Innocents abroad

National Review, August 11, 1997 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

NEW YORK, JULY 11

The project was sponsored by an institute at Brown University and paid for by the Rockefeller Foundation. What a terrific idea! Get a dozen North Vietnamese generals, politicians, intellectuals, seat them across the table from American generals, politicians, intellectuals, and jaw away at the events of 1965 - 1975. Better jaw jaw than war war! Robert McNamara, commander-in-chief of the Flagellant Order of Vietnam, led off by saying: Look, here we have a wonderful opportunity to review the reasons for the Vietnam War, the reasons why negotiations didn't work, and, by doing so, to nurture the wisdom necessary to prevent another such war in the twenty-first century.

There was this problem. The North Vietnamese refused to admit they had done anything wrong. They refused to divulge any substantial information not already known worldwide. They were offended at any suggestion that the North Vietnamese were less sensitive to the loss of human life than the Americans. "At 81," wrote Randall Richard of the Providence Journal-Bulletin, one of the two reporters permitted on the scene, "the former U.S. Secretary of Defense moved about the room like a man who still needed to be in control, answering important phone calls, shuffling papers and agendas, and consulting with ambassadors and generals and spies." He was as ineffective a seminar leader as he had been a secretary of defense.

The American delegation had a few questions an answer to which would have been interesting. Why oh why didn't the North Vietnamese respond to overtures for negotiation?

Answer: We didn't like it that you didn't initiate those overtures directly, always using intermediaries, like Canada and Switzerland.

Well why did you not let that information out? That you would have been willing to negotiate if we had taken the lead directly?

Answer: We have our secrets. Some of what happened we do not know the reason for its having happened. And if we did, we wouldn't tell you. Besides, we declined to respond to negotiations while you were simultaneously raining bombs down on us.

But there were eight bombing pauses! One of them lasted forty days! Why did you not take any of those opportunities to meet us at the negotiating table?

. . . The sessions remind us of the endless meetings between Secretary Kissinger and General Giap in Paris in 1972. General Giap was himself there at this weekend retreat in Hanoi, a brooding omnipresence. Admit nothing. Repeat everything. Demand everything.

What were the North Vietnamese here demanding? They had got everything else-- monolithic control over the South, national independence, a Communist regime and Communist practices, however leavened with the salt of capitalism, as in China. All that they want is total historical rectification. I.e., they wish history to record that what the Vietnamese did during those ten years was heroic, admirable, and justified.

The Orange County Register's dispatch from Vietnam on July 6 opened: "It was the war America lost. The war in which more than 8 million Americans served; 303,678 were wounded and 58,168 died. It also was a war that killed 3.6 million Vietnamese." It is fair to add to the figure 2 million South Vietnamese refugees after the North took over.

The ever-elusive question is, of course: What might have been done to win the war? And, beginning at the other end, Was the strategic objective worth any effort, let alone a gargantuan effort?

We learned that 300,000 Chinese troops were engaged in this "civil war." That Peking encouraged the North Vietnamese to continue the struggle on the straightforward grounds that the dissipation of U.S. strength on that theater diminished our reservoir of strength on other fronts.

But we learned, too, that although the Vietnamese fighters were substantially driven by the prospect of national union and independence, the strategic questions were not misread in Washington: The leadership in the struggle was a cadre of committed Communists. The American defeat of 1975 was followed 15 years later by the defeat of the Communist superpower half a world away. Vietnam endures as a totalitarian nation with the spirit to show contempt for such as McNamara, so anxious to strut his abjection on the world stage. The ongoing casualty of his performance is the cause for which Americans died.