April 30, 2023

On March 28—just two days before the congressionally proclaimed “National Vietnam War Veteran’s Day“—PBS broadcast “The Movement and the ‘Madman,’” gleefully depicting America’s resistance to blatant international Communist aggression in Vietnam as moronic and portraying leaders of the so-called “peace movement” as heroes who saved the world from nuclear disaster. The program was as absurd as it was shameful.

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Jefferson advised that, when angry, count to 10 before speaking. When very angry, count to 100. Waiting a month did not quell my outrage, but today’s forty-eighth anniversary of the Communist conquest of South Vietnam necessitated a response.

I spent considerable time in Vietnam between 1968 and leaving during the 1975 final evacuation, including tours as an Army Lieutenant and Captain, a stint as a journalist, and multiple visits while serving as national security adviser to a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. After leaving the Army, I was a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, where I authored the first major English-language history of Vietnamese Communism.

Beginning in 1965, I took part in more than 100 debates, lectures, ‘teach-ins,” and other programs on the war. During that time, I encountered a litany of arguments against the war from some of the most prominent war critics in the country. Most of their alleged “facts” were clearly false—a point confirmed by the “Pentagon Papers.”

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Their protests were hardly meaningless. They helped Hanoi “snatch defeat from the jaws of victory” when America and its allies were clearly winning the war on the battlefield—paving the way for the slaughter of millions and the loss of any chance of freedom for tens of millions more in Indochina alone. The consequences beyond those borders included wars in Angola, Afghanistan, and Central America—and a credible case can be made that they incentivized Osama bin Laden to attack America on September 11, 2001.

Image: Human remains from Cambodia’s killing fields by Adam Jones. CC BY-SA 3.0.

PBS did not even address why American involvement in Vietnam was so inherently evil. Most of the substantive arguments it made seemed premised upon the reality that soldiers and civilians were dying—a common occurrence during armed conflicts and, certainly, a much stronger argument for abandoning our resistance to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during World War II, which claimed tens of millions more lives.

There was not a single reference to Hanoi’s postwar publication of its official history—translated into English under the title Victory in Vietnam—documenting its May 1959 decision to open the Ho Chi Minh Trail and smuggle troops, weapons, and supplies through Laos and Cambodia into South Vietnam to overthrow its government by armed force. Put simply, Hanoi demolished the claim by war critics that America was not resisting international aggression in Vietnam.

It is true that the 1954 partition of Vietnam was supposed to be temporary. But the same is true of the 1945 division of Korea. When North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, the UN Security Council denounced the aggression and authorized the United States to lead a multinational coalition under the UN flag to protect South Korea.

Several speakers during the hour-long program asserted that their protests kept President Nixon from using nuclear weapons against North Vietnam. The apparent basis for that dubious premise was an “options paper” prepared for the president, including a wide range of contingencies. Nixon told close advisers that he wanted to force Hanoi to the negotiating table by making them fear that he was a “madman” who might use nuclear weapons—an option Nixon had expressly dismissed while campaigning.

It should be recalled that Nixon served as vice president under Dwight Eisenhower, who reportedly helped end the Korean War by leaking word to China through Indian diplomats that he was moving nuclear weapons to Okinawa for possible use against North Korea if a quick settlement could not be reached. Not everyone agrees that these threats were ever actually delivered, but even deniers generally acknowledge the assertions made about these threats. Decades later, former Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted that he had tried to deter Saddam Hussein’s 1990 aggression by hinting that America might use nuclear weapons.