More than thirty-five years past the 1968 Tet Offensive provides an excellent vantage point from which to re-examine the alleged truths about the Vietnam War. One such ‘truth’ is that President Lyndon Baines Johnson, in sending U.S. Marines ashore in March 1965, followed shortly thereafter by U.S. Army ground combat units, broke the strategic continuity of American involvement in Vietnam and, in so doing, paved the way for the U.S. forces’ ultimate defeat.

But that theory cannot withstand dispassionate analysis. The American commitment to Vietnam was very much part of the overall U.S. Cold War strategy. As President Harry S. Truman said on June 27, 1950, at the beginning of the Korean War, the attack on Korea made it ‘plain beyond all doubt that communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent nations and will now use armed invasion and war.’ Containment of such Communist expansion in Southeast Asia would remain the bedrock of U.S. national and military policy for the next 25 years.

The Eisenhower administration approached nation building in South Vietnam in the classic terms of Cold War confrontation. An international alliance — the South East Asia Treaty Organization in the case of South Vietnam — was supposed to deter Communist forces from conventional aggression by threatening belligerent Communist regimes with conventional warfare, backed by a possible nuclear strike by the United States if the fighting got out of hand. Then American money would prime the pump of economic development and ameliorate dire social conditions in the nations under Communist attack. American advisers would work with local governments and military units. In theory, successful nation building would defeat the Communists and forestall any American involvement in a conventional ground war.

American policy toward an independent South Vietnam first took shape in the late summer and early fall of 1954, after the Geneva Conference armistice agreement between French Union forces and Ho Chi Minh’s government created two states, North and South Vietnam. In a letter to South Vietnam’s new leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, dated October 1, 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower explained the rationale for his support of South Vietnam: ‘The purpose of this offer is to assist the Government of Vietnam in developing and maintaining a strong, viable state, capable of resisting attempted subversion or aggression through military means … . Such a government would, I hope, be so responsive to the nationalist aspirations of its people, so enlightened in purpose and effective in performance, that it will be respected both at home and abroad and discourage any who might wish to impose a foreign ideology on your free people.’

The Kennedy administration sustained and even intensified this strategic approach to containment of Communist expansion in Vietnam. President John F. Kennedy responded belatedly to Hanoi’s 1959 decision to subvert South Vietnam by increasing the size and scope of American financial and advisory assistance to the South Vietnamese. But Kennedy and his advisers remained well within the conceptual limits of classic nation-building theory: America’s role was to provide South Vietnam with supplementary skills and resources to accelerate indigenous economic development, political mobilization by state structures and military self-reliance.

National Security Action Memorandum 52, issued on May 11, 1961, set forth the Kennedy administration’s policy for South Vietnam, essentially affirming the previous Eisenhower policy. It stated, ‘The U.S. objective and concept of operations stated in the report are approved: to prevent communist domination of South Vietnam; to create in that country a viable and increasingly democratic society, and to initiate, on an accelerated basis, a series of mutually supporting actions of a military, political, economic, psychological and covert character designed to achieve this objective.’

Later, President Richard M. Nixon’s program of ‘Vietnamization,’ under which American forces withdrew and the South Vietnamese increased their own war-fighting capacity, again invoked the theme of nation building, but only after many Americans had lost confidence in South Vietnam’s capacity to prevail in the long run against Hanoi.

In between the Eisenhower administration’s programs and Nixon’s Vietnamization effort, an apparent aberration in American strategy occurred. Beginning in March 1965 — at the request of General William C. Westmoreland, the MACV commander — President Johnson committed to South Vietnam an American field army of two Marine and seven Regular Army divisions with appropriate logistic, air and naval support. Many analysts have been misled by this 1965 escalation of military force into concluding that it represented a change of U.S. strategy in Vietnam. Controversy then grew around the wisdom of this imputed innovation in America’s Cold War policy. This new strategy was said to have resulted in South Vietnam’s defeat at Communist hands.

But LBJ’s 1965 decision to escalate the force deployed in Vietnam did not signal a discontinuity in strategy, nor did it represent an Americanization of the war so that an acceptable victory over Hanoi could be obtained unilaterally by American arms. LBJ’s escalation of direct American participation in the war was a response to a prior escalation by Hanoi in 1964, in which North Vietnamese regular forces had been committed to battle in South Vietnam. Faced with the potential defeat of South Vietnam’s volunteer armed forces, Johnson authorized General Westmoreland to fight a limited war with American and allied combat units. Westmoreland was instructed to prevent the fall of South Vietnam as an independent nation-state governed by its own people and to secure its borders against further North Vietnamese incursions.

In April 1965, when he acted on recommendations to use American air power against North Vietnam, President Johnson reiterated his reasons for that decision and for subsequent escalation of the war. In an address at Johns Hopkins University, he said: ‘Our objective is the independence of South Vietnam and its freedom from attack. We want nothing for ourselves — only that the people of South Vietnam be allowed to guide their own country in their own way. We will do everything necessary to reach that objective, and we will do only what is absolutely necessary.’

Johnson’s strategic objective in South Vietnam, as articulated at Johns Hopkins, was the same one set forth previously by Kennedy in National Security Action Memorandum 52. In his April 1965 speech, Johnson limited himself to a defensive strategy of containment in Indochina. His limited goal was to keep North Vietnam from destroying South Vietnam’s capacity for self-defense, preserving its ‘independence and freedom from attack.’ Johnson never meant for American forces to win the Vietnam War by taking offensive action in the traditional sense. American soldiers were merely intended to act as guardians at the gate until the South Vietnamese could reconstitute their armed forces consistent with their collective national resolve.

Two decisions made by Johnson in 1967 offer compelling evidence for interpreting his controversial escalation of the American role in the Vietnam War as a temporary expedient rather than as a new strategy for victory. First, he sent Ellsworth Bunker to South Vietnam as the new ambassador with private instructions to prepare for the disengagement of American forces. Second, that summer he denied Westmoreland’s request for substantial augmentation of American combat forces for tactical use against Communist base areas inside South Vietnam.

Johnson gave his instructions to Bunker in a private meeting between the two men. Both have since died, but Bunker once related to me his recollections of that meeting and told me how his subsequent decisions as the senior American official in South Vietnam had been shaped by Johnson’s directive to disengage American forces from Vietnam. After the war ended, I interviewed Bunker at his Vermont farmhouse about his experiences as American ambassador in South Vietnam from 1967 to 1973. I asked him, ‘By the way, why did Lyndon select you to go to Saigon?’

‘That’s easy,’ Bunker replied. ‘Because of the Dominican Republic. I had gotten him out of the Dominican Republic and still accomplished his political objectives there.’

In the spring of 1965, Johnson had sent 25,000 American troops to the Dominican Republic to prevent pro-Castro elements from coming to power in the civil war that was about to start between right- and left-wing armed Dominican units. Johnson had found it easy to send in American troops, but then his diplomats had had trouble arranging a political solution to the rivalries that had brought the country to the edge of chaos. Bunker found the negotiated solution Johnson desired, and the American troops came home.

The call for Bunker to go to Saigon had come suddenly and unexpectedly. En route home from a conference in Buenos Aires, he had received a message that Secretary of State Dean Rusk wanted to see him. Rusk told Bunker: ‘The president is in Texas and wants to see you Tuesday morning on his return. But I forewarn you that he wants you to go to Vietnam.’ As scheduled, Bunker saw President Johnson alone in the Oval Office. The president quickly came to the point — ‘I want you to go to Vietnam,’ he said. ‘It’s the most important problem facing the country today, and I need you there.’

LBJ avoided specifics and focused on the mission he wanted Bunker to accomplish in South Vietnam. Johnson wanted to begin withdrawing American forces. To de-escalate without losing the struggle demanded that the expansion and training of the South Vietnamese army be accelerated so that it could take over more and more combat responsibilities. As the South Vietnamese capability increased, Johnson believed the United States could withdraw units without risk of defeat. Simultaneously, LBJ wanted the South Vietnamese to accelerate the development of a participatory political structure, which would make the people completely responsible for their nation’s destiny.

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