For many historians of a certain age, the Vietnam War was the formative intellectual experience, which shaped our understanding of the United States and its history.

There were searing realizations from that time that never left us: how political leaders could lie -- boldly, blatantly and repetitively -- and win a mandate for unnecessary war; how the cynical invocation of democracy and freedom could conceal American domination and support for dictatorship; how easy it was for the White House to co-opt Congress and intimidate the press; how the vast American “war machine” could rain unimaginable suffering on foreign civilians whom it was claiming to save; and (perhaps most shocking of all) how willing our political leaders were to sacrifice tens of thousands of young Americans in a project that could not succeed.

Now forty years later, all these elements are back as the US fights an unnecessary war in Iraq, in which victory is a receding possibility, where every fresh American initiative grows the opposition and each new step makes it harder to leave. So the question arises: “Was anything learned from Vietnam?”

I believe that at the level of mass opinion, the answer is “not much.” The once momentous events of the Vietnam era have been assimilated to the celebratory narrative of the Cold War. In that simple tale, Communist aggression threatened the peace and freedom of the world, but over the course of decades American power forced a halt, a retreat and then finally the collapse of a ruthless enemy.

A certain dark cloud still hangs over the Vietnam War. It was a war in which America was defeated, in which soldiers were somehow betrayed, and in which U.S. society was somehow rent asunder. But the central truth of that experience -- the death of literally millions of people for no defensible reason, caused by policy failures in Washington -- has been virtually eradicated.

In reflecting on this, I think that we as historians need to take some responsibility. While recognizing all the larger forces in our culture that bury uncomfortable realities, we might have done a better job. It is one of the ironies of my generation that the insights gleaned from the Vietnam experience sent so many of us into intellectual flight from the study of “powerful white men.” It is a positive development for our profession that history has become more inclusive and focused on diverse groups. But what is not positive is how attention drifted away from those whose decisions continued to shape developments here in the United States and abroad. And who are shaping them still.

This abdication has many aspects – a shortage of talented people specializing in the Vietnam War, a shortage of talented people specializing in the history of US foreign policy, the marginalizing of these subjects in the curriculum (not merely in the public schools but the colleges and universities), a neglect of these subjects in modern textbooks, the lack of well-written books accessible to a general audience, the paucity of historical “experts” participating in the contemporary debate.

I am offering these critical remarks because I think the present situation is so grave. Despite many parallel elements, Iraq is no Vietnam. It is far more dangerous and poses a more profound challenge to our domestic institutions. We urgently need historians to be on their feet, functioning as public intellectuals willing to address the actions of “powerful white men” and using our knowledge in every possible venue to debate the critical issues of our time.

In the minutes that remain, I want to turn to a central feature of the Vietnam experience - the forfeiting of American and foreign lives in a doomed endeavor. How can we understand this? And what is the relevance to the present?

Among historians studying the Vietnam conflict, there is a certain silent competition about which president or period was the most “irrational.” With archives now open, what is striking about each phase is the accumulated intelligence pointing to an eventual defeat. And yet each Administration persists.

As someone writing about Nixon and Kissinger, I am supremely confident that these two gentlemen win the “irrationality sweepstakes.” To understand this, we need to go back to 1968. In the aftermath of Tet, the antiwar movement had scored a significant achievement by making it politically impossible for any American president to increase the number of troops going to Vietnam. And it created enormous public pressure (partly mediated through Congress) for a significant decrease in the American troops that were over there.

When Richard Nixon began his presidency, he pondered the fate of Lyndon Johnson and heeded the advice of political advisors, who urged him to begin a policy of troop withdrawals. By the end of 1969, significant increments were coming out of Vietnam.

Yet Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger were determined to win the war, to retain South Vietnam as an anti-communist bastion. This left the question: if 550,000 American troops were unable to prevail, why would fewer succeed? The answer as we all know was “Vietnamization”—turning back increased responsibility to the South Vietnamese Army. But that policy too had been tried and failed. Kennedy and Johnson had escalated US involvement because no matter how much money and weaponry was sent, the Army of South Vietnam would not stand and fight.

For most top officials, the implication was clear: if the US continued drawing down troops, it would lose the war. Yet Nixon and Kissinger steadfastly resisted this logic and the associated stream of bad news. Something would work: cutting access routes from Laos and Cambodia, using air power in new and more devastating ways, seducing the Communist superpowers into pressuring Hanoi. None of this panned out. And the war continued.

Yet so many knew better, recognized the mutual delusions of Nixon and Kissinger, understood that more American lives were being lost in pursuit of an unachievable goal. As late as December 1972, when the peace agreement was virtually signed, Nixon ordered the infamous Christmas bombings. Anguished military officials wondered why he was jeopardizing more US pilots and wasting the planes when everything was settled? These questions were ignored and the bombings proceeded.

In Richard Nixon’s first term of office, close to 20,000 Americans died, approximately 1-2 million Southeast Asians.

Ironically, it was John Kerry who most eloquently addressed this profligacy when he testified in Congress in April 1971: “Each day…someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn’t have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can’t say we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won’t be and these are his words, the “ first American president to lose a war’.”

John Kerry had it right. By 1971, there were no important American stakes in Vietnam, other than a national reluctance to appear weak and Nixon’s political need be undefeated. Flimsy reasons, which controlled events. But what made this possible was the very existence of the “national security state,” which had developed over decades and eroded democratic controls. The business of that state was war and its untrammeled leader was the president. Any chief executive bent on making or continuing a war, would be almost impossible to stop, unless Congress -- still accountable to the people-- did the job.

Let us ask ourselves, why did so many former secretaries of state and defense line up this week for a photo opportunity with President Bush? Who only listened for ten minutes? Who clearly had no interest in their views? Because these were the national security managers of the past, people who by temperament, training and life experience could never resist the temptations of power and who could never definitively reject military force as an instrument of national policy.

Even though the delusions of Nixon and Kissinger were well recognized by members of the bureaucracy, who whispered in corridors and leaked juicy items to the press, nobody important quit, nobody important went public, nobody important directly challenged the president or Kissinger, nobody important said out loud, “You are killing people for nothing.”

If this sounds familiar and applicable to the present, there is one important difference, which we cannot afford to overlook. Unlike Vietnam, there are real risks to the United States in leaving Iraq and important stakes there. We can reiterate the many ways in which the American presence in Iraq is fanning the insurgency. But this does not mean that if the US leaves that the situation would stabilize. There might well be an expanding civil war, which could engulf neighboring states. And this would take place in a region, rich in oil and vital to the prosperity of the United States and the industrial world.

If it was so difficult to disengage from Vietnam -- a symbolic piece of real estate with no intrinsic importance-- how much more difficult will it be to leave Iraq?

When Bush went to war in Iraq, I think most of us recognized that he was driving the car over the cliff, that there would be no good choices on the way down. And so it has developed. All the options are dangerous. From a humanitarian and even practical point of view, we might think that the wiser choice is to withdraw now. But can the custodians of the “national security”/ warfare state make that decision? To leave the battlefield voluntarily while danger lurks? I don’t think so. Which is why I would suppose that all those secretaries of state and defense gathered around Bush, will grumble and complain and tell each other how out of reality he is and how many mistakes have been made, and then turn around and say, “America must win.”

Therefore, the only hope resides in us -- the people who are not part of the “national security/warfare state” or trapped in its doctrines, who must keep organizing from the bottom up a massive resistance to this Iraq policy. We are finally seeing some movement in Congress, which is the only arena in which we can prevail. But that movement will be paralyzed by the Bush counter-attack and the warnings of the foreign-policy elite unless there is popular fire, an aroused and informed citizenry that will say, “Not one more soldier! Not one more dollar!” In that effort, we as historians have a vital role to play, if we find our voice.

Related Links

R. J. Del Vecchio: Lessons of Viet Nam ... By Whose Judgment?