American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War

Professor David Kaiser of the Strategy and Policy Department of the Naval War College tells us the real story behind the bureaucrats who put us into Vietnam, and in doing so lives up to the highest traditions of the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps which have generally been far ahead of the other services in their resistance to bureaucratic pressures from politicians. The CIA refused to provide Kaiser with anything but token documents, violating the Freedom of Information Act. Kaiser shows how politicians including Presidents Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson grew up under the spell of Churchill's anti-appeasement speeches to believe that the USA had to become the World Policeman. When he became President, Eisenhower began U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia covertly and the Joint Chiefs of Staff except General Shoup of the Marines were badgered into accepting this. When John F. Kennedy became President, both his Senate and Navy service led him to oppose intervention for a long time, in agreement with the U.S. Senate Democrats (Mansfield, Humphrey, etc.) and isolationist Republicans (Dirksen, etc.). The State Department Bureaucrats (who controlled the CIA) and their allies in related departments and the Joint Chiefs so badgered and pressured Kennedy that he eventually collapsed under their bombardment and agreed to intervention in Laos. When Johnson came in as President, he made full scale intervention. Some readers may recall that I have reviewed biographies of Field Marshalls Montgomery and Slim of Great Britain and Marshall/General Zhukov of Russia but not Eisenhower. The Allies produced 4 creative geniuses in World WarII: Montgomery, Slim, Zhukov, and Admiral Nimitz. Eisenhower was not one of them. He was then and later more suited to bureaucratic Ingenious Follower status than to individual Creative Genius status, like Lyndon Johnson. Our British and French allies opposed the intervention (Churchill would probably have opposed it too) not because of De Gaulle's *intransigence* as the news media claimed, but because they are the two nations with the most creative geniuses (along with Italy) in world history. When all is said and done, World War II was needed to defend the USA, but most wars are not and were not (like World War I, which was a bureaucratic war and nothing more). I hope that we start thinking more about jobs and education and environment at home and less about creating overseas what we cannot do at home.

In an interesting, provocative, well-written and often very surprising work of careful scholarship, author David Kaiser has raised the level of intellectual discussion regarding the origins and prosecution of the war in Vietnam. Using a range of new archival materials only now available, he carefully constructs an intriguing and disturbing portrait of individuals out of control. In this sense this book is a worthy companion piece to David Halberstam's memorable book, "The Best And The Brightest", in the fact that it argues that it was a number of specific individuals with their own personal credos, private agendas, and belief systems that led to the deepening involvement in Southeast Asian affairs. However, this is not to suggest that Professor Kaiser either agrees with Halberstam's thesis or to argue that he has nothing new or worthwhile to reveal. Yet there are undeniable threads of similarity running through both works. Most interesting is Kaiser's contention that it was the unique and singular "can-do" Yankee spirit and aggressive attitude of the World War Two generation that directly led to the decisions to interfere in the internal policies of Vietnam. Unlike previous tomes such as Halberstam's as well as Stanley Karnow's excellent book, "Vietnam", that portrayed President Eisenhower's policies of global containment of communism as extremely cautious and careful, Kaiser presents a mass of documentary evidence that reveals that it was precisely those decisions and policy predispositions established by Eisenhower, including a willingness to use nuclear weapons tactically, that later led to the fateful moves toward greater involvement by Lyndon Johnson. Even more interesting, Kaiser presents evidence by way of policy changes made By President Kennedy illustrating his own deep concern and reticence regarding involvement in the former French Indochina. In fact, the author shows that for the three years of his administration, Kennedy purposefully denied repeated attempts by both his senior advisors and the military to significantly widen our action in Vietnam. According to Kaiser, while JFK did allow escalation by way of many more military advisors, he repeatedly quite specifically denied, both verbally and by way of documented minutes to meetings with advisors, authorization to escalate by introducing direct combat involvement. However, the author argues that even Kennedy was seriously misled and misserved as to the status of ongoing efforts by deliberate deception on the part of that great national hero and contemporary revisionist historian, Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense in Kennedy's administration (see my review of McNamara's book). As a result, Kennedy died believing the situation in Vietnam to be much more constrained and careful than it actually was. With Kennedy's departure from the scene in late 1963, events began to move much more quickly and fatefully toward our blind involvem

These days, not many argue with Tom Brokaw's coinage, "Greatest Generation," for those who came of age with World War II and held power in America from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Back in the '60s, David Kaiser reminds us, this was the generation of Rusk, McNamara, the two Bundys, alias the "best and brightest" on the far side of the angry "generation gap." In this extraordinary book, Kaiser reveals more than just who wrote which memo for whom; he also describes and interprets the peer motivations that made Vietnam the tragic failure of these men of geopolitical hubris, numbers-crunching technocracy, and "controlled response" secularism--much to the anger of their draft-age children.Kaiser's sharp eye for generational dynamics is what makes "American Tragedy" such a fine and complete history, one that should be required reading for anyone who has read or heard Brokaw's encomia. Yes, this was a "great generation," but also one with great flaws. They, not Boomers, were the real Vietnam Generation.

David E. Kaiser, American Tragedy : Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)As the Vietnam War recedes into history, debate over its causes and conduct continues. In this massive, authoritative study of the war's origins, David Kaiser asserts that Dwight Eisenhower initiated policies calling for military responses to Communist aggression in Southeast Asia, and John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, although they may have questioned these policies, never changed them. Kennedy was reluctant to commit American ground forces in Vietnam. In contrast, Johnson was determined to confront North Vietnam, and the war began in earnest early in 1965, when the bombing campaign commenced and ground forces were introduced. Kaiser offers the provocative theses that the war was the work of the "GI generation," a term he borrows from William Strauss and Neil Howe's 1991 book Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069, for men born between 1901 and 1924 who lived through the Great Depression and then did most of the fighting during World War II. According to Kaiser, the "strengths" of the GI generation included a "willingness to tackle tough and costly tasks, a faith in the institutions of the government of the United States, a great capacity for teamwork and consensus, and a relentless optimism," and its weaknesses included "an unwillingness to question basic assumptions, or even to admit the possibility of failure, or to understand that the rest of the American population was less inclined to favor struggle and sacrifice for their own stake." Kennedy and Johnson, most of their senior civilian advisers, and all of the Joint Chiefs, belonged to the GI generation, and they "almost unquestionably accepted the need to resist Communist expansion wherever it took place." Nevertheless, the Kennedy administration never agreed about policy in Vietnam. According to Kaiser, throughout most of 1961, Kennedy "resisted the bureaucracy's repeated calls for full-scale American military intervention in Southeast Asia." Events in1962 made intervention more certain, and the Pentagon began planning "to defeat the Viet Cong...with conventional military operations." But, by that time, President Kennedy was increasingly reliant on State Department official Roger Hillsman, who believed that "[c]onventional military tactics were ineffective against guerrillas." Ngo Dinh Diem's government in South Vietnam also posed serious problems. The regime received significant American aid, and its army was wholly financed by the United States, but "Diem never showed the slightest tendency to follow American advice." To the contrary, Diem relied upon his widely-hated brother Ngo Dinh Nhu. In late 1961, when the U.S. proposed "fundamental changes in the operation of Diem's government and army in order to win the struggle against the Communists," Diem resisted. Coup rumors circulated

This book tells us things that previous books haven't, apparently because of newly released documents the author managed to get access to. He is very persuasive about his theories of what went wrong and when. It sheds a whole new light on this period of history, and it convinced me that several things I thoughtI knew about it were wrong.Everyone with an interest in this terrible war should read it.