Everything You Think You Know About Vietnam Is Wrong — Historian Mark Moyar (Transcript)

And the communists initially think they can beat him with just political agitation, but that turns out not to be the case.

And so as his regime gets stronger, the communists decide in 1960 to launch an armed insurrection basically using the techniques of Mao for mobilizing the peasants. And so that begins in 1960. The Diem regime struggles at first. They start to get their act together in 1962. President Kennedy helps, puts a lot of aid there. Things are going pretty well in 1963, and then all of a sudden you have what we call the Buddhist crisis, which is a hugely complicated and convoluted story where supposedly some Buddhists in the population were dissatisfied with the government.

This was all really ginned up, and we know in fact the Communists were helping give the propaganda behind this, but they duped some of the American press into believing them. And so ultimately the U.S. government supports a coup to overthrow President Diem in 1963. And to me, that is a watershed moment in the war because the war effort suddenly goes off a cliff. Now, a lot of historians have overlooked some of this, but I think it’s quite clear. We now know from North Vietnamese sources, this is a huge moment. So the South Vietnamese government goes into a tailspin.

The Gulf of Tonkin and the Escalation Under Johnson

And then we have Lyndon Johnson come in. Kennedy’s assassinated just a few weeks after President Diem, and Lyndon Johnson in 1964 is focusing on getting reelected in the ’64 election. So everything to him has to be looked at through that lens.

And so you get to the Tonkin Gulf incidents of August in 1964. What happens is that a couple of American destroyers are out on the high seas, and the North Vietnamese attack them. And President Johnson is then confronted with the decision of what to do. Johnson doesn’t want this in the newspaper. This is not something he was hoping for. But now he’s confronted with this fact, and so decides he needs to do something.

And here we hear him listening to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who is really the architect of the war for both Kennedy and Johnson. What McNamara says is, “We need to convey a signal of our intent to the North Vietnamese.” And here he’s drawing on academic theories about conflict, which are not based in history. It’s really quite remarkable how influential these especially economists are, but he buys into this theory that we’ll use force to communicate. And so they undertake a very limited raid on the North Vietnamese naval base nearby.

Now the North Vietnamese see this and they take away the very opposite message that the Americans are trying to send. They see Americans just did a little pinprick strike. That must mean they actually are not serious because if you were serious you’d hit them really hard. So this leads them to believe that Johnson is going to throw in the towel on Vietnam or not make a big fuss.

And then in the election, Lyndon Johnson portrays himself as the peace candidate and says, “I’m not going to send American boys to fight wars that Asian boys can fight.” And so the North Vietnamese see this and they say, “Yeah, South Vietnam is now ripe for the taking. It’s in big trouble since this coup, and now Lyndon Johnson’s saying he’s not going to send American troops.”

So soon as Johnson wins the election in November ’64, the North Vietnamese launch an invasion with, for the first time, sending entire North Vietnamese Army divisions. Up until this time, they’ve sent smaller forces recruited in the South. So their plan is—

The Gulf of Tonkin: Conspiracy or Complexity?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’m so sorry to interrupt. Can I pause you for one second and just come back to the Gulf of Tonkin incident? Because our friend Joe Rogan, he brings this up as — I think when I asked him what his favorite conspiracy is, he said, well, the Gulf of Tonkin is one of them because it was a pretext for war that was false. What’s your reading of some of the narratives around that situation?

MARK MOYAR: Yes, well, it is a complicated situation. So there are two reported attacks, and one of those attacks clearly took place because there were bullet fragments found on the American ships. The second one is still kind of a mystery. The Americans at the time though did think there was a second attack based on communications intercepts. Now some of those intercepts maybe referred to the first one.

Now what is misleading, and I think maybe what feeds into conspiracy theories, is McNamara deliberately deceives Congress about what’s going on. He says this was an unprovoked attack. Now we know — and this was not known at the time — the US is actually conducting covert operations against North Vietnam, and probably that has something to do with the fact that they attack the American ships. And yeah, McNamara, he comes out as one of the most disreputable people out of all of this, I think. And this is a case where he misled the American people.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Do we know why he did it?

MARK MOYAR: I think he just felt that it might get a little too messy if people knew that there were some gray areas in here, that maybe this was not purely unprovoked aggression. And again, that also wouldn’t probably look great with the election coming up.

But we do know Lyndon Johnson and McNamara, they are already talking about bombing North Vietnam in 1965. Even when publicly they’re trying to claim that they’re not going to send American boys. So there is a great amount of deceit. In fact, Johnson’s advisors come to him several times in 1964 and say, “We’ve actually got a pretty bad rap, Democrats, because we had Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt promise they were going to keep us out of war, and then they get us into war, and we could be heading down that road this way. So we may be fighting a war, so you might not want to talk about being the peace guy.” But he ignores them and keeps going on this. So it is a rather sorry aspect of the conflict.

Hawks and Doves: The Debate Within the American Administration

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And do you think there’s any truth to the idea that actually there were some forces that really did want this war to escalate within the American administration at the time?

MARK MOYAR: There are some who see that it’s probably going to happen, and there’s a big debate between the ones who are in the McNamara camp, who buy into these academic theories, and they think they can kind of keep this as a limited war, and then it’s going to continue. Now, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others in the military say that doesn’t make any sense. We either need to fight this war hard, or we need to get out. And so that undercurrent was running for the next several years. And for the most part, McNamara is the number one guy, so he largely prevails. And so he pushes this idea that we’re going to fight a limited conflict rather than going all out or getting out.

American Boots on the Ground: 1965

FRANCIS FOSTER: So 1965, when was the moment American boots hit Vietnamese soil?

MARK MOYAR: So the first American troops come ashore in March of 1965, and at that point, the situation is continuing to get worse in the South. Johnson’s already thinking about doing some bombing, but he thinks that they can bomb the North, but it’s going to kind of keep on a somewhat modest pace. They don’t know that this big invasion is coming. So they send these first troops thinking that they’re just there to guard American bases. They’re not there to actually get into the fighting.

But what happens then is May of ’65, the North Vietnamese — these divisions that are coming from the north — they launch a big offensive. And by June, it’s clear that South Vietnam is probably going to fall unless the Americans get in. So in June and July, Lyndon Johnson decides, thinks this over, and will ultimately, in late July, say, “Okay, yeah, maybe I said we weren’t going to send boys, but actually we need to send our boys because otherwise Vietnam’s going to fall, and the consequences of that are things that we just don’t want to accept. It’s too damaging.” Again, going back to the Domino Theory, this is going to lead to the fall of other countries in Asia.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail and American Strategy

FRANCIS FOSTER: Because when we look at the American armed forces at that point, you go, this is the most technologically advanced armed forces in the world. This is the richest country in the world. They were up against, let’s be fair, a technologically limited Viet Cong, that should be an easy win, shouldn’t it?

MARK MOYAR: Yeah, you might think so, and the first battles are very lopsided. The first big one is Operation Starlight in August of ’65, and yes, the Americans have tanks and amphibious vehicles, they have air power, artillery. North Vietnamese don’t have these things, and so it is very one-sided. In fact, that will be the general pattern.

But what happens is that the North Vietnamese are able to withdraw when they don’t want to fight, or when they’re taking too much damage. So they can either go into remote jungles and mountains and hide out, or they can go into Laos and Cambodia.

And this is one of the problems that actually begins before 1965. There’s a big debate in the US over the country of Laos, which is where the Ho Chi Minh Trail will come into existence. Kennedy, when he’s president, thinks about sending American troops into Laos because in between North and South Vietnam you have this narrow demilitarized zone, and the North Vietnamese can’t easily sneak things across. They tried it and they were stopped. So they decide they’re going to go through Laos and build this Ho Chi Minh Trail.

And again, some of the U.S. military says, let’s go into Laos, cut that Ho Chi Minh Trail. But Kennedy listens to his civilian State Department and they decide to negotiate neutralization, which means North Vietnamese are supposed to leave and the Americans. But the North Vietnamese, being good communists, violate the agreement and they keep going in. And so you have an unending supply of equipment and manpower. So the North Vietnamese will take very heavy losses, but they can keep sending stuff down through the Ho Chi Minh Trail and keep things up indefinitely.

Search and Destroy: American Military Tactics

FRANCIS FOSTER: I read, Mark, and correct me if I’m wrong, that part of the problem for the American forces is that they were very good when it came to offensive maneuvers. Defensive maneuvers they weren’t so good at, and they really didn’t know, they weren’t very good strategically at that particular point.

MARK MOYAR: Well, and this is also a point of a lot of debate. Now, General Westmoreland, who’s the commander at the time, argues that the American forces should concentrate on what he calls search and destroy. So go look for big enemy units no matter where they are, even if they’re in the furthest reaches of the country, in the mountains and jungles. And the South Vietnamese, our partners, they will focus on securing the villages and towns where most of the people live.

And this does have the advantage of keeping Americans for the most part away from the population because Americans don’t speak Vietnamese, they don’t understand the customs. Now one of the problems is the Vietnamese government this time is in disarray, so they’re not very good at this kind of stuff.

But the search and destroy is also a very interesting topic because most of these operations, they don’t find the enemy. So a lot of people say, well, this was kind of wasteful. But we now know, especially from looking at the North Vietnamese side, that they still inflict very heavy losses on the North Vietnamese, because sometimes they do catch them, and that this really keeps the North Vietnamese off balance.

And if you were just to let the North Vietnamese run free, they would be able to mount massive attacks, concentrate in overwhelming numbers at a city or a base, and when they are able to do that, the only way you stop them is destroy the city, essentially, which occasionally happens, but for the most part doesn’t.

The Proxy War: China, the Soviet Union, and the Sino-Soviet Split

KONSTANTIN KISIN: One thing we haven’t talked about yet is, I think it’s quite an important part of this, is of course this is a proxy war, and the North Vietnamese are not fighting by themselves. They’re getting support from China and also the Soviet Union, right?

MARK MOYAR: That’s correct, yes. And in the early years, China is the main partner. And there’s a myth that Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh really were not on good terms with the Chinese. They didn’t really like them. That is actually not the case. We do know they were quite close, especially Mao and Ho Chi Minh themselves. Now, there’ll be a falling out later, but initially the two of them are quite close to one another.

And it goes back to Dien Bien Phu. We know the Chinese had sent 1,000 trucks to help the Viet Minh win there. And so the Chinese do see this as a major front in dominating Asia, pushing the United States out as a major power.

But the Soviets are also there, and the Americans know the Soviets and the Chinese aren’t on board. But this American intervention actually sort of widens the Sino-Soviet split, because what happens when the Americans come in, the Vietnamese turn to the Soviets for anti-aircraft weapons because there’s so much American air power. And so when they start getting more from the Soviets, the Chinese start getting jealous, and you start to see a falling out, and then you have the Cultural Revolution in China, and so eventually the Soviets will become the principal benefactor of the North Vietnamese.

When Did the War Start to Turn?

FRANCIS FOSTER: So 1965, boots on the ground. At the beginning, the Americans were making inroads, high fives all round, kicking commie ass. When did it start to turn?

MARK MOYAR: Well, for the troops themselves, they’re still pretty motivated for several years. Robert McNamara himself starts to become disillusioned at the end of ’65, and this is one of the reasons why he’s so unpopular, is that he’s actually now having doubts, but he’s not talking too much about them. So a lot of people say, well, should have maybe resigned, or maybe told people that we’ve got to do something different.

But the reason he gets discouraged is that when the troops go in the middle of ’65, he is still believing that we have these limited war theories that tell us that one side restrains itself and the other side will restrain itself. Well, the Americans limit themselves, but late ’65, they find out North Vietnamese are sending in a whole bunch more people, and so this theory has been essentially destroyed. And so now McNamara realizes that it’s not going to work, and the war is getting bigger and bigger, and he can’t really figure out a way out of it.

Now you have the military at this point continuing to say we need to either invade Laos, invade North Vietnam, bomb in a much more powerful fashion. But the war will continue to go pretty well for the Americans, especially for the next several years, and there’s still, I think, a pretty strong feeling among the troops that this is something worth fighting for.

But there is also this growing realization that the politicians are tying our hands behind our back and not letting us win this conflict. And that will increasingly become the sentiment of American troops.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What was the objective for the US?

MARK MOYAR: Well, officially it was to protect South Vietnam against North Vietnamese aggression. You had the model of the Korean War where you had North Korea invading South Korea. And so the hope was that we could maintain an independent South Vietnam.

Now, once the American troops go in, again, there is pressure from the military. Let’s go into the North. Lyndon Johnson said, well, we tried that in Korea and the Chinese came in. Now, it turns out to have been a huge miscalculation because we now know the Chinese had taken a terrific beating in Korea and they said, we’re not doing that again.

But the United States again decides to limit itself to the southern half of the country, and so you’re playing defense all the time, and you have an enemy that can keep infiltrating through the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Ultimately the hope is we can build up the South Vietnamese to the point that they can deal with most of this on their own, which will bear some fruit later in the war ultimately.

Comparisons to Afghanistan

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, it sounds, for younger generations, this feels kind of like Afghanistan. You know, you stabilize it, you train the local people, everything’s great, but the moment the American forces aren’t there, it reverts to the mean.

MARK MOYAR: Yes, well, I will say that the South Vietnamese government was quite a bit better than what we saw in Afghanistan, Iraq, but on the other hand, the enemy was also much stronger. And the U.S. shot itself in the foot several times in Vietnam in terms of promoting especially this coup in 1963.

I do think in the case of Vietnam we had viable partners. In the case of Afghanistan, I think clearly that was kind of doomed, because we never really found anybody. Of course, as soon as we withdraw our air support, the head of the country flees the country. I mean, the South Vietnamese will continue to fight as the US and the Congress pull out aid.

Growing Disillusionment Among American Troops

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And so you mentioned that it’s going pretty well for the first few years, and the first demoralization for the American forces there is the realization that they’re not being allowed to go in and do the job that they need to do to win the war. And they’re basically sitting ducks just waiting for the Viet Cong to attack rather than going out and cleaning them out, basically.

MARK MOYAR: Yeah, that’s right. The initial period is kind of an emergency rescue operation. You’ve got to push all the North Vietnamese back. And so that’s all quite effective. But yeah, after a while, when things just start to drag on, then you do increasingly have people wondering, are we just going to sit here forever?

And this is similar to Afghanistan in that when the Americans were there, we’d kill Taliban day after day after day, but they kept coming in from Pakistan. And so the American people generally don’t have an unlimited patience for that sort of thing.

And I think a big part of the problem too was Lyndon Johnson never really made an effort to sell the war. He himself will admit that. He will admit that he was so focused on becoming a domestic policy president, he was going to have the Great Society and civil rights, that if he talked too much about the war, that was going to distract from this. But again, that will lead to some of the ultimate disillusionment when, if the president’s not out there explaining to you why you’re fighting, it’s hard to understand.

Johnson’s Spin and the Road to Tet

FRANCIS FOSTER: But not only did he not explain why they were fighting, didn’t he also downplay the way that the war was going and the casualties that were being incurred as a result of war?

MARK MOYAR: Yeah, he was certainly trying to put a positive spin. He’ll initially be a candidate in 1968 for the presidency, and so he will bring General Westmoreland back to kind of give pep talks and say how things are going well, rather than saying himself. But this is partly to assure people that in fact things are going okay. Then you get to the Tet Offensive in 1968, which seems to contradict that. Now again, that’s also—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Tell us about the Tet Offensive before we talk about this. What happened?

The Tet Offensive and Its Aftermath

MARK MOYAR: So, early 1967, the North Vietnamese keep losing battle after battle. And so, they at first think things are going well. In early 1967, they finally figure out that they’re taking crippling losses and that their own commanders in the South were kind of deceiving them about how things were going because they didn’t want to lose face. So they were always claiming they killed all these American South Vietnamese. Somebody finally did the math and said, “Well, wait, the Americans and South Vietnamese are getting stronger even though you claim you did.” So they finally kind of figured out we’ve got to come up with a new game plan.

So, since fighting in the remote areas of South Vietnam’s not working, what they’re going to do is target the cities of South Vietnam, which they’ve largely left alone. And these are controlled by the government. Their thinking is that if we go in there, the people there are going to rise up because they hate the South Vietnamese and American capitalists. And they think it’s going to be kind of like in 1945 when they go into Hanoi.

So they decide to attack during the Tet holiday, which is the biggest holiday of the year, violating a ceasefire. So they have the element of surprise, but it turns out the people are not ready to rise up. In fact, almost none of them do. And so now they’re stuck in the cities, and they’re not familiar with the city, so they don’t know where to go. They can’t just run away easily. So they take crippling losses at the hands of American and South Vietnamese forces.

But you have an American media that focuses on just the magnitude of this, suggesting that this showed that they were stronger than they were, which isn’t really the case. But again, Lyndon Johnson has mismanaged the war of ideas. And some of the American hawks say, “Okay, this is like a Pearl Harbor moment. We can tell the people there’s this dastardly surprise attack, time to really take the shackles off, send even more troops.” But Johnson doesn’t want to do that. And so there again, you have an opportunity to capitalize on this “let’s win the war” sentiment. But instead, he decides he doesn’t want to do that. And he ends up dropping out of the presidential race partly because of Vietnam, partly for other reasons.

Fighting to Win: The Central Question

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So reading between the lines of everything you’re saying, my sense — and correct me if I’m wrong — is your perspective is you either don’t fight, or if you do fight, you fight to win. And the reason that the Vietnam War ended up not being a success is Lyndon Johnson, McNamara, they tried to sit on two stools and end up falling in between them. Is that a fair assessment?

MARK MOYAR: Yes, there’s certainly a lot of truth to that. Now, there were other opportunities too, I think, because one of the central controversies of the war was just whether it was something that could have been won or not. And a lot of historians, especially on the left, will say no, we could never have won it. Again, I think the Americans could have gone into North Vietnam and maybe there would still have been some resistance, but it would have been a much more manageable problem, or that we could have cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

But you also do have towards the end of the war, the US decides to cut off aid to South Vietnam. But South Vietnam was actually getting better over time. And so that was another missed opportunity. And then the one other huge missed opportunity was this coup in 1963. I think had we not done that and sort of torn the government apart, it never would have gotten to the level that it gets to.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And why does America cut off aid to South Vietnam?

MARK MOYAR: Because Congress is getting fed up with the war. It also coincides with Watergate, and so Congress is getting angry at Nixon. Nixon has promised that he’ll go help the South Vietnamese, but because of Watergate, his hands are tied. And you have increasingly large anti-war sentiment within Congress who thinks and has a very benign view of Vietnamese communism, and an unduly harsh, I think, view of our Vietnamese allies.

The Draft and Public Sentiment

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Is it possible also that because of the draft and because the people who are going to fight and die and be maimed in Vietnam are just normal people who didn’t volunteer for this, who didn’t want to be professional soldiers, that the sentiment among the American public at this point has already turned, or is that not true?

MARK MOYAR: Nixon actually has been very mindful of this, and he will end the draft for that reason. And so he does take that issue away. I do think a lot of the hesitation and reluctance is because of this draft issue. In fact, when you look at how the war is written, a lot of the people who dodged the draft end up becoming very harsh critics of the war.

But towards the end, the draft is no longer an issue, but part of it’s just some people are saying, “We’re tired of this. We need money for other things.” Again, I think a lot of it too was naïveté. I mean, you have George McGovern as the presidential candidate for the Democrats in 1972, and he’s saying, “Ho Chi Minh is the George Washington of Asia.” And you have just incredibly misguided notions that these Vietnamese communists are nice people. Of course, after the war, they do all sorts of terrible things to clearly show that’s not who they are.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Because a lot of those people, like you said, they got scarred by this war because they see this war, it’s a place, Vietnam, most of them have never been. Most of them, if you’re going to be honest, probably didn’t quite understand what was going on. But then they would see young men being sent away, some of them as young as 17, returning in coffins. And eventually they would probably think to themselves, not only is this deeply unfair, but what are we getting out of it? Why are our boys dying?

MARK MOYAR: Yeah, and that’s where it was so problematic that Lyndon Johnson is not out there explaining to people. And a lot of his own aides are saying, “Look what Franklin Roosevelt did in World War II. He was out there telling people why it’s important for our sons to be going over there and risking their lives.” And that did a lot to help sustain morale because it’s an enormous risk any family takes, or any young man, to go put your life at risk. So it should be something that the people understand and understand its importance.

Now, when Richard Nixon comes in, he does address this problem, and he gives his famous Silent Majority speech where he does make a real effort to explain the war to the people, which should have been done long ago. But as I said, I do think there’s actually a pretty strong case to be made for why this war was important. But unfortunately, Lyndon Johnson doesn’t really make that case.

Class, Race, and the War

FRANCIS FOSTER: But it’s also as well, there were huge figures at the time like Muhammad Ali, who said, “No Viet Cong has ever called me the N-word.” You know, this huge cultural and sporting figure who refuses the draft on principle. I mean, that’s got to have a huge impact, not only on the zeitgeist, but also on the Black population as well.

MARK MOYAR: Yes, the Black population is interesting because in the early years of the war, it’s not a big issue for the most part. You do have Martin Luther King coming out, but the American forces in Vietnam are seen as sort of a model of racial integration because you don’t have much in the way of racial friction from ’65 to ’68. And then after ’68, you increasingly see the influence of the Black Power movement, and that causes a lot of problems in Vietnam as well as in the U.S. And increasingly you have this notion that this is a white man’s war.

Then you also have some prominent media actresses, Jane Fonda being the most well-known example, who come out basically in support of the enemy. And that was also very distressing for the American troops. A lot of them still will never forgive Jane Fonda. I mean, she goes to North Vietnam and poses with the North Vietnamese anti-aircraft weapons, basically looking like she’s helping the guys who are trying to shoot at our pilots. So you really have a sense of betrayal that you don’t see really in earlier conflicts.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Because there was a lot of talk, and it’d be good to actually delve into this, that there was a real problem with racialization, racism within the armed forces in Vietnam.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And you mentioned that the perception was eventually that this was a white man’s war. Is the implication it’s a white man’s war being fought disproportionately by Black people? Is that—

MARK MOYAR: Well, there will be allegations made like that around 1967, and at that point it’s interesting too, because previously, until the Korean War, Blacks were generally kept out of the combat units, at least the combat units that were doing the most difficult parts of the fighting. And so through integration, in some senses it was an advance — now they’re integrated in these combat units. But I don’t know the exact number, something like maybe 15 to 20% in those first few years of the casualties were Blacks at a time when they were about 12% of the population. So they are overrepresented.

Now, after that becomes an issue, the US actually changes the policy so that there is not this disparity. And so for the war as a whole, Blacks are right around 12% of the population overall, and they’re also 12% of the casualties.

MARK MOYAR: Yes, and having spent a great deal of time looking at that, I think just about any veteran will tell you that this problem was not that big of a deal once you were in the field because your life depended on cooperation. And so the real friction all took place in the rear areas. You know, you have people with too much time — maybe 10% of American forces are actually out in the field; the rest of them are all in these support units. And so that’s where problems are really bad. But you also see this happening all over the world where the US has military bases — Germany, Korea, et cetera. You have this strong racial antagonism that is really corrosive, starting around 1969.

The My Lai Massacre and Its Aftermath

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And when, what, when you say starting around, I would assume that the racial antagonism is simply the legacy of the history of slavery and Jim Crow and all the rest of it in this country. Is that what’s driving this, or is there, is there a new dimension? You know, you mentioned the Black Power Movement.

MARK MOYAR: Yeah, I do think the Black Power Movement is sort of starting to change people’s attitudes. I mean, for one thing, a lot of the Blacks who fight early in the war had volunteered for service. You know, a lot of them, I think, believed in sort of the vision of Martin Luther King that we want sort of a colorblind society. And, you know, of course, a lot of people decided, after you have the Civil Rights Act, think there’s not progress as rapidly as some people might want. So then you start to see— I mean, it’s a little bit like what we saw too with the George Floyd movement more recently, where people say, well, the colorblind society isn’t doing enough for us, so we need to take a more radical approach and one that is, you know, more confrontational towards whites.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Because you had the problems within the Army, there was also problems with drug taking, wasn’t there?

MARK MOYAR: Yes, and that also is more prevalent in the rear areas because, again, people kind of know that this could get you killed. Now the combat troops, they may use drugs. They probably won’t be doing it when they’re out in the field. Probably because their other soldiers would get really angry at them for doing that because you’re putting everyone’s lives in jeopardy. But yeah, the drug problem is also getting worse about the same time, and it’s very easy to get marijuana. And heroin then also becomes a problem. That of course is a much more serious matter.

And so there are real problems. You know, it’s not the case, I would say, that the US forces are becoming less effective. I mean, there is one thing that’s happening in this period that probably does more than either race or drugs to undermine performance. And that is when the Americans start withdrawing under Nixon, you start to have people saying, you know, I don’t want to be the last guy to die in Vietnam. And here Nixon does not probably do a good enough job, although you also will see this in World War II or in Korea, you also have this near the end of the war, nobody wants to be like the last guy to die. So you do have morale problems as a result of that in the latter stages.

War Crimes and Scandals

FRANCIS FOSTER: And you also have scandals going on. So that had a very real impact, particularly on Americans’ view of their boys. I mean, there was a scandal with rape, mass rape happening. So let’s talk about that. What were these scandals that really damaged Americans’ viewpoint of their army?

MARK MOYAR: Well, one big war crime was the My Lai Massacre, which took place in 1968. And you had a part of a company of American forces went into a village and killed and/or raped over 400 people. And now he actually was stopped when an American pilot saw this was going on and came in and intervened and then told higher headquarters. But it was a horrific war crime.

Now this was done by low-level officers, but officers at a higher level thought that if this word gets out, that this is going to be a catastrophic PR nightmare, so let’s try to hide it. So they’re able to hide it at first, but about a year later, the story comes out. And so that was hugely controversial. You know, there’s Lieutenant Calley, who’s the leading perpetrator, is put on trial, will get convicted. Americans actually have divided on this. I mean, some people think that Calley was just being made a scapegoat. Other people thought, you know, Calley fully deserves this.

Now there’s then speculation, maybe this was happening all the time. I think clearly, and we know it wasn’t, this was an aberration. But it does become sort of a rallying call for the anti-war movement and others who are saying, look, we’re committing war crimes. I would add, Americans have committed war crimes. I mean, most wars have some crimes, and oftentimes they don’t get as much publicity, but this one, you know, they have pictures that are circulated, and so it is very harmful for the American cause.

The Pentagon Papers

And then you have the Pentagon Papers where Daniel Ellsberg releases this study that had been put together, actually under the Johnson administration. Now it doesn’t come out till Nixon’s president, but it does reveal some of the deceit and mistakes that were committed by people like McNamara and Johnson and all the disastrous errors that came from that. So that will certainly provoke a lot of controversy. Now, Nixon himself is not covered in the Pentagon Papers, and at first he kind of thinks, I’ll just let this go. But then Henry Kissinger, who is his national security advisor, tells him that we have to figure out who did this and punish them ruthlessly, and that there’s actually probably a conspiracy involved.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Can I just pause you there, Mark? Yes. Because we skipped over— we didn’t skip over, but we kind of didn’t really delve into what the Pentagon Papers actually said. What were the accusations? What were the mistakes made? What were the crimes that were committed? And then we can come back to this bit, which is Kissinger saying we need to punish our enemies and the people who did this.

MARK MOYAR: Yeah, so the Pentagon Papers expose the American role in the coup of 1963. And at the time, up until this time, it wasn’t clear what role the Americans had actually played. But now, you know, these make clear that, in fact, the U.S. Embassy is supporting this coup, the CIA is involved. And so that was quite disconcerting for a lot of people on both the right and the left who were wondering, why are we actually overthrowing this allied government of ours?

You have information about the Tonkin Gulf suggesting that maybe it was not quite what we were told, that in fact there was some provocation involved. You have documents just indicating that they’re actually planning to go to war when Lyndon Johnson’s saying that he’s the peace candidate. And you have talk of the war strategy.

And one thing we haven’t talked about yet is Robert McNamara had what he called the strategy of gradual escalation. This again goes back to these game theories that he’s pulled from academia. But he argues that when we start bombing North Vietnam in early 1965, we should start off at a low level and build up gradually. And that’s part of our plan to communicate our intent and also to limit our risk. Now, the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the same time— this also comes out of the Pentagon Papers— the Joint Chiefs of Staff are saying, that’s crazy. Hit him hard right away. And so, clearly the strategy of gradual escalation doesn’t work. And in fact, what happens is it gives the North Vietnamese time to build up their anti-aircraft defenses. So you have a lot of strategic incompetence being exposed here in the Pentagon Papers.

The Drug Trade and Hollywood’s Portrayal

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And, uh, Mark, this takes us into the realm of Hollywood, which actually is a big part of this, but probably after the war. But one of the things that’s been depicted in a number of movies, one of them, I think, American Gangster, with Denzel Washington, is the idea that actually the Vietnam War becomes a big drug trafficking operation, and a lot of drugs are coming to the United States through that. A lot of the Army is involved, the CIA is involved. How much truth is there to that?

MARK MOYAR: I think a lot of it’s been exaggerated, probably some truth to it. You know, a lot of the drugs taking place are just taking place within that theater. They’re not going back and forth necessarily with the United States. I mean, it does get a little murky when the U.S. is supporting various groups in Laos and Cambodia that are also involved in the drug trade. And so it sometimes looks like the U.S. is supporting them. A lot of that’s the CIA side of it still. Actually, we don’t know that much about it. They don’t release records on those things. But yeah, I don’t think it’s probably as serious as people might imagine.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Hollywood’s dramatizing things.

MARK MOYAR: Yes. Yeah, there’s a lot of Hollywood. Yeah, Hollywood hasn’t done a very good job on Vietnam.

The Road to American Withdrawal

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, we’ll talk about that, but before we get there, take us through to the end of the war. We’ve got to this point where the morale is dipping, the soldiers on the ground are starting to realize we can’t actually win because the politicians won’t let us. Eventually, the rot sets in, the American media is on it, you’ve got these racial tensions, morale is dropping further. As you said, no one wants to be the last guy to die in Vietnam. What happens then and how do we get through to the American withdrawal?

FRANCIS FOSTER: And just before, probably we’ll do with the Kissinger actually go and punish the enemies, then get to that point. Okay.

MARK MOYAR: Yeah. So after the Ellsberg disclosures were made— so Ellsberg turned himself in, but Henry Kissinger and others tell Nixon that there may be a broader conspiracy here. It might involve some State Department people, some think tanks. And so Nixon decides to set up a group that will become known as the Plumbers to go find out and dig dirt on these people. And so one of the people they target initially is a psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, and they go and raid his apartment without really proper legal clearance. They end up not finding anything, but this will become important because it basically sets the stage for the actual Watergate break-in, which is what’s going to take Nixon down ultimately.

So Nixon gives a silent majority speech in November of ’69. 1970, there’s a coup in Cambodia, throws out the pro-communist leader, and the U.S. then decides to go into Cambodia to help the Cambodian government, which is useful in reducing sanctuary. And one of the things we find out is that the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville was a massive hub for North Vietnamese supplies coming in. So we’re able to shut that down. So that means the only place really they’re getting supplies is Laos.

So the next year, ’71, Nixon supports a South Vietnamese effort. It’s all South Vietnamese forces to go in, and they have a big fight. It’s not as successful as they want, but it has short-term benefit, buys time.

In 1972, the North Vietnamese decide they’re going to launch a huge offensive. This is 14 divisions. This is clearly far beyond any sort of guerrilla war, and it’s almost all North Vietnamese coming into the South. At this point, American ground troops are gone, but US air power is there and inflicts a crushing defeat on the North Vietnamese. And so this is one of the indicators that the South Vietnamese are getting their act together, that they can fight off 14 divisions without American ground troops.

Now then, what happens is you have a peace agreement in late ’72 that is really, I think, mismanaged by Kissinger. What Kissinger ends up doing is cutting a deal that allows North Vietnamese troops to stay in South Vietnam, and South Vietnamese go crazy when they hear this. And Nixon was actually doing this without telling the South Vietnamese, and so there’s a huge conflict between the Americans and the South Vietnamese. And then the North Vietnamese are also—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Why does Kissinger do that?

The Paris Peace Accords and Their Consequences

MARK MOYAR: He, I think, partly didn’t realize how bad of an idea it was. He also— so Nixon, for a while, he’s been trying to sort of cement his legacy as a great diplomat. And if you look at other diplomatic endeavors, it’s actually not all that similar. Some people get so obsessed with the deal that they just start giving things away just so they can say they struck the deal.

What ultimately happens is the South Vietnamese complain. Then Kissinger goes back to the North Vietnamese and says, well, we kind of need to change what we agreed to because maybe that wasn’t such a great idea. But the North Vietnamese say, well, you already agreed to this other stuff. So then Nixon bombs them in what’s called the Christmas Bombing, very heavy bombing in December of ’72. And Nixon thinks, yeah, we’re going to clobber North Vietnam. They’re going to be hurt for so long, and they won’t be able to do anything, at least not for a while. And we’re going to declare this peace agreement.

And he promises the South Vietnamese that he will protect them if the North Vietnamese in fact do launch another big offensive. Now whether he was going to actually live up to that, we don’t know because he’s gone by ’74. The South Vietnamese, basically the peace never really happens. South Vietnamese are fighting North Vietnamese, and it’s going pretty well until about the middle of ’74 when the aid cuts by the Congress are taking effect. So now South Vietnamese don’t have enough fuel for their aircraft, and to defend somewhere like South Vietnam, you need aircraft. They don’t have enough ammunition, and this gradually gets worse and worse. And so North Vietnamese see this and launch an offensive in early ’75, and they kind of wait to see too, are the Americans going to come do anything? By this time, Nixon’s gone, the Americans don’t do anything, and so the North Vietnamese then are able to, with 600,000 troops, defeat this depleted South Vietnamese force.

FRANCIS FOSTER: When you tell the story and you outline it like this, it does sound more and more — and something that I didn’t appreciate through watching the movies, and we’ll come on to that — it just sounds like political and strategic incompetence. But what you said about Kissinger, I mean, to me that just blows my mind. I mean, this was obviously a fantastically intelligent man. I’m not the brightest, but even I can work out leaving the enemy in the cities isn’t a good idea.

MARK MOYAR: Yeah, that’s right. And he will catch a lot of heat. You just said he was a brilliant man. McNamara also, again, brilliant guy, but yet they commit some terrible strategic blunders, which, again, I think this was not a foregone conclusion that it was going to end the way it did. You had both of those guys making very terrible decisions.

Now, you also had McNamara and Nixon who listened to these guys. I think that’s part of the problem — they thought, well, these guys are so smart, they must know what they’re talking about. Now, we do know in the case of McNamara, Johnson actually near the end of his presidency concludes that McNamara doesn’t know what he’s talking about, because McNamara wants to — in late ’67 — cut the bombing because he says bombing’s really not doing anything. But there’s so much information that says it’s in fact doing things that McNamara has become deluded.

And Kissinger commits some huge and costly mistakes. I mean, another thing he does is he comes up with this whole agreement with the North Vietnamese before he even shows it to the South Vietnamese. And keeping the North Vietnamese troops there is not the only huge problem they have in there. Kissinger didn’t even appreciate that some of the language that’s in the document — the Vietnamese are very attuned to language. He had signed off on these terms that he had no idea the Vietnamese were going to attach some importance to. For example, how do you describe the demilitarized zone between North and South? The U.S. didn’t think it was a big deal, but the semantics of this were huge to both Vietnamese. And so he just put the U.S. tied to this deal that had all these problems without even getting the concurrence of our allies. And it just did not go at all well.

Was the Domino Theory Correct?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So the war was fought because of the Domino Theory, the idea that if you let Vietnam get overrun by communists, communism will spread in Asia. Well, Vietnam does get overrun by communists.

MARK MOYAR: Was Domino Theory correct? Yes, great question. So I think it’s first worthwhile — one of the big problems with the Vietnam War is oftentimes people don’t understand the different phases. I mean, it goes from ’60 to ’75, and a lot of times people think the world’s kind of static, but in fact the world’s vastly different in ’65 when the U.S. goes in than when South Vietnam’s overrun in ’75.

What you see in ’65 is that in fact there are lots of countries under threat from communism. The most important one, which doesn’t often get its due attention, is Indonesia. At this time, there’s a civil war brewing between Sukarno, who is essentially a communist, and his military. That will actually come to a head in September of ’65, and the military will end up overthrowing Sukarno, but they will actually say later that the reason they took the stand was because they realized the Americans were not bailing out. And had we given up on South Vietnam, no country in Asia is going to want to be your ally if they see you send 50,000 troops to a country and then leave when the going gets rough.

So it was actually, I think, very important in the case of Indonesia, also Thailand, Singapore. Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew has very explicitly come out and said that Vietnam bought time for Southeast Asia to solidify and build up its strength against communism.

Another thing that happens is American intervention will drive North Vietnam and China apart for a few reasons. One, as I mentioned, now all the Soviet aid’s coming in. American intervention also, I think, plays a role in the Cultural Revolution in China. In 1966, Mao had thought he had this big period of expansion in Vietnam and Indonesia. Both those get crushed, and he now turns inward for enemies, and he loses interest in international affairs. And so by the time you get to ’75, Chinese and North Vietnamese have turned against each other, and in fact, they’ll fight a war in 1979.

So most of the dominoes don’t fall. But Cambodia and Laos fall, so those are significant. And it’s also worth noting, this leads then to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia who kill some 2 million people in this genocidal conflict, which again, I think, is worth keeping in mind — that this is a fanatical ideology. Vietnamese also kill a lot of their own people. Most of it goes under the radar. But I think ultimately the U.S., while it loses South Vietnam, holds on to a lot of other Asian countries, which today are actually the main U.S. allies in this ongoing competition with China.

The Right War, Fought the Wrong Way

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And again, reading between the lines of what you’re saying, it sounds to me like your view — and of course there’ll be historians who disagree on this — but your view is, I guess, it was the right war to fight, it was just fought in the wrong way. Is that fair?

MARK MOYAR: That’s correct, yes. And those are really the central issues of the war. And unfortunately, it’s so politicized in this country that to make that argument is radioactive in American academia.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: The show is called Trigonometry for a reason. By the way, I honestly didn’t know that was going to be your perspective. You were recommended to us by a friend and I’m really interested in your thoughts on it. So it’s an interesting perspective. It’s one I have heard from other people, and as you say, it is very toxic. And I imagine that is partly because — well, look, it might not be true, there will be people who say it’s not true — but also I think because of just how powerful the Hollywood narrative that was created after the war was. And I’m not saying that narrative is false, I’m not qualified to assess whether it’s true or false. What I’m saying is, even as someone who’s not American, who wasn’t brought up in America, if I had to tell you what the story of the Vietnam War was, it would be Platoon. It would be — what’s the one with Tom Cruise?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Born on the Fourth of July, right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yes. Like, those are not positive war movies. You’re not looking at that going, we’re the good guys here and this was the right war to fight.

The Hollywood Narrative and the Anti-War Movement

MARK MOYAR: Yes. And the country very much split along political lines. Ronald Reagan described this as a noble cause, but most of the left has taken the view that it was unnecessary, unwinnable. And a big part of why the left pushed that so hard is — look at what’s going on on college campuses in the middle of the ’60s. When the U.S. goes into Vietnam, there’s actually very little protest. Again, this is one of those areas where it’s worth keeping in mind the chronology. The protests don’t start till 1967, and it coincides exactly with the reduction of draft deferments for students, for college students.

And so suddenly — and I’m not the first person to say it, but I think it’s true — a lot of this opposition is driven by the fact that when you tell college students, well, we’re going to send you there, some of them don’t want to go. And if you look in the nation’s history, it’s almost always the case that the manly thing, the civic thing to do is to go when your country calls you. So if you’re going to not go and not answer the country’s call, you have to come up with a reason. And so the reason is this was a terrible war and we never should have fought it. Again, I think much of this is for self-serving reasons. And if you actually look into the facts of the war, they don’t bear those things out.

The Psychological Toll on Veterans

FRANCIS FOSTER: A little bit of pushback to that. So I have American friends and I know some people who’ve actually — Vietnam veterans, one whose father committed suicide, came back completely damaged because of what he saw. Young man ended up killing himself before the age of 30. Another one had real addiction issues. I think as well we need to acknowledge, Mark, that there was a very real psychological scar that was imprinted amongst a generation of young men, particularly blue-collar working-class young men?

MARK MOYAR: Well, I think there are certainly cases of that. Now, it is interesting — the polls that have been done on Vietnam veterans — there was a survey done a few years after the war, about 90% of them said they were actually proud of their service. Now, most of those people also said the problem was that we tied our hands behind our back. So they did have gripes, but it was about how it was fought.

Now, the question of psychological damage is an interesting one too, because you have the rise of certain psychiatrists who are arguing that there is some unique mental illness — we’re going to call it PTSD — that’s coming out of Vietnam. I think that’s mostly been debunked, in that if you look at any war, there are people with these same problems coming back. Probably a little bit worse given that when people came home, they weren’t greeted as heroes. But any war — I mean, if you talk with veterans of World War II or Korea or Afghanistan — there are a lot of veterans coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq who have committed suicide as well, tragically.

Yeah, I think it’s worth keeping in mind that in many senses it’s not really any worse of a war than most of the wars we fought, because all the wars we fought have been pretty awful. But again, when you compare — the Hollywood version of World War II movies don’t look quite like Platoon or Apocalypse Now.

The Legacy of Vietnam: America’s Foreign Policy Mindset

Francis Foster: And do you think the Vietnam War has made a profound impact on how America sees wars moving forward?

Mark Moyar: I do. I think the left and the right took different lessons. The left’s lesson was basically we want to stay out of wars, and the left pretty much stuck with that for decades. Every time a war came, they said, “This is another Vietnam.” And it’s been interesting with Ukraine, suddenly they’ve now become the party of war, which they were actually for. They got us into several wars in the 20th century.

The political right came out with the message that if you’re going to fight, you fight to win. And so we saw in the first Gulf War, the Bush administration was very intent on saying, “We’re going to use maximum force,” and it worked there. Now then you get to Afghanistan, Iraq. In both of those cases, I think the US didn’t really know what was coming. We weren’t even expecting a protracted war. And neither of those went quite as expected.

Vietnam as a Template for Future Conflicts

Konstantin Kisin: I was going to ask you about that, because do you think the Vietnam War and the portrayal of it, rightly or wrongly, in the media, in Hollywood, among a lot of people in the country as well, is the template onto which the failure of Afghanistan and the failure of Iraq fit very nicely?

Because I hinted at this right at the beginning of our conversation. It’s strange for us because we’re not immersed in American culture nearly as much. When we look at conflicts that are happening now, Ukraine, Israel, the left and right split in different ways on those issues, both within and against each other. But you hear a lot of people say things like, “I’m not dying for Ukraine,” or, “We’re not sending American boys,” which is kind of weird in the current context, because that really isn’t remotely what’s happening in either of those conflicts, nor is it the direction of travel, nor does the United States have a draft. So even if America did put boots on the ground, which it has no intention of doing, they would be people who volunteered for that. But the cultural dominance of this thing of like, we are not going to die for a foreign country — does that come from Vietnam?

Mark Moyar: I think on the left, but it’s been interesting on the right. As I said, that was not the main message that the right took. The right took away the message that you fight to win. It’s not that you just don’t fight.

Whereas in recent times, again mainly because of Iraq and Afghanistan, you increasingly hear people on the right who are questioning whether we should get involved in these interventions. The right now is thinking more in terms of Iraq, Afghanistan, how those things were costly. At a time when we’ve got rampant inflation, people are conscious of how much we spend abroad. So yes, there is a lot of reluctance.

Within the Republican Party, of which I’m part, there’s been this big split between the neoconservatives and sort of the neo-isolationists. The neocons kind of get blamed for Iraq and Afghanistan, and they were kind of the principal architects. So now you’ve had this other element that’s very hostile to them. In between those, I think, is a large group which I would say are sort of the Reagan conservatives who are not either super eager to get into every war, but also not necessarily opposed to war and willing to fight when American interests are at stake.

The Case for Strategic Engagement

Konstantin Kisin: Well, as an outsider, that does seem like the smart position, because those two other extremes — the neocon wars of the 2000s — don’t seem to me to have been beneficial to anybody, especially America, say nothing of the people that were killed. And the neo-isolationist position seems to me a little bit naive.

We had a big debate about this with a guy called Dave Smith, who’s a very popular representative of that point of view, because if you are going to be the most powerful country in the world, you are going to have to control territory beyond your own borders, and sometimes that means getting physical. To go to that other extreme seems kind of incompatible with America being the most powerful country in the world.

Mark Moyar: Yeah, I think that’s right, and I do think there is some naïveté. I have debates with people. I consider myself in the middle on this. There are some who would say, well, yes, having a military is important for deterrence purposes, but what we should do is just have a big military and then never use it. But I don’t think you can really have deterrent power if you take that position, because people are going to call your bluff, or if you’re out there advertising this.

Sometimes, as you said, if you’re the world’s greatest power, sometimes you are actually going to have to do something or you’re not going to be the world’s greatest power, especially with this rising China.

I do think we also see today what we saw before, which is that American politicians have not done a good job explaining to the American people why Ukraine or Israel or whatever other causes are actually so important to us. I spend a lot of time teaching college students, and that’s one of the things they say. They don’t really understand why we are spending all this money here. It hasn’t really been explained to them.

Konstantin Kisin: How do you explain it to your students?

Ukraine, Israel, and American Interests

Mark Moyar: Well, I think both of them are tricky issues. They’re not as compelling as the case you have for Vietnam. In the case of Ukraine, we obviously still have great interests in Europe. If Eastern Europe gets unsettled, we have problems of migration, which of course is a big issue here. Potentially Russia could keep pushing west, though I’m not convinced that Russia is going to ever go attack Poland. But there is also the human element — you have mass killings of civilians, and at some point, as the world’s greatest power, that’s something we may not want to be willing to tolerate.

Konstantin Kisin: I’m not hearing much strategic interest for the United States in that explanation though.

Mark Moyar: Well, that’s the thing. I think it’s harder to make the case for strategic interest, which is perhaps part of why you don’t hear a lot of people in Washington make that case.

The other reality is we now have a situation where Russia seems to be just using attrition, calculating on their larger population that they’re eventually going to grind Ukraine down, which I think would just be terrible for all concerned. My own view is we ultimately need to find some kind of solution to stop this, which probably means the Ukrainians may have to give some things up, which is not great either. You don’t want to set the precedent for countries taking territory and then keeping it. But it’s really, to me, just a nasty problem without a lot of very good solutions at this point.

I think the Biden administration, a couple years ago, thought that the Ukrainians were going to prevail militarily. The Russians did very poorly at the beginning, and so I think they thought that was going to continue, while it’s not. And so I think they miscalculated in —

Konstantin Kisin: Well, the weird position of the Biden administration was like, “Ukraine is going to win, but we are not going to give them the weapons to do it.” They could have won maybe — look, it depends, the Ukrainian flag’s not going to be flying over the Kremlin anytime soon, but they could have pushed Russia back to the 1991 borders. Unlikely, but if you’d given them proper support, they might have done that. It was all pom-poms and no actual support. It wasn’t zero, but it wasn’t the support that they needed.

So this is kind of how, and I’m from Russia and I have a lot of Ukrainian family, how we’ve ended up where we are. What about Israel and the war against Hamas? How do you talk to your students about that?

Mark Moyar: That’s an interesting one too, because historically the Republican Party has been pretty strongly pro-Israel. It’s much more divided now, and I think partly because we have some very influential figures on the right who are kind of questioning this from the national interest perspective.

Konstantin Kisin: Does America have a national interest in being allied with Israel?

Mark Moyar: With being allied with Israel, yes. I think the harder point is what people struggle with more — do we have a national interest in supporting what’s going on in Gaza? But even on the question of whether it’s in our national interest, that’s something that’s been debated too. You probably saw that there was a big flap with the president of the Heritage Foundation a week or so ago. So clearly, there’s a lot of conflict around this.

Konstantin Kisin: By the time this episode goes out, everyone will have forgotten about Kevin Roberts, who we’ve had on the show, by the way. But what I’m asking is, what is the strategic interest for the United States in being allied with Israel? Forget about Gaza. That’s where the conversation on the right in America really is. And by the way, on the left too, I think. Why is America allied with Israel?

Mark Moyar: Well, a lot of it has to do with history. There’s a sense in this country still, although again this is sort of fading, that in the aftermath of World War II, after all that was inflicted on the Jewish people, they deserve to have a homeland and a place where they could live in safety.

We’ve always also had this competing view that we also want to be friends with the Arab countries and the Islamic countries around them. I think this was an easier case to make when the US was more concerned about the Middle East. We had these fears of terrorism, and Israel is an ally in terms of dealing with the terrorist threat. But I think that’s partly why it’s harder to get support now, because most Americans don’t think about terrorism in the same way.

I think also, in terms of us considering Iran to be one of our top enemies, which makes sense, clearly Israel is critical in terms of keeping those guys in check.

The Erosion of Public Trust

Francis Foster: Mark, doesn’t it also represent what we’re talking about, the scars of Vietnam, in that there’s a lot of people in this country who simply don’t trust government because they go, “You’ve lied to me repeatedly. You lied to me over Vietnam and it’s just gone right the way through — weapons of mass destruction. Why should I believe you? Why should I believe a single word you say about Israel, Ukraine, or anything else?”

The Crisis of Trust: Media, Conspiracy, and Public Ethics

MARK MOYAR: Yeah, I think that’s a valid point. I mean, certainly you hear a lot of that coming out, and not just Vietnam, but also Watergate reinforces this. And I said the Pentagon Papers are part of this because clearly people are being lied to.

Now, I do think it’s exaggerated. Some people say, well, up until Vietnam, America trusted its leaders. Well, if you actually go back and look at your history, Americans have always had a certain suspicion of our leaders, going back to George III. So I don’t think it’s quite the case that we just never thought that our leaders would lie. I mean, if you look in the early republic too, they’re slinging all sorts of mud and saying how the other sides are all a bunch of scoundrels.

I think it goes in cycles too. I mean, yes, in the ’90s, and that’s partly what, when you get to the first Gulf War, there is a lot of people think, okay, well, yes, there are weapons of mass destruction and they seem to know what they’re doing. But again, obviously that turned out to be huge. And so now we’re back in one of those periods of deep distrust.

And yeah, I’m not sure what gets you out. I mean, I think it could be a president who— I think that’s one of Ronald Reagan’s big accomplishments is that he was the kind of person who could help restore a certain degree of trust in the government. And I don’t think we’ve really had a figure since then in this country who’s been able to do that.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: The thing is, the media environment is now so, so different. Social media, podcasting, the plurality of voices as such. And also, as I said, this episode will go out some time ago, but we just had a story in the UK, and who knows if the BBC still exists by the time this conversation’s aired, because I mean, we now know that large swathes of the media— and I say this as no fanboy of President Trump, I think he’s great on some things and not so great on other things— but they lied so much about him. They literally did election interference while accusing him of election interference. That it’s just hard for people, I think, to trust media they don’t already agree with.

MARK MOYAR: Yes, I think certainly there’s been great distrust in this country. And actually, Vietnam really saw, I think, probably the first time you had very deep distrust of the media among some parts, because it clearly became evident that the media was increasingly monolithic ideologically, clearly left of center. And so conservatives complained for a long time, and there really actually wasn’t much recourse.

When you have Fox News and the internet, it’s actually changed things a lot because people have other sources of news to go to. And that’s important. But yeah, I mean, it is unfortunate, and I think we gave up a while ago on hoping for something more impartial, which I guess the BBC still strives to be. But all our media here pretty much is either left or right. And I always tell students you want to listen to both to make sure you’re getting the information, but a lot of people only listen to the side they agree with, which isn’t healthy.

Conspiracy Culture and the Legacy of Deception

FRANCIS FOSTER: No, it’s not. And you know, Konstantin and I always talk about this, and forgive me because it might be slightly offensive to our American viewers and listeners, but you bloody love a conspiracy theory here. You are the nation of conspiracy theories. Whenever you sit down with somebody, doesn’t matter how smart they are, what side of the political spectrum, they all go, “You know who’s really in charge?”

Like, how much of that really is to do with Vietnam? Where exposé after exposé after exposé, people lying. I mean, that government gaslit a nation whilst they were at war. That’s got to have an effect. And then weapons of mass destruction again, that has got to make a population more conspiratorial.

MARK MOYAR: I mean, you do have a good number of conspiracies before Vietnam on the political right in terms of— although, what was sometimes seen as communist conspiracies actually have been validated to have been true. But yeah, you certainly see a rise in the distrust of government, and a willingness to believe that the government is going to do bad things. And I said, I think it did subside for a time.

I will tell you, more recently, things that might have been some kind of conspiracy theory— Crossfire Hurricane is an example of the government actually doing some crazy things, and you think there’s no way the government is actually going to do this.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Tell us about that a little bit. What was that?

MARK MOYAR: Well, that was surrounding the 2016 campaign. The FBI— and this is when Obama was still in power— they used this so-called Steele dossier, which had all these crazy allegations against Trump, which turned out to be false. They used that to open FBI investigations into Trump’s associates. And some of this is still being sort of pushed out now by the new government.

But you have the FBI basically being used to try to interfere with the 2016 campaign. And very senior FBI officials end up getting fired. I mean, Kevin Clinesmith— this is one I’d like to tell my Democratic friends, I’ll say, tell me who Kevin Clinesmith is. Most of them don’t even know who he was— this FBI official who falsified a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. And then there’s Andrew McCabe— excuse me— he gets fired. So there’s actually quite a few of these very senior FBI officials who were caught up in this.

And so things like that, I think, have made certainly the right— and I think partly what you’re seeing on the right is sort of a backlash against this, and a broader sense that yes, the government is broken and it needs radical surgery. Now, how you actually fix it tends to be a little more difficult than destroying the bad parts.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Because what we also saw— and people stopped talking about it because of the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk— but people kind of forget that before that, the big story was Epstein. And it looked like the Jeffrey Epstein scandal was going to do significant damage to Donald Trump’s presidency. And you go, look, well, obviously the Epstein scandal is a big thing, but why this above everything else? And to me, it was the conspiratorial element that was almost making people lose their minds. Like, they couldn’t get past that.

MARK MOYAR: Yeah, I do think, and this is one area I think the internet’s been problematic, because theories like this would not have been spread 30 years ago in the way they are. But we now have— and partly because people just go to where they like to get their information and they tune out things that might contradict that. And so, yeah, I mean, certainly it’s been incredible how much play that issue, the Epstein issue, has been receiving.

Now again, a lot of other people aren’t paying much attention to it, but of course you also saw with the Charlie Kirk thing, you have all these conspiracy theories about who was involved in that as well. So it is an unfortunate element of our politics.

Public Ethics and the Broader Cultural Problem

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, it’s been great having you on. Thank you so much for talking to us. Before we head over to our Substack where our audience get to ask you their questions, what’s the one thing we’re not talking about that we really should be?

MARK MOYAR: Yeah, I’d say the question of public ethics in this country is something we don’t talk enough about. Now, people are getting very spun up about corruption scandals, and rightly so.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But you had some experience yourself with all that.

MARK MOYAR: I did, yes, in the first Trump administration. And I became a whistleblower essentially, reporting corruption, and then they came after me. And I certainly saw a deficit of ethics in our government.

And this is part of a broader cultural problem where, historically, this country was comfortable talking about ethics in terms of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Some of our population still does, but we also have large segments who want to be so secular that we can’t talk about any of that stuff. And they assume that through some sort of cosmopolitanism, we can still maintain a culture of ethics.

But from my experience, ethics isn’t something that just arises out of thin air. This is actually a problem, and we see a lot of unethical behavior in our society. If we really want our government to cause us less harm, we probably need to figure out our cultural, social, religious moorings so that we are actually behaving ourselves better.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: All right, Mark, thanks so much for joining us. Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where you get to ask Mark your questions. To what extent did Nixon and Kissinger sabotage the Democrats’ peace negotiations ahead of the ’68 election? And to what extent does Mark think they should be held as culpable for tens of thousands of potentially unnecessary deaths in the years that followed?

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