Tragedy or Choice in Vietnam? Learning to Think Outside the Archival Box

Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

In 1965, the United States launched a major air and ground war on behalf of a weak ally against an experienced and committed enemy. Policymakers understood that domestic support would not last forever and would likely decrease as casualties mounted. War games and simulations had suggested that Washington might end up isolated internationally. Yet the nation embarked on a war that reduced U.S. power and prestige, claimed the lives of some 58,000 of its citizens, and led to a skepticism of limited war that still shapes civil-military relations and foreign policy today.

Given the risks and uncertainties, why did the United States go to war in Vietnam? After three decades there still is no consensus on this or any number of other basic questions regarding U.S. policy. The exchanges that followed U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's conditional apologia in1995 demonstrated that neither a central architect nor his critics could agree on whether the war was inevitable or winnable. ¹ In 2001, on the thirtieth anniversary of the release of the Pentagon Papers, two participants in that study made diametrically opposed arguments regarding what the documents revealed about policy-makers' beliefs and intentions. ² Collectively speaking, historians, political scientists, and policy analysts have not provided the answers sought by President John F. Kennedy when, shortly before his death, he requested a comprehensive review of how the United States got into Vietnam, what Americans thought they were doing there, and how they could be most effective. ³

The official record of U.S. thinking about the war is now nearly complete. The Lyndon Baines Johnson and other presidential libraries have declassified their public and private holdings, and the National Archives and Records Administration has opened most of its diplomatic and military records. The Foreign Relations of the United States series includes some seventy-five print and microfiche volumes on the foreign policies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The nature and abundance of this evidence make it possible to reexamine old debates and theories regarding the U.S. path to war and, by extension, review two competing perspectives on the origins of war in international relations theory.

One view, reflected in the overwhelming majority of literature on Vietnam, emphasizes the nonrational aspects of decisionmaking and policy. This perspective, which has sustained several subfields within the international relations community for more than a quarter-century, emphasizes the role of cognitive limitations and psychological biases, the self-defeating behavior of small groups facing stress and uncertainty, and bureaucratic and organizational barriers to the provision of important information and advice. ⁴ Analysts who find evidence of nonrational behavior generally believe that U.S. policymakers in the mid-1960s faced difficult dilemmas but made bad and avoidable choices. ⁵

The other view, closely identified though not synonymous with realism and currently enjoying resurgence in formal bargaining models, emphasizes the predictable, rational aspects of the road to war. In this view, war is best seen as a conscious, deliberate extension of politics. Analysts working from this perspective tend to view Vietnam as a classic tragedy in which fate, in the form of structural pressures and constraints, determined policy.

Three impressive studies, based on the latest trove of archival material, shed considerable light on the value of these two perspectives. Fredrik Logevall's thesis is captured in the title of his book, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam. ⁶ In this well-written account drawing on European as well as U.S. archival...