[In the following review, Marshall agrees with Podhoretz's opinions in Why We Were in Vietnam regarding the lack of popular support for United States military intervention in Vietnam.]

Norman Podhoretz's Why We Were in Vietnam is a sharp disquisition in political pathology. Given my own reactions at the time—as long ago as 1954 I was convinced of the futility of getting into war over the future of a distant and recalcitrant land against close-by forces bent on possession, but once we had entered the conflict I was loath to be seen siding with people who assailed the U.S. for criminality rather than mere bumbling—I am favorably disposed toward Podhoretz's negative answers to these questions: “… did that defeat truly mean what the antiwar movement seems to have persuaded everyone it meant? … Does the United States deserve the moral contumely that Vietnam has brought upon it in the eyes of so many people both at home and abroad?”

Still, his conclusions—epitomized in a final paragraph affirming Ronald Reagan's description of our involvement as “a noble cause” and disparaging Jimmy Carter's allusion to “‘the intellectual and moral poverty’ of the policy that had led us into Vietnam and had kept us there so long”—leave me unsatisfied. Reagan's approbatory adjective echoes Hoover's endorsement of Prohibition—“an experiment noble in purpose.” Conceptual righteousness and operative morality are not the same. Like automobiles or watches, policies have to work to be any good. They must give plausible promise of working to be acceptable. The noble experiment in Vietnam was a colossal fizzle.

Podhoretz traces its vexing course from the standpoint not of military history or diplomatic history, though these enter into account, but of the interplay of ideas in the nation's public life. Little to hang one's head about but much too much to shake one's head about emerges.

The scene is populated by a miscellany of hawks and doves and mutable birds that metamorphose from the former to the latter breed—least respectable among them being sundry of JFK's and LBJ's attendant lords who, once displaced, outdid each other in trying to divert blame for the mess they themselves helped to get the country into and then to aggravate. Turkeys abound in the metaphoric aviary. Owls are few. One is made to wonder whether individual acumen had drained away at higher levels of policy-making, or something had gone wrong systemically—or both, interacting.

Podhoretz depicts a JFK unequal to his responsibilities, “cavalier about difficulties,” and predisposed to will “the end but not the means—just as he had done before at the Bay of Pigs.” In Podhoretz's analysis, the main policy props—Robert McNamara at the Pentagon, “the Secretary of Defense, whose arrogance was a function of his belief that he could devise a system for dealing efficiently and successfully with any enterprise, whether an automobile company … or a guerrilla war,” and McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow on the NSC staff, respectively “a man … whose arrogance was unshakable” and one “who was confident that he knew everything”—supplemented rather than complemented the President's lacks.

Under such guidance, the United States, “… failing to take the measure of the local obstacles both political and military, refusing to face squarely to the dimensions of the commitment that would inevitably be required … for all practical purposes, in all but name, went to war in Vietnam”—but in a piddling sort of way. That the U.S. did so at all is hard for Podhoretz to square with JFK's well-authenticated indifference to the place. The missing clue—I submit this not idly—is that JFK was chafed by the hazing over things in general and Vietnam in particular that Nikita Khrushchev had given him at their Vienna meeting and felt impelled to retaliate with a gesture.

Podhoretz's interpretation of LBJ mentions “flamboyant personality … and hyperbolic style.” More willfulness than gumption, one might say. LBJ's connections with great affairs had been at the Capitol, where policy-making is a matter of laying down the law rather than having to cope with elusive and obdurate external circumstances. Character and experience combined to make him a specialist in policy by jawbone. He started out emulating his predecessor in trying to manage war “on the military cheap” (in Podhoretz's phrase). Forced to a choice of getting out or putting up, he opted grudgingly for incremental inputs of troops and matériel that raised the U.S. from an auxiliary to a principal belligerent role—but “on the political cheap.”

A steadily expanding war was to go hand in hand with an aggrandized version of the general welfare—the Great Society—as well as tax reductions, the whole mix without stimulating inflation. How? Simply by so decreeing. So great was the import of words in Johnson's outlook that he thought he could conceal the impact of the hostilities by downplaying them in speeches and by avoiding the rite of declaring war. No one can yet see an end to the multifarious malign effects of such frivolousness, however foxy or even well-intentioned the man in charge thought himself to be.

One such effect, not handled by Podhoretz, was demoralization of the armed forces, particularly the Army. Projecting troops into the most miserable sort of combat—war of attrition—without appropriate doctrinal preparation has inevitable and serious destructive effects. Even more importantly, enduring harm is done to morale by sending officers and troops into the field to kill without the state's having assumed moral responsibility by declaring war.

In the longer term, extrication from Vietnam following failure of the LBJ surge could not have been creditable, and was not. As inheritor of the task, Richard Nixon, with Henry Kissinger as coadjutor, did try to salvage a measure of success—“on the strategic cheap.” The formula—easing out U.S. forces in phase with building up the shaky indigenous forces to be able to hold their own—probably never had a chance. Fatuously counting on the spirit of detente, Nixon and Kissinger, both practitioners of Realpolitik, even hoped for Soviet diplomatic help in saving something from the wreck.

At the inevitable petering out—in Gerald Ford's tenure, though not his fault—Congress even withheld promised ammunition from America's beleaguered erstwhile allies. I recall my chagrin at the time: none among a couple of dozen newspaper editorial writers in my audience at an American Press Institute seminar saw anything wrong in this betrayal.

In Podhoretz's rueful retrospection, “The people … were never enthusiastic about the war. … For America the war in Vietnam was not a people's war, it was a war of the elites, conceived and executed by ‘the best and the brightest.’” He adds, “… this cannot be said of the decision to cut the South Vietnamese off and leave them … vulnerable to a massive North Vietnamese invasion. Those decisions were made not by a small elite but by a majority of the members of the Congress.” Hence, “… a measure of responsibility for them … also belongs to the people whose representatives they were and whose wishes they believed themselves to be carrying out.”

The kernel of goodness in the enterprise—notwithstanding all the muddling—has been dramatically vindicated by massive barbarities committed following the Communist victory. Podhoretz wrings what satisfaction he can from contrasting the tragic realities with what fabricating scriveners and professors in the antiwar movement said would happen if the U.S. would just stop interfering in Vietnam. Yet one is left to ponder the phenomenon of public indifference. The polls that LBJ was wont to cite, demonstrating major support for the war, may well have been arithmetically right. What the support lacked was not numbers but fervency. Popular enthusiasm is fragile for a war whose goals need a dozen strung-out syllogisms to explicate.

One must counterpose the limits of strategic reach to the appeal of meritorious purpose. Anxiety about triggering interposition by the adversary's sponsors constricted U.S. military operations. The result was an attempt to fine-tune warfare at a level conceptually sufficient to cow the immediate enemy without doing enough damage to impel others to the rescue. No sooner had the U.S. begun stepping up combat during LBJ's Presidency than it was felt incumbent to iterate the modesty of hostile intentions. Threats were offset by reassurances. The message was: We are trying to scare you, but not very much. It is hard to intimidate the kittens while being leery of the cat. In the crosspull between determination and trepidation, U.S. strategic planners got to worrying more about attrition inflicted on the other side than on their own.

Another dour thought concerns hubris. Those in the top policy slots seemed never to doubt the susceptivity of remote realities to U.S. designs. One day in the Senate, as I remember, the younger Kennedy brothers in back-to-back speeches demanded American measures to put an end to corruption in South Vietnam—something Americans find hard to do in New York or Massachusetts. Examples of such overreaching abound in the Podhoretz account—most of all in designs for refashioning another society, low in civic culture, in the midst of a war.

Hubris includes the assumption of having luck on one's side; it has to do with traits that led Napoleon through many triumphs to a final undoing. Our side had lucked out in Korea, more or less. The idea of a declaratory staving-off of Communist conquest in Southeast Asia was a case of playing luck. Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon also counted on luck—certainly not on exacting strategic assessment—once the issue entailed putting up a fight. Johnson similarly counted on luck—surely not on analysis—in seeking to replicate the World War II feat of concurrently conducting external war, stimulating upward mobility within the American society, producing more of everything, and restraining inflation. It recalls Louis XIV's words to Marshal Villeroi returning from the defeat at Ramillies: “At our age we are no longer lucky.” That thought is hard for the nation to get used to.