Thoughts Of Hanoi Quotes

A decision came quickly from the very top and we launched what the bureaucracy in Washington thought would be a small war under false pretenses and in the face of the on-scene military commander’s advice to the contrary.

Twenty months had now gone by since Nixon’s inauguration, and peace seemed no nearer. Thwarted in his desire to strike a bold blow against the North, frustrated at the continuing impasse in Paris, and angered by the antiwar demonstrations that had undermined his ultimatum, the president searched for another opportunity to make the kind of dramatic show of force he thought would force Hanoi to make the concessions that would lead to peace. Cambodia would provide it.

Influenced by strategic theories of the day—advanced most prominently by Harvard economist Thomas Schelling*—that conflicts were essentially bargaining situations, that one could signal an adversary that he should in his own interest avoid certain courses of activity, and that participants in a conflict coolly and rationally calculate costs and benefits and arrive at consistent expectations of each other, Taylor, McNamara, and Bundy had assumed bombing would be perceived by North Vietnam as limited and would be controllable—something that could be turned on and off like a faucet. “It’s something you can stop. It’s a bargaining chip,” McNamara would say of bombing—one that seemed to have the advantages of both flexibility and control.146 Taylor, McNamara, and Bundy thought bombing would not last long, perhaps a few months at most. They made the cardinal error of assuming that the North Vietnamese agreed with them. They did not contemplate what would happen if Hanoi did not perceive bombing as a limited gesture and proved willing to absorb its costs because they did not believe bombing would fail, making such considerations moot. They might not have agreed on when to start a bombing campaign, but nobody doubted it would work. None of them foresaw that bombing would instead feed demands for greater military action, that it would be only the first step in what would become a massive American military effort in Vietnam.

Plainspoken and optimistic, Westmoreland epitomized American values, among them confidence and certainty. Westmoreland had both when it came to considering his own talents. (“He never got over being first captain of cadets,” observed a fellow West Pointer who knew Westmoreland well.159) More a good leader than a great intellect, he thought and acted in predictable and conventional ways, and he saw the war as he had been trained and taught: as a military rather than a political struggle, and a conventional one at that. As a result, Westmoreland believed the key to military success in Vietnam lay in targeting the enemy’s main-force units and destroying them; winning the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese people took a distant second place. Like most other American officials, he would vastly underestimate Hanoi’s and the Vietcong’s will to fight, to endure punishment, to replace their losses, and to sustain the war effort despite massive suffering and hardship.