50 Years After Vietnam, Intellectual Humility Still a Critical Lesson

Over the long weekend, I went to southern California and ended up going surfing. I have only surfed a few times, and this trip quickly corrected my belief that I was not that bad. Folks, I am really bad. It was a humbling experience. To be fair, the waves were pretty rough, and just getting out through the break was hard. I ended up catching a few waves, but for the first 15 attempts I was battered. On the last successful ride into the beach, I thought of that great Robert Duvall line from the magnificent Vietnam film Apocalypse Now: “Charlie don’t surf!”

This of course brings to mind that this week is the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, the history of which I have taught since the 1990s. The lessons of Vietnam are powerful. The war demonstrated the limits of American power as U.S. leaders tried to build a nation and prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam. The experience raised profound questions about the decision making and logic behind aspects of American Cold War foreign policy. The war exposed social, political, and cultural divisions in this nation in ways not seen since the Civil War. Leaders from both parties—from Truman to Eisenhower to JFK  to Nixon—consistently lied about the nature of American involvement and misrepresented American progress. This caused an erosion of trust in the American government that is still felt to this day.

In my classes, I am always careful to distinguish between the decisions and actions of the U.S. government and the experience of the American soldiers. Certain policies, strategies, and tactics set up by the generals and leaders in the Defense Department were morally dubious, created conditions in which American soldiers committed acts that haunted many of them, and were ultimately responsible for the American defeat in Vietnam. The common “grunts” who served were largely poor Americans doing their patriotic duty. Despite the many stories of their inspiring heroism, many Vietnam veterans were rejected by both the WWII generation and their young peers. Further, the government essentially abandoned them as many struggled with PTSD. The human cost of this war was frightful—over 59,000 Americans died, along with some 1-3 million Vietnamese.

Perhaps the biggest lesson for me connects to the lesson of humility—and particularly intellectual humility. It is one thing for a person to be humble about the limitation of their athletic prowess. I am a bad surfer—I can live with that. But it’s extremely hard for a person to be humble about their intellect and be open about what they don’t know. Schools don’t help this, as we constantly assess and push students to be excellent at all things. But that is not a realistic goal. Humans are going to have gaps in their knowledge. It is when one does not acknowledge those gaps and goes forward without listening or being self-reflective that disasters can happen.

Vietnam is a case in point. Consider the architects of American involvement and the war itself. Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, and Nixon were all brilliant in their own ways. They were surrounded by advisors who are giant figures in American foreign policy, such as Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, and Henry Kissinger. The generals who led the war effort had all been rising stars during WWII. Yet, they were arrogant about American power. They never evaluated whether South Vietnam could be saved from communism or if it would actually matter. They were too rigid in their beliefs about containment.  

Most importantly, they failed to understand the history and culture of Vietnam. I am no apologist for Ho Chi Minh or the Vietnamese Communist Party. In many ways, trying to save South Vietnam was a noble cause. But the internal politics and corruption of the Saigon regime made this an impossible task for the American military. Further, the history of Vietnam is the history of resistance to outsiders. The country fought against the Chinese for 1,000 years; then, against the French for 250. And then against the Americans, after they tried to prop up the French and conjure up an alternative to communist rule. The earliest Americans in Vietnam were OSS agents who worked with Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh (a communist front organization) to help rescue downed American pilots and to plot against the Japanese. (There are photos and records of these early American spies training the leadership of the Viet Minh.) Those early observers urged the Americans to get out of Vietnam after the war because they understood that America would have difficulty achieving its strategic goals. Immediately after WWII, Ho Chi Minh pleaded with the Americans to recognize their independence, as he was distrusted by the Soviet Union and the Chinese communists. Yet these super-smart American diplomats, military leaders, and presidents who came later lacked the intellectual curiosity to question their own policies and assumptions or dive into the real history.

A year before LBJ sent in combat troops, he was promising the American people publicly that he would not send US soldiers to Vietnam. Yet, privately, he was polling his advisors about it.  One remarkable conversation was held in May of 1964 with his congressional mentor Rep. Richard Russel, Chairman of the Armed Services Committee questioning the wisdom of committing U.S. troops. He recorded the conversation and I put together this video for my class:

It’s interesting to hear LBJ understand how difficult it would be to win in Vietnam. (Note: There are a series of conversations he was having around this time period in which he was testing out political support for Vietnam. In many of these conversations, he revealed deep doubts about sending troops in.) Yet he feared the political backlash if Vietnam “fell” to communism. He pressured McNamara, his Secretary of Defense, to come up with plans. McNamara was a true believer in the potential for victory and in American power until the data clearly showed him that the war was unwinnable. Nixon and Kissinger, two of the most insightful foreign policy thinkers in American history, understood that the war was not winnable and enacted strategies aimed at creating a “decent interval” between the fall of Saigon and the American withdrawal, with the goal of maintaining American prestige. Some terrible facts: 40% of American casualties occurred during Nixon’s presidency after Nixon helped covertly undermine an LBJ  peace agreement that could have been reached in 1968 and was very similar to what Nixon would hammer out in 1973.

This history offers a few lessons for all of us. One is to recognize the dangers of being overly confident. Two is that one needs to ask questions. Three: One needs to have empathy. Later in life, McNamara understood that he had never put himself in the shoes of Ho Chi Minh to consider his perspective. Had he done so, different outcomes might have been achieved. I think it is important that we encourage students to have the humility to acknowledge their limitations, to learn how to ask the right questions, and to endeavor to understand both simple and complex issues from all sides.