Hubris?

Or realism?

“I have been observing the war in South Vietnam at close hand for almost four years,” General William Westmoreland told the National Press Club in Washington in November 1967. Westmoreland had taken command of American forces in Vietnam in 1964. A West Point veteran of World War II and the Korean War, the square-jawed South Carolinian appeared the model of the modern general. Time magazine named him “man of the year” in 1965, and he was mentioned as a future president, following the likes of Ulysses Grant and Dwight Eisenhower.

A can-do attitude comes with the military profession. At least it did in America in the wake of World War II, when America had taken on Germany and Japan, which had defied the best efforts of the rest of humanity to rein them in, and whipped them both in less time than Westmoreland had been in Vietnam.

No one displayed the positive attitude better than Westy. “During the first one-and-a-half years we were confined generally to an advisory role,”the general continued in his press club speech. “In the past two-and-a-half years I have seen the progressive commitment of U.S. troops in support of the Vietnamese. I am absolutely certain that whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing.” And the bad guys realized it. “There are indications that the Viet Cong and even Hanoi know this.”

The only potential weakness in the American position was political, Westmoreland said. Which was why he was in Washington rather than Saigon. “The enemy may be operating from the delusion that political pressure here, combined with the tactical defeat of a major unit, might force the U.S. to ‘throw in the towel.’” American leaders must stay firm, and American voters must back them. If they did, defeat of the communists was assured.

Westmoreland was saying in public what American analysts were telling themselves in private. A Special National Intelligence Estimate a week earlier declared, “Manpower is a major problem confronting the Communists. Losses have been increasing and recruitment in South Vietnam is becoming more difficult. Despite heavy infiltration from North Vietnam, the strength of the Communist military forces and political organizations in South Vietnam declined in the last year.” The enemy’s difficulties were likely to persist. “Given current Communist strategy, and levels of operations, a major effort will be necessary if the Regular forces and the guerrillas are to be maintained at or near present levels. To do so will require both a level of infiltration much higher than that observed in 1967 and intensive VC recruitment as well. Considering all the relevant factors, however, we believe there is a fairly good chance that the overall strength and effectiveness of the military forces and the political infrastructure will continue to decline.” Cracks were showing. “The Communist leadership is already having problems in maintaining morale and quality. These problems have not yet impaired overall military effectiveness, but they are likely to become more difficult.” Hanoi’s one hope was to weaken America’s will. “Communist strategy is to sustain a protracted war of attrition and to persuade the U.S. that it must pull out or settle on Hanoi’s terms.” Hence Westmoreland’s admonition to America at the press club.

Historians writing with the benefit of knowing what was just beyond Westmoreland’s horizon—the Tet offensive of early 1968, in which communist forces assaulted cities and towns all across South Vietnam, knocking American and South Vietnamese forces back on their heels—have often quoted the general’s confident assertion that the communists were losing the war as evidence of his and other American officials’ ignorance and even arrogance.

Ignorance and arrogance—summing to hubris—have indeed afflicted American foreign and military policy over the years. The can-do attitude leads in that direction. But hubris might not be the issue here. Both the intelligence estimate and Westmoreland’s speech emphasized the importance of American political will. Westmoreland wasn’t simply—or even primarily—delivering a situation report. He was acting as a cheerleader, trying to drum up the political support he knew was essential to American success in Vietnam. The intelligence estimate clearly acknowledged that the struggle in Vietnam was a war of attrition; the winner would be the side willing to hold on longer. Westmoreland knew the communists were determined; America needed to be just as determined.

Critics of Westmoreland, then and later, said he was passing the buck. At the time he spoke there were half a million U.S. troops in Vietnam, and they had at their disposal the most advanced weapons on earth. If Westmoreland’s force couldn’t defeat the communists of Vietnam, something was wrong with his leadership.

Maybe so. But there was something else. Dictatorships do wars of attrition better than democracies. To be sure, the human and material costs inflicted by American forces on the communists were far greater than the costs the communists inflicted on America. But Ho Chi Minh didn’t have have to run for reelection. Lyndon Johnson did—until the political reaction to the Tet offensive caused him to drop out of the 1968 race.

Yet democracy-versus-dictatorship was only part of the story. Dwight Eisenhower thought Ho would have won 80 percent of the vote had the election to reunify Vietnam after the French pullout in the 1950s been allowed to take place. It wasn’t, and Ho never tried the experiment on his own.

Nationalists do wars of attrition better than foreign powers trying to defeat them. Ho was a communist but he was also a nationalist, having devoted his life to ridding Vietnam of foreigners—first the French, then the Japanese, then the French again, finally the Americans. No one on the American side—not Westmoreland, not Johnson, not anyone else—had anything like Ho’s commitment to the struggle being waged in Vietnam. There was good reason for this: Vietnam meant everything to the Vietnamese, but it was never more than a sideshow for the United States. The Americans could always pack up and go home—just like the French and the Japanese. Vietnam was home for Ho and his fighters.

America did go home from Vietnam, starting the year after Tet. The fact that the offensive failed militarily, costing the communists more casualties than they inflicted, was beside the point. The energy the offensive displayed belied Westmoreland’s claim that the communists were losing. Yet it substantiated the less-quoted part of his speech: about the importance of political support. American support began declining conspicuously amid the offensive, and it never stopped declining until all the troops were gone.

After wars are lost, it’s tempting to say they never should have been fought. Many probably shouldn’t have been. But you never know how a war will turn out until you fight it. A free South Vietnam was worth something to the United States, not to mention the South Vietnamese people. Was it worth the cost of a war? That depended on how much the war cost. And the cost couldn’t be known until the war was fought.

The Tet offensive revealed that the war was going to cost more than Americans had thought. At which point they decided to wind it down. This was a realistic response, based on new information. Realism was cold comfort to the loved ones of soldiers who had died in Vietnam. But it was better than throwing more lives away in a losing cause.

The fact that Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, did precisely this—throwing away lives in a losing cause—by taking four years to exit Vietnam is a separate matter, reflecting neither hubris nor realism, but cynicism. Which is a subject worth an essay of its own.