Additional Writings by George Herring  

THE WRONG KIND OF LOYALTY

VIETNAM, AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY, AND THE USES OF HISTORY

SNOWED BY THE CIA

THE WRONG KIND OF LOYALTY

In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. BY ROBERT S. MCNAMARA. New York: Times Books, 1995, 356 pp. $33.95.

As much as any other individual, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara personified the American commitment in Vietnam. He was "the can-do man in the can-do society in the can-do era," David Halberstam wrote in The Best and the Brightest, and during the Kennedy and early Johnson years, he managed America's expanding involvement almost as if he were a desk officer. Whether slogging through Vietnam in army fatigues, spewing out statistics to demonstrate progress, or presiding at a press conference, map on the wall, pointer in hand, he epitomized what came to be called "McNamara's war." Whatever the difficulties of the moment, he exuded a certainty that promised ultimate success.

In fact, as has long been clear, his public confidence far outlasted the emergence of personal skepticism, and McNamara's tearful departure from the Pentagon at the height of the Tet Offensive in early 1968, as much as Lyndon B. Johnson's March 31, 1968, speech, marked the inglorious end of an era once bright with promise.

As the war aroused growing controversy in the United States, McNamara became a major target for critics from both left and right. Ignorant of his muted, tightly constrained internal dissent, doves viewed him as the ultimate technocrat, whose blind faith in technology and statistics plunged the nation into a destructive quagmire. Hawks, on the other hand, denounced with growing venom his interference with the military and his refusal to give it the freedom and tools to win an eminently winnable war.

For McNamara, Vietnam became a source of great personal torment. He left office quietly in 1968, declining out of a sense of loyalty to his president to air publicly his grave doubts. From that day forward, he refused to speak of Vietnam, even when he resurfaced in the 1980s during the debate over nuclear responsibility. He broke his vow of silence only briefly, at the time of the Westmoreland-CBS trial and on the eve of the Persian Gulf War.

His completion of the book he "never planned to write" is as mysterious and characteristic of the man as his curious internal dissent against the war and his subsequent silence. He insists that he did not write to defend himself, and the results seem to speak for themselves on this score. His purpose, he claims, was rather to explain to the nation the reasons why its government and leaders acted as they did and to draw appropriate lessons. The fundamental question he raises is, why did the best and the brightest go wrong in Vietnam? Why did they make errors "not of values or intentions but of judgment and capabilities?"

DECLASSIFIED DOUBTS

In compiling this memoir, McNamara followed the example of his successor as secretary of defense, Clark Clifford, in Counsel to the President. Rather than rely on memory, he consulted the documentary record, examining the vast quantity of recently declassified materials and some sources not yet available to historians, such as Johnson's tape-recorded phone conversations. He also brought in historian Brian VanDeMark to help him access that record and ensure that "insofar as humanly possible" he remained faithful to it. This method gives the memoir an air of authority that others lack but robs it of some personal reflection. Clifford compensated by offering sometimes shrewd retrospective judgments about people and events. True to character, McNamara only occasionally provides the insights that give the documents fuller meaning. He reveals little on the interaction of personalities in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the decision-making process, or the conflict with the military and Joint Chiefs of Staff that raged throughout his tenure and reached a crisis point in late 1967.

McNamara does shed new light on the origins of the bombing halt of late 1965 and his inception of the Pentagon Papers project, and he provides important new examples of the way Johnson in the last years of his presidency squelched internal dissent. He also provides some illuminating personal insights, especially on his growing disillusionment with the war. He admits, for example, the profound impact on him of the self-immolation of the young Quaker, Norman Morrison, outside his Pentagon office in November 1965, and he deplores the way he bottled up his reaction. He also admits that the impact of visits to Harvard and Amherst in 1966 led to his realization that "opposition to the administration's Vietnam policy increased with the institution's prestige and the educational attainments of its students." Johnson long suspected that his defense minister's dovishness derived from the sinister influence of Robert Kennedy, but McNamara recalls a dramatic encounter in which Jackie Kennedy literally beat his chest and demanded that he "do something to stop the slaughter." Though a private person, he speaks with remarkable candor about the effects of the war on himself and his family.

What is truly remarkable about this book, however, is the pervasive apologetic tone. For public officials to write memoirs to defend their actions is conventional, and McNamara does this on occasion, mostly on smaller issues. He continues to insist that the alleged second Gulf of Tonkin attack of August 4, 1964, "appears probable but not certain" yet presents no new evidence. He defends the much-maligned body count as a measure of progress in the war yet rejects charges that he was a mindless number cruncher. He also claims the much-criticized McNamara line, his project for an electronic barrier, helped reduce North Vietnamese infiltration into South Vietnam.

McNamara has never been conventional, however, and his memoir seems more apology than apologia. Throughout the book, he concedes--and deplores--the errors of his ways, for all practical purposes assuming personal responsibility for the Vietnam debacle. The list goes on almost in the fashion of a litany. The secretary of defense was a key figure in decisions to escalate the war between 1961 and 1965, and he readily concedes that the assumptions upon which he and his colleagues acted were badly flawed. They approached Vietnam, he recalls, with "sparse knowledge, scant experience and simplistic assumptions." Victims of their own "innocence and confidence," they foolishly viewed communism as mono-lithic, knew nothing about Indochina, and were "simple-minded" regarding the historical relationship between China and Vietnam. They badly misjudged Ho Chi Minh's nationalism and consistently overestimated South Vietnam's ability to survive. Regarding the key decisions of 1965, he admits he should have anticipated that bombing North Vietnam would lead to requests for ground troops. He concedes there should have been a public debate on the July 1965 decision for war. Over and over he acknowledges that he should have examined the unexamined assumptions, asked the unasked questions, and explored the readily dismissed alternatives.

McNamara was the primary war manager for both John E Kennedy and Johnson, and here too he admits error. He concedes a lack of candor in his reports to the public, defending himself only to the point of wondering how top officials can be frank without aiding the enemy. He regrets on numerous peace initiatives that "we failed to utilize all possible channels and to convey our position clearly." He admits that he and his military and civilian colleagues repeatedly underestimated the ability of the North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front to endure losses.

THE PRISON-HOUSE OF CONTAINMENT

As to why the failure occurred, McNamara draws two conclusions. One, commonly cited by beleaguered top officials, is a "blizzard of problems" that left no time to think. Of the crucial decisions to escalate in 1964, for example, he writes that "we were left harried, overburdened, and holding a map with only one road on it. Eager to get moving, we never stopped to explore fully whether there were other routes to our destination." He also emphasizes the lack of expertise in the administration. In the Cuban missile crisis, he notes, the Kennedy administration had the great advantage of such veteran Kremlinologists as Llewellyn Thompson. For Vietnam, he insists, no such expertise was available, and major miscalculations resulted.

Much is compelling in McNamara's analysis. The speed of events in present times leaves precious little time for ordinary citizens, much less for harried top officials, to think. It has long been recognized, moreover, that the purge of Asia hands from the State Department during the McCarthy era crippled policy-making for Indochina and had a deadly impact on Vietnam decisions.

But is it really so simple? As former National Security Council official James C. Thomson, Jr., pointed out in the April 1968 Atlantic Monthly, even the available expertise was difficult to get to the top. And when it got to the top, such as State Department official Paul Kattenburg's criticism in the Kennedy years, it was ignored. McNamara admits, incidentally, that Undersecretary of State George Ball's dissent was dismissed because he was "Eurocentric."

Conceding McNamara's point that the pace of events is indeed dizzying, one must ask whether the real problem was the time available to think or the way people were thinking. U.S. policymakers miscalculated, to be sure, and they were woefully ignorant of Vietnam and the Vietnamese. In the final analysis, however, the American debacle in Vietnam was not primarily a result of errors of judgment or the personality quirks of the policymakers. It was a logical, if not inevitable, outgrowth of a worldview and a policy--the policy of global containment--that Americans in and out of government accepted without serious question for more than two decades. Even those who had time to think, intellectuals, for example, shared this view, as did most experts. The foreign policy elite had few dissenters until the United States was waist-deep in the big muddy. Those who did dissent normally concluded not that the worldview was wrong but that Vietnam was not doable. Some doves indeed advocated liquidating the Vietnam commitment only to save the larger containment policy.

Skeptics gained a hearing only with great difficulty because of the pervasive optimism that is so much a part of the American character. Top policymakers persisted in believing that, despite the problems in Vietnam, the United States, as always in the past, would eventually prevail. "In the lands of the blind, one-eyed men are king," said President Eisenhower in 1954, explaining his decision, against the recommendations of many of his expert advisers, to aid South Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem. Kennedy fell victim to the same delusion, as did Johnson.

If ever they wavered, the imperatives of domestic politics (about which McNamara says virtually nothing) brought them back into line. No political figure, especially a Democrat, was prepared to risk the fate that had befallen Harry Truman and Dean Acheson for the loss of China. Despite his doubts, Kennedy refused even to consider withdrawal from Vietnam until he had been safely reelected. Johnson repeatedly insisted that he was not going to be the president to see Vietnam go the way of China.

DISLOYALTY TO THE TRUTH

To his credit, McNamara recognized earlier than most of his colleagues that the war was not winnable. Tragically, however, he refused to act decisively on his convictions, and perhaps the most serious issue raised by his memoir involves his handling of his own steadily growing doubts. He readily admits--as has long been known--that his "sense of the war gradually shifted from concern to skepticism to frustration to anguish. . . . I had always been confident that every problem could be solved, but now I found myself confronting one involving national pride and human life--that could not." He does not say exactly when he reached this conclusion. Some claim as early as the summer of 1965; most agree no later than the end of that year. Yet he revealed his doubts to only a few confidants. While desperately exploring presumably less costly and destructive alternatives, such as the bombing halt and peace offensive of late 1965 and a shift of focus to pacification and the McNamara line in 1966, he continued to give in piecemeal to military proposals for escalation. Only in 1967 did he propose radical changes in policy, and when his suggestions, predictably, were rejected, he quietly left government.

The reason historians usually give for his behavior is that he put loyalty to his president above what he had come to see as the unpleasant truth, and McNamara does nothing to challenge that notion here. He claims, somewhat lamely, that he hoped his November 1, 1967, memorandum calling for a cessation of the bombing of North Vietnam and a change in the ground strategy would stir debate within the administration. Surely, from earlier dealings with Johnson, McNamara must have known better. Not only did the president refuse to distribute the memo to his other advisers and the informal advisory group known as the "wise men" then meeting in Washington, but he refused even to invite former wise men he knew had turned against the war. L.B.J. sought validation of his policy, not debate.

Many have argued that McNamara should have resigned in protest. Like others, including George Ball, he persuaded himself he could better influence policy by staying. He also believed, he notes here, that resigning and challenging the prevailing policy would have violated his responsibility to the president and his oath to uphold the Constitution.  In an era when personal ambition usually seems to prevail and loyalty seems a lost virtue, McNamara's stand appears in many ways admirable. But, it must be asked, what about loyalty to the truth, and does not loyalty to the Constitution, the welfare of the nation, indeed to the president demand a willingness to confront him with the unpleasant truth, to try any means available to force him from his self-destructive course? However honorable McNamara's intent, the nation--and indeed Lyndon Johnson--have been ill-served by this kind of loyalty.

Robert S. McNamara has accepted a full measure of responsibility for a great tragedy (far more for Vietnam than for America, it must be remembered). His candid memoir provides useful insight into his and America's agony over Vietnam. To understand what went wrong, however, requires looking beyond his essentially instrumental explanation. It was McNamara's war, yes, but also Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles' war, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson's war, and Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger's war. The ideology of a generation of policymakers and a flawed set of policies, more than anything else, explain why the United States intervened in Vietnam and ultimately failed.

~~~~~~~~

By George C. Herring

George C. Herring, Professor of History at the University of Kentucky, is author of America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975. 
McNamara's Apology for Vietnam 

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VIETNAM, AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY, AND THE USES OF HISTORY

Even before the last U.S. combat troops departed from Vietnam, Americans were struggling to learn from the longest and most divisive war in which their nation had been engaged. From that time forward, Vietnam has been at the center of every foreign policy debate. The very word "Vietnam" has become "an emotive," Michael Howard has written, "a term for this generation as 'Munich' or 'Pearl Harbor' was for the last." From the Angolan crisis of 1975 to the Persian Gulf crisis of 1987 and especially on the question of U.S. intervention in Central America, analogies have repeatedly been drawn with Vietnam. The word has evoked powerful and often contradictory images, and the lessons drawn have dictated answers to the most pressing questions. Such is the perceived power of that short, three-syllable word that when the United States first intervened in the Persian Gulf in 1987 the speaker of the Iranian parliament warned ominously of another Vietnam, obviously feeling that this was the best way to intimidate America from interfering.

It is, of course, natural for people and nations to learn from past experience, especially when it is a painful one. In this case, however, there are at least two problems. First, there is no agreement on what should be learned. Indeed, nearly 17 years after the end of U.S. military involvement, the nation is still deeply divided on the meaning and significance of the war and what should be learned from it. But there is a second and I think greater problem. In attempting to learn from the recent past, Americans on both sides of the debate have badly misused history. What I would like to do, therefore, is to survey briefly what has been learned from Vietnam, suggest why these "lessons" lack validity, and then indicate some ways we might learn more profitably from a recent, painful experience.

What Americans have learned from Vietnam to a considerable degree reflects their broader political beliefs. They have divided on the lessons-as on the war itself-along ideological lines. The battle cry of the left has been "No More Vietnams." From the Angolan crisis of 1975 to Lebanon in the early 1980's, to Central America, liberals and radicals have urgently warned that any form of intervention in Third World countries will lead to another Vietnam. They regard the war as at worst immoral, at best unnecessary, in any event unwinnable, and they are certain that new interventions will produce the same results. In the early days of the Reagan administration's intervention in Central America, liberal journalist Tad Szulc warned that if the United States persisted in its present course it would become bogged down in an "endless Vietnam-style guerrilla war," a "scenario for absolute disaster." Reading news clippings from 1964 indicating that no troops would be needed in Vietnam and reports from 1966 that still more troops would be required, a congressman in a debate on aid to the Nicaraguan Contras raised the specter of another Vietnam: "Here we go again," he warned. "We ought to know by now that when they send the guns it does not take long before they send the sons."

Conservatives also cry "No More Vietnams," but their lessons are very different. Hanoi's harsh treatment of the defeated South Vietnamese, the tragic flight of nearly a million boat people, and the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia confirmed in their eyes, that, as former President Ronald Reagan once put it, Vietnam was "a noble cause." The fundamental error was not in intervening in the first place but failing to win. The war could have been won, they insist, if American power had been used wisely, decisively, and without limit. Some conservatives indeed conclude that timid civilian leaders prevented the military from winning the war, a view that has worked its way into the popular culture. "Sir, do we get to win this time?" the hero Rambo asks upon accepting the assignment to return to Vietnam and rescue his comrades allegedly being held captive there. Thus in looking at Central America and other issues conservatives conclude that the United States must uphold its commitments and must use its power decisively and without limit to attain military victory.

In proclaiming their respective lessons of Vietnam, both sides badly misuse history. They base their conclusions on superficial historical knowledge and faulty historical reasoning. They blatantly abuse history for partisan and political motives. They appeal more to emotion than to reason. As a result, the Vietnam analogy has misled rather than guided, obscured rather than clarified.

On each side, the lessons are based on historical "givers" that cannot in fact be proven. The liberal argument that the war could not have been won is as unprovable as the conservative argument that with a different strategy the United States could have prevailed. Both sides answer dogmatically and categorically the sort of "what if" questions that can never be answered with any degree of certainty.

The historical reasoning of each side is also suspect. The liberal warning that each new intervention will lead to another Vietnam is less than convincing. Indeed, if that means a prolonged, inconclusive war in which thousands of American troops and billions of American dollars are committed, this may be the least likely outcome since Vietnam happened so recently and memories of it are so fresh.

On the other hand, the conservative effort to ennoble U.S. intervention in Vietnam on the basis of what the Hanoi government has done since the end of the war, as former diplomat Paul Kattenburg has noted, engages in the "dubious business of judging the past from the present." Such judgments cannot help but produce wrong-headed conclusions, and in the case of Vietnam the highly emotional moral judgments offered by conservatives distort both the present and the past to reverse the moral standards applied by antiwar critics during the war itself.

In addition, liberals and conservatives base their lessons on history that is at best debatable, at worst just plain wrong. For many liberals and radicals, the Communist victory in Vietnam is a vindication of the concept of peoples' war, suggesting that similar popular uprisings will inevitably triumph elsewhere. In fact, since World War II, popular insurgencies have lost as many as they have won, failing in Greece, Malaya, and the Philippines. Moreover, in Vietnam the United States crushed the southern insurgency in the aftermath of the Communist Tet Offensive of early 1968. The war was won not by guerrillas but by North Vietnamese regular forces in a massive conventional invasion of South Vietnam in the spring of 1975. In the final analysis, the Communists succeeded in Vietnam not because of the strength of people's war but because of the unique position they enjoyed in the political history of Vietnam, an ingredient not easily replicated elsewhere.

The conservative argument that the unrestricted use of American power would have produced victory is equally simplistic. There is reason to doubt whether the all-out bombing campaign advocated by the Joint Chiefs of Staff would have forced North Vietnam to settle on American terms. The strategic bombing surveys done after World War II raise serious questions about the ability of air power to attain political goals. Moreover, there is considerable evi dence to suggest that the North Vietnamese were prepared to resist, whatever the level of the bombing, even if they had to go underground. The addition thousands more U.S. troops, invasion of enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia, Laos, and across the demilitarized zone in North Vietnam might have produced victory, however that may be defined; but they would also have enlarged the war at a time when the United States was already stretched thin. Each of these approaches would have greatly increased the cost of the war for the United States without resolving what was always the central problem-the political viability of South Vietnam. And they might have provoked Soviet and/or Chinese intervention, thus widening the war in a most dangerous way.

Finally, even if the history were good, this kind of reasoning by historical analogy is fundamentally flawed. One can find in it at least two of the methodological errors cited by David Hackett Fischer in his book, Historians' Fallacies. First is what Fischer calls the fallacy of the perfect analogy, "the erroneous inference from the fact that A and Bare similar in some respects to the false conclusion that they are the same in all respects." To put it in plain terms, history does not repeat itself. Each situation is unique, and it is at best misleading to make superficial comparisons. Current efforts to learn from Vietnam also manifest what Fischer calls the "didactic fallacy," the extraction of specific lessons from one historical situation and the literal application of them to contemporary problems without regard to differences in time, space, and circumstances.

To move from the general to the specific, there is a vast difference between Vietnam, on the one hand, and, say, Lebanon and the Persian Gulf on the other, and to use them analagously violates sound historical practice.  The often-cited comparison between Vietnam and Central America provides a case in point. The conflicts are, to be sure, superficially similar. In each case, the perceived enemy was a revolutionary regime that appeared to threaten the interests of the United States and the small nations to which it was allied in a region deemed critically important. In each case, significant support for the nation opposing the United States did come from its number one adversary, the Soviet Union. In El Salvador, at least, the analogy can be carried a step further. There, much as it did in Vietnam, the United States has supported an established government against a leftist insurgency with some external support in a small, underdeveloped country in a tropical region.

The differences are much greater. The conflicts occurred in very different parts of the world in different political cultures and historical settings. War originated in Vietnam in 1945 as a nationalist revolution against French colonialism. The conflicts in Nicaragua and El Salvador originated in response to narrowly based, reactionary regimes with varying degrees of support from the United States. Both conflicts became internationalized in their early stages. In Vietnam, however, the major "outside" power, North Vietnam, was fanatically committed to liberating its southern brethren and unifying the country and, with assistance from China and the Soviet Union, provided the bulk of external aid to the southern insurgency. Cuba and the Soviet Union provided primary support to Nicaragua, and, along with Nicaragua, have given aid to the Salvadorean rebels. Neither  appears to have the same level of interest or commitment that the North Vietnamese had in Vietnam. In Nicaragua, of course, the fundamental difference is that at this stage the United States has supported the counterrevolutionary Contra insurgency against an established government, precisely the opposite of what happened in Vietnam. The conflicts were thus strikingly different, and the revolutions and wars have taken different courses.

II

Each situation is therefore unique, and to assume that the lessons of one time and place can mechanistically be applied to another is to be guilty of the worst kind of cultural universalism. Any effort to correct the strategic errors of Vietnam in Central America ignores the vast differences among the several conflicts and the conditions unique to each. To conclude, on the other hand, that we must reflexively abstain from any involvement in conflicts in the Third World for fear of another Vietnam is to draw on a very narrow and selective use of analogy. This is rather like Mark Twain's cat, who sat on a hot stove lid. "She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again," Twain said, "but also she will never sit down on a cold one." I suppose, as an unreconstructed dove, at the gut level I sympathize with the tendency to overgeneralize. To borrow from Twain's metaphor, more might be gained by avoiding hot stoves than by sitting on cold ones. But such a reaction, carried to its logical conclusion, eliminates the element of choice in foreign policy decisions. It reduces policy making to a set of reflexive actions that could negate American influence in areas where it might be constructive. In terms of the political debates in the United States thus far, what has been learned from Vietnam is as likely to mislead as to enlighten.

The one valid lesson we might therefore draw is to view all historical lessons with a healthy dose of skepticism. There is, I think, much wisdom, if also obvious overstatement, in historian and former policy-maker James Thomson's admonition that the central lesson of Vietnam should be never again to "take on the job of trying to defeat a nationalist anti-colonial movement under indigenous communist control in former French Indochina," a lesson he quickly-and redundantly-added, of"less than universal relevance."

Does this mean then that history has nothing to teach us, or, more specifically, that the Vietnam experience sheds no light on today's problems? Obviously, for me, a professional historian to take such a position would be foolhardy at best, suicidal at worst. History in general, and the history of American involvement in Vietnam, in particular, have much to teach us. But like any fine-tuned instrument, they must be used with care.

To learn from an historical event, it is necessary to look beneath the surface, to go beyond the general outcome of success or failure and examine its component parts. In the case of Vietnam, in-depth analysis of how we got there and why we failed can be instructive in its own right. Such analysis will not yield explicit lessons that can be applied uncritically to other, seemingly similar events, but it can provide enlightenment and perspective and even suggest certain cautionary principles that can help us make decisions in other areas. When compared to similar components of other events and indeed to "lessons" provided by competing analogies, it can be even more instructive.

Numerous points might be made. Let me suggest just a few. The mindset that got us into Vietnam-a set of attitudes and assumptions also used in the 1980's to just)* intervention in Central America-bears close analysis. From the early 1950's until at least the mid-1960's, we viewed the conflict in Vietnam as an integral part of our larger Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union. This assumption was based on a view of the world that was simplistic and fundamentally flawed. Vietnamese nationalism, not international communism, was the driving force behind 30 years of war in Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh and his lieutenants were Communists, to be sure, and throughout the conflict the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China aided the Vietnamese Communists. But the Vietnamese initiated the struggle in 1946 to secure independence from France, and they continued the war to achieve their age-old nationalistic goals of unifying the country under one government. To a considerable degree then, local forces explain the origins and peculiar dynamics of the conflict in Vietnam.

Our misperception had profound consequences. By wrongly attributing the war to world communism, we drastically misjudged its origins and nature. By intervening in what was essentially a local struggle, we placed ourselves at the mercy of local forces, a weak client in South Vietnam and a determined adversary in North Vietnam. What might have remained a local conflict with primarily local implications was elevated into a major international conflict with tragic consequences for Americans and Vietnamese. Vietnam thus suggests the centrality of local forces in international crisis situations. These forces will necessarily vary in each situation, but the point should be clear: we ignore them at our own peril.

Vietnam also suggests the pitfalls of incrementalism. The massive intervention of 1965 stemmed from a series of small, steadily expanding commitments over a period of nearly twenty years. From the decision to provide military aid to the French in 1950 to Lyndon Johnson's decision to send combat Troops to Vietnam in 1965, the United States enlarged its involvement slowly, step-by-step, until it had committed a half million troops and billions of dollars. At no point did policy makers foresee the ultimate costs of the war. Each decision seemed harmless enough, and the consequences of doing nothing appeared more ominous than those of escalation. Yet each step made extrication more difficult, and in time the extent of the investment already made became an additional and compelling argument for further escalation. This process makes clear the hidden dangers of small, seemingly harmless commitments.

At each stage, moreover, policy makers appear to have taken success for granted. From the first U.S. commitment to South Vietnam in 1954, expert assessments of the chances of success were pessimistic, but policy makers somehow persuaded themselves that everything would work out. "In the lands of the blind, one-eyed men are king," Dwight D. Eisenhower told his National Security Council in October 1954, by which I think he meant that because of the purity of its motives and the superiority of its methods the United States could overcome the unfavorable odds. In 1963, during one particularly heated debate among John F. Kennedy's top advisers, Attorney General Robert Kennedy asked why, if the situation were as bad as reports seemed to indicate, the United States did not simply get out of Vietnam. The "question hovered for a moment, then died away," Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote, "a hopelessly alien thought in a field of unexplored assumptions and entrenched convictions." Throughout its history, the United States has enjoyed an unparalleled record of success. Americans came to take success for granted, falling victim to what an English scholar has called "the illusion of American omnipotence," the belief that they could accomplish anything they set their mind to, that, the difficult we do tomorrow, the impossible may take awhile. Vietnam makes clear-and this is one reason it was so traumatic for this country-that the United States, like all nations, can fail. In making difficult decisions, policy makers must take this harsh reality into account. They should be wary of committing the nation in unfavorable circumstances. They might revert to the old rule of European diplomacy not to intervene unless the people to be supported show a capacity to stand on their own.

This is especially true because in a larger sense Vietnam suggests that the ability of great powers to dictate solutions in small, "backward" countries has drastically declined. Throughout much of the 19th century, the great powers used a variety of methods to dominate smaller nations. Even in the early days of the Cold War, the United States contained insurgencies in Greece and the Philippines and overthrew governments in Iran and Guatemala with relative ease and at little cost. Increasingly, however, the ability of large nations to impose their will on smaller nations has diminished. The power of smaller nations has grown relative to that of the larger, and their leaders have learned how to use the force of nationalism to resist great power encroachments. The rivalry between the superpowers in turn limits their ability to manipulate smaller nations. Soviet aid was crucial to American failure in Vietnam, and American aid was a vital factor in Soviet failure in Afghanistan. These two situations dramatically indicate the new limits of power. At the very least, as political scientist Thomas Schelling has suggested, they herald the "end of an era in which we could believe that a great industrialized power is bound to win when it fights a small, poor, backward country."

III

The way in which the United States used its power in Vietnam also yields instruction and perspective, if not outright lessons. That American strategy was fundamentally flawed goes without saying. American policy makers assumed that the gradual increase of military pressure against North Vietnam would persuade its leaders to stop supporting the insurgency in the south and at the same time avert the dangers of a larger war with the Soviet Union and China. "I'm going up old Ho Chi Minh's leg an inch at a time," LBJ assured George McGovern in his inimitable fashion. If nothing else, the results make clear the difficulties of fine-tuning the application of military power in this fashion.

A fatal error was to underestimate the enemy. Americans rather casually assumed that the National Liberation Front and North Vietnamese would know better than to stand up against the most powerful nation in the world. In the Johnson White House, Bill Moyers has written, "There was a confidence-it was never bragged about, it was just there-that when the chips were really down, the other people would fold." Years later, Henry Kissinger could still confess great surprise with the discovery that his North Vietnamese counterparts were "fanatics." Since our goals were limited and from our standpoint more than reasonable, we found it impossible to understand the total, unyielding commitment of the enemy, his willingness to risk everything to achieve his objective. We ignored the oldest and most fundamental rule of warfare: know your enemy.

The way in which we dealt with our client state in South Vietnam can also teach us a great deal. First, seemingly paradoxically, the deeper our commitment grew, the less leverage we had to get that government to take the actions we considered necessary for its survival. The more deeply committed we became, the less inclined we were to risk the collapse that would likely follow the withdrawal of our support.

Moreover, the way in which, after July 1965, we assumed primary responsibility for the war in Vietnam induced a sense of dependency on the part of the South Vietnamese whose independence we were professing to defend. Tragically, the dependency we unwittingly nourished persisted long after we had tired of the war. The South Vietnamese could not believe, one of their diplomats once told me, that having invested so much in their country we would not defend it. To the very end, therefore, and despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, they clung desperately to the belief that we would come back and rescue them. Even when a nation or government is worthy of our support, we do them no favor to provide the support in a way that undermines the self-sufficiency that should be the object of our assistance.

There is, I think, a larger and more important point regarding the basic morality of such support. The South Vietnamese were the real losers of a long and bloody war. We lost a great deal of blood and treasure, our pride, our "perfect" record in warfare. They lost everything. In the light of this experience, we should ponder long and hard the morality of making a commitment to a people that at some point we may not be prepared to see through. Referring to the casual, almost whimsical, way in which the United States has offered and then withdrawn support to the Nicaraguan Contras, the lineal descendants of the South Vietnamese, Contra Leader Donald Castillo has asked: "have you been aware that you're playing with the life and blood of a people and a country?" It is a telling question that we should ask ourselves repeatedly when facing such decisions.

Vietnam also suggests the essentiality and basic fragility of public support for major foreign policy ventures. Military intervention cannot be sustained in the American system without public support. Yet dissent in war is as American as apple pie-it is not an aberration. And Korea and Vietnam make clear that the longer the war and the higher American casualties the more public support is likely to erode.

Even in World War II-the good war-and the one American war in which support was broadly based and dissent inconsequential, General George C. Marshall accurately perceived that public support could not be held indefinitely. The crucial ingredient in holding support may be success on the battlefield, and Vietnam certainly demonstrates that without clear signs of success public support will be difficult to sustain. At the same time, without public support, it may be impossible to do what is necessary to achieve success. There is no easy answer to this dilemma. Certainly leaders cannot take public support for granted, as the Johnson administration appears to have done at the outset of the war. Nor are secrecy and subterfuge of the sort used by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger a viable alternative. In the final analysis, it probably boils down to a simple but repeatedly ignored proposition: the only sustainable policy is one that can be successfully articulated and defended in public debate.

Vietnam provides a veritable catalog of what not to do in the raising and handling of troops. The draft law used throughout much of the war imposed most of the burden on the lower classes and permitted the middle and upper classes to escape service. Aside from the obvious inequity of such a system, the draft increased class divisions and, by freeing the children of the elite, encouraged complacency about the war until the nation was deeply committed. The services early decided that no one should serve more than 12 months in Vietnam. This arrangement had disastrous effects on unit cohesion and individual morale. Above all, if the nation goes to war again, it must make adequate provision for the return of its fighting men to civilian life. The way in which Vietnam veterans were thrust back to an ungrateful homeland with no time for decompression and little assistance in readjustment was not only callous but disgraceful and left scars that may never heal.

These "lessons" may or may not be useful, depending upon the specific circumstances of the individual situations we confront. But there is another-and final-lesson that does, I think, have universal validity. Moving from the specific back again to the general, Vietnam also demonstrates the value indeed the necessity-of history in making and implementing foreign policy decisions. What is so striking now, especially looking back on the early years of our involvement, is our abysmal ignorance of Vietnam and the Vietnamese. Not much information was even available.

The eminent China scholar John Fairbank has recalled that when the crisis emerged in the early 1960's he went to the Harvard library to consult books about the area. He found almost nothing, and what he found was under the designation of French colonialism. To cite another small, but revealing, anecdote, I recently ran across a document in which a top U.S. official observed in the mid-1950's how difficult it would be to build an army in an area Vietnam-without any military tradition. This person was apparently quite ignorant of Vietnam's 1000-year struggle against the Chinese and Mongols and its defeat of the fearsome Genghis Khan, of the Trung sisters and other legendary heroes, of the Vietnamese generals who, centuries before Mao Tse-tung and Vo Nguyen Giap, pioneered the art of guerrilla warfare.

We also ignored the more recent experience of the French in their war in Vietnam between 1946 and 1954. The First Indochina War probably appeared irrelevant because, we felt, the French had pursued selfish, colonial goals and we did not, or because, as Edward Lansdale once put it, the French went "from glorious defeat to highly glorious defeat while being highly articulate on how to win a war." The French, it was said, had not won a battle since Napoleon. They couldn't build the Panama Canal either. Yet close examination of the French war from 1946 to 1954 might have given us important clues as to how the Vietnamese would deal with us and might have alerted us to certain problems we would face in responding to their strategies.

If nothing else, then, we can conclude that rather the' employing false and misleading analogies, decision makers and the attentive public might better use history to enlighten themselves about the areas and peoples with whom they must deal. This is particularly important, Ernest May and Richard Neustadt have recently argued, in cases where we are dealing with people "whose age, sex, race, nationality, or beliefs are different from our own." In their book, Thinking in Time, May and Neustadt even provide a rather complicated scheme for what they call "placement," attempting to understand adversaries or potential adversaries or even allies by studying the historical and cultural context from which they come.

I cannot resist finally making an appeal for history that moves beyond the specific case of Vietnam. Like no other discipline, history can provide that essential perspective without which understanding is impossible. This can take several forms. At its simplest level, it involves nothing more than taking an issue or problem back to its beginnings to determine how we got to where we are. It is striking how infrequently this is done in internal discussions on policy problems, and the media, which is notoriously myopic and ahistorical, provides little help. Historians themselves are at least partly at fault, for they tend to write for each other rather than trying to reach a broader audience. Yet to act without such perspective can be deadly.

History is essential to clarify the context in which contemporary problems exist.  At a still deeper level, it involves understanding the larger processes of history, what May and Neustadt call "seeing time as a stream," looking at contemporary issues with a sense of past, present, and future, being sensitive to continuity and change, having that rare ability to "see the future as it may be when it becomes the past-with some intelligible continuity but richly complex and able to surprise."

Nations, like people, have long memories, and Vietnam will continue to exert a powerful influence on American attitudes toward foreign policy until some other cataclysmic event takes its place. It is important, then, that we study it and learn from it. But we must keep in mind that history does not prescribe explicit lessons, and we must be aware of the many pitfalls and the false trails down which it can lead us. We must also recognize, as Michael Howard has observed, that the "true use" of history is "not to make men clever for the next time" but "to make them wise for ever."

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BY GEORGE C. HERRING

Copyright of Virginia Quarterly Review is the property of Virginia Quarterly Review and its content may not be copied without the copyright holder's express written permission except for the print or download capabilities of the retrieval software used for access. This content is intended solely for the use of the individual user. Source: Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter90, Vol. 66 Issue 1, p1, 16p. Item Number: 9607094966

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SNOWED BY THE CIA

From "My Years with the CIA," by George C. Herring, in the May issue of the Organization of American Historians Newsletter. Herring teaches history at the University of Kentucky.

When I was first asked to serve on the Central Intelligence Agency's Historical Review Panel back in the summer of 1990, I felt quite positive about the assignment. The panel had been created in 1984 in a spirit of openness, and I was enthused to be taking part in the process of bringing long-hidden records to light. Since the Cold War was over, I felt there was good reason to assume that those agencies that had been on its front lines might now begin to release some of their voluminous records for public study. As it was explained to me, our job was to work with the CIA's history staff to determine what materials might be ready for declassification.

My first meeting, in August of 1990 (just about the time Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait) at the agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia, held a glimpse of things to come. Shortly after we arrived, we were asked to give our plane tickets and other expense receipts to some individuals who had just entered the room. They soon returned and handed us the requisite plain brown envelopes filled with cash. During the day we were forbidden to go to the rest room without being escorted by one of our hosts. We were "briefed" by various officials, and then, after a day's deliberations, we made a number of initial recommendations.

We urged the declassification of selected operational files, particularly those concerning major covert operations, such as the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, the 1954 Guatemalan coup, and the 1953 coup that installed the Shah of Iran. We also called for the creation of a central inventory of CIA files. (We learned that there was no such thing, that compartmentalizing records was one means of shielding them from disclosure.) I can't speak for the others on the panel, but I left Langley that day with a wad of cash in my pocket and a feeling that if we had not conquered new worlds we had at least taken that proverbial first step in the journey of a thousand miles.

Some important developments over the next few years seemed to confirm my initial optimism. In a celebrated speech in February 1992, then CIA Director Robert Gates conceded that the agency had not lived up to the openness promised in 1984. This was the result, Gates said, of limited resources and, most important, "rigid agency policies and procedures heavily biased toward denial of declassification." Gates promised that things would change, and the following year his successor, R. James Woolsey, publicly acknowledged the existence of eleven covert operations and vowed that documents concerning them would soon be released.

Meanwhile, our work on the panel told a different story. We met at the whim of the agency, and during the time that I served, we must have set some kind of record for inactivity. Between August 1990 and June 1994--a period of tremendous activity in the area of declassification in other departments and agencies--our panel did not meet. At the same time, declassification was excruciatingly slow. When the CIA did publish documents (often miscellaneous documents and articles that didn't amount to anything of substance), it refused to include citations, thus making it extremely difficult to track down related materials.

Somehow, though, the agency was able to conduct a brilliant public-relations snow job. When I'd bump into people in and outside acedemia, I was frequently told how terrific it was that the CIA was moving toward openness. Even more galling to me personally, when the issue of releasing CIA records came up at historical conferences, CIA representatives would proudly point out that the agency had an advisory committee on which three prominent historians, including myself, sat. Now, I'm from Kentucky, and I'm not supposed to be swift, but it didn't take me long to realize that I was being used to cover the agency's ass.

In June 1994, the panel finally met again. After a series of briefings, we made recommendations that were almost a carbon copy of those we had made in 1990: that the agency create a central inventory of its records and that it initiate a systematic program of declassification. I drafted the report and submitted it. I never heard who, if anyone, saw the report or what disposition, if any, was made of it.

To make ourselves more relevant, we also recommended that the panel meet on a more regular basis and play some role in its ostensible tasks. Remarkably, though it took two years, meetings were held in February and August of 1996, and on each occasion CIA Director John Deutch met with our group. At least in an administrative sense, this represented real progress.

In terms of influence, however, it was hard to measure any change. Promises were still being made regarding documents on the acknowledged covert operations, but as yet there had been no releases. (We laterlearned that, regarding the 1953 Iran coup, nearly 100 percent of the files had been destroyed.)

In addition, the CIA's response to a 1995 executive order requiring agencies to meet minimum levels of declassification was less than reassuring. I can still vividly recall a display projected on a screen during the February meeting that measured unreleased agency documents in terms of the height of several Washington Monuments. We were told that of the 165 million pages of pre-1975 agency records, the CIA would seek exemptions from declassification for 106 million--roughly 64 percent of the total.

Officials continued to insist that protection of sources and methods made it impossible to consider the release of operational files of any age. In an especially chilling moment, one troglodyte from the Directorate of Operations referred to the executive order as that "silly old law." When asked whether it would be necessary to withhold secret materials from the American Revolution because of sources and methods, he said no, probably not, but on the other hand he could not set a date before which documents could be released.

Then, shortly after the August meeting, we were informed that the three of us who had been with the panel from the early years were being removed. Term limits were being established. Although I cannot prove that this change was designed to get rid of troublemakers or eliminate the expertise that some of us had gained, I'd be willing to bet it's no coincidence that years of experience and institutional memory were removed at a most critical time in the process of declassification.

Looking back and trying to be fair, I must concede that there has been slight progress. The CIA has at least released some material, including finished intelligence documents and some materials required under the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act. This spring, the agency declassified some 1,400 pages of documents from the Guatemala coup (although these represent less than 1 percent of CIA files on the incident). If nothing else, these releases establish a precedent.

The main problem, as Director Gates noted in 1992, remains the culture of secrecy that has pervaded the agency since its founding. Can it change? Perhaps, but substantive change requires pressure from the outside--namely, the threat of congressional intrusion into CIA affairs--and pressure within the bureaucracy itself, from the top down. So far, officials at Langley seem to have decided that an agency desperately searching for a post-Cold War mission and wracked withhuge internal problems should spend its political capital in areas other than the potentially troublesome matter of declassification.

My years with the CIA have not left me optimistic. Rather than feeling that a new era of openness is upon us--and that I've helped pave the way for scholars and citizens to study material that might help them understand the hidden drives of U.S. foreign policy--my time at the agency has taught me a very different lesson, one about the limitless ability of bureaucracy to frustrate change.

"Landscape with Cooling Towers near Liverpool, England," by Bob Hower. His work is currently on display at Galerie Hertz in Louisville, Kentucky, where Hower lives.

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by George C. Herring

Copyright of Harper's Magazine is the property of Harper's Magazine Foundation and its content may not be copied without the copyright holder's express written permission except for the print or download capabilities of the retrieval software used for access. This content is intended solely for the use of the individual user. Source: Harper's Magazine, Sep97, Vol. 295 Issue 1768, p17, 4p. Item Number: 9710305403

This email was generated by a user of EBSCOhost who gained access via the VALENCIA COMM COLLEGE account, user vcc.main.web. Neither EBSCO or VALENCIA COMM COLLEGE are responsible for the content of this e-mail.

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