Joe Boyles: Guest Columnist
Twenty years ago, I retired from the Air Force and moved to Madison County. Shortly after Linda and I had made that transition, I heard about a new book that intrigued me: “Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the lies that led to Vietnam (Harper Collins, 1997).”
I read it from cover to cover. As a Vietnam veteran, I am always interested in critiques of the conduct of the war that was so impactful on my generation. What I read astounded me.
The author at the time was a young Army major by the name of H. R. McMaster. The book was an outgrowth of his doctoral thesis from the University of North Carolina before beginning a teaching assignment at his alma mater, the United States Military Academy at West Point. Last week, President Trump named now Lieutenant General McMaster as his National Security Advisor.
When McMaster graduated from West Point in 1984, not many in the Army were talking about Vietnam that many view as “America’s greatest foreign policy disaster” in the last century. It would seem that while many claim success, failure is an orphan. Young Captain McMaster led troops in the first Gulf War (1991) and the next year, began his graduate studies. He was determined to compare his combat experience with Vietnam and determine the difference. His thesis evolved into a best-seller.
The book centers around the time of the Kennedy Assassination (November 1963) and examines the critical decisions made by President Johnson into the summer of 1965. In the midst is a presidential election that LBJ won handily, in part because he deceived the American people and their elected representatives in Congress. As he was making critical decisions about escalating the war, he was billing himself as the “peace candidate” while labeling his Republican opponent a war-monger.
LBJ was concerned about the Cold War and haunted by our experience in Korea just a decade earlier where Chinese intervention caused casualties to escalate. These colored his thinking about the situation in Vietnam. But, as McMaster concludes, “The United States went to war in Vietnam in a manner unique in American history. Vietnam was not forced on the United States by a tidal wave of Cold War ideology. It slunk in on cat’s feet.”
What does he mean by this? As a new president, Johnson wanted to push an aggressive social domestic policy. He wanted Vietnam to go away. His principle advisors, led by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara convinced the president that a policy of ‘graduated response,’ similar to what had worked in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, could prevail in Vietnam. Additionally, the statistician McNamara tried to reduce the war to a game of numbers. But the situations were far different, as was the result. In the words of Joel Chandler Harris, Vietnam became our “Tar Baby:” the more we struggled, the more entangled we became.
In going out of his way to keep from losing, LBJ ceded the initiative to our enemy. The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese set the agenda. We would respond proportionately after their attacks. Our soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen were the pawns in this deadly game of bluff. More than 58 thousand came home in body bags. As many as one million Vietnamese died. In the end, the American people had enough and political will was lost. It was an ignominious ending.
McMaster concludes: “The war in Vietnam was not lost on the field, nor was it lost on the front pages of the New York Times or on the college campuses. It was lost in Washington, D.C., even before Americans assumed sole responsibility for the fighting in 1965 and before they realized the country was at war; indeed, even before the first American units were deployed. The disaster in Vietnam was not the result of impersonal forces but a uniquely human failure, the responsibility for which was shared by President Johnson and his principal military and civilian advisors. The failings were many and reinforcing: arrogance, weakness, lying in the pursuit of self-interest, and above all, the abdication of responsibility to the American people.”
General McMaster is a warrior-scholar of the first order. In addition to the first Gulf War, he has led troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He was a principle architect of the 2008 Surge in Iraq that reversed our fortunes for the better … only to be squandered by a change of administration. Now he has our new president’s ear on national security matters. I think our nation is in good hands, but time and circumstances will tell.