Vietnam: Was the System the Solution?: A Review Essay

System the Solution?1 A Review Essay Leslie H. Gelb with Richard K. Betts, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (WashingtonD.C.: Brookings Institution, 1979) 374 pp. R. N.: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978) William Shawcross, Sideshow (New York, Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1979) 467 pp. T h e task of putting the United States’ involvement in Vietnam in perspective is an enormous one. While no definitive work on the subject is likely to appear for many years, individualbooks can make importantcontributionsto our understanding of specific aspects of the conflict, and several that do so have recently appeared. The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked, by Leslie H. Gelb with Richard K. Betts, focuses mainly on the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations ; it views the war as the logical outcome of American foreign policy principles and procedures during the 1950s and 1960s. RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon has received less attention than it deserves; it shows why the war continued from 1969 through 1973. Sideshow, by William Shawcross, dealsbrilliantlywith the new front which Nixon and Henry Kissingeropened in Cambodia. Added to earlier works, these books help to form a coherent picture of the origins and consequences of the American involvement in Indochina. Leslie Gelb views Vietnam from a unique perspective. A Defense Department official under Robert McNamara, he also directed the Pentagon Papers study which McNamara commissionedshortlybefore leavingoffice.Hisbook has been long awaited; his thesis, which he summarized in an article in 1971,’ is provocative and helpful. On the surface, as the authors admit from the outset, their thesis that ”the system worked” seems ridiculous; the American involvement was “obviously a failure.” The book is not a book about a failure because it is not exactly a book about the American involvement in Vietnam. It is, in fact, a book about the system-the American government and its views and decisions on Vietnam from the Roosevelt through the Johnson Administrations. By concentrating on Washington rather than 1090pp. 1. Leslie Gelb, ”Vietnam: The System Worked”, Foreign Policy, (Summer 1971), pp. 140-173. David E. Kaiser is Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University. 199 International Security I 200 Vietnam, the authors can argue that the system did, in some sense, work. By this they mean two different things: first, that the various decisions which took America into Vietnam were made consciously, by the highest authority, on the basis of relatively accurate information about the chances for victory, and with due regard for existing political constraints; and second, that “the decision-making system . . . did achieve its stated purpose of preventing a communist victory in Vietnam until the domestic balance of opinion shifted and Congress decided to reduce support to Saigon in 1974-75” (The Irony of Vietnam, p. 24). The first of these propositions is useful, but oversimplified; the second is much more questionable, and an analysis of it suggests various ways in which the system did not work. In arguing that the system worked, Gelb and Betts make clear that they are arguing against various other simplistic explanations of America’s involvement in Vietnam. These include the idea that the presidents involved merely wished to avoid the responsibility of losing South Vietnam, the belief that a series of small steps led the United States into a quagmire, and the idea that military and civilian bureaucracies dragged presidents into the war by lying. Here Gelb and Betts have performed a service; these are rationalizations which many Americans have found it comforting to believe. When the enormity of what we had done became apparent in the late 1960s, many concluded that the nation as a whole could not have consented to such a catastrophe. But it did consent; the ideas that led to U.S. involvement had originated decades earlier. In taking the United States into Vietnam during the 1960s, the system acted according to generally shared principles of American foreign policy. In this sense, Gelb and Betts are right to deny it a crucial, autonomous role. The road that led America into Vietnam began with the Truman Doctrine; the specificprecedent for such a commitment was the Korean War. Truman’s decision to intervene there did not reflect...