The offensive failed but has been viewed as a turning point. It had two important effects:. North Vietnam The US army had superior conventional weapons but they were ineffective against a country that was not industrialized and an army which employed guerrilla tactics and used the dense jungle as cover.
Dedication North Vietnamese soldiers were dedicated to fighting for independence and for communism. Fighting on familiar ground The Vietcong had an intricate knowledge of the terrain. If Hanoi wants to negotiate, the United States will agree to withdraw all its forces but, if not, the United States will maintain a minimum force in South Vietnam indefinitely.
If there is no negotiated settlement, the people of South Vietnam will continue to fight and a war that neither side will win will go on and on. The longer such a war continues, the more difficult it will become to arrange any peace settlement.
That is a reality that Hanoi must face. For its part, South Vietnam must face the reality that Hanoi will not accept its constitution and elected government. But, after a cease fire is in place, a serious attempt to find a middle way in which the interests of all sides are protected could produce a negotiated settlement. If the North Vietnamese accepted negotiations within the framework of this understanding, Bunker wrote, then the United States could move to phase two — presentation of terms for ending the fighting.
But if Hanoi stuck to its old positions, then Bunker saw no point to continued meetings and discussions with its senior representatives. Faced with North Vietnamese intransigence, the negotiations should be closed as a waste of time. The United States would exit the Vietnam War under the terms of Vietnamization leaving the burden of future fighting to the South Vietnamese.
After three weeks, the Communists agreed. Two were inconsequential. One was betrayal. These dates were dependent on the completion of negotiations and thus had no importance in and of themselves. He told Bunker that the United States position on that point would only be that the peoples of Indochina should discuss this question among themselves. With his approval ratings dropping in an election year, Johnson called a halt to bombing in much of North Vietnam though bombings continued in the south and promised to dedicate the rest of his term to seeking peace rather than reelection.
Despite the later inclusion of the South Vietnamese and the NLF, the dialogue soon reached an impasse, and after a bitter election season marred by violence, Republican Richard M.
Nixon won the presidency. In an attempt to limit the volume of American casualties, he announced a program called Vietnamization : withdrawing U. In addition to this Vietnamization policy, Nixon continued public peace talks in Paris, adding higher-level secret talks conducted by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger beginning in the spring of The North Vietnamese continued to insist on complete and unconditional U.
The next few years would bring even more carnage, including the horrifying revelation that U. After the My Lai Massacre , anti-war protests continued to build as the conflict wore on. In and , there were hundreds of protest marches and gatherings throughout the country. On November 15, , the largest anti-war demonstration in American history took place in Washington, D. The anti-war movement, which was particularly strong on college campuses, divided Americans bitterly.
For some young people, the war symbolized a form of unchecked authority they had come to resent. For other Americans, opposing the government was considered unpatriotic and treasonous.
As the first U. Nixon ended draft calls in , and instituted an all-volunteer army the following year. In , a joint U. The invasion of these countries, in violation of international law, sparked a new wave of protests on college campuses across America. At another protest 10 days later, two students at Jackson State University in Mississippi were killed by police. By the end of June , however, after a failed offensive into South Vietnam, Hanoi was finally willing to compromise.
Kissinger and North Vietnamese representatives drafted a peace agreement by early fall, but leaders in Saigon rejected it, and in December Nixon authorized a number of bombing raids against targets in Hanoi and Haiphong. Known as the Christmas Bombings, the raids drew international condemnation. Some of the papers from the archive of Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in A top-secret Department of Defense study of U.
The report, leaked to the Times by military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, further eroded support for keeping U. In January , the United States and North Vietnam concluded a final peace agreement, ending open hostilities between the two nations. In , Vietnam was unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, though sporadic violence continued over the next 15 years, including conflicts with neighboring China and Cambodia.
They were only partly successful. It was not obvious how Diem and the Americans were supposed to forge a nation from the fractured society the French left behind. What made it poisonous was nepotism. Diem was deeply loyal to and dependent on his family, and his family were an unloved bunch. One of his brothers was the Catholic bishop of the coastal city of Hue. Another was the boss—the warlord, really—of central Vietnam.
American officials in Saigon prayed that the Nhus would somehow disappear, but they were the only people Diem trusted. Nhu ran the underside of the Diem regime. He created a shadowy political party, the Can Lao, whose members swore loyalty to Diem, and he made membership a prerequisite for career advancement.
He also created a series of secret-police and intelligence organizations. Thousands of Vietnamese suspected of disloyalty were arrested, tortured, and executed by beheading or disembowelment.
Political opponents were imprisoned. For nine years, the Ngo family was the wobbling pivot on which we rested our hopes for a non-Communist South Vietnam. After landing in Saigon and setting up a front, the Saigon Military Mission, Lansdale began sending infiltrators into North Vietnam violating a promise that the United States had made about respecting the ceasefire agreed to at Geneva, though the North Vietnamese were violating the accord, too.
The agents were instructed to carry out sabotage and other subversive activities, standard C. People survive in totalitarian regimes by becoming informers, and those regimes were often tipped off by double agents.
The Geneva Accords provided for a three-hundred-day grace period before the partition in order to allow Vietnamese to move from North to South or vice versa, and Lansdale, using American ships and an airline secretly owned by the C.
A much smaller number immigrated to the North. The French defeat had left a power vacuum, and groups besides the Vietminh were jockeying for turf. In , three of them united in opposition to Diem: the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao, religious sects, and the Binh Xuyen, an organized-crime society with a private army of ten thousand men.
Diem neutralized the religious sects by the expedient of having Lansdale use C. Boot says the amount may have been as high as twelve million dollars, which would be a hundred million dollars today. But the Binh Xuyen, which controlled the Saigon police, remained a threat. Worried that Diem was not strong enough to hold the country together, the U.
Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, sent cables to the American embassies in Saigon and Paris authorizing officials to find a replacement.
Lansdale warned Diem that U. The Binh Xuyen was routed, and Dulles countermanded his order. To secure his winnings, Diem called for a referendum to determine whether he or Bao Dai, the former Emperor, should be head of state.
Diem won, supposedly with He carried Saigon with , votes out of , registered voters. Kennedy was a Cold Warrior, but he was not locked into a Cold War mentality. He liked outside-the-box types, and he liked Lansdale and even considered appointing him Ambassador to South Vietnam. But the State Department and the Pentagon did not like outside-the-box types and they certainly did not like Lansdale, who remained in the States and was assigned to head Operation Mongoose, charged with devising methods for overthrowing Fidel Castro.
Lansdale does not seem to have been directly involved in the notoriously wacko assassination plots against Castro the poisoned cigar and so on , but Boot suggests that he knew of such plans and would not have objected to them. He did come up with a scheme for an American submarine to surface off the Cuban coast and fire explosives into the sky.
Rumors, introduced inside Cuba by C. In the mid-seventies, in a statement to a congressional committee, Lansdale denied proposing the scheme Boot says he lied , but it was consistent with his usual strategy, which, in the case of Cuba, was to fund an indigenous opposition movement whose suppression would give the United States an excuse to send in troops.
A lot of brainpower was wasted on those anti-Castro schemes. Castro would run Cuba for another forty-five years. The country is now ruled by his brother. Lansdale was reassigned to Vietnam in , but Diem was dead. He and Nhu were assassinated shortly after they surrendered. Madame Nhu was in Beverly Hills, and escaped retribution. There were celebrations in the streets of Saigon, but the event marked the beginning of a series of coups and government by generals in South Vietnam.
Short of withdrawal, the United States now had no choice but to take over the war. By , therefore, when Lansdale arrived for his second tour of duty, the American military was fully in charge. It had little interest in the sort of covert operations Lansdale specialized in. Lansdale was not able to accomplish much, and he returned to the United States in Reception of the book was not kind.
From the letters Boot quotes, it is clear that Pat was the love of his life. He suffered for many years from longing and remorse. When Lansdale was with his wife, Pat dated other men. There appear to have been no significant dalliances on his part.
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