Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

But the reality was different. In the first place, there was a classic piece of fraud. A truce had been arranged for the New Year, for the sake of the ordinary people, and it was broken; many Americans were celebrating, and firecrackers masked the sound of gunfire. Besides, the attacks, however spectacular, all failed, with heavy loss of life to the attackers, and there was no popular uprising. General Frederick C. Weyand, near Saigon, had expected the truce to be broken, had prepared for an attack, and fended it off easily. In the north, on the border, 6,000 Marines held a base at Khe Sanh for seventy-seven days of battle, and this was presented as another version of Dien Bien Phu, the great French defeat in 1954. But the truth was that the Marines, in holding the place, lost on average three killed and twelve wounded every day, whereas the Vietcong casualties were much heavier, and in any case the essential problem at Dien Bien Phu had been the failure of the French over supply, whereas at Khe Sanh the C123 transports had no such problem. The ‘Iron Triangle’ north of Saigon was notoriously difficult to defend because of the relative freedom of approach roads for an attack, and the Americans had done well in the circumstances. Qualified observers have since said that the Vietcong’s southern element was dealt a tremendous blow by their losses, and that, thereafter, the North Vietnamese regular army predominated.

The curious aspect was that the American media presented Tet as a terrible failure. Newsweek talked of ‘the agony of Khe Sanh’ and Walter Cronkite on CBS referred to it as a ‘microcosm’ of the South Vietnam ‘problem’. Later on, Vietnamese Communists themselves admitted that Tet had been a disaster — 60,000 killed, as against 10,000 Americans and South Vietnamese (though also 14,000 civilians). Two American writers, very hostile to American intervention, Don Oberdorfer and Frances Fitzgerald, note that Tet was a failure, though of course very spectacular. Why did it have such an effect on American educated opinion? It did, and the role of the media was analysed in extraordinary detail by Peter Braestrup. Part of the problem was purely technical, in that getting a ‘story’ out meant seventy-two hours over thousands of miles: satellite broadcasting was still in a very early stage. Accordingly, journalists in Saigon — 464 of them, tending to repeat each other — were best placed to send out film of the various troubles in the capital, and as one of Braestrup’s informants said, ‘the networks see no harm in running a stand-up piece… by a guy who has just come in the country two days earlier’. The many positive aspects were ignored — the fact, for instance, that there had been no South Vietnamese defections. Was a central problem the fact that the American military did not know how to ‘manage’ the news? Westmoreland himself breathed confidence, and came across as a buffoon.

A war started between the media and the White House, and there were grand defections, including John Kenneth Galbraith, high priest of the Rooseveltian New Deal, and even Senator J. William Fulbright, who had done much for the spreading of democracy under an American aegis. The younger generation of the Johnson team broke off, and Johnson himself became demoralized, sometimes breaking down in tears. McNamara himself broke off, and went to head the World Bank, though his ministrations did not make a positive difference in all but two of the economies he treated. The fact was that Johnson’s nerve had already been badly weakened by the failure of the ‘Great Society’. He had been overawed by the grand Galbraiths and McNamaras; now they were making him take the blame.

The disaster was clear: America was losing, and doing so at much cost. There were to be nearly 50,000 battle deaths, over 150,000 cases of wounds severe enough for hospital, and over 2,000 missing. Two million Americans saw service in Vietnam but even then it was a selective business: conscription (‘the draft’) was theoretically universal, but in practice seldom hit young men who could ask for deferment on grounds of education, and education was a very broad church. The army took a dim view of homosexuals and exempted them: there were volunteers for that. Blacks and the working classes (and the inevitably enthusiastic Virginians) were disproportionately represented in the draft, which took 100,000 men for Vietnam in 1964 and 400,000 in 1966. There were protests across the land, and the universities, though not in truth much affected, were in ferment. Demonstrations and the media desertions caused collapse in Johnson, whose hopes for the reputation of his presidency were smashed. In March 1968 he made a dramatic announcement on television that he did not intend to run for President again.

The withdrawal of Johnson introduced a period of surrealism in American affairs, a surrealism that became grotesque. A President, soon to be hounded from office for telling complicated lies about a matter of no importance, was seen on the Great Wall of China; he had come there as part of a fantasy game, had been received by a Chairman Mao who had ripped the hospital tubes out of his post-stroke body in order to exchange fifty minutes of exhausted and interpreted platitudes with his knees-pressed-together visitor. Mao was, said André Malraux, a colossus contemplating death. Of death, the colossus had seen much. His People’s Republic had turned into a sort of huge, failed version of anything that the Bolsheviks had ever tried, beginning with War Communism in 1919. Thirty million people had starved to death in one of his campaigns, when, trying to stop birds from eating grain, he had ordered peasants to bang pots day and night to stop the birds from landing. They flew about, as planned, until they dropped. Insects were then deadlier to the grain than the birds had been, and Mao’s peasants were eating bark.

In the same period, the dollar turned into paper, and the financial structure that had saved the West collapsed. There was a consequence: oil producers quadrupled their prices, and then octupled them, causing mayhem. Stock exchanges imploded and banks failed; Keynes’s famous line, that modern ideas reflected defunct thinkers, boomeranged back at him. The period even managed to start off with a villa belonging to the modernist French painter Fernand Léger, who had bequeathed it to the French Communist Party, which then offered it as a place where peace negotiations could be concluded (a ceasefire over Vietnam was eventually signed there). These were another Panmunjom, endless haggling over tiny details while hundreds of thousands went on dying.

In November 1968 a presidential election, by a small majority, brought to office the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, whose reputation was for fierce anti-Communism. He seemed to be entirely pledged to winning the war. Nixon’s presidential career was bedevilled from the start by media hostility, which he was extraordinarily clumsy in handling — bullying one moment, cloyingly and with obvious insincerity making up at another, and then, when both tactics had failed, relapsing into paranoia. Nixon was no patrician from the East Coast — quite the contrary, he counted as a weaselly provincial reactionary, and his assistants were charmless effigies of the American virtues. Hanoi sensed blood. Not long after Johnson’s announcement, what appeared to be negotiations on a ceasefire took place in Paris. Johnson had been desperately trying to arrange these, and offered to stop the bombing in return for North Vietnamese acceptance. It was given, as a propaganda gesture, but it was empty, and very irritating. There were indeed endless different ‘peace initiatives’, a ‘charade’ according to Gabriel Kolko: none had any effect. The North Vietnamese were adamant that the Americans should just pack up and go, and they ignored Johnson’s offers. The fact was that they did hold some cards. The North Vietnamese army was battleworthy and ruthlessly led; unlike the South Vietnamese one, it did not have to rely on ethnic-minority conscripts; it had supplies from one or other of the Communist giants; it had safe areas in ostensibly neutral countries only a few miles from Saigon. Besides, the Americans’ hands were firmly tied. They had too few troops for a very complicated political geography, those few often quite untrained, and therefore reliant on aerial bombardment.