Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (107 page)

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Authors: Conrad Black

BOOK: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
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1. THE GREAT SOCIETY
 
President Johnson formulated his legislative plans with great breadth of vision, and after passing Kennedy’s civil rights and tax reduction bills, and winning his overwhelming reelection, he presented and jammed through the Congress a flurry of social measures, including the Voting Rights Act (putting teeth into the federal guarantee of the right of African Americans, in particular, to vote) and a raft of measures connected to what was officially described as the War on Poverty. These included the Higher Education Act of 1965, which poured federal money into the promotion of education.
Johnson had briefly been a school teacher in the early 1930s in Depression-era southwest Texas, and had great faith in the propositions that education was the key to eliminating poverty and that money was the key to better education. He broke the barrier against the funding of private schools, a taboo that Kennedy, as a Roman Catholic, had been afraid to touch, and his initiatives improved the physical plant and educational materials available to the nation’s schools. Unfortunately, time would determine that the persistence of poverty had much more to do with family stability and social conditions than with access to education. And educational standards in fact declined over time.
There was a raft of welfare programs and alterations that assisted poor areas of the country but inadvertently undermined the family, especially in the African American community. Medicare was enacted to assist the elderly and Medicaid for the economically disadvantaged, and these programs were popular and durable. The tax reductions proved more helpful in encouraging and generalizing prosperity, by stimulating economic activity and private-sector job creation. Johnson also radically altered the pattern of immigration. As a product of the Texas Hill Country and the areas that had received a good deal of poor Mexican migrants, he changed the ratios and was the chief generator of a sharp evolution in American immigration. In 1970, 60 percent of foreign-born immigrants were from Europe, but in 2000, this had declined to 15 percent. The numbers of first-generation immigrants quadrupled from 1970 to 2007, from 9.6 million to 38 million. (These trends were greatly accentuated by the deliberately tolerated entry into the country from Mexico of 15 million or more illegal or underdocumented Latin Americans in the last third of the twentieth century.)
There was a pervasive spirit of support for the end of racial discrimination in all forms and for adherence to the equality of rights and opportunity that infused the founding texts and sustaining national self-image, not to say mythology, of America. This heady atmosphere was topped up by steady major achievements in space exploration, as Johnson financed and promoted first the Gemini and then the Apollo program and the United States edged ever closer to a manned landing on the moon, which Kennedy had promised before the end of the decade. A military intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965, though it aroused some protest in liberal circles, was quickly followed by a fair election and democratic stability and was seen everywhere as a success. By mid-1966, however, all was overshadowed by Vietnam.
2. VIETNAM, THE GROWING CRISIS
 
As Johnson entered office, there were 16,000 American “advisers” in South Vietnam. The South Vietnamese army had received a good deal of equipment and training from the Americans and had some respectable fighting units, but the victorious Viet Minh army that had won at Dien Bien Phu had been pouring through Laos and into South Vietnam in heavy numbers and were fully supplied by the Russians and the Chinese, since Eisenhower recognized the permanence of South Vietnam in 1956, and particularly since Kennedy accepted the “neutrality” of Laos in 1962. South Vietnam could not, on its own, resist the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong (essentially the Viet Minh from the South) without either massive American military assistance or a vast program of conscripting, training, and equipping an autonomous anti-communist army.
Eisenhower drew the line for the start of the dominoes at the 38th parallel, but did not do the necessary to equip Diem as quickly as possible. Kennedy poured in more advisers, but saw that the war was being lost. Under the mistaken advice of Lodge, Kennedy had imagined that getting rid of Diem would enable a more democratic and popular leader to conduct resistance to the communists. It only made the Americans appear treacherous and brought on an era of acute instability in Saigon, as the communist forces vacuumed up large areas of the interior. If this country was going to be defended, something would have to be done soon, and it would have to go far beyond pep talks, arms shipments, building schools, and social work.
The dominoes weren’t obviously going to fall in all directions from Saigon. Thailand seemed to be stable; the Switzerland of the East, it had been bullied by Japan into declaring war on the U.S. after Pearl Harbor, but accompanied its war message with the assurance that it would commit no warlike acts, and did not. The British and their local allies had largely won the civil war in Malaya. Taiwan, with the U.S. Seventh Fleet in the Formosa Strait, was secure and prospering, as were Japan and South Korea. The Philippines was adequately stable, though no model of civic management, and of course, Australia and New Zealand were flourishing Commonwealth democracies. Burma was almost incomprehensible, a hermit country of gentle people but uncertain governance.
The wild card was the potentially biggest domino of all, Indonesia. Oil rich and with thousands of islands and 100 million people, Indonesia had been governed since Dutch rule by the dissolute international posturer Kusno Sukarno, whom Nixon so disapproved when he visited him in 1953. Sukarno’s system of “Guided Democracy” was a tenuous balance of the Indonesian Communist Party, led by D.N. Aidit; the military, led by Defense Minister General Abdul Haris Nasution; Suharto, his chief of staff; and politically active elements of the Islamic hierarchy. While Lyndon Johnson considered what to do in South Vietnam, having been elected in his own right, promising to prevent South Vietnam from falling to the communists, but also to avoid having “American boys doing what Asian boys should be doing,” the political fabric of Sukarno’s corrupt and economically backward 20-year rule was tearing apart, as the three factions began scrapping and assaulting each other. Most of the senior staff of the armed forces were kidnapped and murdered, and General Nasution only narrowly escaped a communist hit team (by jumping over the back wall of his house, breaking his leg). This was the point of no return; General Suharto raised his standard against the Communists, and the military joined forces with political Islam.
A gentle and cheerful people, the Indonesians, famously, run amok occasionally and become wantonly and brutally violent. This was what happened for about a year after May 1965. Sukarno remained as a figurehead as the Communist Party was declared a national enemy and became a subject of a very determined extermination effort. Approximately 600,000 people were murdered, most of them allegedly Communists, including Aidit, seized and summarily executed while trying to escape on a motorcycle. The Communists were massacred and disbanded, and more than 1.5 million people were arrested. Sukarno was stripped of power, deposed in 1967, and put under house arrest, and he died in 1970. Suharto became president in 1966 and joined with the Sultan of Jogjakarta as Islamic leader, and set the country on a new course of pro-Western foreign policy and an economic program of growth and spreading prosperity, largely devised by capitalist American economists from the University of California. Indonesia was politically reliable by mid-1966, but the American buildup in Vietnam, which may well have emboldened military resistance against Sukarno and the Communists for whom he was then fronting, was still in its early stages.
President Johnson had revoked President Kennedy’s order to reduce the number of American advisers in Vietnam by 1,000, just four days after taking office. He had always been something of a conventional hawk, having floor-managed the Formosa Resolution giving the president a military blank check; urged upon Eisenhower support of the British and the French against Nasser in 1956; and urged strong action against Cuba in 1960; and he now soon expressed concern that if “we don’t stop the Commies in Vietnam, tomorrow they’ll be in Honolulu, and next week in San Francisco.”
196
This was the Red Scare combined with the Yellow Peril.
The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of August 1964 gave Johnson the authority to deploy such force as he considered necessary “to repel armed attack,” a slightly more explicit formulation than the Formosa Resolution. The origins of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution remain controversial. On August 2, 1964, the U.S. destroyer
Maddox
was attacked by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats, and three torpedoes and some machine-gun fire were ineffectually aimed at the
Maddox.
An American fighter plane from the carrier
Ticonderoga
sank one of the torpedo boats and Johnson issued a severe warning. On August 3, in heavy weather, the
Maddox
and the destroyer
C. Turner Joy
(named after the chief Pan Mun Jon, Korean War peace negotiator) were patrolling in about the same place as the previous day’s incident. They believed they had been attacked, though they were not certain, and reported the incident, and Johnson was doubtless in good faith when he solicited the very broad resolution from the Congress. He bombed North Vietnamese coastal and air facilities. Whether the American ships had been attacked or not, it was a very slender legal basis for the eventual American war effort in Vietnam.
Vietnam was the strangest and most unsatisfactory war in American history. By 1965, when Johnson had finally to decide what to do about it, Indochina had attracted the attention of five consecutive presidents. Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower were determined not to assist France back into colonial rule; Roosevelt had proposed a United Nations trusteeship until it and other colonial territories were ready for self-government, though he told Stalin that in the case of Indochina, that could take decades. (Stalin thought his timetable would need acceleration.
197
Truman largely ignored it, though American diplomats and agents, and the French, warned him of communist advances there. Eisenhower found the French so pig-headed in their suicidal battle for retention of their doomed empire, he couldn’t do much until they had been defeated and expelled from the country. But then he drew the line in the jungle and proclaimed the inviolability of the state whose legitimacy he championed, in contradiction of the Geneva Accord, where the United States was not bound, but which had been approved by its principal allies.
Kennedy just did the necessary to prevent a collapse without making any effort to turn the tide, whose direction was clear to all. The Laos Neutrality Accord, as has been mentioned, facilitated the communist invasion of the South. The best guess is that Kennedy was not prepared to intervene with heavy force to keep Vietnam divided, but he and his successor agreed to address the issue after the 1964 election. Johnson’s reaction to the developing Indochinese crisis bore from the start the stigmata of catastrophe.
As someone who had watched with much admiration how Roosevelt had gone deeper and deeper into war while professing only to maintain peace, he seemed to have taken away the message that as president he could pursue his domestic agenda, expensive though it was, while conducting an ever-growing war. The conditions were incomparable: Roosevelt was maneuvering into war on his own schedule, after arming his country to the teeth after the principal adversary and most doubtful ally (Germany and Russia) had enervated each other, and after the British and their Canadian affiliates had fought heroically for over two years; the entry to be triggered by a monstrous provocation that would unite the nation and enlist it until an absolute victory had been won.
With Johnson and Vietnam, there was never a declaration even of the existence of a state of war, only an escalation of force levels; never a stated determination to achieve victory, just a lot of ever more ungalvanizing official waffle about “a limited war by limited means, for a limited objective.” Washington was achieving independence; Lincoln was suppressing insurrection and later emancipating the slaves; Wilson and Roosevelt were making the world safe for democracy, and, in an international framework and a regional context, Truman was also. And all were responding to overwhelming provocation and all were determined to persevere until their military objectives were achieved, and all did so, though Truman’s Korean objectives fluctuated upwards for a few weeks, before settling back down to the status quo ante in response to the direct Chinese intervention.
Polk was expanding slavery with the Mexican War while skillfully avoiding a rending crisis between slave and free states by wrapping it in the manifest destiny of the Stars and Stripes. And McKinley had a private sector-confected accidental provocation and a humanitarian mission to administer an effortless thrashing to the hapless Spanish.
With Johnson and Vietnam, America was sleepwalking into its fourth deadliest war without a casus belli, with only a gradual increase in belligerency, and no clarity of objective. From 15 to 25 percent of the country was doubtful of the moral justification, or at least the human costs of the war, and more than half, once war was afoot, wanted to pursue it single-mindedly to a defined victory. Lyndon Johnson never really made it clear that he wanted to win enough to do what would be necessary to win. Lyndon Johnson, so immensely accomplished in the congressional arts, fell victim to the overconfidence of the strategic advisers he inherited from Kennedy, and their cocksure conviction that they had the key to precise, calibrated problem-solving. And he and his entourage and the nation fell victim to the glib promise of the confident morn of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, that any price, any burden, would be borne and any foe opposed, in freedom’s name.

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