From the WSJ Opinion Archives
THINKING THINGS OVER
The Democrats Refight Vietnam
The antiwar movement is dead--and it's the party's albatross.
Younger readers may be puzzled by the spectacle of Al Gore and Teddy Kennedy sounding anti-war rhetoric, upsetting plans by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to back an attack on Iraq and get out of town to campaign on free pills for granny. As someone who's followed this for 30 years, let me explain: It's all about Vietnam.
A good many Democratic Party cadres cut their teeth as anti-war protestors marching against Vietnam. Passion still runs too hot among many liberals, Democrats and intellectuals to allow mere political calculation to stand in the way. Why? Because Vietnam was a liberal, Democratic and intellectual war. Senator Kennedy has to lead the anti-war remnants because Vietnam was John F. Kennedy's war. Let me review a little selective but instructive history:
The first Indochina War, between the colonial French and Communists headed by a man known to history as Ho Chi Minh, ended with the Geneva accords of 1954. Pending an improbable free election, the agreement divided the country into two regions, a Communist north and a non-Communist south. Nearly everyone expected the south to collapse, but Ngo Dinh Diem succeeded in consolidating a government there and sought Western support. About 1959, the North started sending supplies and infiltrators over what became known as the Ho Chi Minh trail through neighboring Laos.
When President Kennedy was inaugurated President Eisenhower advised him he might have to put U.S. troops in Laos. In other words, the military strategist who led the European theater in World War II had singled out the key terrain. Instead, Mr. Kennedy sent Averell Harriman out to negotiate a new agreement on Laos giving the Communists de facto control of the trail they wanted.
President Kennedy also increased U.S. military advisers in South Vietnam to 16,000 from the 865 limit set by the Geneva accords. And of course, in his inaugural address he pledged "to bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, and oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty." He talked up counter-insurgency and Green Berets, and told West Point cadets they should be ready for "a new kind of war."
Crisis erupted in 1963, with agitation by a charismatic monk named Thich Tri Quang and repression by Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu. The notion that the way to win the war was to replace Diem seized intellectuals advising the administration and writing in the press. The famous State Department telegram No. 243 on Aug. 24, 1963, instructed American diplomats in Saigon to "urgently examine all possible alternative leadership and make detailed plans as to how we might bring about Diem's replacement if this should become necessary."
The telegram was drafted over a weekend by Mr. Harriman, Roger Hilsman and Michael Forrestal; President Kennedy signed off from Hyannis after being called from a shower to be briefed in a phone call from Acting Secretary of State George Ball. Vietnamese generals proved reluctant to move, but after weeks of further intrigue in Saigon and indecision in Washington, they mounted a coup on Nov. 1, 1963. They captured Diem and Nhu, and executed them on the morning of Nov. 2.
On Nov. 22, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Lyndon Johnson, who'd opposed the coup, became president. Ellen Hammer's "A Death in November" reports that the day after the Kennedy funeral, President Johnson pointed to a picture of Diem. "We had a hand in killing him," he told Hubert Humphrey, "Now it's happening here."
However bad the battlefield situation was in 1963, it got worse in 1964. In 1965, President Johnson committed large-scale ground troops. In 1968, the Tet Offensive destroyed the Vietcong guerrillas and the American home front. In 1972, Richard Nixon withdrew the last American troops, mined North Vietnamese harbors, and sent air and naval power that allowed the South Vietnamese army to defeat a major Communist offensive. After the "Christmas bombings," he won the return of U.S. prisoners in the Paris peace accords, and promised South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu further aid if attacked.
At home, an anti-war Congress first passed the Case-Church amendment banning funds for any U.S. military activities in Indochina, and then passed the War Powers Resolution over a veto. The combination of the Watergate scandal and anti-war passions forced President Nixon to resign on Aug. 9, 1974. In September, Congress slashed financial aid to South Vietnam. After probing attacks drew no U.S. response, the North Vietnamese launched 20 divisions across the border with South Vietnam. On Aug. 30, 1975, the last American was airlifted from the U.S. embassy. Saigon fell not to guerrillas but to tanks.
Over this history, liberals, Democrats and intellectuals refined their attitudes toward the war in Vietnam. Daniel Ellsberg, one-time bombing advocate who leaked the Pentagon Papers, put it succinctly, "I have seen it first as a problem; then as a stalemate; then as a crime." Betrayal is not the crime they had in mind. Instead, they professed to hold the moral high ground, and asserted that American power was illegitimate.
These sentiments led the Democratic Party to electoral debacle in 1968 and 1972. With 45 of 55 Democratic Senators voting against the Gulf War resolution in 1991, they've been able to win the presidency only with Southern governors who had no foreign policy record to connect them to the anti-war movement.
Today such ideas seem more clearly than ever out of step with the nation and events. We've lost some 3,000 lives on American soil, and the public seems willing to let President Bush do what he believes necessary to keep it from happening again. The anti-war movement is dead, but it hangs like an albatross around the neck of the Democratic Party.
Mr. Bartley is editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
