The March of Folly (43 page)

Americans were the settlers and colonizers of a territory deemed so essential that its loss would spell ruin, but the British wall of superiority precluded knowledge and promoted fatal underestimation. Meeting it during the peace negotiations, John Adams wrote, “The pride and vanity of that nation is a disease; it is a delirium; it has been flattered and inflamed so long by themselves and others that it perverts everything.”

Unsuitability for government, while an unwilled folly, was a folly of the system, which was peculiarly vulnerable to the lack of an effective head. At his dynamic best, Pitt had engineered England’s triumph
in the Seven Years’ War, and his son was to hold the controls effectively against Napoleon. In between, a hapless government shuffled and blundered. Dukes and noble lords in the reign of George III did not take well to official responsibility. Grafton, in his reluctance and sense of unfitness and once-a-week attendance, Townshend in his recklessness, Hillsborough in his arrogant obtuseness, Sandwich, Northington, Weymouth and others in their gambling and drinking, Germain in his haughty incapacity, Richmond and Rockingham in their moods of aloofness and devotion to their country pursuits, poor Lord North in his intense dislike of his job, made a mess of a situation that would have been difficult even for the wisest. One cannot escape the impression that the level of British intelligence and competence in both civil and military positions in the period 1763–83 was, on the whole, though not in every case, low. Whether that was bad luck or was owing to the almost exclusive hold of the ultraprivileged on decisionmaking positions is not clear beyond question. The underprivileged and the middle class often do no better. What is clear is that when incapacity is joined by complacency, the result is the worst possible combination.

Finally there is the “terrible encumbrance” of dignity and honor; of putting false value on these and mistaking them for self-interest; of sacrificing the possible to principle, when the principle represents “a right you know you cannot exert.” If Lord Chesterfield could remark this in 1765 and Burke and others repeatedly plead for expediency rather than token display of authority, the government’s refusal to see it for themselves must be designated folly. They persisted in first pursuing, then fighting for an aim whose result would be harmful whether they won or lost. Self-interest lay in retaining the colonies in goodwill, and if this was considered the hinge of British prosperity and yet incompatible with legislative supremacy, then supremacy should have remained, as so many advised, unexercised. Conciliation, Rockingham once said, could be brought about by “tacit compact” and much remaining “unascertained.”

Although the war and the humiliation poisoned Anglo-American relations for a long time, Britain learned from the experience. Fifty years later, after a period of troubled relations with Canada, Commonwealth status began to emerge from the Durham Report, which resulted from England’s recognition that any other course would lead to a repetition of the American rebellion. The haunting question that remains is whether, if the ministers of George III had been other than they were, some such status or form of union between Britain and
America might have been attainable and in that case might have created a preponderance of trans-Atlantic power that would have deterred challengers and perhaps spared the world the Great War of 1914–18 and its unending sequels.

It has been said that if the protagonists of
Hamlet
and
Othello
were reversed, there would have been no tragedy: Hamlet would have seen through Iago in no time and Othello would not have hesitated to kill King Claudius. If the British actors before and after 1775 had been other than they were, there might have been statesmanship instead of folly, with a train of altered consequences reaching to the present. The hypothetical has charm, but the actuality of government makes history.

Ignorance was not a factor in the American endeavor in Vietnam pursued through five successive presidencies, although it was to become an excuse. Ignorance of country and culture there may have been, but not ignorance of the contra-indications, even the barriers, to achieving the objectives of American policy. All the conditions and reasons precluding a successful outcome were recognized or foreseen at one time or another during the thirty years of our involvement. American intervention was not a progress sucked step by step into an unsuspected quagmire. At no time were policy-makers unaware of the hazards, obstacles and negative developments. American intelligence was adequate, informed observation flowed steadily from the field to the capital, special investigative missions were repeatedly sent out, independent reportage to balance professional optimism—when that prevailed—was never lacking. The folly consisted not in pursuit of a goal in ignorance of the obstacles but in persistence in the pursuit despite accumulating evidence that the goal was unattainable, and the effect disproportionate to the American interest and eventually damaging to American society, reputation and disposable power in the world.

The question raised is why did the policy-makers close their minds to the evidence and its implications? This is the classic symptom of folly: refusal to draw conclusions from the evidence, addiction to the counter-productive. The “why” of this refusal and this addiction may disclose itself in the course of retracing the tale of American policy-making in Vietnam.

The beginning lay in the reversal during the last months of World War II of President Roosevelt’s previous determination not to allow, and certainly not to assist, the restoration of French colonial rule in Indochina. The engine of reversal was the belief, in response to strident French demand and damaged French pride resulting from the German occupation, that it was essential to strengthen France as the
linchpin in Western Europe against Soviet expansion, which, as victory approached, had become the dominant concern in Washington. Until this time Roosevelt’s disgust with colonialism and his intention to see it eliminated in Asia had been firm (and a cause of basic dispute with Britain). He believed French misrule of Indochina represented colonialism in its worst form. Indochina “should not go back to France,” he told Secretary of State Cordell Hull in January 1943; “the case is perfectly clear. France has had the country—thirty million inhabitants—for nearly a hundred years and the people are worse off than they were at the beginning. [They] are entitled to something better than that.”

The President “has been more outspoken to me on that subject,” Churchill informed Anthony Eden, “than on any other colonial matter, and I imagine that it is one of his principal war aims to liberate Indochina from France.” Indeed it was. At the Cairo Conference in 1943, the President’s plans for Indochina made emphatic capital letters in General Stilwell’s diary:
“NOT TO GO BACK TO
FRANCE!”
Roosevelt proposed trusteeship “for 25 years or so till we put them on their feet, just like the Philippines.” The idea thoroughly alarmed the British and evoked no interest from a former ruler of Vietnam, China. “I asked Chiang Kai-shek if he wanted Indochina,” Roosevelt told General Stilwell, “and he said point blank ‘Under no circumstances!’ Just like that—‘Under no circumstances!’ ”

The possibility of self-rule seems not to have occurred to Roosevelt, although Vietnam—the nation uniting Cochin China, Annam and Tonkin—had before the advent of the French been an independent kingdom with a long devotion to self-government in its many struggles against Chinese rule. This deficiency in Roosevelt’s view of the problem was typical of the prevailing attitude toward subject peoples at the time. Regardless of their history, they were not considered “ready” for self-rule until prepared for it under Western tutelage.

The British were adamantly opposed to trusteeship as a “bad precedent” for their own return to India, Burma and Malaya, and Roosevelt did not insist. He was not eager to add another controversy to the problem of India, which made Churchill rave every time the President raised it. Thereafter, with liberated France emerging in 1944 under an implacable Charles de Gaulle and insisting on her “right” of return, and with China as a trustee ruled out by her own now too obvious frailties, the President did not know what to do.

International trusteeship slowly collapsed from unpopularity. Roosevelt’s military advisers disliked it because they felt it might
jeopardize United States freedom of control over former Japanese islands as naval bases. Europeanists of the State Department, always pro-French, thoroughly adopted the premise of French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault that unless there was “whole-hearted cooperation with France,” a Soviet-dominated Europe would threaten “Western civilization.” Cooperation, as viewed by the Europeanists, meant meeting French demands. On the other hand, their colleagues of the Far East (later the Southeast Asia) desk were urging that the goal of American policy should be eventual independence after some form of interim government which could “teach” the Vietnamese “to resume the responsibilities of self-government.”

In the struggle of policies, the future of Asians could not weigh against the Soviet shadow looming over Europe. In August 1944, at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference on post-war organization, the United States proposal for the colonies made no mention of future independence and offered only a weak-kneed trusteeship to be arranged with the “voluntary” consent of the former colonial power.

Already Indochina was beginning to present the recalcitrance to solution that would only deepen over the next thirty years. During the war, by arrangement with the Japanese conquerors of Indochina and the Vichy government, the French Colonial administration with its armed forces and civilian colonists had remained in the country as surrogate rulers. When, at the eleventh hour, in March 1945, the Japanese ousted them from control, some French groups joined the native resistance under the Viet-Minh, a coalition of nationalist groups including Communists which had been agitating for independence since 1939 and conducting resistance against the Japanese. SEAC (Southeast Asia Command), controlled by the British, made contact with them and invited collaboration. Because any aid to resistance groups would now unavoidably help the French return, Roosevelt shied away from the issue; he did not want to get “mixed up” in liberating Indochina from the Japanese, he irritably told Hull in January 1945. He refused a French request for American ships to transport French troops to Indochina and disallowed aid to the resistance, then reversed himself, insisting that any aid must be limited to action against the Japanese and not construed in the French interest.

Yet who was to take over when the war against Japan was won? Experience with China in the past year had been disillusioning, while the French voice was growing shrill and more imperative. Caught between the pressure of his Allies and his own deep-seated feeling that France should not “go back,” Roosevelt, worn out and near his end, tried to avoid the explicit and postpone decisions.

At Yalta in February 1945, when every other Allied problem was developing strain with the approach of victory, the conference skirted the subject, leaving it to the forthcoming organizing conference of the UN at San Francisco. Still worrying the problem, Roosevelt discussed it with a State Department adviser in preparation for the San Francisco meeting. He now retreated to the suggestion that France herself might be the trustee “with the proviso that independence was the ultimate goal.” Asked if he would settle for dominion status, he said no, “it must be independence … and you can quote me in the State Department.” A month later, on 12 April 1945, he died.

With the way now clear, Secretary of State Stettinius told the French at San Francisco twenty-six days after Roosevelt’s death that United States did not question French sovereignty over Indochina. He was responding to a tantrum staged by de Gaulle for the benefit of the American Ambassador in Paris in which the General had said that he had an expeditionary force ready to go to Indochina whose departure was prevented by the American refusal of transport, and that “if you are against us in Indochina” this would cause “terrific disappointment” in France, which could drive her into the Soviet orbit. “We do not want to become Communist … but I hope you do not push us into it.” The blackmail was primitive but tailored to suit what the Europeanists of American diplomacy wished to report. In May at San Francisco, Acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew, the dynamic former Ambassador to Japan and polished veteran of the Foreign Service, assured Bidault with remarkable aplomb that “the record is entirely innocent of any official statement of this government questioning, even by implication, French sovereignty over that area.” Recognition is a rather different thing from absence of questioning. In the hands of an expert, that is how policy is made.