Hagel and Vietnam

“If you listen to the tapes released by the Johnson Library, on which President Lyndon B. Johnson and Senator Richard Russell discuss Vietnam in the mid-1960s, you will hear President Johnson confess that we couldn’t win in Vietnam, but we couldn’t pull out because he didn’t want to be the first president to lose a war. Senator Russell said (and I’m paraphrasing): ‘Get out. It’s unfair to project this country into a situation where on the outside you’re saying “Stay steady, stay the course, there’s lights at the end of the tunnel, we can win” when privately you are saying we can’t win. That’s wrong.“I wish someone had told me when I was sitting on a burning tank in a Vietnamese rice paddy that I was fighting for a lost cause just to save a president’s legacy. I volunteered to go to Vietnam to defend our nation, not to save LBJ’s place in history.“The cold political calculation I heard on those tapes made me vow that I would never—ever—remain silent when that kind of thinking put more American lives at risk in any conflict.”* * *Those paragraphs, drawn from Senator Hagel’s memoir, encapsulate the lesson that the nominee who would become the first enlisted-man-turned-defense-secretary took from his service in Vietnam. It’s a lesson that bothers us as much as Mr. Hagel’s willingness to treat with our enemies in the Middle East. We don’t gainsay for a second Mr. Hagel’s own patriotism and even gallantry, for which he was decorated with the Vietnamese Cross. But we have a different, less cynical view of Vietnam.For starters, we have never viewed America as being in Vietnam to save LBJ’s reputation. By our lights, Mr. Hagel’s paraphrasing gives an inaccurate impression of President Johnson’s famous conversation with Senator Russell. That took place in May of 1964, before LBJ, backed by Russell, began the big troop buildup at Vietnam. It was before the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which passed the senate almost unanimously. When LBJ signed it, he handed the pen to Senator Russell.By our lights, President Johnson, like President Kennedy before him, and Vice President Humphrey had honorable, even idealistic motives in respect of Vietnam. No doubt they saw Vietnam, as many of us did, as but one battle in the vast, twilight struggle that erupted after World War II and came to be known as the Cold War. Our view is that GIs, such as E-5 Hagel, won the Battle of Vietnam in the field. There was never any justice and much harm in gainsaying the glory of that victory.Where Vietnam was lost was in the 94th United States Congress. This view has been outlined in these columns before. It’s a view that reckons there were a right and a wrong side in Vietnam. The Soviet and the Red Chinese and the Vietnamese communists were on the wrong side. America and the free Vietnamese were on the right side. The anti-war movement — including President Obama’s nominee to be state secretary, Senator Kerry — wanted people to believe that they were opposed to the war because they wanted to protect our GIs and get them home, but that turned out not to be the case.After all, how many combat GIs were left in Vietnam by the time the 94th United States Congress voted to end all further aid to South Vietnam? It’s one of our favorite questions, first posed to us at an editorial dinner of The New York Sun by Henry Kissinger. The answer is that there were no combat GIs in Vietnam by the time the Congress ended support for the struggle of the South Vietnamese to preserve their freedom. The sorry truth is that the anti-war left didn’t give a fig about protecting Mr. Hagel and his brother or any other GIs.No, the goal of hard-Left architects of the anti-war movement was to end support for free Vietnam. The anti-war left wanted a victory by the communists. That isn’t true of all doves on the war. There were millions of patriotic doves, Mr. Hagel in the end included, as there were millions of patriotic hawks. But the architects of the anti-war movement weren’t satisfied by the withdrawal of American GIs. They wanted to end support for Free Vietnam. A communist victory was their laurel. It is one of the most tragic chapters in our history, and it is one of the most important to understand.And never more so than today, when we have GIs in the field in a vast, new, twilight war, launched against us by an Islamist foe that is potentially every bit as dangerous as the communists. It is as part that larger war that we view Iraq and Afghanistan. This is why these columns avoid the phrase the “Iraq war” and refer instead to the “Battle of Iraq.” Cynicism is not the quality we are looking for in the leadership at the Pentagon. We’re looking for leadership that can inspire and embolden and lift up our GIs as they risk their lives on the front line in a war that we didn’t start and can’t afford to lose.The final irony is that President Obama is trying to execute a much-ballyhooed “pivot” to Asia. That seems to be part of the raison d’etre for the retreat he and Messrs. Kerry and Hagel are calculating in the Middle East. It happens that some of us remember when the future of Asia was at stake in the 1960s and 1970s, and our ideas of free men and free markets won in Asia. It would not have happened had we shrunk from making a stand against the communists at Vietnam. If Mr. Hagel failed to draw the right lessons in Vietnam, how is he going to lead in either theater in the fight we’re in today?

Hagel and Vietnam

Hagel and Vietnam

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