Choosing War (Fredrik Logevall)

In this book, Prof. Logevall argued that the US's involvement in Vietnam was not inevitable, there were opportunities where the US could have left Vietnam, none better than the months immediately after Lyndon Johnson was elected as President. Unfortunately he was not of the temperament to read the signals coming from his own electorate or the international community. In the end, he would have to bear a big part of the responsibility for bringing the US into war.

Whether one agrees with the thesis, this is an excellent book. Extensively researched, logically argued, and fluidly written, the book takes the reader through an exploration of the circumstances surrounding Vietnam after the French left. It takes a broad frame of reference, tackling the issues including presidential leadership, their advisers, the attitude of the electorate and the international political climate. He examined the options available at each point between 1964 and 1965 and whether a different decision could have been made. 'Yes', he argued, and in hindsight might not have been difficult, but no, these roads were not taken.

The different questions he explored include: Would JFK keep the US out of the war had he lived as some came to argue (e.g. McNamara in his book In Retrospect)? Were the attitudes of the elites at that time as they said they were after the war (eg. George Bell)? Did the 'Domino Theory' really hold? To the first of these questions, the author examined JFK’s fundamental doubts about the US’s agency in dealing with the political issue in Vietnam (pg. 37) and compared it against his actual actions. In that section the author started one of the paragraphs with these two words: And yet. That’s the author's lament. JFK, despite his doubts, first adopted a wait-and-see attitude, but would later boxed himself in with his rhetoric. The author systematically dismantled the enduring myth that JFK would have kept the US out of the war if only he had lived.

Of more interest is why LBJ, despite having won a large mandate from an electorate that expected him to keep the US out of the war, continued to stay the course and in fact progressively up the stakes, eventually Americanising the war. This the author explored in detail, taking care to explain that it was not because he felt that LBJ had managed the situation worse than JFK would have, but because he had a much longer time in the game and so was able to make many more decisions. I shall not spoil the plot by leaking his conclusions here, enough for me to say that the argument was convincing.

The final chapter of the book is a summary of the arguments but the author also expanded it to consider a few counterfactual scenarios. The fact that Prof. Logevall revisited questions he asked earlier and gave them a somewhat different treatment shows the nuance he employed in investigating this important issue of why the US ended up caught in Vietnam. The Vietnam War receive a lot of attention by historians, journalists and people who fought and suffered in the war. In all cases the motivation is to understand why and how it happened and hopefully we are able to avoid getting in such a situation in future. How much we have succeeded we still do not know, but if this book has gotten it right then we are looking at a complex mix of flawed logic, personality, arrogance and career management. Any one of which can lead any nation down this unfortunate road.

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Embers of War (Fredrik Logevall)

The Vietnam War has received extensive studies and spawn a great many books. Most of them focus on the USA's involvement in what the Vietnamese called the Second Vietnam War. Much less emphasis has been given to the First Vietnam War, that between the French and the Vietnamese. This excellent book goes a long way in adding to the small body of literature and does it with style.

The story started in the Second World War. Then, the French had to content with the Japanese. The Japanese wanted to be in Vietnam to stage the action to block aid from going to Chiang through Yunan. while there was initial apprehensions because they did not want a conflict with the US (pg. 41), they did not know that the US would counsel the French to accede to the demands of the Japanese (pg. 32).Yet this would eventually lead the US to make the fateful decision to increase economic sanctions on Japan who, by then, had decided that she had no choice but to secure the resources from Southeast Asia. Which brought it to war with the US, and having to surrender, gave the Vietnamese the opportunity to demand independence.

This book explores the question: how did the US eventually got caught in such a tragic war after the French left Vietnam? In doing so, the author spent a good amount of time focusing on the famous Domino Theory which in hindsight did not materialise. Immediately after the Second World War, the US was at best ambivalent to the Vietnam question and in fact leaned towards asking the French to give independence to the Vietnamese. The French though, would have none of that and was able to cleverly portray the fight against Ho Chi Min as that of a frontier against the spread of Communism which requires the materiel support of the US. The US would be persuaded (pg. 220, 356).

As the US got more involved, they eventually had to confront the dilemma: should they follow their anti-colonial instincts or should they support the French in the larger context of the Cold War? They first chose a position that was a non-starter for the French - to promise independence to Vietnam but at the same time fight the Communist. That was a logical recommendation to an ally helping them to fight a broader war against the spread of Communism; it was fantastical idea if one is fighting to hold on to a colony, which the French was. So the French led the Americans along, and eventually when they felt that the Americans were too bothersome, wanted to shake them off.

And I quote from Jack Higgins's book Touch the Devil: Touch the devil and you can't let go.

By 1952, the French felt that they had had enough. But by then the Americans felt that they had been in the game too deep to let the French quit (pg. 318, 346-347). The French would not be able to shake the Americans off, and would have no choice but to go on with the war, culminating in Dien Bien Phu. The Americans who at first had to underwrite the war would end up taking over from the French. There would be a few years of relative calm as the date of the promised election in Vietnam came and went and the Americans would have their own experience at not being able to let the devil go (pg. 186, 197).

Prof. Logevall is an engaging writer. I particularly enjoy the lead up to Dien Bien Phu with all the suspense and then the fiasco as the French parameters shrunk. But it is not just enjoyable writing that makes this book an important one to read. In it, one will see history rearing its head, the attitudes that the French had (eg. the sunken cost) could also later be seen on the Americans, the belief amongst the Vietnamese that the foreigners would eventually go home would be repeated in the Second Vietnam War. We are left to wonder about ourselves, do we learn?

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The Best And The Brightest (David Halberstam)

This book features almost all the people who had a hand in the decision on the US’ involvement in Vietnam. There was no question that these were the best and the brightest, which all more makes the reader wonders why the US eventually found herself in the quagmire. By the end of the book the reader may still not find the answer, but what he or she will find is a lesson in human folly and how the illusion of superior ability can lead one to arrogance, or perhaps less, over-confidence, but ending in hubris nevertheless.

This book is cleverly structured, the first half featuring one president (and the presidency) and the second half the next. Under this over-arching framework, the author added the layers below the presidents, starting with the national security advisor, secretaries of defense and states, their deputies and assistants, then the chief of staffs, and finally the ambassadors to South Vietnam. In some cases these happen to be the same people who worked across the administrations, in others there were multiples changes. But all the time the message was consistent – these are the most brilliant people, although in different ways. Yet there was no denying that these were the best and the brightest.

And thus the reader is led to ask – why then did the US eventually slipped into the Vietnam War which killed more than 50,000 Americans, severely draining the treasury, divided the country, and lost the country of a lot of its prestige and goodwill? The author did not provide a simplistic answer to this complex question, rather, he showed the mixture of personalities, beliefs, politics, and self-interest that slowly pushes the country deeper and deeper into a situation from which they could not extricate themselves, even after some have changed their minds about the US’ involvement.

At the beginning there were those who did not know what Vietnam was about, besides the unpalatable fact that it was a French colony which the French should quit, but would not. But in view of the need for France’s support in Europe a little sweetener for them in Vietnam is of negligible cost to the US. Then there were those who framed it with cold-war rhetoric of having to stop the spread of Communism in Asia. After “losing” China, it would be unthinkable to let the rest of the dominoes fall. Later it began to look to others like it was a good place to fight a good war. To be sure, there were those who tried to stop the tide and where impossible, to at least retard it. But these were in the minority, their cases always weak and their stance uncoordinated. In the end they were among the earliest casualties, and the author took us up the hierarchy again, only this time showing the sequence of the casualties: the ambassadors, the deputy and assistant secretaries, the secretaries, and ultimately the president himself. Few came out looking good, those who escaped rather unscathed politically would look unprincipled in the book.

The author did not just write a book that recorded the events and the decisions, he wrote a book to caution decision makers of all kinds. His message is for people to remember that arrogance has no place even (or especially) among the best and the brightest, for the game will eventually play you. But the biggest chill that the author gave me was not the fact that if the best and the brightest can fall into such a folly what more the lesser beings, it was that it is precisely when you think you have control of the game that you lose control. When you think you have resisted the tide because you managed to not give your opponent all that he wanted, you have actually forgotten what you had to give him in exchange for that. The illusion of being on top of things will lure you into the trap. I think this book should be kept handy, not because it would serve as a reference, but it would serve as a good reminder that even if you think you are the best and the brightest, you can still be catastrophically wrong. And then you would have to live with it.

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