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Yeah. Mm, Hello. I'm Mike Cannon, and this is Conversation. A landmark in the production of television documentaries, has been the 13 part series called Vietnam a Television History. It was shown on PBS last year and is being repeated on that network this year. It is thorough because it is based on sound scholarship.

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It is comprehensive because it uses film and tape from this country, from France and from North Vietnam. The series includes interviews with many of the principles in that very difficult conflict. The script was written by Stanley Karnow, and while he wrote the script, he authored a book which has a similar title, Vietnam.

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A History. Mr. Karno will be my guest on this conversation. When I returned in a minute. Yeah, thanks. Yeah. Mhm. Mhm, No. Yeah. Conversation from the University of Florida. The discussion of social, political, scientific and religious issues of the day. Your host is Michael V. Gannon, professor of history and ethics and associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida.

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Yeah, Stanley Karnow. Welcome to conversation. Thank you. And welcome to the campus of the University of Florida. That's quite an achievement to have developed with one hand, a 13 part television series and very sound impressive book with your other hand. How long did it take you to do this?

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Well, the television series was about six or seven years in the making that as we conceived the idea back in 1970 77. And then there was a long period being public television. We had to raise money that was very difficult. And at the time that we were thinking about the series, Uh, it occurred to me that a companion book would be a good idea television as a medium of drama of impressions.

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But it's not exactly a medium for for explanation, for interpretation. And while a book, uh, cannot convey drama in the same sense that film can, it does give you the elbow room to explain, to describe, uh to analyze. And so I'd like to think that people who are watching the series are also reading the book.

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Uh, in other words, the book is not really a reply or or a script of the series. It's a totally different books. Also in the book, uh, there is very much of myself because I began to cover the Vietnam War long before it was called the Vietnam War.

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It was called the Indochina War. Back in the days when the French were there, the French we're fighting out there to regain their colonial empire, Uh, which was being challenged by the Vietnam that is the Communist led nationalist movement. Uh, and, uh, I was a reporter in Paris starting back in the early 19 fifties.

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And the war, of course, was a major subject in those days. And so I began to cover the French end of the war and then in the late 19 fifties, went out to Asia as a correspondent, still with Time magazine and naturally began to get involved in Vietnam and stayed out there actually based out in Asia for 11 years.

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And I have been back several times since. Well, I think one of the finest things that you do in the book, as well as in the television series, is give the historical background to what we now call the Vietnam War. And when we use that term, we mean the period of American involvement.

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But really, um, there was a lot of tension in Vietnam during the one century long rule that France exercised in Vietnam and then about an eight year conflict military conflict between the French and the Vietnam. Isn't that correct? That's right. It broke out in 1946 and ended in 1954 when the French were defeated at the famous battle of Dien Bien Phu.

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And our own involvement overlapped. In a sense, I mean, many people believe many Americans think that our involvement began when the Marines landed in Vietnam in March of 1965. Or some people would say it began with Kennedy, the Kennedy administration. Uh, but when you go back, you find that the first steps towards getting involved go back to the Truman administration.

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When President Truman and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson, decided to help the French, and it was just a small amount of money in those days, $15 million was the first grant to the French to help them. And, you know, there was an old phrase of Senator Dirksen was a billion here and a billion there, and the next thing you know, it's running into real money.

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And, uh, 1954 when the French were defeated. We had paid for 85% of their war, close to $3 billion. The money was squandered, of course. So our involvement really reaches back to those days. And when the French were defeated and Vietnam was divided into two zones and an anti communist government was set up in the south to oppose the communist government in the north, we moved in to support that southern government.

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That anti communist government. And of course, one thing led to another, and our commitment deepened so that by 1965 we sent in troops. I wonder if our military people learned any lesson from what happened at D M v ng fu when General Giap moved artillery up on the surrounding hills and did it with Labour that the French did not think they possessed just pure manual laborer, I think hall those cannons up on the ridge lines and from those positions they had the French cornered in that Long Valley.

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And it was it was preordained that a guerilla force had overwhelmed very well equipped and highly trained army. Well, you know, it's an interesting thing when you go back and look at, uh, attitudes of the American military. So many American senior officers, I think in particular General General Ridgway.

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General Matthew Ridgway was very much against our involvement in Vietnam. Many were the Joint Chiefs of Staff were against it in the mid fifties. They considered, first of all, they didn't consider Vietnam to be strategically vital to the United States. It is if you look on a map, it's a peninsula.

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It goes nowhere. Uh, also, they believe that the terrain was extremely difficult to fight in jungle rice fields. And thirdly, uh, the veterans, the senior veterans of the Korean War ah, took from that experience the lesson that we should not fight land wars in Asia. Remember General MacArthur?

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Controversial General, but a very good general. Uh, his strategy during the Second World War was to fight on the islands. He fought his way up through the islands of the Pacific, avoiding the mainland of Asia. We became involved in Korea. I think it was necessary to become involved.

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But we learned a lesson in Korea that Asia is a mass of people. Uh, you're just dealing with hordes to use the old phrase. In reality, they are hordes And when we crossed the 38th parallel in Korea in 1950 in October 1950 we were confronted with Chinese coming over to fight us in addition to the North Koreans.

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And, of course, that was a deadlocked war. It went on until some kind of armistice was achieved. And it was. It was to these men that experience taught them that land wars in Asia are almost impossible because you're up against so many enemy troops. And many of those veterans of Korea, as they looked at Vietnam, said, Let's stay out of it.

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But just one point, I think, for people who tend to blame the military, I think that's a mistake. The military takes orders from the president of United States, and as President Truman used to say, the buck stops here. It's the president who is basically responsible. Of course.

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Do you believe that President Eisenhower seriously contemplated using nuclear weapons at the battle of Dien Bien Phu? I don't think so. First of all, I've researched that in detail. What happened essentially was that there was a Pentagon study that suggested that three tactical nuclear weapons could be used, but bear in mind that the Pentagon is always studying something.

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I mean, there are plans for contingency plans for every possible. That's right. There's a plan for the invasion of Canada, Uh, or the secession of Florida. Uh, that's one thing, uh, he realized, I'm sure, uh, that to use them would have been politically unacceptable in the world.

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But there again, if you look back at the documents, General Ridgway, who was then the Army chief of staff and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned. But even if you use tactical nuclear weapons, you would still have to send in ground troops. And I think his if I remember correctly, his estimate was, If we're going to get involved, it would take 12 divisions without nuclear weapons and perhaps eight divisions with nuclear weapons so that the idea of just using bombs and, uh, you know, dusting off your hands and going home just as unthinkable.

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Last year on this program, I had the opportunity to chat with General William Westmoreland about the strategy that he followed during his time as commander in chief of US forces in Mac, the military assistance Vietnam, and I asked him, in particular about a study recently published at the Army War College in Carlisle Barracks, which made the point at its beginning that here was a war in which we won every battle and yet lost the war.

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And he said, Yes, that's correct. In essence, we did when every full pitched battle in which we engaged. But we were unable to sustain a front which was longer than the front. We had to fight in Europe during the Second World War, extending from the D M Z all down the Laos and Cambodia borders, he said.

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We just did not have enough men. Well, uh, I know the study was written by Colonel Harry Summers. Uh, I think, as I observe General Westmoreland's strategy and I won't pose as a military expert. But I think the basic flaw in General Westmoreland's strategy, which he called the strategy of attrition his objective was to bring to bear so much power, um, firepower, the full weight of America, America's industrial might that he would grind down the enemy and force the Communist leadership to surrender.

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Now I think what he misunderstood was that we were up against an enemy that was prepared to take almost unlimited losses. You know the problem with Westmoreland is he looked at the war as an American. He made a statement which I quoted my book saying, If general shops referring to the Communist commander were an American general, he would have been dismissed overnight for taking those kind of losses.

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Well, he job wasn't an American general. That's just the point. You cannot go into a totally alien environment, a different culture and bring to it your own concepts and think that the other side believes the same thing you do now. What we were up against, as I say, was this enemy taking these vast losses and uhh since Vietnam was not a fight for territory.

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Uh, since it was, as I said, an attempt to grind down the enemy. You could kill 5000 enemy troops in an area in a given time and come back to the same area six months later and find another 5000. The enemy took lost, killed, uh, something like six or 700,000 men between 1965 1973 which, if you put it in population terms, is like are losing 10 or 12 million men and still they kept on going.

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And I mean, you you were in Vietnam in 1968 during the Tet Offensive, they took tremendous losses in that 50 or 60,000 men were killed in a month. General Westmoreland sought certain pitch battle situations in which he could achieve this nutrition. Kasan being one that he planned very carefully.

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And yet how far always thought that that was an inconclusive battle. Of course it was. Uh I don't think that he was the one who sought Kasan as much as they lured him into Kasan. There were a whole series of battles that took place in the highlands, uh, near the Cambodian border, or just south of the military militarized zone.

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Ah, and I think they were deliberately a staged by the Communists to draw the American forces away from the coast and away from the cities in preparation for the Tet offensive, which took place at the end of January 1968 in which the Vietcong forces mostly southern Communist forces, hit every town and city in the country, and they wanted to get the Americans away from those cities into the highlands, and I think.

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In other words, I think the casino was basically a diversion on their part, and it was a long battle. The Communists took terrible losses from our B 50 two's, uh, but their whole objective was to keep the Americans away from populated areas. And Westmoreland, I think again I repeat criticisms of Westmorland by other generals, notably General Gavin.

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Even General Maxwell Taylor. Uh, in retrospect, feels that perhaps, uh, military military strategy might have been better. Uh, if the Americans had stayed in enclaves along the coast instead of trying to fight the enemy in the jungles in the highlands where you were really fighting the enemy on his own terrain on his own terms, not yours.

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And I think that Summers makes the point that we would have used our forces to greater advantage if we had used the ARV in the South Vietnamese army to seal the frontiers and then let the U. S forces wipe up the of N V A and the Viet Cong and the interior.

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I wonder if that would have worked in your view. Do you think it would? Well, Harry Somers is a good friend of mine, and I don't mind criticizing because we've debated together. I just think it was an unwinnable war. I just think it was an unwinnable war.

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Uh, Summers. His theory is that if we cut across and stop the infiltration south, it would have isolated the guerrillas and they could have been mopped up. It's a nice theory, but I I don't think basically we could have easily stopped that infiltration. Ah, the area is really a very dense area.

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It's very nice to look on a on a map, but when you get down into those jungles, yes, it really is a terrible area in which to fight. And another thing, incidentally, is that the air power ah, strategically, really was a failure. Tactically, airpower was very strong.

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When the B 50 two's operated in battles in support of troops, they were very, very effective. But when they bombed again, let's say bombing the hotel in trail to stop the equipment for moving down. It really didn't make that much difference If the Communists sent 100 trucks down and they lost 90 of the trucks, there was still enough equipment in the other 10 to keep that war going.

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What were some of the successes of that war. Uh, do you think that the helicopter warfare devised by the first Air Cavalry, for example, was successful? What about the riverine warfare that we conducted in the Delta? Can you think of some examples where we did succeed?

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Well, that's exactly the point that Harry Somers made, uh, in the quote that you said when he recounts in his book that he turned to a Communist colonel after the war and said, You know, we won every battle and the Communist Colonel said, Yes, That may be true, but it's irrelevant.

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Everything you mentioned was successful. The river in troops were successful, that helicopters were successful. Tactical bombing was successful. Uh, we won every battle, uh, as Harry Somers said, but strategically it added up to nothing or added up to defeat, essentially because there was no let up in the determination or fanaticism.

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If you want to use that word of the Communist troops to keep coming down, because the whole concept, the whole objective of victory and unification of Vietnam was almost a sacred objective to them, and they were prepared to take those losses and just one other point in reference to General Westmoreland and my criticism of him.

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He has said, Well, they took those losses because they do not. Asians do not have the same view of human life that we do. To which I would point to the Battle of Antietam, the Civil wars. 20,000 Americans on both sides, killed in one day the Battle of the Somme.

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50,000 British troops killed in the first hour of the battle. I mean, we, with our pretenses to human values, have slaughtered our boys in the same kind of way. Yes, a good telling point. Stanley. Let's, uh, turn to Central America for a moment. Do you see any similarities between the beginnings of our involvement in Vietnam and the initiatives that our country has taken over the last several years in El Salvador and principally in Nicaragua and Honduras?

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But I'm thinking of the rebels, the contra force, that we seem to have either organized or certainly patronized. Well, I went down to Central America and I just for a trip down there, look around. I can't claim any expertise, but I sniffed. I sniffed the Arab it to see whether I smelled the same smell that from from Vietnam days and I basically felt and this tends to be impressionistic, that Central America is not Southeast Asia.

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I mean, it's it's totally different. They're different people, different history. Uh, they certainly did not have the colonial experience in the same way that Southeast Asia did. The Spanish conquest was totally different. Uh, they did not inherit institutions from the West the way, Let's say Vietnam did.

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I mean, interestingly, just for digression. Even the Communists in Vietnam today are very Frenchified, the older generation, uh, from their French education. So I see vast differences on the ground between Vietnam and Central America. But Washington is still Washington, and that's where I see the similarities.

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I see a similarity in the administration's attempt to fit the Central America situation into the global context of America's confrontation with the Soviet Union, which is exactly what we did in the early days of Vietnam. As if to say, there would not be any trouble down in Central America if the Russians and Cubans weren't meddling, Uh, which I think is wrong.

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I think given the situations in those places, uh, there would be great unrest because those places are going through changes. Ah, another similarity from the viewpoint of Washington is, I think, the tendency to put the emphasis on military activity and ignore at least minimize the political, social and economic approaches, which I think are the foundations of the unrest and the turbulence down there.

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And among other things, I see in this, uh, administration which does have a kind of Pollyannish view of things ah, kind of illusion that somehow Central America is going to turn back the clock and everything will be nice and stable and sweet. I mean, those are areas in turmoil.

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They're undergoing changes. You have old fashioned oligarchies. You have a not spontaneous revolution. But people looking, uh, for some change and I think it's going to continue and we have to deal with that. And we have. It seems to me, over the years there's always been some plan.

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Go back to the Roosevelt administration. Was the good neighbor policy. Kennedy had the Alliance for Progress? Yes, all of them have amounted to very little. For some strange reason, we have ignored South America, Latin America, Central America, and then, as it seems to become a crisis, we think we can deal with the situation in a year or two years.

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Uh, situation has had decades in the making. Yes, over the course of many, many decades. We allied ourselves with dictators and despots, and it's not a political statement. That's a historical statement to make. And now we're dealing with a much more fluid and dynamic set of societies in Central America.

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So I suppose we should expect to see some amount of revolution, some changes you say rapid and threatening, perhaps to the neighbors of states such as Nicaragua and El Salvador. Well, it's interesting, of course, uh, to go there through Mexico. Mexico is much more threatened by an upheaval in Central America than we are.

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And yet the Mexicans are looking for some kind of compromise and in many ways tangling with us over what they think we should be doing. Yes, they have a burgeoning population almost out of control, and yet they have maintained a certain stability. I don't know what it is in Mexico that has led to their success in that, but it's quite remarkable, isn't it?

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Well, as Napoleon's mother said, let's hope it lasts. Uh, I mean there's by the end of the century. I think Mexico City is going to have a population of 30 or 35 million people. I don't know what the total population will be, but it really is going to be a very tense situation, I think.

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But they seem to be less concerned about what's happening in Central America, in Nicaragua and Salvador and Honduras and Guatemala than we are. Yes, that is quite remarkable. Of course, they have had a better relationship with Cuba over the years than we have enjoyed, and perhaps they don't feel as threatened by Cuba as we do.

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Well, I think we have an opportunity to cut a deal with Cuba, too. All the signals were getting from Castro is that he looked like to find some way of working out a compromise. He's not gonna be easy to deal with. Certainly I think he wants trade.

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He might want some kind of aid. Uh, I certainly think that he must, uh, I want to find some way of diluting his dependence on the Soviet Union, and at least it's worth exploring. In fact, we are talking to the Cubans right now in New York you know, over the question of that massive refugee influx.

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And, uh, there are negotiations going on on technical matters. It would be very interesting if Fidel Castro agreed to take back some of the Mari El refugees. We would like to send a number back because allegedly, many of those are criminals. Yes, well, you know, he made his gesture to Jesse Jackson of letting some Americans out of jail.

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Uh, well, that's what they're discussing in these in these talks, I would think that it would be, uh, a very strong political gesture by by President Reagan to offer to meet with Castro. He's meeting with Gromyko. Remember President Eisenhower offering to go to Korea to solve the Korean War?

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I mean, before he was president in the 52 campaign. Uh, I mean, for more than cosmetic reasons, I think there's certainly a possibility of dealing with Castro. Stanley before we close, I want to ask, Is your book Vietnam history? Um, one of the last books that we'll see about Vietnam Or do you believe that we're going to see a continued proliferation of books?

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Not only serious studies such as your own, but novels and other writings. There just seems to be an explosion of work right now about I think it will continue. I think it certainly will continue. Uh, and it will continue into for future generations, uh, people for whom a Vietnam will be a vague memory, uh, will be writing books about it just as people today writing books about the Civil War and the American Revolution and the Peloponnesian Wars.

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But Vietnam has a particularly grave aspect about it. It being the only war that many people say we lost. I don't know if that's the correct terminology, but that's the way many people feel. And it inflicts itself upon our consciousness in a way that some of our earlier wars have not.

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That's true. And I think it. I think it's, of course, one of the major experience of our history. And you know, there's an old Chinese curse. May you live in interesting times. Well, I felt I feel as if I did live. I think we've been cursed in that respect, Stanley, thank you very much for being with me on the program.

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I want to repeat that you are the author of Vietnam. A history I think it's a remarkable piece of work and very well balanced in his treatment, as you are the writer also of the 13 part series Vietnam. A Television History, which played for the first time on PBS last year and is being repeated on many PBS stations around the United States.

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Uh, this time, uh, this year and as a matter of fact on this particular station, W U F T T v. Channel five Gainesville Thank you for being with me on conversation. Thank you, Mike. That's mhm with women. Yeah. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Mhm yourself. Mm hmm.

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Mhm.