Tran Hung Dao Trip Essay on Leadership

Vision is conceptualizing some future state that has a much higher value than the cost of achieving it. Much of the detail of getting there can be left to execution but vision must also include at least a rough outline of a viable path.

Motivation is inspiring people to work toward achieving the vision. Importantly, that inspiration must be of sufficient intensity and duration to get the job done.

Execution is managing to get it done: developing a detailed, viable plan, identifying and marshaling appropriate people and other resources, and coordinating them according to the plan.

Great leadership requires extraordinary performance in all three areas. One can be strong in only one or two areas and still be a good leader, but not a great one. Since it's rare for one individual to be exceptional in all three areas, leadership teams often are structured with complementary strengths, shoring up each others weaknesses. The crucial idea is this: Failure in any one of the three areas means falling short of great leadership.

Hindsight indeed often offers exceptional clarity. Let's use it to apply the preceding description of leadership to the Vietnam-American War. What were the objectives of the two sides, how well were they achieved or not, and how did leaders on the two sides perform?

It is a defensible simplification to say that America fought primarily to resist the spread of Soviet-style communism and that Vietnam fought for self-determination. It's now decades later and, ironically, there has been substantial progress toward both objectives. It took awhile, but the Soviet Union collapsed and, with it, much of the influence in the world of their ideas. The world is the better for it, we are better off, and so are the Vietnamese. We may think the Vietnamese made an early mess of self-determination, but they have nonetheless been "enjoying" the privilege of finding their own way. Under recent "doi moi" policies, they actually are beginning to enjoy increasing democracy, freedom, and prosperity while maintaining their precious national independence.

I cannot emphasize the following point enough. It is the essential insight into leadership in the war. The objectives of both sides were not mutually exclusive. That is demonstrably so because both have been largely realized by now.

The great tragedy of the war is that both peoples suffered terribly for what they could both have had without conflict, if only a path forward could have been found. Millions of Vietnamese were casualties, tens of thousands of Americans were casualties, a whole generation of American veterans were left unappreciated and, in the minds of many, betrayed; a whole generation of Vietnamese were abandoned to malnutrition and other miseries of a Soviet-style system, and a generation of Americans were left with a listless and uncertain national consciousness.

The first requirement of leadership is vision and it is there that the leadership of both sides failed most tragically. Lyndon Johnson and his predecessors articulated - albeit not persuasively - the necessity to resist Soviet expansion. Johnson may have been so much of a social liberal that he was only slightly to the right of Ho Chi Minh and the socialists, but he undoubtedly understood that democratic capitalism was the best hope for creating the wealth that he would redistribute. Ho Chi Minh clearly placed the struggle of his time in the context of Vietnam's long-standing struggle for independence. I cannot tell you to what extent he was a socialist by belief and how much by expediency but I have little doubt that he was, above all, a nationalist. Each leader had a vision of quite legitimate objectives for their own people, but neither gave us the great vision that would have encompassed both sets of objectives in a cooperative, collective effort.

I don't claim to be able to articulate the path they might have chosen and I will admit that it would have been difficult, if not improbable, by Lyndon Johnson's time. The best opportunities were in the preceding decades, after Japan's World War II occupation but before the Soviet's were so deeply involved. The intensely nationalist Ho Chi Minh, with his unabashed admiration of American democracy, actually expected American support and would likely have been a willing ally. By the sixties, the Soviet genie would not have gone gracefully back into his bottle. Great political courage would have be required if America had needed to abandon the corrupt, but capitalist, regime in the south. Anything that smacked of capitalism could have been a difficult sell in the post-French Vietnam of the time, where any distinction between capitalism and colonialism might not have been easy concept. (Think how often many of us in the West use socialism and communism interchangeably.) It could indeed have been a difficult path to find but that's not beyond the demands of greatness.

To lighten up a little on those leaders, they did not fail alone. A succession of American presidents - Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon - adopted and perpetuated policies that drove America and Vietnam farther from the great vision. Ardent communists apparently succeeded in isolating Ho Chi Minh to little more than spiritual leadership while they implemented the failed communist experiment. OK, so they didn't fail alone but they did fail. They were the leaders of my time in Vietnam, they had aspired to that leadership, and I hold them both personally and individually responsible for their failures. In that take on Ho Chi Minh, I differ from my Vietnamese friends.

Am I being presumptuous to expect such a great vision of them? Undoubtedly, but not more presumptuous than their aspiration to leadership. If they presume to ask us to follow them - even into deadly combat - then we may presume to demand greatness of them.

Am I being unreasonable to expect such a great vision of them? Again, without doubt. Greatness is surely beyond reason but we nonetheless have both a right and an obligation to demand it of our leaders.

OK, so both failed on greatness of vision. Each, at least, had a vision, if not a great one. How did they do with the other components of leadership? In the shadow of their failure of vision, that may seem unimportant but actually offers insight into some current debate.

Let's get execution out of the way first, because it's largely a gimme' for both sides, at least at execution per se. The Vietnamese were - and are - as tough and disciplined a military force as any in the world. They achieved remarkable results with sometimes astonishingly limited resources. Americans were - and are - a military force without equal in the world. The Tet Offensive of 1968 can be considered to be the turning point in the war. The Vietnamese achieved a great tactical surprise with the offensive but it was not a military victory. America's superb military machine crushed the offensive itself. It only became a victory for the Vietnamese politically.

That, of course, brings us to the remaining component of leadership, motivation. From the beginning, Johnson failed to inspire and motivate the American people. We were a divided people throughout the war and never had a dominant, collective will. Surprised by the scale of the Tet Offensive, remaining American will collapsed.

Ho Chi Minh did much, much better with motivation. He inspired his people to effort and sacrifice and he sustained that inspiration throughout the war. He was so effective that even now, a generation later, he remains an inspiration to the Vietnamese. What he failed to do was bridge motivation to execution. He lost political control of his government to Soviet-trained communists who plunged his people into wretchedness.

Before moving up in time to the contemporary presidential candidates, let me take an aside to eat a little crow. I've never been a great fan of fellow Arkansan Bill Clinton. I never voted for him. But honesty in retrospect has required of me that I begrudingly give him high marks for leadership in more than one area. Vietnam is one of those. Of all American presidents in the last half century, he alone took the initiative to turn the American-Vietnamese relationship back toward the friendship and cooperation that has always been our potential. The Vietnamese affection and admiration for Bill Clinton is well founded.

The current political debate in this country has invoked the Vietnam era records of the principal contenders for the Presidency. Unfortunately, it has generally been in the form of attempts to discredit, rather than offering direct witness to the leadership potential of the candidates. Some years ago, a parody by the National Lampoon (I think) asserted that ". . . a walk through the ocean of most souls would scarcely get your feet wet." The current discussion of the candidates' Vietnam records has such depth. Give it a rest. Let's be candid, but brief, about those records and get on with asking about what the candidates might be capable of now.

During that war, many men - especially those of means and privilege - used service in the National Guard to minimize their risk of actual combat duty. It appears that George Bush was one of those. Hardly admirable, but not the criminal behavior that some suggest. John Kerry was a decorated serviceman and a very capable small-unit commander but, in the minds of many fellow veterans, dishonored that service with the character of his subsequent anti-war activities. George Bush's behavior was neither honorable nor dishonorable; John Kerry's was both honorable and dishonorable. It's a wash and, of itself, tells us little of what kind of leaders they might be tomorrow.

We have George Bush's recent performance to serve as a guide. He may actually possess a truly great vision for the world and he certainly has available capable diplomatic and military resources for execution. The open questions amount to whether he can connect them by succeeding with the other components of leadership. Can he articulate a viable path? Can he inspire the American people and the rest of the world to a sustained effort? Can he surround himself with managers who will actually reach the vision, not just Kandahar or Baghdad? The book is still out on those questions. I certainly would hate to be the odds maker and I'm not even overly comfortable with taking the bet.

John Kerry's Vietnam era behavior may not tell us much about what he can do today but what he thinks today about that past performance might be very illuminating. With hindsight, one might forgive his anti-war activities. At the time, American leadership had already failed and we were already certain to abandon the effort. It's understandable that, having recently witnessed young men dying, he would advocate ending the dying sooner rather than later. The real question is whether, as I think may be the case, he still stands by the broader anti-war position. For John Kerry or any other anti-war advocate of the time to continue to maintain that America should have stayed out of Vietnam or, having entered, should have abandoned it, fails to recognize the great vision that was possible but missed, dishonors the sacrifice of thousands who died for the very legitimate objective of resisting Soviet expansion, and callously neglects the misery to which we abandoned the Vietnamese people. If John Kerry can't recognize, with the benefit of hindsight, what could have been great leadership, why should we think that he will see it through the haze of the future?

God bless America - and Vietnam - and God save us all from any more such leadership.