| This study analyzes the design of U.S. intervention in Vietnam, concentrating on 1963-1965.;As global reformers American internationalists strove for a Lockean reordering while their Soviet competitors strove for a Leninist reordering, carrying this competition to specific tests such as Vietnam. Both found their Vietnamese ally difficult and suspicious. As reformers of the Vietnamese fatherland, Ho Chi Minh and Ngo Dinh Diem fought for the chieftainship of an extended Vietnamese tribe, one free of outsiders and reordered by the winning chief.;To coordinate American designs the internationalists created a clearing house, the National Security Council. It was to this council that the institutions of the national security state brought their interventionist designs. In addition to the NSC, this study covers the role in Vietnam of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Agency for International Development. To coordinate the various designs by Vietnamese contenders, each contender orchestrated his own institution, which in the case of Hanoi was a revolutionary party while in the case of Saigon it was a traditional family followed by a military committee.;In the race to force upon the Vietnamese security rights, individual rights, and the subsistence rights, the American Whig and Tory internationalists created a multitude of winners and losers among Vietnam's ambivalent peasant majority and her articulate urban minority. This extremism eroded South Vietnam's already weak foundations.;With all postwar presidents supervising an internationalism of self interest, American oligarchs organized a republican empire around four principles. They assumed the beneficence of their principles--collective security, limited war, political intervention, economic constraints--for themselves and their allies. In Vietnam they applied all four simultaneously, thereby launching a reform of Vietnamese institutions at the same time that they assisted in the military campaigns. |
