An awful lot of good people come in here and tell me what I ought to do. – President Lyndon Johnson to Keyes Beech
What’s happening in Gaza and Ukraine is terrible. It hardly matters whether the word genocide is used: tens of thousands of innocent people are dying. It seems, if anything, worse than what happened in Vietnam in the 1960s (and Cambodia a few years later), though all such comparisons are invidious. What sets Vietnam apart, however, is the vocal, often demonstrative opposition by American intellectuals that the Vietnam war provoked. It may have happened before, but it seems not to have happened since, that so many prominent intellectuals came out into the open, not just in opposition, but often with well-thought-out solutions in hand. There’s nothing like that now.
In an off-the-record meeting with the president in May 1967, veteran Far East correspondent Keyes Beech urged Lyndon Johnson to tell the public why American policy in Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, was so important. The administration’s message, he told the president, wasn’t getting through. Johnson appreciated Beech’s intervention: it was reassuring to hear from someone who approved of the war. Most of what he was hearing was coming from the other side.
The Vietnam War was notable for the number of intellectuals – writers (including novelists), religious leaders, academics and journalists – who went public with their views. They signed petitions and took part in demonstrations. Some, seeming to sympathize with the enemy, went on “fact-finding” missions behind enemy lines. And a good many, reaching back to an earlier tradition, wrote pamphlets. John Kenneth Galbraith was one of the pamphleteers.
Galbraith, it must be said, was consistent. The Canadian-born Harvard economist, public servant and adviser to presidents from FDR and JFK to LBJ, had written to President Kennedy as early as 1961, when he was serving as the American ambassador to India, warning against further involvement in Vietnam. Asked by Kennedy to follow up with a formal memo, he described the South Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh Diem, whom the Americans were backing, as “weak” and “ineffectual” and worried that America was on a course that would lead to their simply replacing the French as an unloved occupying colonial power. He called for American withdrawal and a political solution – a return to diplomacy. Kennedy passed the memo on to the Pentagon for comment. The Pentagon brusquely dismissed it, saying in effect that we’ve considered these objections, we don’t like Diem either, but the present policies “have not yet been under way long enough to demonstrate their full effectiveness.” It was the defense department’s view and that of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that they were on the right path.
By 1967, Diem was gone, and the Pentagon’s approach had had ample time to prove itself. Thousands of tons of bombs had been rained down on North Vietnam. The number of American soldiers and Marines in-country was approaching half a million and the cost in men, materiel and money was cutting into Johnson’s domestic agenda. Galbraith rejoined the debate.
His pamphlet was just forty-eight pages, counting the cover. It was printed on newsprint (now yellowed and brittle) and cost 35 cents. In it, Galbraith reprised the arguments he had made five years earlier, but more emphatically. He had a wider audience than just the president in mind.
He pointed out that the assumptions driving the original policies no longer applied. The Soviet Union and China were clearly not engaged in an expansionist conspiracy to take over Southeast Asia. Not only were they not working together, they were hardly even speaking to each other. What the Americans and the Saigon government were dealing with was an authentic nationalist movement with the capacity to resist indefinitely the effort to suppress it – no matter how savagely that effort was pursued. One had only to consider the experience of other imperial powers when they came up against a similarly authentic indigenous movement. Think of the British in India and South Africa, the French in Tunisia, the Belgians in the Congo. Each one a losing cause.
Galbraith understood the obstacles to getting out cleanly and he had a plan. The Communists were deeply entrenched in large areas of the county – effectively including most of the Mekong Delta and, indeed, much of the rest of the country outside of the cities and towns. The American military’s search and destroy operations had failed and so had the bombing of the North. It was time to accept the facts as they existed. Stop the bombing. Stop search and destroy. Seek a resolution with the North Vietnamese. If, as was possible, the North declined to negotiate even after these steps had been taken, then the Americans would have to defend the areas that were under their control. The military would resist a defensive strategy, but “all experienced bureaucrats (of whom I am one) know that military leaders always describe as impossible what they do not want to do.” This was why, under the Constitution, the military answered to civilian authority. Galbraith was not the Pentagon’s biggest fan.
Eventually, Galbraith argued, as military operations were wound down (and with them, the number of wounded and killed declined), public interest in the war would wane. South Vietnamese leaders themselves might find it expedient to reach out to their counterparts in the North. If not, then perhaps the Geneva talks, suspended in 1954, could be started again. One way or another the conflict would be resolved.
Johnson didn’t follow the advice of either Beech or Galbraith. Beech, in their meeting, had more or less invited the president to adopt the thesis of a book he had written. Not Without the Americans was a good book and, like Galbraith’s pamphlet, well argued. But the Pentagon still weighed more heavily in affairs of state than either Beech the Old Asia Hand, or the Harvard economist. A host of others would have their say. But Johnson’s presidency would expire miserably without his having found a way to extricate himself from the war.
Sources: President’s Daily Diary Entry, 5/13/1967, President’s Daily Diary Collection, LBJ Presidential Library, accessed March 31, 2022. https://www .discover lbj.org/item/pdd-19670513; Keyes Beech, Parsons (KA) Sun, May 9, 1972, p. 2; J.K. Galbraith, How to Get Out of Vietnam (NY: Signet, 1967): Pentagon Papers, Volume II, Senator Gravel Edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971) pp. 670-72.