Aging leaders return to Vietnam to discuss missteps of war
Ghosts of war 'still haunt the American psyche'
In this story: June 18, 1997
Web posted at: 6:48 p.m. EDT (2248 GMT)From Correspondent Ralph Begleiter
HANOI (CNN) -- For the first time, 30 years after the United States geared up its combat role in Vietnam, the American and Vietnamese officials who ran the war are meeting face-to-face this week in Hanoi.
Generals and diplomats of the 1960s are sorting through their own decisions to see if missed opportunities during the Vietnam War might have prevented more than 58,000 U.S. deaths and more than three million on the Vietnamese side.
The visitors include Robert McNamara, the former U.S. defense secretary during the war, who arrived Wednesday in Vietnam. It is his second visit to the Communist-ruled country, following a prior trip in 1995.
Today, Vietnam is thriving. It is a modernizing country extending a welcoming hand to westerners, including Americans. There are of course reminders of the country's long battle against Western colonialism. Downed U.S. warplanes are still visible, as well as scars from the bombing of North Vietnam 30 years ago.
For the U.S., the Vietnam War's years of escalating warfare, staggering loss of life, and humiliating defeat, have become an unpleasant stain on the nation's history.
"The Vietnam War won't go away," Ernest Lefever, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote in a recent paper. "Its ghosts still haunt the American psyche like fragments of a twisted nightmare."
What went wrong?
For Vietnam, the war was a crushing but proudly-endured loss of three million of its people in the pursuit of independence.
Could it have gone differently? "Was there any way that if the two sides had communicated better, had understood the reality better, that they could have come to a settlement at a much lower cost?" James Hershberg of George Washington University asks.
What went wrong? How could more than three million people die as a consequence of decisions made by policymakers not only in the U.S. and Vietnam, but also in Russia and China?
The conflict was viewed by U.S. leaders at the time in a different light. "Their objective is not fulfillment of Vietnamese nationalism; it is to erode and to discredit America's ability to help prevent Chinese domination over all of Asia," former U.S. President Lyndon Johnson said in 1965.
Fighting the 'red blob' in Eurasia
U.S. officials thought the Vietnam War was part of a Chinese-Soviet domination effort. "A lot of Americans didn't even believe the Sino-Soviet split was for real. They simply saw Vietnam as the leading edge of the 'red blob' in Eurasia," Hershberg says.
It wasn't until later that former U.S. defense Secretary Robert McNamara admitted in his memoir that 1960s policymakers were "wrong, terribly wrong." Vietnamese leaders, too, are seeing the value in reviewing the diplomacy and politics of the war era.
"When we recall the past, we can wish for a brighter future of relations between the two countries," says Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, former Vietnamese defense minister and the mastermind of victories over French and American forces.
This week some 30 U.S. and Vietnamese officials and historians of the 1960s are set to question one another in Hanoi. They're exploring opportunities they might have missed to avoid the casualties, the bombing, the destruction and perhaps the decades of second-guessing in the U.S. about Vietnam.
Because many of these officials are aging, it's probably the last chance for such a review of the missteps of the Vietnam War.
Avoidable losses
Although this week's conference is an academic exercise, different decisions in the 1960s might have dramatically cut the losses on both sides.
- If the war had ended before early 1964 U.S. combat deaths might have been fewer than 300. The Vietnamese would have lost several thousand.
- If the war had ended before the U.S. began extensive bombing of North Vietnam in early 1965, combat deaths might have been led to less than 1 percent of the ultimate cost of the war.
- If it had ended by 1968, before Hanoi's infamous Tet offensive, the lives of more than 40,000 Americans and more than two million Vietnamese might have been spared.
Related stories:
- U.S. ambassador accepts MIA remains in Vietnam - May 20, 1997
- From prisoner to ambassador: Peterson returns to Vietnam - May 9, 1997
- Many see Ho Chi Minh City as a 'boom town' - October 17, 1996
Related sites:
Note: Pages will open in a new browser windowExternal sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.
Sound off on our message boards
Tell us what you think!
You said it...
© 1997 Cable News Network, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.