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Vietnam: An Unnecessary Book
Eric Alterman
REVIEWED IN THIS ESSAY Vietnam, The Necessary War by Michael Lind The Free Press, 1999 314 pp. $25
Michael Lind has written five books and edited another in just four years. Vietnam, The Necessary War makes that count at least one too many. This book will likely destroy Lind's reputation among serious students of the war and its domestic implications. It will certainly bring him no new admirers among that war's many millions of honorable opponents.
Politically and ideologically, Lind is unclassifiable. He began his career as an employee of conservative and neoconservative publications, only to denounce their intellectual leaders in highly conspiratorial terms. Next, he careened from left to right, publishing one day in the Nation (where I recruited him) and the next in National Review, and virtually everything in between. At one moment he is denouncing Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol for cozying up to the anti-Semitic crank Pat Robertson. Turn around, and he is viciously attacking David Halberstam, Garry Wills, and Michael Walzer for being dupes and apologists for communist dictators. Currently Washington editor of Harper's and a senior fellow of the New America Foundation, Lind is a seemingly limitless font of ideas and observations. Many of those that appeared in his first book, The Next American Nation, were quite brilliant. The ones that appear in Vietnam, to put it charitably, are not.
Lind's argument is as follows: he admits that Vietnam itself was of "no intrinsic value" to the United States. But the war was "necessary," nevertheless "to demonstrate America's credibility as a military power and a reliable ally to its enemies and allies around the world." Hence, U.S. political and military leaders "should have imposed an informal limit on the number of American lives it was willing to spend" in order to "preserve the military and diplomatic credibility of the United States" in the global cold war.
Reading this book, which features a bright red globe with a sinister hammer shadowed across it, it is hard to believe that Lind has been alive for the past thirty years, much less studying the history of the Vietnam War. Yes, he is able to find some recently unearthed intra-party communist braggadocio to support his thesis, as well as a few conservative historians who share some of his broad biases. But in his rush to exonerate the Johnson administration for its callous lies and strategic misjudgments, he has apparently missed out on some of the most fundamental lessons of the past quarter century.
As implied by the book's lurid cover, Lind's vision of the cold war is vintage 1965. He speaks of "the lessons of Munich" as if they were universally agreed upon and applicable across all boundaries and cultures. He resurrects the domino theory, though he calls it the "bandwagon" effect. ("After the first major defeat or retreat, or perhaps the second, third, or fourth in a row, confidence in America's military capability, or the determination to use it, would have collapsed. At that point, something akin to a panic in the stock market would have ensued. In a remarkably short period of time-a few years, perhaps even a few months-the worldwide American alliance system would have unraveled as European, Asian, Middle Eastern, African and Latin American states hurriedly made deals with Moscow.") He pays little attention to schisms within the communist world, nor to conditions of local poverty and political oppression that give rise to Marxist-tinged revolution. Amazingly, he seems to believe that the Soviet bloc "was now at the height of its global power in December 1979" following the invasion of Afghanistan. Is it possible to miss the irony here? Barely more than a decade later, this alleged global colossus would collapse of its weight, unable to shoulder even a fraction of the burden with which Lind credits it.
Lind believes that the Vietnam War was necessary to impress our allies with our seriousness of purpose. How then to explain the fact that virtually every single one of those allies thought the war to be a catastrophic and deeply debilitating diversion from the main challenges of constructing a stable postwar order amid a continuing East- West competition? In one extremely odd passage, he argues that this complaint by European and Japanese leaders "only demonstrates the degree of their anxiety about the Soviet threat and the shallowness of their confidence in American credibility." Lind must know he is on shaky ground here, as he quotes a Japanese trade official in 1982 threatening that Japan will join the communist bloc if America does not relax its pressure on Japan to open its markets. Lind admits that such threats "may not have been credible." In fact they are laughable, and no one besides Lind appears to have ever taken them seriously. He insists, however, that the "fact that they were made at all is significant." Just why, he does not say.
Lind's logic grows even stranger when he states that "what the United States needed in 1969 was a Charles DeGaulle." He apparently fails to notice that the real Charles DeGaulle had very definite things to say about the war from day one, and none are them are consistent with any of Lind's arguments. (As early as the spring of 1964, the French president told George Ball that "our position in Vietnam was hopeless" and the former French colony was a "rotten country-le pays pourri" as his country had learned "to its sorrow.")
Moreover Lind's history of the war is oddly checkered, cookie-cut to fit his ideological arguments. He insists that the Gulf of Tonkin resolution provided more than sufficient constitutional justification for the entire war effort, regardless of whether the Johnson administration lied about what happened there-though he cannot quite bring himself to admit that they did. (Lind also misstates the date of the first Tonkin incident, and misspells the name of the U.S. ship involved, the Maddox, making it extremely unlikely that he consulted the definitive work on the subject, Edwin E. Moise's Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War, published back in 1996.) Lind compares the constitutionality of Vietnam favorably with that of Korea, noting that the latter was fought without a constitutionally mandated declaration as well. But he fails to address the point that Korea was fought under a UN Security Council resolution that legally bound the United States to intervene, and to which Congress was a party. In the case of Vietnam, all Johnson had to hang his 500,000 troops on was a hastily arranged resolution passed with no debate and based on reports that turned out to be entirely fictional. In fact virtually none of the lies Johnson told the American people about the war are mentioned here. The war's lack of democratic accountability-something that has deeply troubled the military ever since- is never addressed. Lacking therefore, is any understanding of the outrage that these lies engendered when people like Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair J.William Fulbright realized they had been purposely deceived.
Perhaps most egregious of all is Lind's treatment of the opponents of the war. Much of this section feels as though it could have been lifted from Norman Podhoretz's 1982 McCarthyite tract Why We Were in Vietnam. Indeed, Lind relies on many of the same primary sources, most particularly Guenter Lewy's America in Vietnam, published in 1978. Like Podhoretz, Lind speaks of a takeover of the Democratic Party by "left-liberals and radical activists." He lumps together the very different critiques of Noam Chomsky, William Appleman Williams, and Garry Wills, taking a gratuitous swipe at Wills's Pulitzer Prize-winning book on Abraham Lincoln, without ever mentioning that he was the recipient of a savage 1997 Wills review in the New York Times Book Review. He speaks of the purged Asian specialists of the State Department as "gullible dupes of Chinese communist propaganda." He refers to the Communist Party of the 1960s and 1970s as a "major institution of the American radical left," which is nonsense. He very nearly accuses Robert Kennedy of treason on the basis of the sketchiest of evidence. (The word "alleged" for RFK's "treachery" comes and goes as is convenient, though the quality of the evidence presented never improves.) Using the tactics of guilt by one-time association, he supposes that Robert McNamara's postwar dovishness "may have been motivated by personal factors comparable to those that have driven McNamara's former colleague, former attorney general Ramsey Clark, to assume the role of perpetual critic of US 'war crimes' from a position on the extreme left." (McNamara's crimes: He "made a pilgrimage to Moscow in 1986 to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev and met with Fidel Castro in Havana in 1992.") <snip>
