reviewed by MC5, June 2, 2000
Kinnard is an ex-general who was a chief of staff "of the most important field command in Vietnam before his 1970 retirement" according to the book jacket. His book is a report on a survey of U.$. generals that he made before the war ended but after U.$. defeat was assured. MIM reviews the book here for the benefit of our readers studying Vietnam. The overall situation is better studied in ex-Secretary of "Defense" Robert McNamara's book called "Argument without End" reviewed in the MIM bookstore. However, there are some facts that the generals admit in Kinnard's book that readers should find helpful.
Background of the generals
The generals were all white males and mostly Protestants. All were born between 1910 and 1926 and almost all were college graduates. Half were West Point graduates; half were airborne qualified and 60% had served in the infantry.(p. 11) The average general gained a promotion (half a star) by serving in Vietnam.(p. 11) Only one general was not married and all generals had spent a minimum of 25 years climbing the ranks.(p. 14) The uniformity of the generals in their backgrounds makes their disagreements amongst themselves all the more remarkable--an indication of the bind the imperialists were in in Vietnam.
Kinnard proceeds from the view that anyone who disagreed slightly with U.$. strategy in any regard was a critic of the war in Vietnam. Hence, from his perspective, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger under President Richard Nixon was a critic.(p. 9) Kinnard himself expected the generals to be rather uniform in their views given their backgrounds and united in opposition to criticism from the U.$. public.
64% of 173 generals who toured Vietnam from 1965 to 1973 completed Kinnard's questionnaire. He also interviewed some generals in persyn and accepted written comments on his questions.
Lies
Ever since the peace treaty with Vietnam in 1973 and the reunification of Vietnam in 1975, the U.$. media and various experts have spoken of the U.$. "mistake" in Vietnam. We also often hear of Vietnam in the same breath as Watergate.
Watergate was a case of the U.S. President Nixon ordering interference in the campaigns of his bourgeois opponents in the Democratic Party. It also involved lying--a cover-up. Bourgeois pundits mention Vietnam in the same breath for promoting general cynicism in the public toward the government. In the same 1960s era, many youth discovered that taking drugs and having pre-marital sex were not as dire in their impact as adult authority had said. Hence, the 1960s ended up being years in which authority was caught lying.
Kinnard explains in detail the cynicism created by the U.$. involvement in the Vietnam War (1954-1975). It has to do with the fact that the generals and president kept telling the public that they were about to win the war when that was not in fact the case. For example, in the spring of 1964, the outgoing general in Vietnam named Paul Harkins told the incoming military leader William Westmoreland and a civilian official that the United $tates would win in six months.(p. 18) As early as a January 1963 battle at Ap Bac that the media observed, the U.$. media knew that the U.$. government lied about winning a battle that the U.$. puppets lost. President John F. Kennedy tried to get a reporter reassigned for knowing the truth.(p. 126) To its horror, the Amerikan public eventually learned that communism was a popular idea in Vietnam and anti-imperialism motivated the people there to great military achievements.
Some U.$. generals had a career incentive to have a long war in Vietnam and prove themselves there with the most U.$. troops at their disposal possible as Kinnard and other generals have admitted. Other politicians lied because they were desperately wishing to keep fighting the "communists" and felt it necessary to lie to the public. Some politicians also simply erred, not knowing in chauvinist arrogance that the feeble U.$. communist movement was not at all parallel to the one in Vietnam, where there was a genuine proletariat and an exploited peasantry.
The Amerikan public thought the army had to kill a few communists and go home in Vietnam after democratic government established itself. From cruel experience, the U.$. public learned that the politicians either did not know what they were doing in Vietnam or they lied. Once the bubble burst, the public also started to ask whether the war was right in the first place. Many concluded that the system (imperialism) compelled the leaders to lie and go to war. Students and oppressed nationality peoples even started to ask whether communism was what they were told.
To the progressive individual it must seem odd that the Amerikan public did not ask fundamental questions about the war until after a five digit figure of Amerikans and a seven digit figure of Vietnamese died fighting. Yet that is how it happened: there was no automatic ethical review of what was going on in Vietnam. It only occurred because the rulers failed in their goals of subduing Vietnam. The reason for this is simple: the majority of Amerikans benefits from U.$. empire and allows the ruling class to go on its way unless something drastic happens.
Material conditions created U.$. public opinion against the war. There was no U.$. majority opposed to the war until after the major Vietnamese military offensive in 1968 known as "Tet," which killed 6,000 troops on the U.$. side and showed the Amerikan public that the revolution was brewing in hundreds of Vietnamese cities and towns. From 1954 to about 1968, the Amerikan public supported the war and Kinnard admits that the generals did not account for U.$. public opinion in their calculations of how to conduct a war.(pp. 161-2) In November, 1967, Westmoreland was still telling the public that the United $tates was winning, to such an extent that victorious troop withdrawals could start in 1969.(pp. 76, 128) As it actually happened, in 1969 and 1970, opposition to the war hardened and severely limited the capacity of the U.$. imperialists to continue fighting. No more would the public believe stories about a few communists needing to be finished off.
In retrospect, a majority of generals preferred to say in 1974 that they underestimated the enemy rather than saying that they lied to the public about their successes. 56% of the generals agreed that "prior to 1968, the will and determination of the enemy to continue the war was not sufficiently considered."(p. 28) MIM concurs and believes that some politicians, generals and masses were simply ignorant of the situation in Vietnam and did not understand the causation of Vietnamese militancy against U.$. occupation. The United $tates killed millions and still the Vietnamese kept fighting.
The persyn in charge of the U.$. war effort overall, General Westmoreland concluded that lack of knowledge of the enemy's perspective, determination and methods was the "basic error" of the war.(p. 63)
Despite this "error," a majority of generals admitted that at least some lying was going on. The statistic of the "kill ratio" and "body count" presented to the public was inaccurate. 55% of generals used the term "misleading" and 61% said the statistics were "often inflated" to prove success.(pp. 74-5) Some generals admitted that there was a career motivation involved as well; although they did this by blaming other specific generals they did not trust. The question arises that if they knew lying was going on, why did these generals not do anything about it: "The most frequent explanation is that their careers were at stake and they could not afford to make waves."(p. 164)
A U.$. diplomat in Saigon (the capital of U.$. puppet-run Vietnam) also admitted similar problems in diplomatic lying. With regard to an analysis of elections involving the U.$. puppet regime, the diplomat said in 1969: "The result is a totally misleading and unbelievably optimistic view of the local elections. This kind of dangerous diplomatic apologetics is what got us into Vietnam, and will one day make Vietnam an American tragedy. The genre of tragedy no bureaucrat or general will be able to disguise."(p. 145)
As late as 1974, after the peace treaty of 1973, the generals were still saying that the U.$. puppet side would win in Vietnam. 65% said that the chances of the puppet government were better than fifty-fifty.(p. 153) The very next year the puppet regime fell apart without direct U.$. military involvement and the revolution succeeded in reunifying Vietnam. Either the generals did not know what they were talking about or they lied. Kinnard himself concluded that "there was too much tricky optimism from LBJ on down. Furthermore, there was too much concealing of the implications of half-announced decisions."(p. 167)
Although in 1974 they still believed the puppet regime would win thanks to its new Amerikan training, a majority (53%) of generals did conclude that the United $tates never should have sent combat troops to Vietnam.(p. 154) That's something that some reactionaries today still have not figured out.
Contemporary spin
Ever since Ronald Reagan's campaigns for the presidency in 1976 and 1980, conservatives in the United $tates have started rewriting history on Vietnam. They latch on to one belief of generals, that they had their hands tied in Vietnam by politicians and that is why they lost the war.
Kinnard was one of those generals who understood all along that the war in Vietnam would be constrained by the U.$. desire to keep China and the Soviet Union out. The U.$. rulers wanted a fight against Vietnam, not one against Vietnam, China and the Soviet Union combined. Had the generals gone all out without civilian constraints and had they invaded Hanoi, the Chinese would have sent in troops. Kinnard knew this and McNamara knew this. Today, the bragging reactionaries talk like the United $tates should have risked nuclear war and higher conventional casualties in Vietnam. They are counting on historical amnesia in the Amerikan public.
Kinnard also debunks the current view without knowing it. He pointed out that more extreme actions by the United $tates would have provoked the Soviet Union to prove itself to the world. The United $tates delayed mining the harbors of Vietnam because it feared that China (and Mao) would gain in influence in Vietnam at the expense of the Soviet Union according to Kinnard. China borders Vietnam, so if the Yankees cut off the sea, China's overland supply route to Vietnam would become more important and the Soviet Union would have to consider how to bolster its international image as a superpower.(p. 26)
Although a majority of generals say they did not understand the goals of the civilian politicians, (pp. 24-5) they did understand the fact that China and the Soviet social-imperialists were factors that had to be accounted for, not forgotten as some propagandists today like to talk. Westmoreland credited President Johnson for keeping the war limited.
Useful facts on genocide and dialectics
Then Secretary of "Defense," Robert McNamara has already admitted that the United $tates killed more than 3 million Vietnamese in the Vietnam War. Kinnard also admitted earlier some telling facts: "When one considers that the total munitions employed by the United States in Vietnam was greater than tonnages employed worldwide in the 1941-1945 war, some of these side effects on a populated country the size of Vietnam are not difficult to imagine."(p. 46)
As it turns out, even 28% and 30% of the U.$. generals respectively thought the United $tates used too much bombing and artillery.(p. 47) They were able to say that despite the fact that it seems to mean that more Amerikans should die per Vietnamese killed, because the generals realized that extreme use of bombs and artillery created opposition in the Vietnamese people, so there was a trade-off in how much the generals could back U.$. troops with the maximum firepower and how much support from the Vietnamese people the generals could obtain for their war.
Once again, it is a case not where the generals fundamentally opposed the use of bombing and artillery for alleged ethical reasons. It was simply a matter that the more firepower used, the more Vietnamese and global public opinion swung against Uncle Sam, thus causing Uncle Sam to lose the war on the ground in Vietnam. This scientific calculation came into the open and brought forward the more fundamental ethical issues that had been squelched. It's another example demonstrating dialectical materialism's descriptive power. The more bombing, the greater the resistance is.
Conclusion
Kinnard provides historical context and views of the "war managers" as he calls them. McNamara's book is better for overall history, but Kinnard's survey of generals is still useful.