School of War - Ep 194: Mark Moyar on the Vietnam War

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

Mark Moyar, William P. Harris Chair of Military History at Hillsdale College and author of Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965-1968,  joins the show to explain the major inflection points of the Vietnam War. ▪️ Times      •      01:58 Introduction     •      02:47 The “orthodox view”      •      05:51 Dominos     •      08:41 A Maoist vision         •      12:42 1963        •      15:30 Henry Cabot Lodge       •      21:10 Slow erosion           •      24:57 Ground troops      •      30:10 Morale     •      33:39 Nixon in office         •      37:30 Triangular diplomacy      •      39:31 Vietnamization fails      •      43:09 American mistakes          •      47:31 Wanting out      •      50:10 Aftermath   Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

50 years ago this week, Saigon fell. The images are seared into America's collective memory. Perhaps none more so than the iconic photograph of desperate civilians attempting to board a helicopter on the roof of 22 Geelong Street in the final hours of the Republic of South Vietnam. It was the final moment of a military and policy catastrophe that had been a generation in the making. What actually went so wrong in America's war in Vietnam? Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war this to lock the invasion of the way. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in Hempick.

The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the way the situation in France. There's no fight on the beaches. There's a fight on the landing ground. We'll fight in the field. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War.

I'm delighted to welcome back to the show today. Mark Moyer, the William P. Harris Chair in Military History at Hillsdale College, author of numerous books. He's served in government. He's taught in numerous places. and for some years now he has been focused on the war in Vietnam. He's the author of Triumph Forsaken, the first of a projected trilogy covering the early years of the American War in Vietnam, the author of Triumph Regained, the Vietnam War in 1965 to 1968, which we touched on in a previous episode.

And I assume there, I don't want to, this is sort of like asking somebody how their thesis is going, but, you know, we are all looking forward to a third volume at some point. I hope that's going well. Yes, I'm working on the third volume and it will go from 69 to 75. It's a very research-intensive project, so it's still got some time to come, but it will be out eventually. So we're talking just a few days before the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. And I wanted to kind of talk about the war in general today just to set the scene, but also to get there in the end. And a theme of your work throughout the whole project has been litigating this debate against what you've called the orthodox view of the war.

And you say you side largely with another view, the revisionist view of the war. What is the orthodox view of the war in Vietnam? The orthodox view arose really from the anti-war movement of the Vietnam War itself. and the two most fundamental premises of that school of thought are that, first of all, the war was an unnecessary war. It wasn't fought for key strategic interests of the United States. And that number two, that the war was unwinnable so that no matter what the U.S. could have done, it was doomed to failure. And so the revisionist position, which I take says the opposite, that, in fact, there were vital U.S. interests at stake. So strategically it made sense.

And that the war could have been won had different courses of action been taken. And I suppose this Orthodox view also probably nests within a particular take on the Cold War, right, where the argument would run something like American fears about. communists the global ambitions of communism in the 1950s into the 1960s are overblown that the domino theory was ridiculous that you know the sort of nSC 68 perimeter security strategy of eurasia was a ridiculous strategy impossible to resource and deeply ideological and then sort of the vietnam argument nests within that yes that's right and and as part of that you know the idea that there's the question of whether this was a there was a global international communist effort, which is central to the Cold War. And my take on it and on Vietnam is that the Soviets and

the Chinese are in tandem for the early part. They start to diverge, but you still have both of them supporting the North Vietnamese. And so that whole premise that there's some sort of mindless anti-communist hysteria going on is incorrect. And so I believe that there is a real threat to all of Asia during the 1960s and the U.S. fights to stop that threat. First, we fight in Korea for a similar reason. And then in Vietnam, we go in and send troops in in 1965 because the Johnson administration believes in this domino theory that if Vietnam falls to communism, you're going to see many, if not all of the other Asian countries, fall to communism. And I guess if I were to take the side of the orthodox view, particularly on the question of the domino theory, a stronger form of that argument would go something like, well, we did in fact lose slash abandon the Vietnamese such that in 1975, Saigon does dramatically and spectacularly fall.

and the rest of the dominoes didn't go the pacific did not turn red as it were after that so what what say you to that mark moyer yes and that and i do take that argument head on in triumphsaken that and also the next book because that is this sort of standard argument well the dominoes don't fall in 1975 therefore the domino theory was false and so my response to that is that the world is vastly different in 1975 than it is in 1965, and in fact, many of those differences are the result of American intervention. One of the biggest things that happens in that period is you have Indonesia flipping from pro-communist to anti-communist, and that had everything to do with American intervention in Vietnam. You also have the Cultural Revolution in China, which decimates China and turns it inward. It will ultimately lead to a break with North Vietnam. And so you have in 1975 a distinct lack of the unity in the communist camp we had seen the alliance between China and Vietnam's fracture.

They will later go to war in 1979. And you also have other countries in the region have become much stronger. And people like Lake Quan Yu of Singapore say explicitly that American intervention bought time for the rest of the region to strengthen it. itself so that it was no longer vulnerable to the predations of the communists. So what is the evidence for your assertion that essentially the Americans were right to take the imperial ambitions of global communism, whether in its Maoist or Stalinist and Soviet form seriously, and to identify countries like South Vietnam or South Korea before it as as vital interests. We've had over over the years on the show, people sort of on both sides of the

broad question. Sean McMeekin recently came on and made a view that made an argument that I think would be probably pretty, would sit comfortably next to yours. We've had, you know, on the other side of things, Max Hastings, who takes sort of a dim view of such things. You know, in the Vietnamese context, the sort of Max Hastings conventional view would run something like Ho Chi Minh is really a Vietnamese nationalist. The Vietnamese, like so many other East Asian countries, are struggling against European imperial yokes, and the Americans, for sort of bizarre reasons, inherit this imperial war. And misconceive of it fundamentally is an ideological struggle when it's really a internal Vietnamese struggle in which we take the side of the criminals and the thugs.

Your view of Ho is different, and your view is that he is connected to some sort of broader I guess originally Maoist vision. Can you can you give evidence of that? Yes. And we've learned quite a bit more about Ho Chi-Men in the last few decades because this was a common argument and still is made by a lot of the Orthodox school that Hotsiemen's really a nationalist. He's not part of some broader international communist movement. But we know clearly if we look some of his own writings as a young man he talks about this, how he was converted to Lenin. how he revered Leninism, how he, you know, waited in line for hours in the cold and got frostbite waiting to see the body of Stalin, excuse me, body of Lenin after he had died.

And he goes on then to spend much of his career outside Vietnam organizing international communist movements in other countries. And he serves in the Chinese army in World War II, the Chinese Communist Army. And we know that he, you know, once he, you know, once he, you know, actually is in power, he imposes a system of government that is very similar to that of other Marxist-Leninist countries. And he also, and he's been clear on this, too, that he does not think countries should be putting their national interests ahead of the global international communist movement. And in fact, he and other Vietnamese communists are very critical of Tito in Yugoslavia, who does try to take a more nationalist view. And when the Soviets,

crush the rebellion in Hungary in 1956, the Vietnamese communists applaud. And so this is largely a fiction and wishful thinking of people who are trying to criticize American policy and to gloss over the real nature of Vietnamese communism. And the other thing I like to point out too is that while this South Vietnamese government that comes in 1954 is sometimes caricatured as sort of a neo-imperialist project, its leader, Notin Ziam, is actually a very serious historical figure. And even people who are not tied to the revisionist movement, who have done a lot of research on him, have come to the same conclusion about him. And, you know, he actually is more of a nationalist.

He is more reluctant to follow his great power bosses. And in fact, he's overthrown in 1963 because some of the Americans decide he's not compliant enough. Well, let's, let's linger on that because this is, to me, my sort of far less informed view than yours, but my, my view nevertheless, is that that episode in the fall of 63, the coup that leads to Diem's assassination, along with his brother, is, is the pivotal moment. That's the, that's the hinge moment of the entire American war. And it happens before most Americans, I think, are even aware there was a war in Vietnam,

in terms of just sort of the conventional, casual understanding of the war. And that my own view, again, I'm curious to know your response to this, as a non-professional person who is nevertheless interested in the war, if only for personal reasons, my dad served there three times, three different tours, to include one in these very early days in the DM days. And then my mom, as 19-year-old girls are wont to do, she took a job as a secretary working for the U.S. Army in Saigon, showed up right after Tet. And my other fun family history fact is that, you know, the famous photographs of the helicopters taking off the roof in 75, which is relevant for our anniversary recording today, which, as you know, Mark, is not actually the embassy building, but an apartment building nearby. My mom lived in that building in 68 and 69, some years before. Anyway, I have long-standing interest in Vietnam, and my view has been for a long time that after the coup, we, America, had a weaker hand that we then often play. poorly and the whole thing ended up an enormous mess. And I don't think that that's necessarily contrary to the revisionist view. But that, do you agree? Is it your view that 63 is sort of the hinge

year? Or what would you say to that? Yes. I think that's the single greatest mistake the United States makes. And that is an affair that, you know, I researched it in great detail because there has been so much misunderstanding and misinformation. And one of the biggest reasons for that is that we get a lot of the orthodox account of that period from David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan in their award-winning books. You got the best and the brightest in making of a quagmire from Halberstam and Braithshining Live from Sheehan. And they are very critical of Ziam and try to sort of claim that he's on his last legs. Things are falling apart in 1963. And you have to actually go and, you know, what I found from looking at it is that Halberstam and Sheen are not merely reporting.

They're sort of cheerleaders for having a coup in 1963, and they've bought onto this false notion that we're going to get some better regime in after. And so once the coup happens with their encouragement, and then it goes south, they have to justify why they supported this coup. So their excuses, oh, well, things were really going terribly. And so what I found is that actually, no, in 1963, the war is actually going pretty well. and it drops, you know, goes off the cliff as soon as the coup happens because the government's paralyzed. You have all these purges. And we know this. We've got confirmation of this now from the North Vietnamese because they observe exactly this. And so, you know, it takes several years, really, for that government to recover.

And in the meantime, we have the North Vietnamese seek to capitalize on this weakness by invading in 19, early 65, thinking the U.S. is not going to come in because they'll be, has announced he's not going to send American boys. Of course, LBJ does send American boys, and then we have a bigger war in the middle of 1965 onward. And again, unfortunately, the Johnson administration doesn't manage that well either and misses some big strategic opportunities. Well, let's just stick with the coup for a minute. I mean, there's this strange American tick habit of being substantially more hostile to our friends than to our enemies. And you see this, you know, frequently. Maybe you could associate it with one party more than another,

but you see it a lot. The notion that we would coup our own partner, objectionable as he may be in some ways, and I guess part of your cases, he's actually not as objectionable as Haberstam and others were making out, in the hopes that will then improve our hand, we'll do better,

seems like a, I don't know, if that's all you knew, if that was the full pitch, that was the headline that you were aware of, it seems like a stretch, it seems like a risk. And Kennedy thought it was a risk, right? I mean, talk about the actual decision making behind this and how it went down.

Yeah, it's very convoluted. So Kennedy, you know, originally before he's present, is a big supporter, South Vietnam. He supports ZM. And then he comes in and he makes a huge mistake by selecting Henry Cavett Lodge to be ambassador. Because Henry Cavillodge is from the opposing party. And Kennedy actually does this as sort of political ploy that he can, if things don't get better, if it's just a hassle, he can make Lodge take the blame and he can also kind of keep Lodge out of the United States. Well, it ends up backfiring because what happens is Lodge himself decides to listen to the journalists who want a coup.

So Lodge becomes the biggest advocate of the coup. And Kennedy doesn't find this out until a few days before the coup. And at this point, he's too afraid to pull Lodge because that would then be something that Lodge could exploit politically. So he basically sits there at the end. He actually, the last two days, Kennedy's sending messages to Lodge saying, let's put a halt on this coup planning. And Lodge blows him off and basically pretends he can't do anything.

And Kennedy's actually despondent after the coup because he, you know, he also didn't expect Zem was going to get murdered. They thought maybe he'd get sent out of the country. So Kennedy has a few days after the coup, these mournful recollections, and he is, just extremely frustrated. And you know, you mentioned this idea of being tough on our friends and softer on our enemies. Kennedy knows that, you know, one of the principal architects in Washington of the coup, the supporters is Averill Harriman, and he is known for doing this as sort of a regular policy.

And he seemed to have kind of a soft spot in his heart for the communes. He was always kind of going easy on them. He pressured our right-wing allies and allows into accepting a, a phony neutralization deal that was a disaster. And he was always very imperious and condescending with our allies. And it is, yeah, it's just an unfortunate tendency that, again, some of our, particularly some of our politicians have gravitated toward. And usually it does not end well when we are tough on our friends and soft on our enemies.

Yeah. And the actual details of the coup are harrowy. You say that, you know, the general thought, which I take to include amongst some of senior plot, the Vietnamese plotters, is that Diem is going to be sent into exile. Instead, he and his brother just murdered in the back of this truck after they're arrested. You know, Kennedy is shot himself just a few weeks after. And, you know, a lot of the pretext for the, for the coup is this, or if you're Halberstram and, you know, Sheehan and others substance, reason for the coup is this oppression of religious

freedom, oppression of Buddhist protesters against the regime. And there is indeed a kind of political liberalization that happens after the coup. And it does not it does not track well with the fortunes of South Vietnam facing this communist assault, right? Yeah, that's right. There was this idea that, you know, the South Vietnamese government is being too repressive and a new government will be nicer and then you won't have all these protests. Well, what happens is that when they liberalize, this just encourages more protests by these same groups. And, you know, Ziam had made this very case because he had at some point tried to be more accommodating. And what happened was you had more intensive protests and people denouncing the government.

And in a society like this, government can't tolerate that. And you look at North Vietnam, they never tolerated big public denunciations of the government. And so what happens ultimately is that the successor governments are facing such pressure. They are made to look weak. You know, they lose face in Confucian terms if the government is simply tolerating this rampant opposition. So they end up cracking down even harder than Zem ever had ultimately in order to restore order. But it was another fallacy of the coup proponents that somehow if only we could, you know, bring in a government that's more tolerant of dissent that everything's going to get better. And so, you know, 63 turns to 64 and a real crisis.

develops where it looks like the communists are going to succeed, which then leads Johnson to deploy American troops in force in 65. And the reason why I asserted a few minutes ago that this is just a weak hand is even if you played every move brilliantly after that, which we did not, you're still, now you're doing a large deployment of American ground troops on the Eurasian mainland for an uncertain period of time. There are going to be casual. Even if it's going well, it's presumably not a problem that's solvable in a few months. And, you know, you have to know yourself and having lived, we both lived through our post-9-11 wars. You know, there's a ticking clock for that kind of thing.

And the American people have to believe they're fighting for a vital interest. And they like to know they're winning. And if either of those things is questionable, American support starts to collapse pretty quickly. So that's why it seems to me it's a week hand. And then we, we, well, I guess, this is this is where it gets complicated and this is where the sort of the specifics of your view, I think, are complicated. I guess I'm open to the conventional notion that we then played the hand pretty weakly, somewhat influenced by the fact that we lose spectacularly in the end.

But what is, what is, I presume you have a more nuanced take. What is your take? Yes, well, the, there is a view, again, coming from the Orthodox position that once you have the U.S. troops in there, that you are going to be. going to sort of see a slow erosion of public support. You do see some erosion. One thing I mentioned that, you know, a lot of times doesn't get enough attention is that Johnson himself bears a lot of the blame because he deliberately avoids trying to sell the war to the American people because he's focused on his domestic agenda. And he will even admit this late in his presidency that, yeah, we probably should have tried to stir popular passions and patriotism to get the people on board with

this. But there are some opportunities that he misses on, which again, a lot of people ignore because if you take the argument, the war was unwinnable as the Orthodox position does. These other options aren't really important, but there are several that get proposed to him. Even actually before, some of them start before he sends in troops. One is a much heavier bombing of North Vietnam. This gradual escalation he puts in sends the wrong signals. So North Vietnamese have been of war. avoiding invading South Vietnam because they've been afraid of the U.S. So this gradual escalation reduces that fear along with Johnson's statements. You also have proposals to either go into North Vietnam or into Laos with American ground troops.

And these aren't just fringe theories. These are pushed by people like former President Eisenhower and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And we now have more information available that indicates to us that, yes, these would have been good options because the option we end up pursuing is the strategic defense. You're just staying in South Vietnam. And that means the North Vietnamese can indefinitely keep sending troops in. And no matter how many of them you kill, they can still keep sending them. And it's a bit like, you know, as you know, in the case of Afghanistan, you had the Taliban hanging out in Pakistan. And so no matter how many were killed coming in Afghanistan, you could regenerate and send more troops in.

And the American people, and most people in general, you know, realize that you probably don't want to be in a situation where the you're you're just in indefinitely fighting this attrition war and there's no way to win decisive victory. There are a couple of interesting points that you've made in your work that I want to emphasize here. One is, I mean, you're you're basically supportive of Johnson deploying the troops in 65 and you argue that that actually this is the critical domino stopping moment, that the dominoes actually were tutoring and that Indonesia is.

is the principal domino that was going to fall, and that Johnson's intervention in 65, whatever happens next, actually does stop that. And I guess you have no less a friend than Lee Kuan Yew in that argument. Lee Kuan Yew famously basically made this case years later. And then the other thing that I think is interesting about your work is if we sort of take the level of conversation down from grand strategy to strategy and warfighting,

you actually stick up for Westmoreland a fair amount. And there's a sort of version of the revisionist case, which would lump Westmoreland in with all the people making the mistakes and say, actually, it's all Creight and Abrams. It's all counterinsurgency. If we just done counterinsurgency throughout in a deliberate fashion, this attrition base, search and destroy stuff would have been correctly seen as beside the point. And if anything, maybe counterproductive. So let's take those in turn. One, that the 65 intervention in your view was actually critical. grand strategically critical. And two, that Westmoreland gets a bad rap, which I will confess, I'm more skeptical of the second one. The first one, the case seems strong to me. The second one, I think I need some arm twisting, but over to you. Yes, well, it is a, the option of sending ground troops in in 65 is, in my view,

certainly far better than the option of pulling out because I think the evidence is very clear that you would have seen much. if not all of Asia, even possibly Japan, falling or succumbing to communist pressure because you would have had, you know, the U.S. had already been there for years and had lots of forces. And so if Americans pull out, you know, there's an idea sometimes so that, well, we could have made a stand in another country like Thailand. But if you're Thailand, you just saw the Americans make this huge commitment, lots of damage to the country. And then the Americans bail out what, you know, you're not going to want to accept a, an American alliance after seeing that happen.

And so, again, the troops, I think, could have and should have been used better once they were there, but certainly better to protect South Vietnam rather than let it fall. And then once you're there, you know, I think that Westmoreland does the best with the limitations that are imposed on him. And this is an area where, as you say, the revisionists disagree. I mean, Colonel Harry Summers position was a bit closer to mine in terms and arguing really should have extend the frontiers of the war. Louis Sorley, who just recently passed away, you know, he was a good friend, but we differed on Westmoreland. And, you know, what I say with respect to Westmoreland is, you know, the biggest criticism is that he was too focused on search and destroy.

he didn't pay enough attention to pacifying the villages. And I think that's largely misguided for a couple reasons. So first, he actually does not de-emphasize pacification. What he does say is that we should let the South Vietnamese deal with this because they can deal more effectively with the population. And, you know, Americans don't speak the language. They may not be very welcome. So let's send the Americans out into the junk.

and the mountains to look for the insurgents. And so the Americans are out doing a lot. They're not exclusively. They do a lot of this. And so people question, well, you know, you really need to focus on the population. This is an insurgency. And part of the point there is, you know, this is actually a largely conventional war by the time American troops show up.

You know, you can't have a village militia platoon fighting against a North Vietnamese Army battalion and it doesn't work out well for the militia platoon in it when it does it I mean when it happens the North Vietnamese you know clean house so you need these bigger American units to to deal with the larger North Vietnamese units that are roaming around and it's a lot better if you fight them in remote areas because if they get to the cities you know what happens and the most devastating example of this is Hway in 1968 the North Vietnamese get into the city and you basically have to destroy the city in the process of evicting this big North Vietnamese force. And you've also given the North Vietnamese the initiative. And so it actually works out better militarily if you are out

fighting them and keeping them away from the population. And that allows you to make progress in pacification. You know, a lot of the sort of the art that comes out of Vietnam, some of it very good, you know, novels by Carl Marlantis, Jim Webb's Fields of Fire, you know, they cover these these large conventional operations that in both those cases, Marines, but obviously plenty of soldiers out there too. And there's this sense of futility that interlaces a lot of it. I guess, let's think about that first. I mean, if you think about Marlante's and Matterhorn and his chronicling of the Marines experiences up there close to the DMZ, you know, you're fighting over these kind of meaningless pieces.

of terrain, they only take on tactical meaning. Beyond that, they don't really matter to anyone. They're pretty far away from population centers. They don't have any real value intrinsically. You know, you're playing this numbers game. You're trying to report up the body count all the time. And that leads to all manner of dishonesty and BS, which Marlantis is a brilliant chronicler of. And I don't take him to be, I don't take his account to be, you know, particularly left-coded or sort of, you know, this is like an authentic an authentic soldiers or Marine, in his case, reaction, because nothing ever seems to come of it. You're going to go fight over this hill.

You probably win. Most of the time, the Americans win. And then what? Now you have the hill. And maybe you move to another hill and you fight again and you report up like basically Fugazi numbers about how many North Vietnamese soldiers you killed. And on and on and on and on you go.

And that is a bad recipe for morale and ultimately not a great strategic recipe either, it would seem in retrospect. Yeah, well, the, you know, the morale is an interesting question because morale is actually quite high among the American units in the early years. It's towards, you know, as the war moves on, and, you know, Nixon in some ways a better war manager, but he, he doesn't do a great job of sort of explaining to the American sometimes why it is we're still fighting because he's focused. on reducing the American presence.

And there comes a point in time, and this is thinking about when Marlani's is there, is Americans start to think, well, we're kind of getting out of this and why are we still dying? We'll let the South Vietnamese deal with this. And you see similar problems in, you know, Afghanistan and Iraq, I think, which you of course know very well. You know, this idea that people are filing false information. And you have that, although I think it's also worth remembering that you hear the same thing in lots of wars, you know, even in World War II, which we think of as the Great War.

You have this conflict between the guys on the ground and number crunching bureaucrats and, you know, self-serving commanding officers. You know, I think a lot of it is, you know, a function of leadership that if you have, you know, even Marlantis in his book, you know, has the sort of the sort of virtuous officer and the toxic leader. And, you know, that's, I think, kind of a timeless problem we have that if you have good leadership, you know, they will be able to sustain the morale and they will be able to conduct the war, you know, even in difficult times. When you don't have that is when you run into problems, which is why, you know, I've spent a significant amount of my career kind of reeling against toxic leadership because, you know,

It is, I think, so debilitating and you can never get rid of entirely, but certainly some organizations are better at doing that than others. So LBJ turns over to Nixon. Things are, I'll use the word stalemate. I don't know if you would sign up for that. This seems stalemated in 68. We know as people who analyze military affairs that the Tet Offensive is a huge disaster for the communists. That's certainly not how it's perceived in the United States. States and, you know, in the end, that matters a lot. And Nixon's own attitude and strategic

vision of Vietnam is always complicated. I've had the opportunity to talk at some length to Kissinger about it over the years before he passed away. And, you know, one of the points he would repeatedly make, he would say this publicly, too, is, you know, Nixon sort of gets blamed in the record for the Vietnam War, which is sort of ridiculous concerning everything you and I have just spent the last half hour discussing. I don't remember Richard Nixon having a role in virtually any of it. because he didn't unilaterally end the war upon taking office in 1969. Having run as somebody who was going to wrap the war up, which I guess it's more complicated

than that, and you can tell us how it's complicated. But, you know, that is he does not run as somebody who is going to achieve final victory in Vietnam. He runs as somebody who's going to end the war. And then he wins. And on January the 21st, 1969, he does not end the war. The war continues. Tell us about his actual act.

attitudes and Nixon's actual campaign positions in his actual strategic vision and how all this translates into policy starting in 69. Yeah, so Nixon had been very hawkish earlier in the war. In 65, 66, 66, 67, he and a lot of other Republicans are saying that the Johnson administration is, it really needs to take the gloves off, needs to hit the North Vietnamese much harder. When you get to 68, he senses that at least to get elected, he's a lot of the United, he's going to have to take a somewhat more restrained position. And, you know, he's running in the, you know, primary facing Ronald Reagan who wants this tougher line. But Nixon, I think, a politically

savvy guy, I think he senses that the best way to win is to take a more restrained approach. And so he makes sort of vague promises about peace with honor. It's not quite clear to the public what he means, but he ends up winning. Now he's running to the right of Humphrey, who is in the general election, who is seen as being more willing to give in. But Nixon, during this time, during 68, is talking about he does have plans to end the war. And part of this is using overwhelming force. And he has in mind the end of the Korean War in 1953, where Eisenhower comes in and threatens destruction. And this seem to convince the North Koreans to give in. So Nixon's planning to do this. He's also thinking that he will be able to increase the strength of the South Vietnamese. So what happens, there's a period

in February 69 that hasn't gotten a lot of attention, but Nixon himself talks about how this is the greatest mistake of his presidency. There's a North Vietnamese offensive that takes place. And Lyndon Johnson had suspended the bombing of North Vietnam shortly before he left. So Nixon's faced with a choice of do we restart the bombing because the North Vietnamese it kind of said we would ease off if we did that. So Nixon encouraged by some of his advisors to bomb, but then others, including Kissinger, saying, well, no, this could be an obstacle to peace. And, you know, right now we have a honeymoon with the press.

You know, the press had never been very happy about Nixon. But his talk of ending the war has made him some goodwill. So he doesn't bomb. And then later reflects that this, you know, kind of. squandered his ability to push the North Vietnamese around because now they realize he's kind of like LBJ. He will not get tough. He'll talk tougher than he will act. And so then he ultimately has to shift towards Vietnamization, basically gradually turning the war over to the South Vietnamese while removing American troops. And this is a viable strategy in a variety of senses,

but it will end up running into trouble because, you know, ultimately when the Americans leave, of course, we can't maintain our commitments. So Nixon's attitudes weren't totally determined by, you know, political, American domestic political demands. Or at least that's been my take on it. You know, there was something authentically, call it realist, for lack of a better word, in his view of the role that the Vietnam War should play. or ought to have played, perhaps, an American grand strategy, that there was an overinvestment of resources, that there had to be a recalibration of sorts. And part of his desire to, you know, accept something other than, you know, total, total, escalation and further investment of resources, except something less than that was part of this

view of recalibration, which was part of his broader sort of view of the need for detente and the need for a balancing of U.S. Soviet relations. You know, help me, help me think through all of that. Yeah, so he certainly does still believe that the domino theory has validity. So he's not ready to pull out quickly. But he does see in the early 70s, the world's changing that there's opportunities to work more closely with the Soviets and Chinese and to play them off against each other. And, you know, Vietnam will become an important part of that.

that initially he seems to be able to actually use this triangular diplomacy to get the Soviets and the Chinese to put pressure on the North Vietnamese to back off. Later on, it becomes problematic because it will be the idea that we can improve our relations will actually encourage Nixon and Kissinger to reduce their commitments to South Vietnam, which will contribute to the final fall, though ultimately it will be Congress who plays the greatest role in pulling the plug on our allies. Well, let's talk about that because, you know, in some ways, successful Vietnamization with ongoing limited American support that nevertheless maintains

South Vietnamese independence. I mean, that's just kind of getting back to the early 60s, what could or should have been in the early 60s with, you know, without this unfortunate, but you would argue necessary interregnum really started by Johnson in the face. of real crisis in 65. But in part because, you know, you also make the point, you attribute the cultural revolution and a lot of Chinese trouble at home in some ways to Johnson's intervention in 65, which I assume I've not been following the scholarly journals on this, but I'm going to

assume that's a controversial point. But there are opportunities now to try to restart and go back a decade. And it doesn't work out. Is it is it, is it, is it, is it just the fall of Nixon in the, and the, you know, is it just the fall of Nixon in the end that that kills it? Like, walk us through the dynamics that ultimately lead to the failure of the anonymization. Yeah, well, so in 1972, you have this big Easter offensive by the North Vietnamese 14 divisions, and American ground troops at this point are gone. You have American air power, and the American air power will help ensure the defeat of this offensive.

But it's really a watershed moment because it does show the South Vietnamese really have some real capability. Now, of course, American air power is important, but you can't just fight off 14 visions with air power alone. The South Vietnamese ground forces generally acquit themselves well. I mean, not all of them, but it's clearly, I think, the proof that Vietnamization has some viability to it. And so you will have then, as 72 ends, you know, Nixon is thinking about politics and striking a peace deal that will get the U.S. out. But there's a couple critical points on this peace deal. One is, do we let the North Vietnamese keep their troops in South Vietnam?

The South Vietnamese are very opposed to this. And then the other one is, do we leave a residual American force? And that's particularly important when you think about what's going to deter the North Vietnamese in the long run. And ultimately Nixon and Kissinger decide they're going to give in on both these. You're going to take all U.S. forces out and not make the North Vietnamese withdraw, which I think a lot of people have probably properly criticized them for because the U.S. is in a strong position after the Christmas bombings of 1972. But the Americans do promise that they will continue aid and they will bring in air power if the North Vietnamese violate this agreement. Now, again, Watergate is very crucial in withdrawing, you know, ultimately preventing us from living up to those promises.

But the residual force issue is also interesting because, and it's worth, you know, comparing to Afghanistan, we saw in Afghanistan, even with the small American force, the government was able to hang on and it had a deterrent effect. And as soon as you pull those troops out, you know, Afghanistan's collapse was very rapid. South Vietnam, they actually are able to hold on for a few more years without, you. U.S. forces, but it would have, I think, certainly given the North Vietnamese's greater pause if there had still been U.S. troops there after 73. What did we... What would have the correct American strategy from the start looked like? I assume you'll say, in part, Kennedy should have intervened more strongly to stop the coup

back in 63. Like, what is the parallel history where... Because we seem to have a habit of making the same kinds of... mistakes. There are just alarming tragic parallels between Vietnam and certainly Afghanistan. I guess I could argue Iraq as well. But, you know, Vietnam and Afghanistan both share this shocking finale, the fall of Saigon 50 years ago almost to the day, and then the fall of Kabul in 21, where, you know, so many people who fought on the American side essentially lose everything, literally everything in a lot of cases and you have these disastrous blows to American prestige, which, you know, I'll leave it to

you to explain the consequences in the 70s in 2021. I mean, it's sort of visible for all to see. You know, we have the full scale of invasion of Ukraine following shortly thereafter and not exactly a happy period for American foreign policy. What should we have done? Very big picture better. Yeah, well, certainly the, we should not have supported the overthrow of South Vietnamese government. That was a huge colossal disaster. We, you know, also, I think, limiting our ground troops to within South Vietnam was also a critical flaw. South Vietnam potentially, instead if we kept up the aid, they could have kept going. But the U.S. could have, and even in, you know, as soon as Kennedy gets in the White House, Eisenhower is actually telling them put American troops

into Laos, even if our allies won't, because if the Vietnamese, North Vietnamese just have Confederate access, our position South Vietnam is going to be terrible. South Vietnamese are going to get outflanked. Kennedy doesn't do that. He thinks we can avoid doing that. And for all this talk about flexible response, he's actually very cautious. But then, you know, again, when the war heats up, there's the U.S. military again saying going to Laos and some of them are saying going North Vietnam, which I think actually in hindsight probably would have been the best option because we know the Chinese were not going to come in. So that's That was always the issue that kept Johnson from going into North Vietnam was that he was afraid we're going to see what happened in the Korean War where we went to North Korea and then the Chinese came in. And now the generals and the intel community keep saying, well, this is not, you know, 1950 anymore. The Chinese don't want to come in. They don't want to fight us. So, you know, we can go in. You know, the U.S. had gone into Hanoi, you know, and taken Haifong.

Now, the counterargument is, well, the North Vietnamese then. could have taken to the hills like they did against the French. And yes, that's true they could have, but that's a very different and much easier situation to handle because having Hanoi populace areas of North Vietnam gave the North Vietnamese massive resources. They had the port of Haifaun they could bring in supplies. And again, you know, it is, I think, disturbingly similar in some ways to Afghanistan, where you have Pakistan essentially serving as this area that we are unwilling to go into. Now, Pakistan is also a bit trickier because you have, you know, Pakistan with nuclear arms. But, you know, I think, you know, as we look at these things,

certainly we, policymakers didn't pay enough attention to the prospect of a conflict where simply we are, you know, as the thing goes, mowing the grass, you're just going to constantly feed people in from another country and we're going to be stuck in a prolonged conflict of trying to stop them and that the American people will become impatient. If we were the Romans, maybe we could get away with that, but Americans don't want to do that forever. And so either you go in and hit the head of the snake, as Eisenhower once called it, or you find another way. I mean, ideally you get allies to do it. Now, again, if we hadn't overthrown Ziam, It would have been a lot easier to rely on our allies to do this.

You know, all of these are sort of opportunities early on. By the time we are into the Nixon presidency, you see the wheels start to come off, especially towards the end, because it's just all been going on too long as far as the American people are concerned. And you point out, it's the Congress in the end that pulls the rug out from the South Vietnamese. I mean, the Congress is a reasonably decent standing. in for American attitudes. It is on some level an actually representative body.

And there's just this sense, right, that after all these years, there have been so many promises that the successful end is near. The successful end has never come. And by the 70s, really this perception has set in, in particular on the left, that we're wrong. And that's a valence that doesn't really exist in the mid-60s. But by the time you're in the late 60s or in the 70s, this notion that America is actually on the wrong.

wrong side of an unjust war has powerfully taken hold, not just amongst sort of radicals, but really mainstream institutions of the country. And at that point, all these other questions, you know, are sort of sailing, all these other prospects are fighting against that, that force. Yes. And it's really unfortunate. I mean, again, I think Nixon could have done a better job to sell the people. Now, there is, you know, I think if you look at the numbers, I mean, the 1972 election is an excellent example. Most Americans, I think, still don't want to lose the war, but you have the liberal wing of the Democratic Party who they're fine with this and they put up George McGovern. Now, McGovern gets clobbered in the election because, you know, the average American is not in the same place as the liberal Democrats are.

but the liberal Democrats, of course, occupy positions of great influence around the country. They're able to use this to their advantage. And then Watergate, I mean, it's interesting, too, is that a lot of the Democrats were themselves the ones who got us into the war. And so it is rather peculiar that the Democrats now who are pushing us out. And I do think part of the problem is fundamentally you just have partisan politics getting in the way. and I think we've seen that again more recently, where some people will oppose the war simply because they don't like the president who's in charge. You know, I think we saw some of that with the Democrats during the period of George W. Bush. And, you know, I think even you can look at some of the Republican opposition to Ukraine is simply because they, the Republicans are, you know, did not like Joe Biden and some of the other Democrats.

And so, you know, there was, you know, I will say too, like some of the Democrats will still. trying to claim that they didn't really have responsibility. We did keep up a certain level of aid to South Vietnam, but it is clear that a lot of them believed essentially that this was no longer a war worth fighting and our allies were corrupt and the North Vietnamese actually were pretty good people, which is all very hard to sustain. And it's interesting to think about with this anniversary coming up that you don't see many of the anti-war people talking much about, the end of the war and you know at the time a lot of them said oh this is going to be you know big deal you know they didn't foresee the reeducation camps or the boat millions of boat people dying or the

Khmer Rouge lots of disasters came that these people you know assured us we're not going to happen I I'm confused I thought that we were on the wrong side of the war and that once we finally left the good nationalist Vietnamese who we had been wrongly opposing would introduce a more just regime than the one that existed in South Vietnam. You're telling me that that's not what happened, Mark? Yes, that is correct. I mean, we know close to a million people were put in reeducation camps, which, of course, the people who support us leaving said, oh, you know, there's only a few South Vietnamese who really, you know, buy into this idea of independent South Indian. I'm all know. The North Vietnamese clearly see that most of the educated popular

in South Vietnam is a threat. So a million of them going to the camps, probably 150,000 die before they ever come out. We also have several million boat people leave, I think between 200 and 600,000 of them die at sea. And then our departure also paves the way for the Khmer Rouge, who also gets sort of soft peddled by a lot of Americans. So these are, you know, just, you know, the U.S. supported government in Cambodia is corrupt. So probably just as while they leave, of course, again, the Cameroos come in, and are more vicious, I mean, killing in between 1.5 and 3 million people, you know, often for this most ridiculous reasons. And so it's worth keeping all of that in mind as we think about this context,

war in context. I just, I'm sorry, we moved through it really quickly, but I just, the low estimate for boat people, these are, these are South Vietnamese fleeing, fleeing the communists. The, the low estimate for the boat people who do not. right at sea is 200,000? Yes, I think most of the estimates are in the 200,000 to 600,000 range. You know, it's really tragic. There was a, it's actually a really good movie called When Heaven Falls, something to that effect.

A Vietnamese movie kind of gives you a graphic depiction of what happens, but, you know, these people are in little boats. You know, a lot of them get attacked by pirates. You know, a lot of them simply, you know, can't cross the massive, ocean to get where they... It's a South China Sea. It's huge. Yeah. So, yeah, another, you know, tragedy, which, again, you know, you never had a South Vietnamese, you know, causing these mass exodus of people for reasons of political persecution.

And then, sorry, just quickly because we could do many other episodes on it. But how does the fall of South Vietnam lead to the crisis in Cambodia? Just draw that out because the killing... We should do an episode on that. that. But in a way, this is kind of a domino that falls, but just explain what you mean there. Yes. Well, the Cambodian government changed in 1970 when Sienook is ousted in the law, Null comes in. And the U.S. NICS. NICS. administration provides its support to help maintain itself. And you have North Vietnamese forces that are in there, and they've been in there,

using it as a sanctuary to come fight American South Vietnamese. So the Americans and South Vietnamese, actually launch an operation and go in, clean some of them out. But the Cambodian military is pretty weak and they're dependent on American assistance and also help from the South Vietnamese. So once the South Vietnamese are on the ropes, they can't help them anymore. And the U.S. has, you know, the aid is declining to South Vietnam and the U.S. can't really keep up aid to Cambodia either. and so it becomes clear the Cambodian government is not going to survive. And so this opens the door for the Khmer Rouge who come in into Phnom Pen just a couple weeks before the fall of Saigon.

And soon thereafter, begin their murderous regime. And, you know, ultimately, they're so murderous that the North Vietnamese will actually go in in 1978 to put an end because, among other things, they're killing a lot of the ethnic Vietnamese who live. in Cambodia. Mark Moyer, we've only scratched the surface here, but part of me thinks that a better understanding of this period would be salutary because so many of the issues

and the controversies or maybe the dilemmas is a better word that it raises seems so strikingly similar to questions that we face today. I really appreciate you coming on the show. It's great to be with you, Aaron. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.