Vietnam and Beyond: A Diplomat's Cold War Education
Asia Society Washington Center, Meet the Author program

The Honorable Robert H. Miller

Washington D.C., January 16, 2003

Pleased to be asked to speak about my Foreign Service memoir, Vietnam and Beyond: A Diplomat’s Cold War Education, although I do so with some trepidation in front of a group of experienced Asia hands. Even today our Vietnam experience remains controversial. Particularly among those of our generation, hawks tend to remain hawks and doves tend to remain doves, both sides clinging to the arguments of the time. I think we should try to move beyond this aging debate: we should try instead to understand why our involvement in Vietnam wasn’t more successful, and apply that hopefully better understanding to problems that face us today in other parts of the world so that similar misunderstandings and misjudgments might be avoided.

Let me start by telling you what my book isn’t. Not the definitive book on Vietnam; not an expose; not a book that says, “if they had only listened to me. . .” It is rather a memoir of my professional experiences in dealing with Vietnam and Southeast Asia over nearly a third of my career, from 1962 to 1980, with some time off for good behavior in other, non-related assignments.

Today I thought I would:

1) tell you why I wrote the book;
2) recount some of my experiences—in Vietnam, in the Washington bureaucracy, at the Paris Peace Talks, again in Washington at the end-game; later in Malaysia, dealing with the aftermath—the boat people; and finally in returning to VN a decade later as a tourist and cruise lecturer.
3) describe how my views of our engagement in Vietnam evolved over all this; and
4) draw some lessons that seem to me still to be relevant to the way we conduct our foreign policy today.

1) Why did I write this book? Why did I succumb to the conceit of thinking that anyone would be interested in Bob Miller’s Foreign Service career?

Part of the answer to that question is that VN was a consuming challenge for our generation and one that we are still trying to come to terms with. As I said a moment ago, I spent virtually 1/3 of my career involved in that issue on the political or policy side—arguably as long or longer than anyone else in the FS.

I spent three years in VN, from 1962-65, when key decisions were made that influenced the course of the war; then three years, 1965 to 1967, years of growing protest on the home front and cautious peace feelers, as Director of the VNWG in the State Dept; then three more years, 1968 to 1971, at the peace talks in Paris. Later, from 1974 to 1977, as our effort collapsed and the end-game played out, I worked as DAS in EA with Phil Habib and Art Hummel. After dealing with the immediate aftermath—embassy evacuations and massive refugee outflows, we began trying to shore up our relationship with the region as a whole, and to build a new relationship with VN. Finally, during three years as ambassador in Malaysia, I dealt again with the aftermath of the war, this time on the ground as thousands and thousands of boat people streamed across Malaysian beaches to escape new communist masters in Vietnam.

So my first reason for writing the book was therapy—to get VN out of my system—to try to come to terms with my own views about our involvement there and my modest role in it. And I found that, as the years passed, my views kept evolving. Hence the fact that the book is ready now and not ten or even 20 years ago.

The second reason I wrote the book is that, despite all the books and articles and official documents that have been published on VN—and that will continue to be published—much of what we were doing and saying as middle-ranking policy officials—doesn’t come out because, frankly, it didn’t influence policy that much. Nevertheless, we were making our views known, and generally working fast and furiously—and sometimes mindlessly--as officials at that level do in a crisis. And I believe that for an all-consuming national issue like VN that’s a story that should be told. For each one of us the story would be different—a different part of the elephant, if you will—but I think it all adds to the public’s understanding of what goes on inside the US government during such a crisis. Also, hopefully, it provides raw material for the serious historian’s analysis of the era and of how the US Government dealt with the issue of VN. Don Oberdorfer, who kindly contributed a comment on the book’s dust jacket, likened my account to “taking [the reader] into the engine room of the Titanic as US policy unswervingly approached the iceberg of reality.”

Thirdly, the world today is immensely different from the world of the Cold War. And because VN was part of the last major phase—I would say the last major excess-- of a dwindling Cold War, putting down the experiences of our generation of diplomats in writing may contribute to an understanding of that era by the generations that follow us.

And, finally, while today’s crises push VN further and further into the background, many of Vietnam's issues remain relevant today to the evaluation of the national interest, the conduct of foreign policy and the national security decision-making process. Each one of us in this room may have different views on how those issues were dealt with during the VN era, and why we didn’t deal with them more successfully. But the issues need to be addressed today as they were then, the debate needs to go on, openly and vigorously. I hope that, in some modest way, my memoir can make a contribution to this debate.

I should also say that, although my book is heavily focussed on Vietnam and its aftermath, and Southeast Asia as a whole, I do include material on my service prior to going to VN and after leaving Malaysia. Before VN I was dealing mostly with Europe—NATO and Belgium/Luxembourg. Afterwards, it was management, West Africa, and the NDU. I also include some views on how the Foreign Service and Department of State have changed over the forty years of my service, which some may find interesting and a useful contribution to the ongoing debate about the role of those two institutions. But the focus, as I say, is Vietnam and Southeast Asia, which turned out to be the defining experience of my Foreign Service career—indeed, of my Cold War education, as the title of my book says.

2) Let me now summarize the key events that shaped my Vietnam experience:

a) In Saigon, 1962-65, I was deputy chief of a huge Political Section in the US Embassy—some 17 officers as I recall. It was a period during which Washington took key decisions that affected the course of our engagement there: (1) the withdrawal of US support from Ngo dinh Diem; (2) the systematic bombing North Vietnam; and (3) the dispatch of combat troops to South Vietnam.

My work in the political section was more mundane, relating directly only really to the first decision—that of pulling the rug out from under Diem. Embassy political reporting in the spring, summer and fall of 1963 was perhaps critical in this regard: we were reporting how the Diem government was mishandling the mushrooming Buddhist-instigated revolt and thus how it began to lose the support of elements of society that normally were loyal to it. But even that was controversial: Fritz Nolting, then the ambassador, never forgave his friend Bill Trueheart, then the DCM, for allowing our reporting to influence Washington’s judgment against Diem in the summer of 1963 when Nolting was on home leave.

In 1964 and early 1965, with another Emboff, I was also responsible for coordinating Mission-wide weekly so-called progress reports on the war effort, especially on civilian programs. Reporting from Vietnam during that period was controversial and perhaps rightly so. It was largely programmatic, reporting progress of the war and of the civilian programs. Even the political reporting was limited very narrowly to the regime and its activities on the one hand and to communist actions on the other. Non-communist opposition was firmly proscribed and successive Saigon governments used massive US support as a substitute for genuine political give and take. So, until the Buddhist revolt came along that ultimately led to Diem’s overthrow, there was very little genuine political activity to report. The same continued to be true with each succeeding regime—other than trying to explain each one’s downfall and why it happened.

Toward the end of my assignment in Saigon, I also had my own personal experience with terrorism—the car-bombing of the embassy in March 1965.

Even before I left Saigon, in April 1965 it was clear that
getting rid of Diem—“regime change” in today’s terminology--was not a solution to our problems—despite my initial enthusiasm for the change. But I would have to say too that, in my view, continuing to support Diem under the circumstances would have been no solution either. But continuing to support Diem in the face of growing political unrest, and growing communist insurgency as well, would have faced us with very tough choices that we didn’t want to face: to hang in there with Diem despite an increasingly disenchanted press and public at home, or to pull out and cut our losses. Regime change was the easiest solution in the short run.

In fact, we and the Vietnamese were fighting two different wars, ours was a war to win and go home from, with another coonskin nailed to the wall in LBJ’s parlance, and theirs a war for survival from which there was no escape. The fact that we never understood why successive regimes were so ineffectual in fighting the war led ultimately to our pushing the Vietnamese aside so that we could fight our own kind of war—in my view a disastrous decision and one which eventually failed.

b) In Washington, 1965-67, I was Director of the State
Department’s Vietnam Working Group. These were the
years of growing protest at home, the growing troop buildup
and growing casualties in Vietnam, growing frustration
within the Johnson Administration, and the first tentative
explorations of possible peace initiatives. My memories
of those years are not of any measurable contribution to
US foreign policy objectives in Vietnam, but rather a blur of
long hours, exhaustion, frustration and an increasing
polarization of debate between hawks and doves both inside
and outside the government. My book recounts a number of
vignettes from the period—speaking to divided audiences,
briefing doubting, hostile Congressmen, encounters with
high-powered journalists, radio and TV interviews, etc.

It was during this period that I became convinced that our
engagement in VN had outstripped our national interest—
that in fact the domino theory, if it had ever applied, was
obsolete. By 1967 the Huk rebellion in the Philippines had
been overcome, the Malayan emergency was well on the
way to being under control and, most importantly of all, the
Sukarno-blessed coup in Indonesia had failed by a hair. I
argued that all of this called for a reassessment of our strategy in SEA. We were simply suffocating the Vietnamese with money and goods and taking the war way from them, thereby removing their incentive to fight. As far as I know even today, my views went no further than Len Unger, my immediate boss at the time.

But, as I recount in my book, in a long unpublished study by Bill Bundy of our Vietnam policy-making in the LBJ years, Bundy, who was Asst Secretary of State for EAP at the time—my big boss--while acknowledging the possible validity of that argument in hindsight, insists that in 1967 we couldn’t be sure we were out of the woods. Bundy obviously has a point, but I would argue even today that we need to be careful about over-responding to apparent threats from smaller powers far away from our shores.

c) Then, after ten months of R & R at the Imperial Defense College in London, came the Paris Peace Talks—the shape of the table debate, the formulation of opening negotiating positions, the hardening of those positions, the beginning of Vietnamization and the drawdown of US forces in response to US domestic political pressures—and the discovery that the peace talks had become merely the public relations face of the negotiations, and that Henry Kissinger was doing the
real negotiating behind the scenes.

When I left the Talks in mid-1971 we were no closer to a negotiated solution than when we had started nearly three years before. Both parties wanted to achieve at the negotiating table what they had been unable to achieve on the battlefield. The Gordian knot of the negotiations was, on the one hand, the US determination to get foreign forces (i.e., Hanoi’s) out of SVN before leaving to the South Vietnamese of both sides the problem of working out a political solution, and on the other hand, Hanoi’s determination to force a complete US withdrawal prior to Vietnamese working out a political solution. Hanoi did not wish even to address the question of Hanoi’s forces.

By then my frustration and doubts were complete. Even
Kissinger in his memoirs speculates that we might have
done better to offer right from the start a dramatic proposal
for ending US involvement. Instead, we negotiated as we had fought—by gradual escalation. Both were ineffective.
Either way, we ended up abandoning South Vietnam after taking over its war. Although there are those who believe we could have succeeded with a different military strategy, if the Congress hadn’t lost heart, etc. I am convinced any winning strategy would have required an indefinite occupation of SVN.

d) Again in Washington, after three years doing other things
(two years in S/S, one in ACDA), I was invited by Phil Habib, newly named to be Asst Secretary for EAP, to be his deputy for VN, Laos and Cambodia in August 1974, barely six months before the collapse. Watergate was in full swing, the Congress in full rebellion, and we were quietly beginning to plan for the inevitable: evacuations, refugee flows, etc.

Then it was over and we began to deal in spades in evacuations, massive refugee programs, etc. and to think about a post-VN policy for EAP. While it was relatively
easy to conclude that the US could not abandon its position
in EA, shaping a new policy for VN, Cambodia and Laos
was heavily circumscribed by a Republican administration
that sought to blame a Democratic Congress for the debacle
--in a sense the hawks and doves were still flying: the former were determined to make Hanoi’s full accounting for POW/MIAs a condition for any progress toward a new relationship; and the latter, the doves, who fought for humanitarian aid to bind up the wounds of war—and to assuage our guilt for the terrible destruction the US had wreaked on VN.

e) Then in came the Carter Administration, determined to
move much more quickly to repair relations with VN.
Dick Holbrooke became Asst Secretary for East Asia and the Pacific. He had been a
junior officer in VN when I was there and I knew it was
time for me to go elsewhere. Elsewhere turned out to be
Malaysia, where my biggest challenge as ambassador was
to deal with Malaysia’s rapidly growing influx of Vietnamese
boat people coming uncontrolled across the beaches.
Malaysia understandably blamed us for failing in VN and
causing what was for them a threat to their national security.
and they looked to us to solve their problem. To my great
satisfaction, we were able to increase both our own effort
and the international effort manyfold by the time I left in
1980.

3) How did my views evolve in all this time? After going to VN
in 1962 bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to be part of Kennedy’s
great counter-insurgency crusade (with no previous experience
in either Asia or counter-insurgency), I gradually amassed doubts and frustrations over our policies that were clearly not working, either on the battlefield or at the negotiating table.

In the field, we poured in resources and pushed the Vietnamese aside. As the casualties grew on all sides, the US congress and public grew increasing restive. Even after opening negotiations, that restiveness grew as no progress in Paris was visible. We took more casualties in VN after Nixon became president than during the LBJ years.

I began to question the arguments we all used to defend the policies and military effort: that to pull out would undermine the credibility of our commitments around the world and betray the sacrifices of our troops and our Vietnamese allies.

4) All of this, of course, is with the great benefit of hindsight, I must acknowledge. But surely, hindsight is critical in applying foresight to today’s problems. We as foreign affairs practitioners have to recognize that decisions of national interest, national strategy, and war and peace, are essentially taken on the basis of domestic rather than foreign considerations—considerations that relate more to Presidents’ need to amass and keep political support at home than to foreign realities.

The constant challenge to the State Department and its sister foreign affairs agencies is to find persuasive ways to bring these foreign realities to bear on discussions of national interest and national strategies. The fall of two Presidents during the Vietnam era suggest the importance of this task—and the importance of somehow getting them to listen to our advice.

In any case, my account ends with a return visit to VN, including Hanoi, as a tourist and cruise lecturer after retiring in the early ‘90s. My wife and I with friends who had been in Saigon when we were there visited our old haunts, the houses where we had lived, the children’s schools, the Cercle Sportif, Cholon, the Hotel Majestic, etc., etc. We also went to Nhatrang, Danang, Hue and Hanoi/Haiphong—and the fabulous Halong Bay. Nowhere did we find hostility against Americans. It was a nostalgia trip to a beautiful land that had had a particularly bad experience making the transition from colonialism to independence, that had become a bloody battleground between the free world and communism, and that we had tried unsuccessfully to help.

I would be happy to entertain questions or comments, or both