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Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
date Dec 11, 2006 7:39 AM
subject [Vsg] General Weyand in today's NYT
Hi all,
One of the pleasures of the Iraq war has been seeing the VN war recalled
with some realism in the NYT. There has been a run of op-eds over the
last months by the new generation of VN war historians, finally stating
frankly what anyone who was alive at the time could tell you.
One part of the VN war story that has not made it into journalism,
though, has been the dissent among the US military to that war. I
haven't seen Bob Buzzanco's book on the topic quoted once. Bob is an
authoritarian Ha Noi determinist, but I don't see why that has kept him
off even Amy Goodman's War and Peace report, since Amy has her own
streak of Stalinism. I think it is the success of the Reagan-era
we-was-robbed revisionism that keeps the obvious analogies between
military dissent then and now out of the papers.
Anyways, today's New York Times has a crack in the dike, an op-ed by
Murray Fromson revealing General Frederick Weyand as a major source for
Fromson's and R.W. Apple's critical reporting on the conduct of the VN
War, back in the day.
Marc J. Gilbert <mgilbert@hpu.edu>
date Dec 11, 2006 8:11 AM
subject RE: [Vsg] General Weyand in today's NYT
Dan weites:
I haven't seen Bob Buzzanco's book on the topic quoted once. Bob is an authoritarian Ha Noi determinist, but I don't see why that has kept him off even Amy Goodman's War and Peace report, since Amy has her own
streak of Stalinism.
Dan makes a good point. But as Woody Allen wrote in Annie Hall, no one wishes to be reduced to a social sterotype. Such constructions help explain why so many dissenting views are never heard from or marginalized.
Bob's book is an expansion of a much earlier peice on dissent in the military that could have been written by William F. Buckley. Dan knows it well as he wrote its introduction.
David Hunt <David.Hunt@umb.edu>
date Dec 11, 2006 8:16 AM
subject RE: [Vsg] General Weyand in today's NYT
Somebody once called me a Stalinist. It was at a French Historical Studies Conference in 1985, and I had just given a paper on the disposition of communal property during the French Revolution. It was a disorienting experience, and of course it hurt, too. So now I am wondering what purpose is served, when an equally unrelated topic is up for discussion, by saying or implying that Bob Buzzanco is a Stalinist.
Paul Sager <paul.sager@nyu.edu>
date Dec 11, 2006 9:25 AM
subject Re: [Vsg] General Weyand in today's NYT
Likewise for Amy Goodman. I've never heard anything Stalinistic on her show. Dan, could you produce some evidence for that label?
Tuan Hoang <thoang1@nd.edu>
date Dec 11, 2006 9:48 AM
subject Re: [Vsg] General Weyand in today's NYT
In the late 1980s, Weyand gave a well-known interview to Harry Summers (of revisionist fame).
http://www.historynet.com/wars_conflicts/vietnam_war/3035131.html?page=1&c=y
There's a lot in the interview, including this excerpt about the fall of 1967, or shortly after the NYT
article came out.
----
When Clark Clifford took over as secretary of defense after Tet 1968, he found that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had no concept of victory and no plan to end the war. And that was the case in Saigon as well. As you know, a Letter of Instruction is the means by which the president, as commander in chief, issues orders to his commanders in the field for the conduct of military operations. For example, President Roosevelt's Letter of Instruction to General Eisenhower in World War II began, "You will invade the continent of Europe...." But
during our quarter-century involvement in Vietnam, no president--not Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon or Ford--ever issued such clear-cut instructions to their military commanders in Vietnam. In 1974, Brigadier General Douglas Kinnard did a survey and found that "almost 70 percent of the Army generals who managed the war were uncertain of its objectives." As he concluded, that "mirrors a deep-seated strategic failure: the failure of policy-makers to frame tangible, obtainable goals." It was this lack of a sense of
purpose that finally turned the American people against the war. The anti-war movement likes to take credit for it--why anyone would want to take "credit" for the resulting massacre of some three million Cambodians, the consignment of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese to forced-labor camps, and the suffering of over a million Indochinese boat people is beyond me--but I believe they're wrong. The turnaround was more pragmatic than ideological. It was the fall of 1967 when polls showed that for the first time more Americans were against the war than in support of it. And I think that shift took place because of public suspicion that the government didn't know what it was doing. When the Tet Offensive hit several months later it merely confirmed that suspicion--especially when President Lyndon B. Johnson gave up on the war.
~Tuan
Marc J. Gilbert <mgilbert@hpu.edu>
date Dec 11, 2006 9:42 AM
subject [Vsg] RE: Weyand NYT Dissent Redux
The work I mentioned in my last post was:
Informed Dissent:Three Generals and the Viet Nam War Robert Buzzanco and Asad Ismi, Introduction by Dan Duffy,
58 pages, 1991, ISBN: 0-9628524-4-9.
It is a wonderful work!
One never knows. Dan may be be doing us a service by marking out the authoritarians, communist-roaders and Stalinists amongst us.
However, I thought I had Nguy?n Cao K? pegged to be on the right of Chiggis Khan, but always reserved my professional and personal judgment because in the rough and tumble of politics one often loses sight of the complexity that is human behavior and thought. His return to Vietnam suggests a capacity for political complexity I would have been wrong to dismiss had I subscribed to the familiar discouse about him since 1966. All things change; thus people do, too, as do their views. Whether putting folk in political boxes makes it harder for them to change is one question, but Dan is certainly right about how putting folk in such boxes does impair learning from them, a comment Dan would know I offer more in the vein of Thich Nh?t H?nh than the late heckler comic Don Rickles!
I mention this out of experience. By an odd set of coincidences, I was asked to lecture at the United States Air Force Special Operations Command school course on counter-insurgency, as was the American War in Viet Nam veteran and post-war miltiary adviser cum talking head, the late Colonel Harry Summers. We were both asked to relate the war in Viet Nam to subsequent counter-insurgent situations. At the end of the program, the students, an international group of middle grade offficers, asked a panel of lecturers on the segment on Vietnamese insurgent/counter-insurgent warfare, including Summers and myself, what was the one thing we would tell an American President facing any insurgency, given we could tell the holder of that office only _one_ thing. I said, _I would tell any commander-in-chief that whatever you do, before you do it, take the counsel of the very people your advisers tell you not to consult_, outsiders who hold contrarian views (including those that may actually know the people whose conflicting wills have produced the insurgency, if such it was, in the first place). Col. Summers, with whom I disagreed with all of my adult life (especially with his endorsement of the use of nuclear weapons in Viet Nam), surprised me by saying, _I would say the President should remember that there are some things the American people do not want done in their name._
As Dan says, there are many interesting facets of the American War in Viet Nam that have resonance today, but these remarks, given the closed set that was the Bush White House and Rumsfeld's hubris and provacative remarks on Abu Ghraib, etc., have stayed with me thoughtout the Iraq debacle, along with the failure of partitions to effect lasting peace and the paucity of thought that holds firepower superior to politics and diplomacy.
Marc J. Gilbert <mgilbert@hpu.edu>
date Dec 11, 2006 11:25 AM
subject RE: [Vsg] General Weyand in today's NYT
Re: Anti-war movement and Iraq/Vietnam
This discourse is shifting a bit too much toward America (!), but it would not hurt to offer that the numerically small, divided and easily marginalized and demonized anti-war movement, whatever it was, helped create the political space for mass public reconsideration of the failures of American war managers. Without such a movement, ineffective war strategies can drag on for years, hence the current debacle in Iraq.
As in the 1960s-70s, the increasingly open opposition of women (marginalized and demonized. As before), helped galvanize military officers and men like Hawaii's Lt. Ehren Watada (http://www.tomjoad.org/supportlt.htm, for those following Duffy-Buzzanco), who broke the code of silence. In the last two years of his life, William Colby said the US lost in Viet Nam because it could not demonstrate progress toward victory and no democratic nation engaged in a long and costly war can be faulted for (and may , in fact, be duty-bound to) wishing an end to it as result of this failure [he did not say, _whose consequences in blood are on the war leaderships’ hands, not the publics’_, but this may have been implied]. Yes, this is a departure from his Lost Victory thesis, but things do change, even revisionism.
This is what the anti-war leaders today claim credit for helping to bring cloture to failed policy--not the tragic results following the end of the war, a war the anti-war movement did not start. Of course, some argue that their views may have led to/assisted a communist victory, but this discussion is not about that, which requires even more careful discussion i.e. no US intervention, no genocide in Cambodia, just a Vietnamese puppet state until D?i m?i, a process linked to globalization, not merely local history? Or would world communism have triumphed, etc. Hindsight and counterfactual reasoning are difficult paths to negotiate and not the path we are on here.
With thanks,
Marc
Tuan Hoang <thoang1@nd.edu>
date Dec 13, 2006 9:23 AM
subject RE: [Vsg] General Weyand in today's NYT
Yes, I agree with Marc's point about the credit claimed by the anti-war movement. I copied the quote in full, because of the bits about fall 1967 and government-military relationship. But as often the case with interviewees, Weyand peppers the main points with side comments, in this case about the anti-war movement.
Weyand was probably right that Americans turned against the war for pragmatic than ideological reasons. Some of them might have even been influenced by the NYT article in August 1967 that quoted him anonymously.
~Tuan
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