The Real Lesson of the Vietnam War | Fredrik Logevall | TEDxCornellU

the Vietnam War was the defining experience of the second half of the 20th century for the United States it's also been the principle subject of research for me ever since I became a historian so for the last two-plus decades I have been engaged in deep research on fundamental questions pertaining to the war how and why did it happen why did it last as long as it lasted how did it end and why did it end I submit to you this evening that these are questions of profound historical importance I want to reflect on them a little bit with you tonight and I also want to leave you with one principal takeaway a main lesson as I see it of this war that lasted so long that was so bloody a lesson that I think has great resonance for our world today it started in a meaningful sense for the United States or in earnest for the United States fifty years ago in 1965 President Lyndon Johnson made two fateful decisions first he started a regular sustained air war against targets in North Vietnam and against enemy-held areas in South Vietnam and there was also bombing against Cambodia and Laos ultimately seven million tons of bombs would be used by the United States in Vietnam in Cambodia and in Laos also in 65 Johnson sent the first ground troops the first combat troops arrived in South Vietnam on March 8 and that figure would ultimately reach more than half a million the peak was actually early in the Nixon administration so it became in 1965 because the the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong matched this American escalation it became a large-scale war in sixty-five fifty years ago 40 years ago 1975 also an anniversary year for us the war ended in spectacular fashion the so called fall of Saigon when communist forces swept in took control of the South Vietnamese capital raised the flag of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam the war ended and forty years is a pretty long time really and it's you know longer than longer then certainly many of you in this room have been alive can't say that for myself but even so even though it's now 40 years since the war ended I submit to you this evening that Vietnam and what it means retains a powerful resonance in American political culture it's part of our of our consciousness still I think to an extraordinary degree and I sometimes reflect on why this is so why is it that apart from the Civil War no event in American history no event has generated more self-reflection more soul-searching more debate about its legacy than the Vietnam War part of it I think part of the answer to that question is the colossal failure of the United States to achieve its objective its core objective in Vietnam was to to sustain a non-communist Vietnam for the indefinite future it failed second reason I think for this continuing resonance of the war in our in our culture is the false pretexts that u.s. decision-makers used first to intervene then to expand US involvement and then to perpetuate the war year after bloody year and I'll come back to that issue in a minute and then of course the third reason for this power of the war still in 2015 is the brutality of the warfare and I should say the brutality on both sides I'm focusing this evening mostly on the American experience but both sides in this war fought with ferocity and that brutality led to of course immense destruction and mass bloodshed 58,000 two hundred and twenty Americans died in Vietnam they came from large cities they came from small towns all across the country they answered the call when their leaders beckoned them to service and they died their names etched in that dark granite wall that is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC up to three million Vietnamese died in the struggle two million of them two million of them civilians that is a death rate about 50 times the American rate these dots represent each dot represents a thousand deaths this is the American figure lots of dots this is the V the American figure plus an approximation and that's all we can do because then the figures are obviously impossible to pin down when they're that large the Vietnamese figure these numbers ladies and gentlemen matter they matter and I want to say to you this evening that this war was unnecessary it was unnecessary in hindsight from the perspective of of our time but it was unnecessary in the context of its own time that is a conclusion that I've reached on the basis of my research and it connects to this lesson that I want to leave you with at the conclusion of my remarks so why did the war happen this is something I think we have to grapple with if we're going to then understand its meaning for us today there are long-term reasons for the war having to do with the French colonial period which began really in the latter part of the 19th century it has to do with the Japanese occupation in World War two the subsequent war between France as it attempted to recolonize Indochina and Viet Minh revolutionaries led by Ho Chi Minh very important to everything that will happen but I want to focus here on the proximate reasons for the war and the proximate reasons for the u.s. decision to make this a large-scale war it's often suggested that it was hubris it was a lethal combination of hubris and ignorance that brought the United States into the war so a kind of exaggerated self-confidence these pajama-clad guerrillas can't possibly stand up to the to the military might of the United States they won't know what hit them there is no way that we can lose this war we are Americans we've never lost them so that's the assertion with respect to hubris and then accompanying that an idea that Americans had no idea American leaders had no idea what they were getting into they didn't understand the enemy they didn't understand the problems that would be the that would that would occur if they should intervene militarily but I want to say to you that this is a row this is this is not correct this is a mistaken view on both counts I'm not going to say to you this evening that American leaders were experts on Vietnamese history and culture and that they that they understood this country very well not at all but they knew they knew what they were up against in his memoirs Robert McNamara wanted to suggest to us because it served I think his purposes there may have been a genuine belief also but it served his purposes to say the following if only we had known if only we had understood the Vietnamese this would not have occurred well he did know Robert McNamara the Secretary of Defense one of the architects of the war he did know he and Lyndon Johnson when they took the nation into war in 1965 were gloomy realists privately when the doors were closed they said we're not sure that we can win this war even with major US fighting forces so did many others in the administration they were far from alone and believing this they also wondered and this is the more sobering truth as far as I'm concerned whether it was even necessary to try to win it was Vietnam in fact of critical national security importance to the United States they were not sure again only when the doors were closed Lyndon Johnson in a quote that perhaps you've heard I think captured something of this when he said I don't believe it's worth fighting for and I don't believe we can get out the second part of that quote though leads me to the next point why then did they do this if they weren't sure that they could win and more importantly they weren't sure it was necessary to try to win to wage a war 7,000 miles from the California from the coast of California that was not in other words close to the physical boundaries of the United States why did they do it in a word credibility and I mean credibility here both in the sense of national credibility but also partisan and personal credibility often we think of this term in exclusively national terms it is us credibility that is at stake are our allies will no longer be able to depend on us if we don't persevere our adversaries will no longer fear us it was partisan credibility and personal credibility that mattered at least as much for 10 years the United States had committed itself publicly to preserving a non-communist South Vietnam to go against that vow was to potentially threaten the reputations of the United States of course but I think even more so the Democratic Party and even more so the personal reputations of these policy makers to threaten their careers that's that is what I think was at stake and that is what was of principled importance in driving the nation to war in 1965 I'm not suggesting here that idealism had nothing to do with it this idea that we're all tomato it's best for the Vietnamese I'm not suggesting that geopolitical concerns and that's of course bound up with the national credibility not suggesting that didn't matter but I would say that they ranked lower in the causal hierarchy than the concerns in particular about the domestic political ramifications of something other than standing firm in Vietnam and the the impact in the potential influence on reputation in in more personal terms but here's the thing it's not enough it's not enough for us in this room or anywhere else to say that therefore it's just about the presidents and their advisors this war would not have happened absent something that I think is of critical importance and that also by the way connects Vietnam to our present day and it is what I like to call a permissive context Lyndon Johnson Robert McNamara and the others and later Richard Nixon operated in a permissive context I'm referring here to Congress I'm referring to the to the media and I'm referring to public opinion to ordinary Americans we know the evidence is now I think very powerful that even as lawmakers voted almost unanimously in favor of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 which gave Lyndon Johnson a kind of blank cheque to wage war as he saw fit privately those lawmakers many of them including the Senate leadership in foreign policy Senate Democratic leadership and foreign policy said is this really something we should be doing can we win again is it necessary even to try to win have we convinced ourselves that it's actually in the national security interests of the United States to do this and to cause probably a lot of blood to be shed in the process but did these lawmakers then act on that skepticism no they were not willing to challenge the administration in those critical months in 64 and 65 or for a long time thereafter that's part of this permissive environment that allowed the escalation to occur in the press same thing happen important questions were asked in the press but not enough and especially after you see the first ground troops committed to the war what happened the famous rally around the flag effect rally around the president affecting so you see both lawmakers and journalists fallen behind Lyndon Johnson in the spring those vital months in the winter and spring of 1965 as for the American public it was largely apathetic in these months to be sure there were people in 64 and 65 all across this country who were against what was going on the first teaching happened at the University of Michigan already in March of 1965 so I don't mean to to you know paint with a too broader brush but broadly speaking apathy was the order of the day most Americans were too busy with their daily lives to concern themselves with a war that was that far away and to the extent that they did concern themselves they were inclined to trust their leaders which is a noble sentiment in many ways they believed Lyndon Johnson and his aides when they said this is a vital security interest and we are going to prevail that permissive context is important and it's here that I draw connection to the present day because I would submit to you that there have been other American interventions since Vietnam in which a similar permissive environment was in operation in play Iraq 2003 I think you see something very similar with respect to Congress the press the media and public opinion so that's my takeaway that's this is the lesson that I want to leave you with the lesson is this something like Vietnam something like this war could happen again not in the same way not in the same place but equal with equally destructive results because the eternal temptation the eternal temptation of policymakers and presidents to seek short-term political advantage to take the path of least immediate resistance is there and then to hope this was certainly the case in the case with Vietnam to hope that these new military measures will be successful and in the Vietnam case hope is all it was not confidence not expectation it was hope but that temptation is always there and it's there with us today and it'll be we're there with us tomorrow combine that with the the the primacy of the executive branch in foreign policy and you have the potential for this to happen how do we keep it from not happening we keep it from not happening I think fundamentally by educating ourselves all of us doesn't mean we have to be experts after a while after all we have elected representatives who are supposed to know these things better than we do who have experts themselves who advise them so I'm not calling for that but there is a fundamental knowledge and interest that we have to have whether its foreign policy whether it's domestic policy state politics local politics it's up to us to be educated take an interest and to be skeptical not cynical very important distinction but to ask searching questions to demand of our leaders to demand that they show accountability that they demonstrate to us especially on matters of war and peace that this is in fact what we need to do that the military option is truly the weapon of last resort and not the first or second or third if we do that and if necessary we then protest if necessary we then vote them out of office then I think we drastically increase our chances to not have to not have a repeat of this experience this war was not just Lyndon Johnson's war it was not just Robert McNamara's war it was not just Richard Nixon Nixon's war it was our war Vietnam in the end was our war thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 152,996

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Humanities, America, History, War

Id: h6AvtCQBreI

Length: 19min 5sec (1145 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 15 2015