighty thousand plus us ground forces in South Vietnam drawn from small towns large cities all across the United States how do we explain the war in a way that's the fundamental question that I want to pose today how do we explain its origins in particular its long duration its outcome and in particular today I want to focus on America's intervention if I have some time at the end I'll also talk a little bit about what should be the takeaway in terms of current foreign policy today and I want to submit to you as I begin that these are questions is great excuse me great historical importance and I'm not sure I should also admit at the outset that I can give you the full answer to the questions in fact here's a confession in some respects I think that the war is harder for me to explain today 2015 then when I started work on the Vietnam struggle in graduate school 25 years ago I remember in a graduate seminar first year of graduate school saying with breezy confidence that however misguided the American intervention might seem in retrospect in the context of its own time it was inevitable it made perfect sense so I referred in that seminar on that day in New Haven to the Cold War consensus and which I thought them to be this old this very powerful thing I referred to the domino theory and the power of the of that notion that if South Vietnam fell if you allow the first domino to fall all the other little dominoes would then fall soon thereafter I talked about hubris this exaggerated self-confidence that I thought on the basis of my reading as an undergraduate American officials had by the way a very important book and it's still a very important book even though I think it gets this a little bit wrong as I'll say in a moment David Halberstam is the best in the brightest in graduate school in I'm sorry in as an undergraduate that's the SFU I read halberstam his book and wasn't blown away and I credit that book with giving me a desire as an undergraduate to want to pursue with the study of u.s. foreign policy as a graduate student and perhaps beyond and then making me especially interested in the Vietnam struggle and a theme in his book is that hubris is very much characterizing American decision-making so that's how I felt then but 25 years later I no longer feel the same way I see it differently I will no longer say this was the word I used and not graduate seminar and I felt very smart for using it I said it was over determined I thought the professor's gonna like the fact that I use that word with confidence that I no longer see the war's over determined and I think in in the course of two books in particular I've written about Vietnam in in several different places but two books in particular in my first book choosing war and the numbers of war I think on the basis of the research for those books I've come to a different conclusion in fact there's a mystery here at the heart of this story not only was the war not over determined I think in some respects it's actually difficult to explain even as Johnson opted for that large-scale escalation that I mentioned a while ago he privately felt growing pessimism about the prospects in the war in early 1965 growing doubts maybe more interestingly growing doubts that the outcome really mattered to American security so here's a quote from March 6th so this is 50 years ago tomorrow it's too bad when I'm not giving this talk tomorrow because then it would be precisely 50 years but he said this a man can fight if he can see daylight when the down the road somewhere but there ain't no daylight in Vietnam there's not a bit unquote some months before that Johnson said to McGeorge Bundy who was his knick-knack no security advisor I don't think it's worth fighting for that is Vietnam I don't think it's worth fighting for and I don't think we can get out think about that one for a minute in Congress similar fears and misgivings I'll talk a little bit more about that later key allied governments opposed to an expanded war not thinking that the Americans could win with the South Vietnamese and not thinking it was really crucial to Western security that they try to win in the CIA in the State Department in the middle levels of the American government also pessimism about the prospects even towards the top figures like Robert McNamara who are often considered to be you know uber Hawks on the war actually possessed these concerns these fears this lack of optimism about what was going to happen so I'm suggesting to you that the war is hard to explain that there is a mystery as to why this happened but of course explain it we must we have to try as historians to come to an explanation and I do think we can we can reach an explanation for why the United States opted to do what it did and that's what I want to talk about today I want to proceed in three parts also leaving time for making sure that we leave time for four just before discussion I want to talk a bit about the early period in particular the French Indochina war world war two and the French Indochina war because part of the answer for why America's war happened is that there was a war fought by the French before the Americans came and the Americans were very involved in that French war so I want to talk about that earlier period especially in terms of what it means for our understanding of the American war second I want to talk about the three presidents who are at the heart of the Vietnam experience for the United States John F Kennedy Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon I'll say I'll say more about Kennedy and Johnson than about Nixon but we can we can talk about Nixon if anybody's interested in the in the discussion finally third and finally I'll say a few words about what I call the permissive context that allowed the American war to happen and by permissive context I'm talking about Congress I'm talking about the press the media shall we say I'm talking about public opinion John and Jane Q citizen in the United States and that permissive context by the way and I'm not sure excuse me I'm getting over a cold I'm not sure how much time the time I'll have to do this but I think that that permissive context also exists also helps us explain later American interventions and the prime example for me is the invasion of Iraq in 2003 so I may make a passing reference to the permissive context with respect to Iraq now as you're already sensing perhaps and I want to just underscore there is a us-centric equality to my lecture today there is of course a very important international context here that I've tried to develop particularly in numbers of War the Vietnamese it goes without saying our key to what happens in their own country I won't say as much about the Vietnamese today because there's only so much we can do in 40 minutes I want to keep the focus here on why it is that 50 years ago this war happened but I do want to just note that up at the outside let's go back to the early period and in particular I think to the French war seems to me that in a rush to get to America's war scholars myself very much included have given short shrift to what went before it's as though in our work somehow the Vietnam War just started one day in the early 1960s and I want to suggest I want to suggest today that World War two to begin with is of monumental importance to everything that will happen later it occupies a central place therefore numbers of war and I want to just say here very briefly that World War two I think matters in three ways in particular first the Viet Minh which is the revolutionary organization led by Ho Chi Minh that took on and then fought the French the Viet Minh came out of World War two much stronger than it went in much better positioned to fight the French to try to defeat a French attempt to control Indochina and I should note here parenthetically you probably all know this history but I'll just mention that France was defeated in six short weeks by the Germans in 1940 the fall of France an astonishing and humiliating defeat for the French Japan took advantage of that outcome in Europe to swoop into Southeast Asia and to Indochina to take the facto control over Indochina they were clever in the sense that the Japanese in that they allowed the French to maintain day-to-day control in Indochina but everybody knew who had the real power and that was Japan so now with Japan defeated in 1945 France wants to return the viet minh are set to stop them so the first importance here of a viet of the world war 2 for today's purposes is that the viet minh came out stronger second the war drastically weakened world war ii drastically weakened the imperial powers in general and France perhaps in particular the war gave impetus in the colonial world to the forces of decolonization and France was not this is more clear in hindsight although there were people at the time who said this France France was not in a position to come back into Indochina with the kind of power and strength that it imagined that it would have and third third reason why World War two is really matters here is that it saw the rise of the United States to a position of predominance and world and especially East Asian affairs here's a a key moment in the research for me all those of you who are historians most of you are many of you have done archival research you will know that there are times in the archival work when you're in that basement and looking at all those dusty files that you come across a pattern or you see something in the materials that you think yes this matters this was such an instance for me what I saw in French archives in British archives American to some extent when they were reporting what was going on in other countries Canadian archives among others is I saw officials asking the following question time and time again to themselves to each other and it was this what will the Americans do what will the Americans do that question took on greater and greater urgency as World War two went on and as it became clear that when the fighting stopped the Americans were going to be very very powerful indeed we sometimes forget just how large the United States loomed at the end of the Pacific War in 1945 at the occasion of Japan's surrender late that summer which I call in my book the open moment when the future of Indochina was anyone's guess the United States had an extraordinary political power of a kind that hadn't we hadn't seen before and I would argue we haven't seen since so my point here is that World War two matters a great deal we also have to give attention to the French Indochina war that followed World War two so the fighting lasts in a serious way if you know the story between I think late 1946 to some extent 45 but but in terms of a war I would say late 46 1946 to the spring of 1954 when the French suffer a colossal defeat at a remote outpost called Jim Bien Phu that struggle which historians often now refer to as the first Indochina war or the first vietnam war and that's an important designation that's at the heart of my narrative in embers of war and it tells us a great deal about what's gonna happen later so to this question of why we see a large-scale American war in 1965 we have to look back at least important here's what we find and I'm cutting this short for the purpose of this presentation needless to say in terms of the American part of the story we find that to an extraordinary degree Americans followed in the path laid down by the French to study these Wars and succession and especially if you know something about the American War when you start is to is to experience a powerful sense of deja vu so let me give you some example the soldierly complaints about the difficulty of telling friend from foe and about the poor fighting spirit among our as opposed to their indigenous troops the gripes by commanders about the timorous and meddling politicians back home the solemn warnings against early disengagement as this would dishonor the soldiers whose lives had already been lost 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 ubiquitous in the United States in 1966 1967 could be heard also in France in Paris and Lyon for example in 1948 and 49 and always in both instances always there were the promises of imminent success of corners about to be turned so that when US commanding general william Westmoreland in late 1960 vii exalted some of you have heard this phrase he said but Westmoreland did in late 67 we have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view unquote he was repeating a prediction in remarkably similar language that French commander onry Navarre had made in May of 1953 decade and a half earlier civilian leaders meanwhile in Paris as much as in Washington boxed themselves in with their constant public affirmations of the conflicts importance and of the certainty of ultimate success remarkable how politicians how often they do this they box themselves in by the rhetoric something we can discuss to order a halt and to reverse course would be to call into question their own in their country's judgment to threaten their careers don't underestimate the importance of plain old careerism to undermine their reputations 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 much more about I would argue domestic political strategizing and again the Korea reason to which I referred earlier Daniel Ellsberg who some of you how many of you will be familiar with it Daniel Ellsberg would call it the stalemate machine this phenomenon that I'm describing and he was referring to the American war what I want to suggest to you today is that that machine was fully operational also under the French now for a long time American officials didn't pay that much attention to the possible links between the French experience in Indochina and America's what mattered these American officials said was that the French are a decadent people trying vainly to prop up a colonial empire their army a hidebound intellectually bankrupt enterprise whereas Americans were the good guys militarily invincible we've selflessly come to help the Vietnamese in their hour of need and then we're gonna go home we're the possessor of the world's mightiest Arsenal we are untainted by colonialism and where the United States is the champion of freedom the engine in the global drive to stamp out rapacious communist expansion and on the human side again America's is the American official argument on the human side the French experience with the cupidity and the fence sitting of their Vietnamese Alamos appointees in the French expression that fence setting would not repeat itself US officials will themselves to believe how about that phrase because this time the Vietnamese truly had something to fight for they may not have had it before but they have it now this was I want to suggest to you mostly self-delusion this argument for one thing the French units I think I show in the book French units usually fought with bravery and determination and skill for another Frances 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 it's true long before the French war ended American officials were more committed to the French war than were the French themselves I think that's unquestionably the case furthermore what US officials for a long time didn't fathom and then refused to acknowledge after they did was that colonialism is often in the eye of the beholder to many Vietnamese after 1954 which is they say after the French defeat the US was just another big white Western power as responsible as the French for the suffering of the first war and now they are to impose its will on them to tell them how to conduct affairs with guns at the right now there's one American and this I'm shifting now to the second part of my talk there's one American interestingly enough who I think grasped this dynamic that I'm describing to you about the nature of the French war about colonialism being in the eye of the beholder there's one American who grasped the grasp this wonder stood this dynamic better than any other US official at the time John F Kennedy and this is the second part of my presentation to you Vietnam is often called Johnson's war not without reason Johnson's decisions mattered greatly as I've already suggested and I'll come I'll talk a little bit more about Johnson I'm among those who believes that the counterfactual of what a surviving Kennedy would have done in Vietnam had he returned from Dallas alive I'm one of those who believes that that counterfactual well for one thing it's conducive to good analysis it's the kind of counterfactual and we can talk about this that I think is conducive to counterfactual analysis but moreover I think it matters at greatly in historical terms so Johnson is key no questions but I want to focus on Kennedy for just a few minutes I submit to you that he's an important figure here in the interest of full disclosure I will also say that I'm now working on Kennedy I'm writing something I've never done before which is a biography it turns out that JFK understood this dynamic as I've said about the challenges of subduing revolutionary nationalism in this part of the world about the limits of American military power again about that about colonialism being in the eye of the beholder he understood this dynamic more fully perhaps than anybody else Franklin Roosevelt if we go back I need to mention FDR at least once in this talk FDR I think also the grasp of this dynamic FDR understood that colonialism was was a dying system that the United States needed to be on the on the right side of history but of course FDR died in April of 1945 in the later period Kennedy had I think this sense already in 51 1951 when he visited Indochina with his brother Bobby and his sister Patricia JFK was 34 Bobby was 26 he saw through the French expressions of bravado and optimism asked penetrating questions about what a France or by extension any Western power could overcome Ho Chi Minh's cause this is 1951 this is a decade before he becomes president those doubts I want to suggest today never went away even after he became president of a decade later it's an interesting thing about Kennedy that I think he showed a capacity for nuanced and independent thought in world affairs he showed an appreciation for the for the vicissitudes of history for the limits of American power but of course if you know your Vietnam story you know what's coming there's a paradox and this is something that I'm gonna have to sort through in my book then I'm writing this same Kennedy who had these doubts who always resisted sending ground troops to Vietnam which I think matters this same Kennedy dramatically increased American involvement during his thousand days as president so that in 1962 the middle years of his abbreviated tenure vast quantities of the best American weapons aircraft armed personnel carriers arrived in South Vietnam along with thousands of additional military advisers some of whom were authorized to take part in combat this is all in 62 by the end of 1962 the number of American military advisers in Vietnam had grown to 11,000 by the time he laughter four for Texas on that fateful trip in November of 63 the number was 16,000 then under LBJ the number in 64 increased at 23,000 Congress also in 64 voted to authorize Lyndon Johnson President Johnson to use military force as he saw fit in Southeast Asia and then as I said at the outset of my talk in early 65 exactly fifty years ago Johnson sent large-scale ground forces or began to do so he started sustained air war Operation Rolling Thunder in again in early 1965 the US troop count would max out at approximately 550,000 this is early in the Nixon administration the figure the figure would then begin to decline a decline as Nixon initiated his viet so-called vietnamisation policy it had been Americanization in 65 now it was going to be vietnamisation under Nixon but at the same time Nixon continued a massive air war and indeed expanded the struggle because even as he embarked on this troop withdrawal he intent intensified the bombing of North Vietnam and enemy supply depots in neighboring Cambodia hoping to pound Hanoi into concessions he also expanded the ground war into both Cambodia and Laos and so the war continued for four years under Richard Nixon until in late January of 1973 US and North Vietnamese negotiators reached agreement on a deal in the so-called Paris Peace Accords and that effectively brought the American war to an end but here's the thing here is a troubling conclusion that I've reached in my research over the past couple of decades none of these three presidents really believed in the war during their administration's that is to say all of them Kennedy Johnson Nixon doubted the prospects even with major US ground forces doubted again that the outcome really mattered to American national security I think that the literature has underplayed to this point ladies and gentlemen and it also applies as I hinted at earlier two key advisors such as Robert McNamara McGeorge Bundy to some extent and others it certainly applies to the middle levels of the bureaucracy in particular in terms of the existing leadership literature there's still a prevailing view that officials of the time believed that victory in Vietnam was highly important believed in the domino theory in its successor what we might call a psychological domino theory which is the so-called credibility imperative it's not so much that individual countries will fall one by one as the domino theory held but that American credibility globally would be shattered if you lost this piece of territory after insisting time and again how important it was I think that's still a prevailing view in the literature that officials however wrong they might appear in hindsight believe that at the time and I want to suggest to you today that it's not really the case not really the case there's not it turns out much hubris there's not much of this exaggerated self-confidence at least that I can see in the archival record and in the other evidentiary base that we have at least with respect to prospects on the ground it is the case I arguably that there's a certain hubris on the part of American officials about their right the right of the United States to tell the Vietnamese what to do the right of the United States to intervene you could say that there that there there is hubristic thinking if that phrase on that issue but in terms of the prospects I don't see it in fact growing pessimism in 1963 Kennedy's last year in office Kennedy himself grew increasingly weary during the summer and fall of 63 Johnson for his part in 1964 began to question the long-term prospects in the struggle even with major American escalation he began to wonder about the conflicts ultimate importance to American security he said in the phone call and there's lots of quotes we could give but here's a phone call that he had with McGeorge Bundy in May of 64 and pardon my french what the hell is Vietnam worth to me what's it worth to this country and then I think it's in the same conversation he has that that quote I gave you before I don't think it's worth fighting for and I don't think we can get out like his predecessor however like his predecessor Johnson was careful to articulate such sentiments only privately and then only to a select few in public he and his top advisors stuck close to the received wisdom insisting that the outcome in Southeast Asia was critically important to American interest that they were committed they said to defending their South Saigon ally against what they called external communist aggression whatever problems might be hampering the war effort would be overcome in due course they said and whatever the price of victory the cost of defeat would be infinitely greater the sentiments sometimes the very rhetoric echoed that of their Paris counterparts a decade before and by using such ambiguous language in public u.s.a us officials found us leaders found again like their french french leaders before them that backing away could be extremely difficult as I said you back yourself into a corner and your maneuverability is reduced because you know that the Hawks to use the vietnam-era terminology the Hawks stand ready to pounce if you fail to do what you have said time and again that you're gonna do the advisors meanwhile were themselves in a bind having asserted time and time again that success would come if we did X Y or Z and that if we didn't do them we'd pay a huge price in terms of America's credibility or French credibility they were now in a bind because their careers their reputations were on the line so they were in a difficult spot now as I've suggested and hit here again I think part of the answer to the question before us is his history I do want to underscore here that Kennedy's and Johnson's freedom of maneuver had been constrained by the choices of their predecessors by Truman's active support of the French war effort by the Eisenhower's team teams move in 1954 to intervene directly in Vietnam displacing France as the major external power by the way I loans him only mentioned in parentheses here that I do think Eisenhower came closer to intervening militarily to try to save the French position then most historians have suggested that is to say the US war in Vietnam might have started a decade before it actually did begin for more than a dozen years the United States had committed itself to preserving a non-communist toehold in Vietnam and both Kennedy and Johnson feared that to alter course now even under the cover of a fig leaf negotiated settlement could be harmful again in terms of credibility but not just the country's credibility we often think of credibility as a just a national phenomenon so it's us credibility russian-chinese so it's not just national credibility that they're thinking about it's partisan credibility the Democratic Party's credibility and it's their own personal credibility as leaders so we I think you need to have a three-part conception of credibility as we think about these things ultimately Kennedy and Johnson and later Nixon found what a long line of French Lee had found before them that in Vietnam the path of least immediate resistance especially in domestic political terms was to stand firm and hope for the best to hope that somehow things would turn out fine or at least be handed off to a successor keep the patient alive at least through my my term in office was the operating principle as Democrats Kennedy and Johnson felt the need to contend with the ghosts of Joseph McCarthy second Red Scare they had to contend with Republican charges and the Republicans were very good at this in the cold war that they they had to contend with Republican charges that they were soft on communism for Johnson I think there were also and I won't have time to talk about it here really they were also his own insecurities in the realm of foreign affairs that I knew matters there was also in Johnson a leadership style that demanded consents consensus that a style I think that was not conducive to wide-ranging discussion of Policy Alternatives and also that Johnson had a tendency we can see he had a tendency LBJ to personalize policy issues that I don't think by the way Kennedy had referring briefly to the counterfactual Johnson said early in his administration some of you know this in the first week he said I will not be the president who lost Vietnam if you're an advisor and you see this guy who's but six foot four big towering Texan saying I will not be the president you've lost me no that has a I think a powerful effect it's hard at least for me early in my Kennedy research it's hard for me to imagine Don John F Kennedy saying the same thing but what I'm saying here is this the three presidents most closely closely associated with the conflict in Vietnam escalated and perpetuated the war that they privately doubted was winnable or necessary what that means ladies and gentlemen is that they sent 58,000 Americans the latest count that I have is fifty eight thousand two hundred and twenty Americans to die for a cause that they the leaders didn't for you believe in I think these numbers matter ladies and gentlemen in addition to the 58,000 more than three hundred and four thousand Americans were wounded in Vietnam with a hundred and fifty three thousand cases serious enough to require hospitalization seventy five thousand veterans were left severely disabled and of course we must speak as well of the estimated three million Vietnamese who perished two million of them civilians this is for the years when the Americans were heavily involved in the conflict I think the scale at least for me the scale of human misery was so vast that the figures lose a certain meaning for us since rounded off figures three million two point five million two million rounded off figures which are often nor more than educated guesses conveyed the horror horror on a kind of abstract level while concealing the fates of individual people but these numbers matter I'm not suggesting here by the way that geopolitical considerations are entirely absent from American policymaking especially in the early years under under Truman and Eisenhower if you think they worried about the domino theory or that the dominoes falling and especially after Mao Zedong's forces prevailed in the Chinese Civil War you can see why in nineteen forty nine fifty they would be concerned about the geopolitical implications of also losing Indochina nor would I deny that a sense of idealism spurred American leaders a belief that the United States had a commitment to defend the South Vietnamese against outside aggression a belief that ultimately the American intervention would serve the Vietnamese themselves and what some of that but if we construct the causal hierarchies and I think as I tell my students that's the obligation of the historian of decision writing to do I don't think in that ranked hierarchy and that ranked that ranking of causes I don't believe that the geopolitical concerns the idealism comes near the top in that hierarchy instead I would say that for all of these presidents in fact I would say for all six of the presidents are dealt with Vietnam so from Ford all the way I'm sorry from Truman all the way to Ford I think that's six the outcome in Vietnam mattered mostly with regard to the damage they can do to the domestic political position and Johnson perhaps felt this most strongly of all this by the way was also true of the French leaders before them it will not do and I'm gonna cover this Third Point very briefly because I'm out of time more or less it won't do to stop there in my third part I do want to suggest that the circle of responsibility was wide in terms of America's war it was not just the presidents and their advisors the escalation of American involvement from the mid 1950s and certainly in the period were discussing here 64 and 65 what I've referred to elsewhere as the long 1964 it occurred within the permissive context so for example the near unanimous passage in August 1964 of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which again gave Johnson wide latitude it was a kind of blank check for him as he said it's like grandma's nightshirt it covers everything that Gulf of Tonkin Resolution should not obscure the fact the fact that it was almost unanimously in terms of its passage passed unanimously it should not obscure the fact that the most respected most senior democratic law lawmakers on Capitol Hill privately opposed a large-scale increase in the American commitment william fulbright mike mansfield richard russell Hubert Humphrey who is about to come vice-president under Johnson all of them opposed expanded or privately nor were they alone exact numbers are hard to come by but certainly in the in the Senate a clear majority of Democrats and many moderate Republicans were either downright opposed to Americanization or ambivalent meanwhile the vocal proponents of taking the war to North Vietnam of you know escalating the struggle or strikingly few in number this is another sort of a Eureka moment in my research seeing how few were the actual hawks in 64 and 65 publicly however and this is this is crucial the vast majority of these lawmakers voiced staunch support for standing firm in the war not merely in August 1964 but in the months that followed it was a tough spot for them to be and I will acknowledge 1964 was an election year for one thing American advisors in Vietnam were being shot at are you really gonna vote against the president and that sort of a situation Johnson moreover made clear that he expected party members to fall into line that was the sort of leader that he was then after march of 65 fifty years ago a different dynamic to cold one that in a sense we have seen also repeated with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan more recently which is that you have ground troops on the ground you have ground troops in in place and so that lawmakers face the the choice do you support the policy or do you face the political consequences of quote/unquote abandoning the troops in the field as one senator putted Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island going against Johnson on Vietnam would henceforth be like voting against motherhood in the press as well leading newspapers were disinclined to ask tough questions in the months of decision to provoke probe deeply into administration claims regarding the situation on the ground in South Vietnam and the need to take new military measures among the broader public apathy was the order of the day most Americans like most Frenchmen and French women in the earlier war most Americans were too preoccupied with their daily lives to give much thought to a small Asian country thousands of miles away by the way and I'll only mention it in passing this is where I see a connection to our own time this is where I see the Vietnam analogy having special resonance if you look at the months prior to the 2003 Iraq invasion you see the same kind of permissive context in operation in Congress in the press and among the general public I don't think that this permissive context is necessarily immutable we can debate the impact of the anti-war movement in the in the Vietnam War era but there's no doubt to me that it had an effect over time the anti-war movement put constraints on what Lyndon Johnson in his final months could do in Vietnam in 68 and it limited the military options opened to Nixon after January of 69 the anti-war movement did not get everything right it sometimes romanticized the Vietcong the Hanoi government and it often exaggerated the supposed economic imperatives that lay behind US intervention but it had an important effect I want to suggest to you today let me close by taking you back by buy it buy it by zeroing in on a particular figure in 1965 and then we hope we can have some discussion I've tried to suggest today that the mystery of the Vietnam War is ultimately soluble I've argued that we need to consider the longer history dating back to World War two and to the French war I've said that we knew you need to look closely at the American presidents day and that they matter enormous Lee in this story and I've suggested that they shared a belief that it was in their short-term political interest and the short term is the one that always matters most to politicians as we know whatever their country it was in their short-term political interest to stand firm and home for the hope for the best in Vietnam and third I've suggested that we need to consider the broader context this permissive context by the way one could add to that permissive context something I didn't mention which is that key allied governments opposed or warned against an escalated war that were not willing to really fight the Americans publicly on the matter so they too kept their counsel if you will but I want to include by having you consider a Frenchman long since transplanted to the United States who felt a gripping sense of foreboding as 1965 progressed his name is Bernard fall over the course of the previous decade fall had become America's most respected Indochina expert he was he was an expert in and in what was now being called and this is telling the first Indochina war that phrase was now coming into use in 64 and 65 fall fully acknowledged that the United States was immensely more powerful than France had ever been especially from the air American airpower he said often in the summer and fall of 65 is hugely more impressive and and and important than the French use of air power but even as he made this comparison Bernard fall doubted that it would make a decisive difference in the end the unleashing of massive American firepower might make the war as he put 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 Ho Chi Minh's communists would not be vanquished Bernard fall argued 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 fall maintained this was the lesson that must be learned and yet he sensed already then summer autumn of 1965 few Washington seemed prepared to learn that lesson too few of them saw what Barnard fall himself saw and I'll quote I'll close with this quote and I actually closed my book with this Claude Bernard fall wrote that Americans were dreaming different dreams than the French but walking in the same footsteps thank you very much 1940 was about extending your idea about the permissive context which is very possibly worth extending elsewhere to a way to generalize further in Japan 1941 the author argues that the Prime Minister the Foreign Minister the Emperor who decided collectively to attack Pearl Harbor the thought that was a good idea and expected to but no one person wanted to say well I have not read the book I've heard a lot about the book and you know one's reading lists seems to just expand you know who knows it's on that list and I hope to get to it before too long but but it's interesting to hear you who summarized it in that way and I've heard the same thing maybe in reference to the book about the Japanese leaders as you say are many Japanese officials saw exactly what they were getting into I think you could make this I do think you could extend this and one could speak about this in a lot of different contexts not only in terms of what we might call contemporary history but you could go back further and that you often see and this is true of the Japanese and xli you're saying it's certainly true in the case of in the Vietnam case this kind of gloomy realism on the part of a great many people nevertheless are not willing to to speak to it what I don't yet know none of us I don't I think don't know is that does the gloomy realism also characterize the thinking in the lead-up to the enraged invasion of Iraq this is maybe where we actually have a difference that on the part of senior officials at least as far as I can tell in the Bush administration we don't have the archives we don't have the materials you have to really be able to answer this maybe they had a greater sense of confidence but it's clear that in the in in in Congress even though Bush got the authorization he wanted by a pretty comfortable margin in Congress and in the press and on the part of most members of the UN Security Council the misgivings ran really deep do you know what you're getting yourselves into so I think that one could look at this more more broadly no question I think that the permissive context notion is a useful one it has been for me and somebody maybe not me somebody needs to pursue it further
