By Wallace Carroll
Editor and Publisher
Winston-Salem Journal
Published March 17, 1968
What will best serve the national interest of the United States? — that is the guts of the problem in Vietnam. Will we advance our national interest by prolonging and enlarging the war? Or will we simply advance the interests of the Soviet Union and Communist China? If we now make a cool appraisal and find that the war is actually making the world safe for Communism, we will have to open our minds to hard, new decisions.
1. How did we get bogged down like this in Vietnam? Did we go in as part of a considered strategic plan? Did the National Security Council or the Joint Chiefs of Staff determine that this was the place to crack the ribs of international Communism?
The Game of Dominos
No, there was no long-range plan. No responsible American ever suggested in advance that we should tie down our first team in an unending war against the Communist fourth team in their kind of fighting … on their kind of terrain … in a place where we can do no real harm to the main forces of Communism. We slipped into a war that grew bigger than we ever expected. And we floundered deeper and deeper into the jungle as we talked emotionally about the containment of Communism, the aggressive designs of Red China, and the “falling domino theory.”
2. The dominos are falling all right while we remain hypnotized by Vietnam. Look first at the Middle East. Iraq, with its precious oil fields, with its gateway to the still greater riches of the Persian Gulf, has come under Soviet influence. So have Syria and Egypt, with their commanding position at the strategic crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa on the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea. So has Algeria, with its air and naval bases on the southern flank of the Western Mediterranean. Under Communist manipulation, Cyprus has changed from a NATO bastion to a divisive issue between NATO’s eastern partners, Greece and Turkey. The Soviet navy has broken into the Mediterranean in strength never dreamed of by the Czars. It is using the former British base of Alexandria, the former French base near Oran, and other facilities now denied to us. While we keep our minds and energies concentrated on Vietnam, Soviet power is flowing silently, relentlessly into the Middle East and the Mediterranean.
Into the Vacuum
3. Soviet power is also flowing into the Red Sea and all the way down to the Indian Ocean — into the vacuum left by the withdrawing British. The western shores of the Red Sea belong to Egypt and the Sudan, both armed and manipulated by the Russians. On the eastern shore, Soviet military advisers and even combat flyers are with the anti-western forces in Yemen. And the new South Yemen Republic has offered Moscow an air and naval base at Aden near the narrow gate between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. Make no mistake about it: these moves are aimed at us. They are designed to deny the whole Red Sea area to our sea and air power and to force us out of the oil fields that a still friendly Saudi Arabian government permits us to exploit.
4. Now look at Europe. The Grand Alliance of NATO is falling apart. De Gaulle works ceaselessly against us and against our best friends, the British. We are too distracted by Vietnam to pause for a moment and devise the ways to foil his malevolence. West Germany, the key to the Continent, and the one decisive area in the entire Cold War, is growing restive because of our indifference and our clumsy handling of such sensitive issues as the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. In West Berlin, an anti-American demonstration would have been unthinkable five years ago; now 10,000 people turn out to damn us for what we are doing in Vietnam. The Soviet and West German governments are beginning to feel each other out. If they ever make a deal — as they did at Rapallo in 1922 and in the Hitler–Stalin agreement of 1939 — the whole game of dominos will be over. If that happens, we Americans can come home and play solitaire.
The Dollar Quakes
5. Next, consider the agony of the dollar under the pressures of the Vietnam war. Remember the dollar is more than money — it is a powerful weapon in the arsenal of the free world against the forces of disorder. It was a stable dollar that made possible the tremendous expansion of world trade in the past twenty years. This trade created jobs, prosperity, progress wherever men were free to exchange the goods they produced. If the dollar should collapse, trade would contract, factories slow down, jobs disappear, people go hungry around the world. Riots and even wars might follow. In short, the strain on the dollar threatens the stability of the free world. The Kremlin is watching — with high expectations.
6. At home, the war poisons our national life and our personal lives and keeps us from dealing boldly with the crying needs of our society. The racial revolution — and it is a revolution — is gathering pace in the inexorable way of all revolutions. It now has devoured, or is about to devour, its early leaders, the apostles of non-violence. It has moved from the courts and the legislatures to the streets, from the paths of legality and persuasion to the ways of violence. This nation still has the wealth and the wisdom, the compassion and the character to hold this revolution within bounds. But will it do so? The answer is doubtful, so long as we pour $30 billion a year and so much of our national energy into the bottomless pit of Vietnam.
7. A presidential commission warns us of the chasm that is opening between hostile whites and blacks. But there is another ominous chasm — that between our youth and their elders. Most of our young people are deeply, honestly troubled. They do not understand this war. To their credit, they want America to stand for something in the eyes of the world — something better than the hideous violence we have been driven to in Vietnam. If they felt any other way, we would really have to worry about them. Can we afford to have their idealism turn to scorn, their faith in American democracy turn to cynicism?
Another Danger
8.The revulsion against the war among these young people, and other decent Americans, is opening another danger. For the first time since Stalin’s day, the Communists are using their old infiltration tactics with some success. Playing on the honest emotions of Americans, they are slipping into peace groups, student organizations, and other legitimate associations. Indeed, the Stalinist tactics of the “Popular Front” and other front movements are being revived around the world. It is ironic that this should be happening at a time when the Communist “bloc” is being riven by centrifugal forces. But the war is giving our home-grown Muscovites, Maoists, and Castroites a chance to pursue once again the divisive tactics of the 1930s.
9. The war has also divided the President and the Congress. In the Armed Services Committees of the House and Senate, distrust of the administration is so high that President Johnson has had to sacrifice his Secretary of Defense. The Secretary of State fights his own personal war with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee scorns the President’s pleas to help save the dollar. Can any administration hope to carry on an effective foreign policy in these conditions?
10. Truth, we are told, is the first casualty in any war. This war has played havoc with our credibility — our credibility to ourselves and to the world. When President Johnson and Secretary Rusk insist that we are willing to negotiate, many remain unconvinced. Who believes Hubert Humphrey and Walt Rostow when they say the Saigon government is stronger than it was before the Tet offensive? Who believes our generals after all their rosy predictions? We have even debunked our own airpower — the more we bomb, the more we lose. Never before in our lifetime has there been such a crisis of confidence at home. Seldom has America inspired less confidence abroad.
11. By this time it must be clear that the Vietnam war is not our kind of war. True, our men have never fought with greater valor. True, no nation has ever performed such prodigies of logistics across such vast distances. But our military leaders have been unable to convert all this valor, all this ingenuity, all this outpouring of blood and treasure into security for even a single province. Their estimates have been wrong ever since General O’Daniel looked at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and pronounced the French position sound. Year after year since then we have heard the confident predictions, always followed by cries for reinforcements. Only last November General Westmoreland told us the situation was “very, very encouraging.” Two months later the Viet Cong were playing games around his headquarters. And now he is asking for 200,000 more men.
12. Of course, we can continue to “escalate.” We can throw in more men, step up the bombing of the North, blockade Haiphong. But we have been putting in more men for 10 years, and we cannot even protect the capital and our military headquarters from mortar attack. We have already put more tonnage on the North than we put in on Nazi Germany in all of World War II — and the North Vietnamese are now concentrated in divisional strength in parts of the South. Blockade Haiphong? —well, it can be tried, but let’s remember that two can play that game. Suppose the East Germans then blockade West Berlin. What do we do? — mobilize the entire nation, start another airlift, threaten nuclear war? We had the British and French with us during the last Berlin blockade, but they would not lift a finger now. And stretched as we are in Vietnam, we could not improvise another airlift even if they were willing to help.
Spread the War?
Well, then, we can spread the war. We can strike at the enemy forces in Laos and Cambodia. But how many hundreds of thousands of men would that take? And how would it hurt the main forces of Communism? We can invade North Vietnam. But the North Vietnamese army, the best-trained in Asia, is still intact. And Communist China, which put fifty divisions into Korea, can put fifty divisions into North Vietnam. So how many millions of Americans do we have in mind if we go down that road?
Of course, there are always nuclear weapons, and we might reach a point of desperation where we would have to use them. But leaving aside the question of whether they could be used at all against the guerrillas in the South, let us consider the possible consequences of their use. Virtually every government in the world, under pressure of its public opinion, would have to condemn us. In Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia the mobs would sack and burn the American embassies and business houses. A great gulf of fear and hate would open between Americans and much of humanity. What a fate for a people who began their national life on July 4, 1776, with a declaration of a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind!”
They Have Paid
13. So what useful purpose do we serve by prolonging and enlarging the war? We are told we must show the Communists that their “wars of liberation” do not pay; well, after what this war has brought to North and South Vietnam, no one is going to be in a hurry to get the same treatment. We are told that our national honor is at stake; but what nation has ever been a more honorable ally than the United States has been to South Vietnam? If there has been a failure in the alliance, it has not been on the part of the Americans. It is also said that we must keep the Chinese Communists from overrunning Southeast Asia; but despite some provocation, the Chinese have shown no eagerness to move militarily into Vietnam. Indeed, there is evidence that they would not be welcome even in the North. The one thing left to make clear, then, is that the United States will not continue to help a country that is unable to govern itself. This may be a lesson that we need to impress on the other countries of Southeast Asia.
14. The war has made us — all of us — lose sight of our national purposes. We need to stand back and get our priorities right. Enemy No. 1 is Russia. No. 2 is China. The vital strategic areas, in their proper order, are Western Europe (particularly Germany), Japan, the Middle East, Latin America — and only then Southeast Asia. The most crucial priority of all is, of course, the home front.
15. We come back, then, to the question: What will best advance the national interest of the United States? The evidence is overwhelming that this open-ended war in Vietnam is harmful to our national interest. The evidence is equally overwhelming that the war serves the interest of the Soviet Union and world communism.
A Time to Regroup
The options, then, are fairly clear. We can have a domestic policy and a foreign policy — or we can go deeper into Vietnam. We can regroup our forces and redirect our energies against the main forces of Communism — or we can continue to pit the best we have against the Reds’ fourth team. We can rebuild our cities and raise up our people — or we can squander our young manhood and our treasure in the jungles. We can recover our role of leadership among the free peoples — or we can let them slip into the Communist embrace. The choices are as clear as that.
So let us take counsel of each other now in all humility, for we have hard decisions to reach. There is no short and easy road out of Vietnam — we cannot simply scuttle and run. But we must now see that we cannot allow Vietnam to become the be-all and the end-all of our national policies. Starting with that realization we can work our way back to our true role in the world — not as destroyers but as builders, not as sowers of fear but as bringers of hope.