Brian VanDeMark > Quotes

“While by 1961 many of the early dynamics of the Cold War—Stalinist brutality, Sino-Soviet cooperation, Moscow’s considerable influence on other Communist movements—had begun to fade, American perceptions, assumptions, and political rhetoric remained rooted in an earlier mindset. (The Soviet Union suffered from its own simplistic myopia about the West during this period.) As a result, Kennedy and his advisors made policy on Vietnam by relying on Cold War blueprints that assumed the monolithic nature of Communism, defined Communism and nationalism in mutually exclusive terms, and understood the domino theory as a given, filtering it all through fear of a domestic political firestorm that would follow the loss of a country to Communism. They feared the costs of what they termed a “cut-and-run” policy “too much and too automatically,” said Bundy retrospectively.27 More fundamentally, “we never fully explored each other’s views about Communism and the danger of it in Asia, particularly Southeast Asia,” McNamara later acknowledged.”
― Brian VanDeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“(In 1968, an average of 45 Americans died in Vietnam every day.)”
― Brian VanDeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“More American servicemen were killed in Vietnam in 1968—nearly 17,000—than in any other year of the war.”
― Brian VanDeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“It means looking at a much-treated subject again—but in a new way that recalls Gustave Flaubert’s advice to the young Guy de Maupassant, when Flaubert sat Maupassant down in front of a tree and told him to describe it: “There is a part of everything that remains unexplored,” Flaubert said, “for we have fallen into the habit of remembering whenever we use our eyes, what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the slightest thing contains a little that is unknown. We must find it.”2 Doing so brings fresh perspective even for those who already know the story of Vietnam well.”
― Brian VanDeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“Readers of history do not share the same perspective as makers of history. We know what will happen—all of the twists and turns of the story—but they do not.”
― Brian VanDeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“Washington came to believe that a two-Vietnams solution was possible just the way two Germanys and two Koreas had been. In this sense, assisting a small, pro-Western, anti-Communist government seemed a logical and appropriate extension of earlier Cold War policies that had proven successful. But while Diệm committed to develop democratic institutions, his authoritarian rule and prioritization of loyalty over competence in the government continued to undercut this stated goal. By 1958, Diệm-related unrest among non-Communists and former Việtminh in South Vietnam alike had given way to open rebellion. Shortly thereafter, in 1959, North Vietnam reactivated its support of southern Communists who had remained behind after Geneva. They, along with non-Communist opponents of Diệm, formed a popular front that in December 1960 became known officially as the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF), which Diệm and the Americans derisively called the Vietcong (a derogatory contraction of “Vietnamese Communists”). The NLF adopted guerrilla warfare against the Diệm regime.”
― Brian VanDeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“It is very hard to recapture the innocence and confidence with which we approached Vietnam in the early days of the Kennedy administration,” Robert McNamara lamented three decades later.24 Unlike cabinet members in a parliamentary system such as Great Britain’s who before assuming office have studied the issues for years as shadow ministers in the political opposition, McNamara and his senior colleagues possessed scant knowledge and even less understanding of Southeast Asian history, language, and culture. What did they know about Vietnam? “Not enough to have done what we did,” McNamara later confessed.25 “It was a tiny blip on the radar and we didn’t understand at the beginning how it would develop,” McNamara admitted, looking back.26 While by 1961”
― Brian VanDeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“They did not know that when faced with the threat of French domination at the end of the nineteenth century, the Vietnamese had set aside their ancient suspicion of Chinese domination and pleaded with Beijing to come to their aid. American policymakers were conditioned so much that even if someone came to them with such information, they did not pay attention to it or discarded it as irrelevant. The atmosphere of Cold War America did not encourage such attention and awareness, or the perceptions and distinctions that went with them, so government decision-makers in Washington—for not the last time—remained dangerously ignorant and therefore seriously overestimated ideological factors and seriously underestimated historical and nationalistic ones.”
― Brian VanDeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“He [Kennedy] said with great seriousness that the existence of nuclear arms made a secure and rational world impossible.” The only sane solution, Kennedy declared, involved a negotiated compromise with Khrushchev, which JFK believed meant swapping the Jupiter missiles in Turkey for the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Strategically, removing the Jupiters meant giving up little, he added, because deploying Polaris submarines off the coast of Turkey would provide a more secure deterrent and more broadly the insanity of using nuclear weapons in a general war made them “more or less worthless.” Domestic pressure remained an abiding concern for Kennedy, which became clear when he wondered aloud to Ormsby-Gore “whether political developments would enable him to do a deal on the reciprocal closing of bases”70 and that the American public might view a naval blockade as too little too late—to say nothing of a trade. But he had traveled the distance, and was now firm and self-assured.”
― Brian VanDeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam

“Diệm’s sense of entitlement was so great that he did not view the 1954 Geneva Accords as binding on him because he had not signed them. In 1956, he thwarted the promised election leading to reunification, citing the absence of free voting in the North (yet Diệm himself had rigged a plebiscite ousting Emperor Bảo Đại the year before with more than 98 percent of the vote*). Eisenhower endorsed Diệm’s decision,* suspecting the South Vietnamese leader would be crushed in a legitimate contest. As Ike candidly remarked in his memoirs, “I . . . never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Hồ Chí Minh as their leader.”18 By acquiescing to Diệm’s decision to abort the 1956 election, however, the Eisenhower administration effectively sealed Vietnam’s political division. Eisenhower and most other Americans in the 1950s simply could not imagine a Third-World Communist independent of Moscow and Beijing. Through this filter, Hồ was not a Communist nationalist wary of traditional Chinese domination of Southeast Asia and eager to establish and protect Vietnam’s independence, but a cunning and obedient acolyte of the Sino-Soviet camp serving its larger purpose of aggressive expansion. They did not know that Moscow and Beijing had actually counseled Hanoi against supporting armed struggle in South Vietnam out of fear that it might draw the United States directly into the conflict, and continued to do so through the early 1960s.19 Yet even without that intelligence, it was remarkable how easily America’s leaders ignored knowable history.”
― Brian VanDeMark, Road To Disaster: A New History of America's Descent into Vietnam