By David Lambertson, University of Kansas, formerly of the Foreign Service

Academic Citation: David Lambertson, “Failures of Leadership: Some of the Lessons of Vietnam,” Kravis Leadership Institute Leadership Review, Spring 2003.

About the Author: David Lambertson, spent 32 years in the Foreign Service. His distinguished career included assignments in Vietnam, Indonesia, France, Japan, England, Australia and Korea. He has served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Southeast Asia as well as the United States Ambassador to Thailand (1991-1995).

An important aspect of leadership is judgment, defined for these purposes as the ability to draw the right conclusions about complicated situations, and then to make the right decisions. During the American war in Vietnam, good judgment often was in short supply.

In the spring of 1975, a few days after the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese Army, a request was sent to the State Department from Brent Scowcroft, National Security Advisor in the White House. It asked for a summation: what were the “lessons” of Vietnam? I was working in the East Asia Bureau of State, and it fell to me to write a first draft. I circulated it widely among my colleagues and received a torrent of comments and suggestions. Twenty-five years later I retrieved the memo through the Freedom of Information process.

The memo was written in the blinding clarity of hindsight, when there was nothing left to prove or protect, except maybe some reputations—but I don’t recall too many efforts at self-justification as the comments rolled in, and the memo is pretty clean in that respect. It did not pretend to be a comprehensive accounting—no “Pentagon Papers” redux—but it was an honest effort to look back critically.

I had worked in the Embassy in Saigon for three years and at the Paris Peace Talks for two. During South Vietnam’s death throes earlier in that spring of 1975 I took part in the unsuccessful effort to convince Congress to provide one more increment of military aid to avert the impending catastrophe. Despite the Administration’s full-court press, Congress was adamantly opposed to an additional dime for Saigon, much less the $750 million we were asking for. The tone in the House of Representatives was set by the new “class of 1974”, Democrats elected in the aftermath of Watergate and who were by and large strongly opposed to any further involvement in Vietnam. The Ford Administration was weakened by its traumatic recent origins, and was viewed by many Americans as a caretaker government. The country distrusted “Washington” on most issues, and the skeptical Congressional view of our aid request probably was an accurate reflection of the national mood.

I believed then and believe now that our fundamental objective in Vietnam was morally justified—to defend a sovereign South Vietnam against attack from the Communist North. But I had also seen the cost/benefit ratio of our effort slide gradually out of balance and shared in the general relief when we were able to withdraw in January of 1973. I had then watched Hanoi undermine and shred the Paris Agreement over the next two years, leading to the sad events of April 1975—-the final collapse of the South Vietnamese army and government which, flawed though they may have been, were our allies and friends.

I traveled widely when I was in South Vietnam, often to remote and insecure places, and heard my share of shots fired in anger. But except for rare close calls, and despite its proximity, the war was as much an abstraction as a reality for me. I am sure my perspective on the war—close but not close enough—contributed to my sometimes flawed judgment about our actions in Vietnam. The same undoubtedly was true for many people in government, both in Saigon and Washington.

Writing about the “lessons” of any war these days is fraught with potential misunderstandings. Vietnam in the ‘60s and ‘70s had almost nothing in common with Iraq today, or indeed with any of the wars, large and small, in which the United States has been involved since 1975, and it is a mistake to attempt to apply its lessons too broadly. Moreover, I dislike hand-wringing, or second-guessing people who have important work to do. But as a cautionary tale on leadership, if not on war in general or Iraq in particular, that old memo retains some relevance.

It speaks of the mistakes we made—“we” being the people in the Embassy in Saigon, in MACV (the US military headquarters there), and in innumerable places in Washington that were involved in formulating policy or in contributing intelligence or recommendations upon which policy was based. The memo didn’t single out anyone, of course, as if we were all equally to blame for the long-running tragedy of Vietnam. In a way I suppose we were. My personal contribution to this litany of errors was not very large, but neither was my role in the massive undertaking, and I can’t honestly say that I did much better with my small portfolio of responsibility than many of our leaders did with their somewhat larger ones.

Mistakes in judgment—and thus in leadership—dogged our efforts in Vietnam and compounded our difficulties there from the beginning. One of the first and most serious was our decision in the late summer of 1963 to encourage the overthrow of President Ngo Dinh Diem. That event immediately entangled us in the law of unintended consequences, leading to serial coups d’etat, increasingly ineffective South Vietnamese administrative and military efforts, growing popular disaffection with the Saigon government—and gains for the Communists. It also made us morally responsible for those consequences and for the ultimate fate of South Vietnam to a degree we had not been before.

The overthrow of Diem was an early example of an all too common phenomenon in Vietnam—our limited ability to predict events, much less to control them. We were taken by surprise too many times, from 1963 through the Tet Offensive of 1968 and beyond. To put it another way, Vietnam represented a long-term, chronic intelligence failure. We consistently knew less about what was happening in that country, especially among its large rural majority, than we thought. We overestimated the ability of our side to protect rural dwellers from coercion by the Communists, and we underestimated their susceptibility to Communist proselytizing. Throughout the war, there were instances in which we exaggerated the damage we did to Communist units in battle, and we habitually underestimated the ability of the Communists to replenish their manpower and supplies by infusions from the North.

As a rule, intelligence reports from ground level—whether originated by the CIA, military intelligence officers, military advisors to South Vietnamese units, military and civilian officials in South Vietnamese districts, embassy political officers or the hundred and one other directions from which the United States drew its information—were as honest as their authors could make them. I believe that (and I also know there were exceptions to that rule). But the truth was always hard to come by, even for those closest to the action, because so much of our information was filtered through South Vietnamese counterparts, provided by South Vietnamese sources with axes to grind, or distorted by cultural misperceptions. Moreover, the objectivity of many people in the field was unwittingly but powerfully affected by their strong identification with the war effort and their hopes for its success.

And as those reports wended their way up the chain, the picture they portrayed often drifted further from reality—interpreted, shaped and massaged by wishful thinking or to buttress a policy decision. Thus, we declared lights at the ends of tunnels, half believing we really were seeing the daylight—wanting desperately to see it. Timely intelligence uninfluenced by policy considerations is a precious commodity, and we had too little of it in Vietnam.

Many other “lessons” were chronicled in that 1975 memo. It noted our persistent tendency to overrate the capabilities and determination of our South Vietnamese allies and to give too little credit to the Communists for their tenacity. We wanted to believe the best of our friends, and while many South Vietnamese soldiers and government officials were outstanding by any standard, their often courageous efforts were too frequently frustrated by inefficiency, incompetence or corruption around them. As for the Communists, and in particular the North Vietnamese, we never fully appreciated the ability of their leadership and their system to instill—and enforce—a spirit of discipline and self-sacrifice. It enabled them not only to endure but to operate effectively in conditions of extraordinary hardship and privation.

The memo observed that international support is always desirable for dangerous and potentially costly international undertakings such as Vietnam—and always difficult to maintain, leaving the ever-present possibility that we will end up operating alone. In Vietnam, we were so anxious to surround ourselves with allies in order to give our effort a multilateral aura that we recruited and paid for foreign military contingents whose real contribution was minimal. The memo suggested we bear in mind the possibility that involvement in future such actions might actively damage our relations with allies, as had begun to happen by the late 60s, particularly in Europe. The memo also noted the importance of dealing honestly with Congress and the public regarding the duration and difficulty of any such commitment in the future. It acknowledged the folly of using short-term rationales to nurture support for the war effort in Vietnam, as we had done, when we knew there was still a long slog ahead.

Most of the lessons in that old memo were self-evident. But they were valid and important nonetheless, and were overlooked, disregarded or at the very least given inadequate weight during the long years of the Vietnam War. Our effort in Vietnam was carried forward for too long, at great and tragic cost, by a leadership consensus resting on false assumptions and faulty judgments—a weak foundation indeed, to which many of us had contributed.