No Breast-Beating?

Over the course of this year, the centenary of William F. Buckley’s birth, we will republish an article by him weekly. This week’s piece excoriates the left’s foreign policy establishment during the fall of South Vietnam.

T he cliche of the day is, “stop the recriminations:” That is one of several inflections, another being, “stop the breast-beating:” — which is the title of a sermon by George W. Ball in the current issue of Newsweek, wherein he gives us a lesson on how to stop the breast-beating. You begin by ignoring treaties made by the United States, ignoring any responsibility by the United States for living up to the terms of the treaties. You add a long list of complaints against the sloth and mismanagement of any Oriental who was ever dumb enough to be on our side in opposing Communism in Asia, and before you know it, you not only have stopped breast-beating, you are looking around the hall expecting the adulation of all the peoples of the world.

Mr. Ball, who was Under Secretary of State under JFK and LBJ, and who took us into the Southeastern mess without giving any thought to the consequences of fighting it the way they chose to fight it, was not quite so talkative back when he was the second man in the State Department. Now he writes from his seat in Lehman Brothers that “once we withdrew our soldiers and our bombers, it was inevitable that the house of cards [in Vietnam] would come tumbling down.”

I don’t remember his saying that at the time, and I wonder why not? Was he on a mission for Lehman Brothers that gagged him? Was he out of communication with Newsweek magazine? Clairvoyants should practice their gift while it is still useful, rather than discover it retrospectively. The alternative is to expect a certain amount of breast-beating and recrimination. A whole lot of it is going to issue from this little space in the paper.

We are all being asked to believe that there was something on the order of manifest destiny working for the North Vietnamese. That they really “owned” South Vietnam, in the same sense that the early Americans owned California. To get California we had to claw our way past a few Indians, and snooker the Mexicans into one of the great land grabs of the 19th century. But what was hardest about acquiring California was things like scaling mountains and crossing deserts and laying railroad lines.

What was hard about taking South Vietnam was — people. About 16 million people who were 80 per cent opposed to living under the rule of the north. Eighty per cent is slightly better than the number of Americans who sided with George Washington in the Revolutionary War. The will to resist was there, and for all the talk of South Vietnamese pusillanimity and disorganization and graft, you will find that a far higher percentage of them died or were wounded in the war than Frenchmen defending themselves against Hitler.

The military mistakes of General Thieu cannot have been worse than those of the succession of generals appointed by President Lincoln until he happened upon a Ulysses Grant. The notion that Abraham Lincoln was more successful than Thieu in bringing the political opposition into his tent is chauvinism of the worst sort: it is ignorance. If George Washington, leaning as he did on critical help from the French, had been dealt with as we finally dealt with the South Vietnamese, we would have lost that war, General Washington would have been hanged, and George Ball would now be giving us his instructions in an English accent.

If it was so obvious to Ball, one of the two or three most conspicuous Democratic mouthpieces in matters of foreign policy, that the Treaty of Paris was a phony, he should there and then have denounced it. It was certainly a mistake of President Nixon not to have insisted that Congress there and then either accept or reject responsibility for enforcing the terms of the Treaty which Henry Kissinger would never have initialed had he anticipated the rout in Congress from the implicit responsibility of the principal sponsor of that accord — the United States. We talk about how the South Vietnamese have run. At least they did so under the pressure of Russian tanks. Congress ran under the pressure of moral fatigue. I’d sooner, fighting for my life, do so in the company of 15 South Vietnamese soldiers, than of the 15 members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.