"Every president has had to deal with it," journalist Deborah Kalb said, setting the theme for a recent colloquim at Washington's National Press Club. "It doesn't go away."
Her reference was to the nine-year Vietnam War that concluded in 1975 with more than 47,000 American service personnel killed, over 153,000 wounded, and which continues to be the 800-pound invisible gorilla that for nearly 40 years since has been just over the shoulders of every U.S. President from Gerald R. Ford to Barack H. Obama.
It is both a cliche and an understatement to claim that Vietnam changed everything in the United States. For that war resulted in not only an unprecedented self-examination of the American character, but perhaps how the rest of the world will view the United States for generations to come.
If U.S. foreign policy is a study in incoherence - a diplomat's nightmare - blame it on Vietnam.
If the U.S. population is sharply divided whenever the drums beat for military intervention, blame it on Vietnam.
If the U.S. Department of Defense budget exceeds $700 billion, dwarfing defense spending of the nine nations behind it, Vietnam paranoia cannot be discounted.
If countless U.S. citizens have chosen to re-examine Stephen Decatur's gold standard dictum for patriotism - "Our country!. . .may she always be right, but right or wrong, our country" - Vietnam is without doubt the provocation.
Ms. Kalb and her father, Marvin Kalb, a 30-year award-winning correspondent for CBS and NBC News, have co-authored a book titled, Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama. To discuss their tome for which they have conducted "hundreds of interviews" over a five-year period, they shared the NPC stage with Ted Koppel, the former 25-year anchor of NBC's Nightline and current senior news analyst at National Public Radio.
Marvin Kalb cited Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush as examples of how post-Vietnam presidents responded to crises on their watch with that one defeat in U.S. military history not far from their consciousness.
When 241 U.S. Marines participating in a peacekeeping force in Beirut, Lebanon were killed in a suicide bombing on October 23, 1983, "Ronald Reagan decided to do nothing," Kalb recalls. In fact, Marines were pulled out of Beirut and put on a waiting ship offshore. "Ronald Reagan did not want the U.S. to be, as he said, 'spooked' again as it was in Vietnam."
When President George H. W. Bush launched Operation Desert Storm on August 20, 1990, responding to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, he dispatched 200,00o U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia. In the following year, Operation Desert Storm quickly and decisively drove Iraq's armed forces from Kuwait in some 100 hours. Bush 41's decision was to "overload the circuit - go in, do it fast, and get out," Kalb said.
Throughout the U.S. military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan that President Obama inherited from his predecessor, Vietnam has not been far from his mind.
While campaigning in 2008, Obama was accompanied by Senators Jack Reed, D-Rhode Island, and Chuck Hagel, R-Nebraska, both Vietnam veterans, whom he questioned incessantly about that war during the 14-hour flight from Washington to the Middle East. Kalb further noted that when Obama made the decision to double down on Afghanistan, he told his National Security Council: "Afghanistan is not Vietnam."
The so-called Powell Doctrine is frequently used to compare the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and the Iraq War. As its namesake, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said in an interview on The Rachel Maddow Show on April 1, 2009, that doctrine denotes exhausting all "political, economic and diplomatic means" before a nation resorts to military force.
More specifically, the following must be in place: A vital national security interest threatened; a clear and attainable objective; full and frank analysis of the risks and costs; exhaustion of all other non-vi0lent policy options; a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement; full consideration of policy consequences; support of the American people; genuine broad international support.
The closing lines of Barbara Tuchman's masterful 1984 treatise, The March of Folly, cite Michigan Congressman Don Reigle and they bear repeating here:
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