Huntington on Vietnam: Elections Were Sign of Growing Stability

Many, if not most, of Harvard's younger faculty members have become increasingly vocal during the past year in their opposition to the war in Vietnam. One who has not is Samuel P. Huntington, the new chairman of the Government Department, who came back two months ago from a six-week State Department-sponsored tour of South Vietnam.

He came home optimistic--about progress in the war, about the effect of the election, about the prospects for an eventual stable peace.

Huntington, an expert on political development whose course, Government 109, stresses the importance of order in developing countries, was asked by the State Department to study long-term political trends in South Vietnam. Planning his own agenda, he traveled through 15 provinces in the country's four regions, usually in the company of U.S. embassy personnel.

He interviewed villagers and, from Saigon and the countryside, observed the national election campaign. He left the country ten days before the election.

Huntington has not yet submitted his report to the State Department and when he does it will be classified. But he recently discussed some of his preliminary personal observations and conclusions.

The four years since his first trip to Vietnam--in the last year of the Diem regime--have seen an "opening up of political process" in Vietnam, Huntington says. The September 3 election, in which the winning Thieu-Ky ticket received 35 per cent of the votes, was "very beneficial" in increasing national political consciousness, which Huntington found to exist in a high degree even in rural areas.

He thinks that the closely observed, hotly contested election was a political necessity, saving the country from what could have been a "very difficult situation had it not been held. Huntington thinks that the election was a fair one commenting that "we had as much at stake in a fair election as the Vietnamese did." The U.S. government, he said, was prepared to accept any result in the election, in which the "peace platform" Dzu-Chieu ticket received a surprising second-place 17.2 per cent. But he notes that the South Vietnamese army would probably have attempted a coup had the first and second place results been reversed.

The election, he feels, indicated to the average Vietnamese that there is something to be gained through politics. For proof Huntington contrasts last year's elections to the Constituent Assembly with next Sunday's elections for the 137-member lower House. In 1966, he says, "people didn't run because they didn't think it would be important." This year, 2000 candidates have filed for the election "because they feel it's going to count."

Huntington sees several reasons for the rising level of political life in South Vietnam, and one of them is Nguyen Cao Ky. In Huntington's previous studies of developing countries, he has often found in the military a primary source of modernizing influence. In the case of Vietnam, he says, Diem was "really the centralizer and the modernizer" but he was unsuccessful in trying to unify a diverse country "from the top down." Ky, Huntington feels, has "natural political flair. He flies planes, he wears purple scarves, everyone has heard of him; he has made a deep impression on the public conscience."

Style is more relevant than content in this stage of politics, Huntington thinks. He attributes peace candidate Dzu's strong 800.000-vote showing to a rabble-rousing political style similar to Ky's, which impressed the voters more than his platform.

Whatever the value, or lack of value, of Ky's leadership in more substantive terms, Huntington feels that he performs a useful function. 'If you're trying to impose democracy on a society you have to expect the rabble-rousers to play their part," he says.

Another reason for increased South Vietnamese political awareness, Huntington thinks, is rapidly increasing urbanization due to the war economy. When he was in Vietnam four years ago, the country was no more than 15 per cent urban; now about 40 per cent of the people live in cities. Saigon and most other cities have "turned into real boom towns, hit hard by the Honda revolution," Huntington remarks. Saigon's economy is booming, there is no unemployment, and urbanization is snowballing.

The primary danger from this heightened level of politics is that, as the country as a whole begins to make political demands, so will each of South Vietnam's many ethnic, religious, and communal factions.

It was these factions that impressed Huntington most strongly about Vietnam. "Most people don't appreciate the complexity and variety of this society," he comments. Almost half the population is composed of different minority groups, and it is this half that is most immune to Viet Cong influence and most strongly supports the government--now. Thieu and Ky's majorities on September 3, for example, came from the strongly tribal area of the Third Core.

Hunting estimates that about 90 per cent of the Viet Cong's support comes from the other half, the "normal garden variety Vietnamese." This is the mass, unorganized population, and in the vacuum between the village level and the remote national government the appeal of the Viet Cong is very strong. On the other hand, the ethnic groups like the Cambodians, Chinese, and Montagnards have tightly organized communal organizations, with hierarchies of their own which fill the vacuum and make Viet Cong penetration unlikely.

Ignoring the potential threat of this diversity, Huntington says, was what brought about Diem's downfall. By the same token, he adds, the existence of so many groups makes some form of coalition democracy the only kind which can hold the country together. Future stability depends on whether the Thieu-Ky government can accommodate the growing plural consciousness of population it depends on for support. Huntington thinks that there are signs that this may happen.

Ultimate stability, of course, depends on more than Vietnamese national politics. Huntington takes the present American involvement as given, and comments only on present and future, not past, policy. The war cannot end, he says, until "the North Vietnamese are convinced that they will be unable to gain their objectives by military intervention." He thinks that the military phase of the war is running decisively against the North, and that they can eventually be defeated without escalation.

Huntington opposes the idea of immediate negotiations--"there is nothing to negotiate right now"--or of a unilateral bombing pause on the part of the South or the U.S. without "a strong likelihood of a constructive result." An unsuccessful bombing pause, he feels, would only strengthen the hand of the hawks, and "the net result is likely to be a vast escalation spurred by popular impatience."

Huntington is convinced that psychological losses are offsetting military victories for the South. "The only reason the North is still fighting is because they look at our domestic dissent and figure we will get tired and pull out, like the French," he says. "They know they're losing; they can't move supplies and they have had to greatly increase taxes. We have to recognize the fact that dissent has political consequences.

"A lot of domestic criticism of the war stems from ignorance," Huntington adds, admitting that "some of it is due to the Administration's failure to explain its policies." Regardless of the strategic importance of South Vietnam, Huntington comments, American success there has become vital for domestic stability. Withdrawal now, he says, would be followed by "an incredibly strong rightist reaction that would make McCarthyism look like pink tea."

Huntington doubts that the Administration is now prepared to make any new initiatives, and predicts that the war will continue on the same level until after the November '68 elections. However, if the Republican Party nominates Reagan or Nixon as he expects them to, he adds, the North Vietnamese might decide that it would be to their advantage to come to terms with Johnson before the election, on the chance that a more militant hawk might reach the White House.

Despite the increasing closeness to China of American bombing raids, Huntington discounts the possibility of Red China entering the war. "They have nothing to gain," he comments, except in the "very unlikely situation" that their internal political crisis leads current leadership to turn to a war with the U.S., which it believes to be inevitable eventually, as the only way of unifying the country.

Vietnam, Huntington says, is the first country in which the U.S. has involved itself without a previous history of cultural or academic contact. Because Vietnam was always considered the property of the French, it was largely ignored by American scholarship, and Huntington feels that a backlog of literature and of "old Vietnam hands" in the State Department might have significantly contributed to understanding in the early stage of American commitment. "This gap in knowledge and understanding has directly contributed to the shrillness and superficiality of much of the debate over American policy," he wrote recently in Asian Survey.

After two study tours in an attempt to close that gap, Huntington still considers himself much more of a detached observor than an active policy maker or suggestor of policy. His dispassionate attitude toward what might conservatively be called the most dangerous world crisis in the last 25 years gives the feeling that Vietnam is, first of all, another fascinating case study, a testing ground for theory. "It's not hopeless by a longshot," Huntington remarks. "It's not too good, but it's not too bad. What we need is an awful lot of patience.