Better Dead than Red

The Escalation of the Vietnam War in 1965

Letters from Vienna #65

The war in Ukraine, the petite Vietnamese lady told me with a hint of disgust and contempt in her cool eyes and voice, is “mere theatre”; profits for the military industrial complex, nothing more. If anybody grasps this harsh, cruel and bitter truth it’s the Vietnamese.

As readers of my previous letters (especially: Letters #39–#45) might well have noted by now it remains my profound and enduring conviction that war is principally an extension of economics by other means. Thus, it should surprise nobody that the $40bn in military aid currently being promised to the Ukraine will go largely to American defense contractors in much the same way that the $2 trillion spent on the war in Afghanistan between October 2001 and August 2021 went mainly to Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrup Grumman. Vietnam was no exception to this cast iron rule.

Report from the Iron Mountain

There is also a social dimension of course: war is considered a means of maintaining a certain desired hierarchic order. This thesis is embodied in the Report from the Iron Mountain from 1967 which states: “The political functions of war have been up to now even more critical to social stability. It is not surprising, nevertheless, that discussions of economic conversion for peace tend to fall silent on the matter of political implementation, and that disarmament scenarios, often sophisticated in their weighing of international political factors, tend to disregard the political functions of the war system within individual societies…The war system not only has been essential to the existence of nations as independent political entities, but has been equally indispensable to their stable internal political structure. Without it, no government has ever been able to obtain acquiescence in its “legitimacy,” or right to rule its society. The possibility of war provides the sense of external necessity without which no government can long remain in power.”[1] Another way of formulating the same idea is to say that war is necessary to avoid social discontent. That this thinking was dominant in America at the time of the escalation of the Vietnam War is no accident; it remains dominant today.

Better Dead than Red

In 1965 the war in Vietnam escalated when nearly two hundred thousand Americans were sent to South Vietnam. Magazines such as “Life” argued that a war against Communism was regrettable but an ugly necessity if nuclear Armageddon was to be avoided. The “red tide” had to be stopped somewhere and it was preferable that this be done in South East Asia rather than Europe. Furthermore, each American soldier was much more effective than his Vietnamese counterpart, which meant that relatively few men would be needed to complete this difficult task. What “Life” failed to mention of course was that the atom bomb had always been intimately linked to the unhappy fate of Vietnam though by no means in the way ostensibly stated.

“Despite the terrific damage done to mainland Japan by aerial bombardment,” L. Fletcher Prouty relates, “even before the use of the atomic bombs, the invasion of Japan had been considered to be an essential prelude to victory and to “unconditional” surrender. Planning for this invasion had been under way for years. As soon as the island of Okinawa became available as the launching site for this operation, supplies and equipment for an invasion force of at least half a million men began to be stacked up, fifteen to twenty feet high, all over the island.”

“Then, in the early surrender of Japan, this massive invasion did not occur, and the use of this enormous stockpile of military equipment was not necessary. Almost immediately, U.S. Navy transport vessels began to show up in Naha Harbor, Okinawa. This vast load of war matériel was reloaded onto those ships. I was in Okinawa at that time, and during some business in the harbor area I asked the harbormaster if all that new matériel was being returned to the States.”

“His response was direct and surprising: “Hell, no! They ain’t never goin’ to see it again. One-half of this stuff, enough to equip and support at least a hundred and fifty thousand men, is going to Korea and the other half is going to Indochina.”[2]

As Kissinger argued in his book: “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy” in the 1950s, the atomic bomb had made war next to impossible in Europe.

The Deep State seems to have already reached the same conclusion in 1945. The question it was confronted with was: how to justify the enormous sums invested in “defense expenditure”? The answer it seems to have come up with was to conjure up the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam.

Did Kennedy escalate the War in Vietnam?

What many books and articles have mysteriously asserted is that Lyndon B Johnson simply continued the war Kennedy started, as though he had no will of his own. An example of this nonsense is the following: “Once begun, a military commitment is a hard thing to contain. Even a small number of American troops, no matter how limited their mission, had to be protected and supplied. Under Kennedy, the advisory force grew significantly, as bases, ports, and depots were established to safely house, feed and support those directly engaged. Then came Kennedy’s assassination and Johnson’s presidency. As the nation grieved, LBJ shouldered the slain president’s ambitious agenda and made it his own: economic policies, civil rights, the moon program – and Vietnam. How would it have looked to pull the rug from under the martyred president’s most ambitious stand against communism?”[3]

Mark Bowden is by no means alone: “The view that Kennedy would have done what Johnson did—stay in Vietnam and gradually escalate the war in 1964 and 1965—is held by left, center, and right, from Noam Chomsky to Kai Bird to William Gibbons…”

“…A more thorough treatment (of this topic) appeared in 1992, with the publication of John M. Newman’s “JFK and Vietnam”. Until his retirement in 1994 Newman was a major in the U.S. Army, an intelligence officer last stationed at Fort Meade, headquarters of the National Security Agency. As an historian, his specialty is deciphering declassified records—a talent he later applied to the CIA’s long-hidden archives on Lee Harvey Oswald.”

“Newman’s argument was not a case of “counterfactual historical reasoning,” as Larry Berman described it in an early response. It was not about what might have happened had Kennedy lived. Newman’s argument was stronger: Kennedy, he claims, had decided to begin a phased withdrawal from Vietnam, that he had ordered this withdrawal to begin. Here is the chronology, according to Newman:”

“(1) On October 2, 1963, Kennedy received the report of a mission to Saigon by McNamara and Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). The main recommendations, which appear in Section I(B) of the McNamara-Taylor report, were that a phased withdrawal be completed by the end of 1965 and that the “Defense Department should announce in the very near future presently prepared plans to withdraw 1,000 out of 17,000 U.S. military personnel stationed in Vietnam by the end of 1963.” At Kennedy’s instruction, Press Secretary Pierre Salinger made a public announcement that evening of McNamara’s recommended timetable for withdrawal.”

“(2) On October 5, Kennedy made his formal decision. Newman quotes the minutes of the meeting that day:”

“The President also said that our decision to remove 1,000 U.S. advisors by December of this year should not be raised formally with Diem. Instead the action should be carried out routinely as part of our general posture of withdrawing people when they are no longer needed. (Emphasis added.)”[4]

Unfortunately for Kennedy: he kept his decision secret, with catastrophic consequences. Indeed, a case could be made that this sealed his death warrant. This act alone seems to explain his assassination, though his attempt to make peace with the Russians and his tough stance toward Big Business undoubtedly played their part in his downfall.

Sadly, I shan’t be able to deal with all the issues surrounding Vietnam I’d hoped to in this letter without sacrificing too much necessary detail and will have to postpone my efforts for another time.

Suffice it to say: Vietnam remains a potent symbol today when discussing the ongoing war in Ukraine. Some American strategists might well hope to “wear Russia down” in much the same way the conflict in Afghanistan achieved the same object while others, by contrast, fear American dollars sinking into an unfathomable hole. After all, many haven’t forgotten that inflation and economic stagnation followed closely in the wake of the escalation of 1965.

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[1] pp.35-36 Report from the Iron Mountain

[2] pp.17-18 JFK, The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, L. Fletcher Prouty

[3] p.23 Huê 1968, Mark Bowden

[4] https://bostonreview.net/articles/galbraith-exit-strategy-vietnam/