‘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.
13. Nixon in China
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 Andre 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 Leger, 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.
But Johnson could not really bomb the essential targets, because he feared the resulting gruesome publicity, and because he did not want to provoke either Moscow or Peking. The fact was that the Americans were anxious not to push China too far: in 1964 she had exploded an atomic bomb, and in 1967 a hydrogen one (though at the time, in the middle of the ‘cultural revolution’, the country was widely in chaos). There were also great difficulties as regards the United Nations, then taken seriously as a ‘forum’ for ‘world opinion’. Even in 1975 only some two dozen of its 144 member states counted as democracies, and from 1945 to 1991 ‘Third World’ states were run, for half of the time, by their armies. Nevertheless, the organization — at least, capable of ‘peacekeeping’ — had some uses and had to be respected. In any case the North Vietnamese could bite back. They had acquired powerful defences, with 250 interceptors and 8,000 anti-aircraft guns, and one American plane was downed for every twenty-five sorties (whereas, later on, in the Gulf War, the figure was one in 700). The US air force bombed forest, smashed villages, and just caused the locals to hate the Americans all the more (a hatred returned with considerable sincerity). But the North also had the vast advantage that there was a safe supply line, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which went through an area of Cambodia that jutted out towards Saigon itself, the ‘parrot’s beak’. The Americans had too few men to cover these long borders, and in any case they were not the light infantry that might have been effective.
To start with, just the same, events appeared to go in Nixon’s direction. In the first place there was the Americans’ always considerable learning curve. After Tet there was a period when the war seemed to be moving the Americans’ way, and a British expert (from his days in Malaya), Robert Thompson, gave sage advice: the war would have to be ‘nativized’ in the sense that the South Vietnamese should take over as far as possible; their army was given training of a sort. Whether this worked is still debated: there is evidence for and against, but the Northern Communists were certainly not popular, as the huge number of refugees always showed. There was also an American programme of ‘counter-insurgency’, ‘pacification’ — i.e. a carefully controlled reaction, involving the civilian population. Guerrillas or for that matter infiltrators could only really be countered if their areas of support were liquidated, whether by the physical movement of the potentially supportive population, or by that population’s inclining towards the anti-guerrilla cause. The Americans studied these matters, and had an educated team. Robert W. Komer came in May 1967 to head the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support office, or CORDS, run by men who subsequently made considerable careers in the 1980s and even beyond, when the Right were again in charge in sensitive areas (Komer himself becoming ambassador to Turkey). The programme was called by the CIA ‘Phoenix’, an evocation of a Vietnamese symbolic bird, the Phung Hoan (the equivalent of the Central American Quetzal). One of the great problems hitherto had been the endless targeting of competent South Vietnamese officials, of whom tens of thousands had been assassinated. There was to be a riposte — the careful targeting of North Vietnamese ‘cadres’. In 1970-71, 10,444 of these were killed, generally in fire-fights.
Pacification would have meant an infantry war, and the generals did not want this. For a start, they had too few men to cover the long borders with Cambodia and Laos, and of their 540,000 men, only 200,000 were actually fighting. In fact the Marines did quite well with small patrols; and William Colby, Komer’s successor (in 1968), claimed over 20,000 killed, 30,000 captured and 180,000 defections by 1971. Much of the country did become quiet again, and foreigners could travel by road from Saigon to the coast, where there was a protected holiday resort. The watchword was now ‘Vietnamization’ because the Americans were expecting to withdraw, and Westmoreland’s successor, Creighton Adams, was under instructions to release troops as fast as he could. Vietnamization might have worked: however, one of the decisive elements in this pacification would have been mixed American- Vietnamese units, and Westmoreland was adamantly opposed to their existence: only a few thousand such mixed troops operated in the field. Relations were not good — resentment on the one side, contempt on the other, with linguistic barriers to complicate matters. At any rate, by spring 1970 there was a regular war and not a guerrilla one: the North Vietnamese were able to keep troops in great force in Cambodia and their army held what amounted to a regular front line through the mountainous and jungle territory on the official borderline. From there, they could strike at the old imperial capital (most of it was in reality nineteenth-century pastiche architecture), Hue. By stealth, Nixon — infuriated by the endless nonsense of the Paris talks — decided to strike there, together with the
