Vietnam: A Television History; Interview with Richard C. Holbrooke [2], 1982

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Transcript

Failures in American strategy and information-gathering during the Vietnam

War

VIETNAM

Holbrooke/mc (2)

SR#

Tape 5, Side 1

Interviewer:

Ready?

Holbrooke:

Ready.

Interviewer:

Okay, tell us how you yourself define what the challenge was in

Vietnam.

Holbrooke:

How I define the challenge. That's very hard to answer because I was in

my twenties when I got to Vietnam. When I got there in the early summer

of 1963, there were about ten thousand Americans in Vietnam. About

forty or forty-five Americans had died. I thought those were enormous

numbers.

But I was very young. I was just out of college. I had just entered the

Foreign Service, and I didn't have any personal objectives. I believed

in the US government and its objective as stated to me by people in

Washington during my preparation.

And that had added up to the fact that we were going to Vietnam to help

the Vietnamese help themselves, to defeat a low-level insurgency. The

idea that it would escalate into a war involving over a half a million

Americans, and then ultimately tear America apart domestically was

incomprehensible.

And like most Americans arriving in Vietnam in those days, I didn't

question the objectives of the United States government. They were

consistent with the objectives of a liberal interventionist foreign

policy. And it was a long time before it became clear to me that even

if the objective was laudable, the strategy and the application of that

strategy, the specific tactics, were not going to succeed.

Interviewer:

As you, as you worked in Vietnam (cough), how did you, how did your

concept of the objective affect what you actually did?

Holbrooke:

Well, I think, like many Americans, my view of the war went through

different phases. I didn't question the objective for a long time. I

think one started with the assessment of how we were doing.

When one spent time in Vietnam, on the ground, in the provinces, and I

was assigned right away to be a provincial advisor in one of the large

provinces in the lower Mekong Delta, one found rather rapidly that the

facts on the ground in the province were at variance with the official

understanding of the situation of that province, as understood in

Washington and at higher headquarters in Saigon. In the province I was

assigned, a province called the Ba Xuyen , there were - on the official

list - there were three hundred and twenty-three completed strategic

hamlets. This number is very important because it told us how many

people were controlled by the government. And it was the basis on which

on a mathematical formula, certain amount of American aid was given to

that province. That aid had to go through me.

So I said I'd like to have a list of these hamlets, and where they

were. I'd like to visit them. It took months for the Vietnamese to give

me those lists. They were very reluctant. And finally I said, "Look,

I'm not going to sign the papers unless you give me the lists." When I

got the lists, it turned out that eighty of the three hundred and

twenty-three hamlets were in fact just subdivisions of the two largest

cities in the province: Soc Trang and Bac Lieu. And of the remaining

two hundred and fifty or so, two hundred and forty five, two hundred

and fifty hamlets in the province that were allegedly completed and

under government, you couldn't get to about a hundred of them without

government escort.

So, immediately I felt there was a sharp variance between what

Washington and Saigon thought was going on and what was really going on

in this one province, province of about six hundred thousand people. So

with that as the, that as sort of the opening wedge of what later came

to be called the "credibility gap," one began to realize that the basis

of, on which people in Washington were making decisions of the war was

false information. And the story I just told you could be repeated a

thousand times, in a thousand different ways. It was a product of a

system of reporting which emphasized progress, uh, at the price of

accuracy.

One could spend years arguing assessments. That was essentially the

initial argument between the American journalists of the time, people

like Halberstam and Sheehan and others who came to Saigon regularly.

And uh, and the government. That was the original argument. It wasn't

over whether we should be in Vietnam. It was over how we were doing.

So I would call that phase one. You have a problem with the

assessments. In phase two...

Interviewer:

Excuse me a second; okay go ahead.

Holbrooke:

In phase two of one's progressive reevaluation of the war, one thought

about the tactics. Now by tactics I mean specific tactical concepts

used in Vietnam which one could legitimately question. A very obvious

one was the so called "H and I": harassment and interdiction fire,

where routinely to expend ammunition during the night, the Vietnamese

and their American advisors would fire artillery rounds and randomly

chosen cross points, or cross roads, places where paths met in the

jungle. Free-fire zones where people would drop their unexpended

ordnance before returning to base, and in a free-fire zone you could

hit anything that moved.

It struck, it struck many people in Vietnam that these actions were

inconsistent with the rhetoric of winning the hearts and minds of the

people which was at the core of the American strategy at that time. So

one could have arguments over tactics. One could also have arguments

over how good the South Vietnamese army was. That was another level of

concern. And then beyond that as one progressed one could get into

basic strategic questions.

The most fundamental strategic problem that I had in Vietnam came a

little bit later, and that was in the period '66-'67. And it came over

the concept of the war of attrition. And here I believe the American

military command of the highest levels in Vietnam made a mistake of

truly profound and historic dimensions. The command believed, and

briefed journalists, congressmen, and everyone who visited Vietnam that

we were going to grind down the communists over time by - and I believe

this is pretty close to a direct quote of General Westmoreland of the

era - by killing or putting out of action more enemy than they could

put into the south through a combination of recruitment of the south

and infiltration from the north.

Now, the military in Vietnam had a problem. That is that ever since

1959, every few months when they took an intelligence order of battle,

there was always more enemy each time you measured it. So General

Westmoreland kept looking for the point at which we would kill the

enemy faster than he could recruit and infiltrate replacements. That

point would be called the crossover point. And when we reached it, the

enemy, the graph of the enemy, on the intelligence shows, instead of

going off and start coming down.

Well, this crossover point was terribly important to Westmoreland and

to his command. The...he kept waiting for it. He kept looking for it.

It had a profound influence over the battle over the size of the enemy

or the well advertised, much-debated question of the enemy order of

battle. But much more basic than that battle over intelligence, which I

consider a minor and trivial issue, was the concept involved.

The North Vietnamese had fifteen million people in North Vietnam, plus

a population base within which they could recruit in the south of three

to eight million, depending on what time you're talking about. The idea

that the United States and its South Vietnamese allies could somehow

eliminate the communists by killing more of them than they could

replace was on its merits absurd. The idea that we were ready to bleed,

and shed our blood, at a greater rate than the communists was crazy.

Uh, Jean Sainteny had been told be Ho Chi Minh in 1946 at Fontainebleau

that the Vietnam did not want to fight the French, but if they fought

the French, the French would kill ten of them for every Frenchman they

kill. But in the end, the Vietnamese would win. Oh, what Ho Chi Minh

said to the Frenchmen in Fontainebleau in 1946 was just as true twenty

years later with the Americans. And it was true. Certainly ten times as

many communists died as Americans, South Vietnamese, and others died on

non-communist side.

But the point that the American command failed to understand, the

strategic mistake which I think was one of the most serious strategic

conceptual blunders of the mid-sixties was that we could somehow attrit

the enemy, and I use the word attrit deliberately. Now...

Interviewer:

Excuse me sir, could you repeat that point one more time for just the

focal point?

Holbrooke:

What point?

Interviewer:

Uh, this issue, what was most fundamental...

Holbrooke:

And go all the way back?

Interviewer:

No, no, no--just the last sentence. The most fundamental mistake was...

Holbrooke:

I can't remember what I just said.

Interviewer:

The most fundamental mistake was...

Holbrooke:

You have to write it down and give me a cue card the second time

around. (laughs) What do you want me to say now?

Interviewer:

Just say it over again. The most fundamental mistake...

Holbrooke:

(laughs) The most, uh, how far back do you want me to go?

Interviewer:

The most fundamental mistake was the belief that we could attrit...

Holbrooke:

Did I say that?

Interviewer:

Yes.

Holbrooke:

That's pretty good. (breathes) The uh, the fundamental strategic

mistake which was made was the idea somehow that the United States

could bleed an Asian communist enemy into the point of fading away.

That was just a basic and profound error. Now let me make one last

point on this. In Washington, people did...

Interviewer:

You should keep your eyes on Stan.

Holbrooke:

Let me make one additional point about this. In Washington, the

leadership of the United States government did not, if my memory is

correct, take this war of attrition concept...

U.S.-Vietnam relationships during the war

(voices in background) ...happens every time. (BEEP)

Two. Okay.

Interviewer:

All right, the question is how did you, from your perception, what did

you think the Vietnamese were fighting about, and did that differ from

your own...

Holbrooke:

I think the Vietnamese were just fighting to survive. I don't know if

they ever thought they'd eliminate a communist insurgency which had

existed in Vietnam for a generation in certain areas. But they thought

that they could survive better, or at least some of them thought they

could survive better with our help.

Interviewer:

And how did that affect your relations, actually working relationship.

Holbrooke:

How did it affect our relationships with them. I don't know. I really

don't know how our relationships were affected by that, the, some

Vietnamese really truly believed in freeing their country from the

pressures that a communist insurgency, like a cancer, was causing in

South Vietnam. Others were very cynical, and just were in it for

whatever they could get.

Some Vietnamese were very honest with us. Most, I think, treated us,

uh, at arms length, even if they went out drinking with us, even if

they were very friendly with us, they were, it was a very difficult

thing to communicate with the Vietnamese. The gulf that separated us

from the Vietnamese was enormous.

Interviewer:

How did we actually deal with the Vietnamese...

Excuse me, Stanley. Before we leave that point, is there anything that

you could think of in particular that would illustrate from your own

experience that the gulf of dealing with the Vietnamese? Answer to

Stanley.

Holbrooke:

Well, it's almost, it's eighteen years or seventeen years now since I

was in the Mekong Delta, and it's very hard to reconstruct the exact

mood that existed at that time between the American advisors and the

Vietnamese whom we were advising.

But I look back on it with a sense of wonder that we were trying to

give them advice, turning over our own personnel so rapidly. You know

the average tour in Vietnam was less than a year-long. So the

Vietnamese who had been living all their life with these problems were

suddenly confronted with Americans who arrived on one day and within

twenty-four hours, giving them advice. They had to take at least some

of the advice, because the Americans along with the advice had goods,

commodities, money, weapons, ammunition, and the Americans represented

the greatest power on earth.

But there was a vast gulf of misunderstandings, many of the Americans

didn't know what kind of a war they were fighting, or how to fight it,

the training for the American advisors was very uneven. It wasn't even

the best kind of assignment for the American military in terms of their

own careers. So the best officers usually stayed away from the advisory

effort.

And the Vietnamese for their part learned gradually that whether they

liked an individual advisor or didn't like him, he would leave, he'd

move on within six to twelve months. And so he had better just get

along and keep going. It was a very delicate balance in that very

complicated situation.

Interviewer:

Could you describe, though, the Vietnamese recognizing that they needed

the Americans for the sake of the things the Americans could give them,

the money, the supplies and so forth. How did they accommodate

flattery, dinners, girls, progress reports, and so forth that were just

what the Americans wanted.

Holbrooke:

A whole variety of things were used by the Vietnamese in dealing with

the Americans. Flattery, progress reports were a very important part of

the equation. But it varied enormously from place to place and

relationship to relationship. Sometimes relationships were very

personally cordial; sometimes they were very cold. Sometimes they

survived the twists and turns of subsequent history, sometimes they

didn't.

It's very difficult to generalize, except for one generalization. It

just seems to me that there was something inherently structurally

fallacious about the whole advisory relationship. Its concepts and its

motives were extremely good, but in execution, it didn't often work.

Now when you had an outstanding advisor, a legendary advisor like John

Paul Vann, results could be very dramatic. But Vann's theory which was

more John Vanns will win this war would only have been true if there

were more John Paul Vanns. And, in fact as we all know, there were only

a handful of people, uh, like John Vann.

Competing objectives between South Vietnam and the U.S. during the war

Interviewer:

As we get into the great big Americanization of the war now, late '65,

how did we actually deal with the Vietnamese government after that

stage? I mean, did we bypass them, were we doing, were we fighting the

whole war? Could you describe a little bit this strange sort of

conflict that we're calling on the sovereign government, when at the

same time, we're really in fact, partly fighting the war for them?

Holbrooke:

All through 64, accelerating in 65 and 66, the Americans were building

up at a fantastic rate an army and a parallel government of advisors.

Not just the military. But on the civilian side. Hundreds of education

advisors, hundreds of public safety advisors, hundreds of agricultural

advisors dispensing millions and millions of dollars in goods,

commodities, aid in kind.

The theory was "nation building". That was one of the clich頷ords of

the mid-sixties. In fact, it seemed often to me that the more Americans

you had, the more they became a crutch for the Vietnamese to depend on.

Rather than stimulating the Vietnamese to greater self-reliance and

only in self-reliance was there any even marginal hope of success, you

were merely weakening the indigenous Vietnamese governmental and

bureaucratic administrative structures. And given greater credence to

the communist propaganda that the South Vietnamese were American

puppets.

Interviewer:

Could you be a little more precise, though, actually in '65, '66, '67

period, '65, '66... How did it actually function in Saigon, how did we

plan with the Vietnamese? Did they know what kind of a war we were

fighting? Did they, did we share our strategy with them, or how did it

work?

Holbrooke:

Basically, the Americans made their own plans and then presented them

to the Vietnamese. Although there was an ornate and very ritualized

system of reaching joint agreements on how to proceed. But basically,

it was done by the Americans.

It's important to remember that the American mission in Vietnam,

including the military and tall the disparate elements of the civilian

side, AID, USIA, CIA, the Embassy, and so on, were themselves very

poorly coordinated. They were not centrally managed, except for the

Army. And even within the U.S. military, there were divisions between

the Marines, Air Force, Navy and Army. But all of those elements in

Saigon had direct channels of communication back to Washington, so

whatever bureaucratic rivalries existed in Washington - and there were

plenty of them - these were mirrored in Saigon.

And each American group worked with its own Vietnamese group. The

Vietnamese tended to be relatively passive and accepting an American

theory, provided by accepting the theory they got something tangible,

goods, money, something in return.

There were areas, I want to stress, where they American efforts made a

big difference. Economic stabilization program certainly staved off an

economic collapse in Saigon which otherwise would have been quite

serious and would have had an enormous inflation. The education effort

did educate large numbers of Vietnamese children. The agricultural

efforts did produce rising yields of miracle rice and other things. I

don't want to leave you with the impression that these were hopeless,

worthless, uh, projects.

The American input did result in a measurable output. But it was not

necessarily related to success in the war. And sometimes, in a horribly

ironic way, it could work against those objectives.

Interviewer:

How?

Holbrooke:

You could create a dependency on the Americans. In certain areas of the

country, uh, where I visited, the U.S. Marines had successfully taken

villages, and built up a relationship with the villagers so that the

village was prospering, secure, schools that had been closed for years

were reopened, rice paddies that had lain fallow were being cultivated,

fertilizers being used, the people were more prosperous. But the link

was directly between the village and the unit.

I remember one very poignant trip where I visited in the Third Marine

Amphibious Force area, south of Danang, and the, around Thanksgiving of

1965. And the marines had done a spectacular job in the village. It was

really a happy village. And as I left, I spoke a little Vietnamese in

those days, although I don't remember much of it today. And as I left,

one of the Vietnamese children came up to me and said that they heard

that this unit, which they knew by name, "First of the Ninth", First

Battalion, Ninth Marine Regiment, this unit was going to leave the

village soon. And they didn't want it to leave.

Well, of course, that story illustrated several things to me. First of

all, how porous our intelligence effort was. It was true; they were

going to leave. And here was some kid who knew it, which presumably

meant the Viet Cong knew it. Secondly, the plan was that the First of

the Ninth, this was a company of the First of the Ninth, was going to

move on and be replaced by the Vietnamese. And they didn't want to be

replaced by Vietnamese. The villagers did not want a Vietnamese unit to

come and take over the combination of security and nation building. And

these things, this was...

Interviewer:

Out of film?

VIETNAM

Richard Holbrooke/mc

SR# 2 (?)

Tape 5, Side 2

Americanization program 9-16-82. End of 772, sound 2723 USADP

reference. (BEEP)

Holbrooke:

Well, the...

Interviewer:

I'm sorry, I wasn't ready.

Holbrooke:

The villagers knew that the American unit was going to leave. They

didn't want them to leave, they didn't want them to be replaced by

Vietnamese unit. They didn't trust the Vietnamese unit. They felt safer

under the protection of an American marine unit, for obvious reasons.

The only problem with the picture that one saw in this little village

that I'm describing was that for the United States to protect the

population of South Vietnam the way that marine company was protecting

that village would have taken several million American troops. So you

couldn't do it that way. So the very concept was fallacious.

The irony of it is how immensely moving it was to see these young

marines doing their best in this village. Building schools, helping

with irrigation, agricultural development, but how strategically wrong

that concept was.

Interviewer:

Remember to keep looking at Stan. Let's go back to one point about

after the war becomes Americanized, what happens to all the American

hopes for political reform, social reform, uh, I mean, did you believe

that, at, at that stage, we're talking about late '65, '66 that you

were bringing democracy, justice, so forth to Vietnam?

Holbrooke:

Did I believe, personally...

Interviewer:

You, and others in the American nation. I mean what...

Holbrooke:

I think Americans were fighting in Vietnam for a multiplicity of

reasons. Some idealists thought that they were going to build a modern

nation in Vietnam. That was at one end of the extreme. Other people

were in Vietnam simply to avoid a defeat. I think that you had every

range of objectives mixed in.

And that is true even at the highest levels. Lyndon Johnson himself, I

think was tormented by the contradiction of the different objectives.

It isn't until you get to the Nixon era where the objective becomes

much narrower and more clear-cut.

Interviewer:

Let's go back a moment, that's getting into commentary. You're in the

mission in Saigon, it's 1965, '66, what do you think, I mean as all

these Americans come pouring in, what do you think's going on in there.

Or what are we doing here? You.

Holbrooke:

I didn't...I don't know what I thought we were doing in those days. And

I was a very junior officer, watching a buildup taking place which I

could hardly understand. And month by month, the American role in

Vietnam changing. I had no historical perspective on it.

All I knew was the people pouring into the country full of energy,

enthusiasm, sincerity, and firepower, did not seem to always know where

they were. And the tremendous argument was going on continually over

strategy and tactics. For example, there was an argument over whether

the Americans should guard enclaves or go out and kill Viet Cong in the

central highlands. These were not debates to which I could, as a junior

officer, contribute much.

But, uh, I watched them, and I was lucky enough, or unlucky enough, as

the case may be, to have been in a position to see a lot of these

debates. And, uh, to watch some of the most extraordinarily fallacious

concepts imaginable being put forth, particularly this concept of the

crossover point that we could somehow kill more enemy than they could

replace through infiltration from the north and recruitment from the

south.

Westmoreland believed that when we reached that point, the crossover

point, we would be on the way to winning what he termed a "war of

attrition", those were his exact words. That concept was completely

wrong. It did not take into account that the North Vietnamese were at

all times prepared to pay whatever price necessary in terms of human

blood, in order to achieve their objectives. The ruthlessness of the

North Vietnamese was, and the determination was constantly

underestimated.

Internecine character of the American mission in Vietnam

Interviewer:

Were there different perceptions within the American mission in Saigon

between the military...Were they fighting the same war? How...Did they

look at it differently?

Holbrooke:

There were tremendous disputes in the mission in Saigon over almost

every aspect of the war. There were jurisdictional disputes with

different agencies seeking control over overlapping programs. There was

a tremendous battle between the military, the CIA and USIA over who

would control the cadre program involving General Westmoreland, and

some of the civilians.

There were arguments over strategy and concepts at every level. All the

time. But, you know, in the long run, in the final analysis, these were

unimportant debates. None of them focused on larger strategic issues

posed by problem.

Practical realities for the U.S. military during the war

Interviewer:

What were the differences between the war as you saw it being conducted

in Vietnam and as you saw it when you came back to Washington?

Holbrooke:

There was a true and astonishing lack of understanding in Washington as

to what the war was really like. There was a deep ingrained view on the

part of so many Americans in the US government, including the congress

that we were just so powerful as a nation that we couldn't lose. How

could we lose when we'd never lost a war in our history, when had

atomic weapons, when we had just faced the Russians down in the Cuban

missile crisis less than three years earlier.

The missile crisis, it must be remembered, it was the most immediate

prior event in our history, and the most determining one for people.

Even the intervention in the Dominican Republic in April of '65, which

although controversial, had apparently succeeded in keeping Santa

Domingo from going communist, had contributed to this incredible

believe in America's destiny. I also believe in America's destiny, but

when I came back to Washington in the summer of 1966, I came gradually

to realize that people in Washington had somehow believed that we could

do things at the furthest reaches of our supply lines at the other end

of the globe on, in a remote part of the Asian land mass, which

exceeded our capability and our understanding.

There was a tremendous gap between the understanding there and the

understanding in the field. I, when I had lived in the provinces in the

Delta, I had thought that Saigon didn't understand this in the

provinces. When I got back to Washington, when I got to Saigon, I

thought of cour--let me do that again. When I had, um, let me start

again. When I...

Interviewer:

Look at me.

Holbrooke:

When I had lived in the provinces in the early '60s, I had thought that

people in Saigon didn't understand the real problems of the Delta, of

the, of the field. When I got to Saigon a year-and-a-half later, I

thought the people in Washington didn't understand the real problems in

Vietnam. When I got back to Washington, I realized that whatever was

true in the field, the understanding in Washington was really

extraordinarily limited. And yet, decisions of the most enormous import

were being made.

The leadership of our country in the mid '60s, from, President

Johnson's senior advisors spent hundreds of hours, personally selecting

bombing targets over North Vietnam. They didn't spend a fraction of

that time educating themselves as to what the war was really like.

(clears throat) Now I want to stress something: I do not believe and I

have never believed that there was anything morally wrong with our

leadership in that period. I totally reject the idea that the Americans

prosecuting the war were war criminals or morally culpable, or that

their motives were bad. What has upset me, then, and still upsets me

today, is the fact that with the most sacred and heavy responsibilities

put on them by our nation, either our elected officials or appointed

civilian and military officials, they didn't take the time to learn

what the war was really about.

Many of the problems that arose between the government and journalists

stem from the simplest fact that even a average journalist could go out

in the field and learn more in a few days than might be evident to

senior officials in Washington who would never spent that much time in

the field. How the journalists themselves were guilty of vast

exaggerations and misrepresentations, but they had on their side of the

argument the fact that they had actually seen more of the war than the

people who had made the American strategic and policy decisions. (loud

cough in background) Men like Stan Karnow, for example, they knew much

more about the war than David Halberstam...

Interviewer:

Let's look back for a moment. What do you think we learned from...?

Holbrooke:

Karnow, of course, was particularly good, I want to say that (soft

laughter)

Lessons from the Vietnam War

Interviewer:

Looking back, what did we really learn in Vietnam? What did you learn?

I mean, you go on to higher things in the Carter administration.

Holbrooke:

I, I learnt that Stan Karnow really (more laughter)...What did I learn?

I'm wasting film!

Interviewer:

What are the lessons of Vietnam? C'mon, we want to get this for the

film.

Holbrooke:

What are the lessons of Vietnam? There are many lessons in Vietnam in

simple operational terms. For me, I hope that I learned that one should

try to learn as much about a problem as possible before making

decisions about it; that the smartest man in the room may not always be

right; that you've got to listen to the person who comes into a meeting

and says, "Hey, wait a minute; it isn't quite that way."

I saw brilliant men, some of the best and the brightest man of the

'60s, mislead themselves through careful analysis of statistics and

fail to listen to less intelligent, less articulate Americans who

happened, for whatever reasons, to have been in Vietnam and seen the

actual...

Loud beep near mike, softer buzz in background, both of short duration;

rustling, shuffling, clicking, followed by another similar loud beep

Holbrooke:

You know, the smartest person...You know, the smartest person in the

room wasn't always right, and sometimes the best and brightest of the

'60s, brilliant as they were, got carried into very serious errors

which might have been avoided, had they listened more carefully to

slower speaking, less brilliant people who happened to spend part of

their lives in the rice paddies or jungles of Southeast Asia.

Beyond that, the lessons of Vietnam at the largest level are probably

fairly obvious. You have to decide what your national strategic

interests are. If it's important, you've got to be prepared to put

whatever resources are necessary into the effort to succeed. You can't

make a halfway measure.

And in this sense, Robert MacNamara's probably the symbol of everything

that was most wrong in the war. He wanted to achieve his objectives at

the cheapest possible cost. If the objectives are so important, he

shouldn't have been so parsimonious with the resources. If the

objectives were only worth limited resources, then the objectives were

too limited to be worth going for.

Time and time again, in the 1980s, as you go around the country and

talk to people, particularly people who fought in Vietnam, when you ask

them to look back, they say the same thing: They're angry, and what

they're angry about is not a simple hawk or dove position, but more

complicated. We either should not have been there or we should have

won. They know in their, in their guts, that we fought with one hand

tied behind their backs, but they're not reaching the judgment that we

shouldn't have been there, i.e., the dove position, or that we should

have used nuclear weapons.

They're not taking sides, they're just saying don't, they're saying,

"Our leaders should not put us in positions like this." Uh, we have to

decide what our national strategic interests are, and then, if it's

important we should be ready to pay the price. If it's not that

important, we should limit our commitment at the outset and position

ourselves so that we can survive outcomes of events we can't control.

It's very, it's very, very important, as we construct a foreign policy

for the future, that we not misread the lessons of Vietnam. Some of the

military would have you believe that Vietnam was lost because the

American press and Congress lost heart and undercut them. They are

trying, in my view, to deny their own responsibility for complete

misconceptions strategically and tactically.

Other people would have you believe that because Vietnam was a

disaster, we should never involved in overseas, uh, commitments again.

That, I think, denies the interrelated nature of global politics. And

the fact that our national interests and our national security are

indeed affected by things that can happen in very remote places.

Vietnam does not give you an equation that you can plug in El Salvador

or Lebanon or Namibia and give you the right answer, but it does give

you a set of very clear warning lights on how not to proceed.

Now I'd like to saw a few words about Stan Karnow.

Interviewer:

Is there any more?

Clapstick (three times)

Room tone start.

End of tape.

END OF INTERVIEW

Transcript

Transcript

Series: Vietnam: A Television History

Raw Footage: Interview with Richard C. Holbrooke [2], 1982

Contributing Organization: WGBH (Boston, Massachusetts)

AAPB ID: cpb-aacip/15-nz80k26p58

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Description

Credits: Publisher: WGBH Educational Foundation
Writer: Holbrooke, Richard C.

AAPB Contributor Holdings: WGBH
Identifier: d97fe57ad5c8fff2049f78b3fa5b2cf974019ef6 (ArtesiaDAM UOI_ID)
Format: video/quicktime
Color: Color
Duration: 00:38:14:16

Citations: Chicago: “Vietnam: A Television History; Interview with Richard C. Holbrooke [2], 1982,” 1982-09-16, WGBH, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed November 19, 2024, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-nz80k26p58.; MLA: “Vietnam: A Television History; Interview with Richard C. Holbrooke [2], 1982.” 1982-09-16. WGBH, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. November 19, 2024. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-nz80k26p58>.; APA: Vietnam: A Television History; Interview with Richard C. Holbrooke [2], 1982. Boston, MA: WGBH, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-nz80k26p58