04-19-00 16:23

Hrk 10 00

04.04.1974 EITORIAL ADMINISTRATION

ID=212 4215882

P14/18

VIETKISS

DEPT:

PG:

apply the Kosovo principles to Chechnya
~~my~~
for fear of Russian power—proved that even
universali~~st~~s must learn the maxim that for-
cign policy is the art of the possible. Or con-
sider the difference between the Clinton
Administration's attitude toward Iraq and

toward Kosovo. The Clinton Administration's attitude is [further evidenced] by the differential treatment of its two military operations in
1998-99. In December 1998, Iraq

inflicted a strategic defeat on us by expelling
the U.N. inspectors placed there as a condition
for ending the Gulf war. The

Administration responded by bombing for
four days. But three months later, it bombed
Yugoslavia for seventy eight days in pursuit
of what was perceived as a humanitarian
interest. In each chase, the conduct of oper-
ations was undertaken with a reluctance to
accept casualties that ultimately conveyed
to the American public the absence of any

vital interest. For Americans surely would not recall from casualties in defense of their vital interests.

What Vietnam has

bequeathed to the new generation is two
new forms of exceptionalism: one in search
of riskless applications, another in quest of a
strategy. It is not that this generation is
obsessed by the debates of the Vietnam war,
with which it is largely unfamiliar. Nor does

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04-19-00 16:24

ID=212 4215882

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world, it <u>the nation state</u> is breaking down, either into hitherto ethnic entities <u>subgroupings</u> or by joining larger regional groupings. And the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction represents a challenge faced by no previous society.

Yet If our new generation of national leaders is embarrassed to deal with the concept of national interest or with the <u>unapologetic use of power as a last resort</u>, it will achieve not moral elevation but progressive paralysis. Certainly any concept of national interest would not be American if it did not flow from our <u>dede motivation from America's democratic tradition</u> or its concern with collective security. But we <u>must</u> also be prepared to face up to some hard questions imposed by reality. What, for our survival, must we seek to prevent no matter how painful the means? What, to be true to ourselves, must we seek to accomplish no matter how small the attainable consensus or <u>and</u>, if necessary, on our own <u>alone</u>?

What wrongs is it essential that we right?

Which are beyond our capacity or not <u>consist</u>?

<u>consist</u> with <u>compelled by the national interest</u>?

We will not have overcome the shadow of Vietnam legacy—or be able to meet our new challenges — until we can achieve a

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national consensus on these issues. And this
requires mutual respect among the dis-
putants and a conviction, nearly lost in the
Vietnam period, that we *they* are engaged in a
common enterprise rather than a fight to
the finish. Our political leaders may be able
to evade these issues during the presidential
*national* campaign that is about to begin. But the
winner will not be able to escape them once
he enters the Oval Office.

VIETKISS Page 19 of 19

APR 18 '00 05:00PM EDITORIAL ADMINISTRATION

P.1

Newsweek

FAX COVER SHEET

Attention: Rebecca Nelson

From: Rita Gutmann

Pages to follow: 20

Any problems with this transmission, please call (212) 445-4497.

APR 18 '00 05:01PM EDITORIAL ADMINISTRATION

P.3

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DEPT: VER # 1
BU: HJ: Galley 479
PG: ISSUE:
CREATOR: MWHITA; 04/18/0, 12:11

PRINTED BY: mwhita; 04/18/00, 5:31 PM
WRITER: MWHITA
FROM: ; 04/18/0
FILE: VIETKISS-MWHITA-PVT
REVISOR: MWHITA; 04/18/0, 12:32

By Henry A. Kissinger

Not too long ago, former President
Gerald Ford and I were reminiscing about
his Presidency and our respective experiences in gov-
ernment service. And We concluded that the
high points have a way of becoming blurred
with the passage of time. But we had shared one
experience that will never lose its immedia-
cy: the pain and anguish of the day when the
last Americans and a pitiful band of refugees
were evacuated from the roof of the U.S.
American embassy in Saigon.

Movies and television present
great crises as times of in terms of frenetic activity, with
showing images of officious aides ripping telephones off the
hook and shouting instructions to scurrying
subordinates. In reality, crises are distin-
guished by a the stillness born of induced by the awareness
that choices are narrowing. The number of
decision-makers those involved in decisions shrinks to those still in a
position to affect events, their solitude mag-
nified because, the more severe the crisis,
the fewer volunteers there are willing to assume
responsibility.

VIETKISS

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DEPT: PG:

mentary, and dominated by the perspective
from their particular vantage point of wherever the author found himself as chaos engulfed
two decades of sacrifice. For those who were
spared the anguish, the passions will seem
incomprehensible. And historians are no
help, since their accounts only replicate [accounts] have replicated the
bitter schisms of the period. Radical critics
andlessly conjure up repeat their litany of bloodthirsty leaders pursuing a
war to satisfy twisted psychologies. The
right either ignores the war as a liberal aber-
ration or sublimates it in reflexive the strident anti-com-
munism (often the zeal of "neo-conserva-
tive" converts to conservatism who, in reality, were had been on the
radical side while the war was going on and
who have their own reasons for avoiding its
memory). Reluctant to come to grips with
the most traumatic experience of the past
half century, Americans find it difficult to
draw the real lessons from what was done to
this country—and what we did to our-
selves— America did in itself during that sad period.

Let me I will therefore concentrate on
only one aspect of the Vietnam tragedy:
what it did to American exceptionalism—
the faith in the universality of our values—
and the impact this has had on the conduct
of U.S. American foreignpolicy.

VIETKISS

APR 18 '00 05:02PM EDITORIAL ADMINISTRATION

P.8

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DEPT:

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Vietnam through Laotian territory and intensified the guerrilla war, Kennedy sent sixteen thousand U.S military "advisers" to South Vietnam in 1962. President Lyndon Johnson escalated this commitment until it reached over five hundred thousand by the time he left office. Initially, there was no significant opposition, either within or outside the Administration, to that massive deployment. Though later on the decision was blamed on Johnson later on, it was in fact Kennedy's closest advisers—McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk—who urged the escalation.

By the end of the Johnson

Administration, frustration had set in. The strategy that had worked in every previous

--------- End of column ---------

American war—of wearing down the adversary by attrition—could not succeed against guerrillas defending no specific territory and therefore in a position to choose when and where to fight. Nor could any of the non-communist countries of Indo China be called a democracy, *scut or reward to make clear why this is relevant? mark*. For those who had made the decision to send American troops, growing self-doubt compounded despair

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about the entire political process triggered by the assassination of their hero, John F. Kennedy.

While the leaders were seized by emotional turmoil, the critics challenged went ever further toward challenging the very essence of American foreign involvement. The arguments that the war was unwinnable and that its the cost of the war exceeded its benefits escalated almost as rapidly as the U.S. American deployment. At first The initial argument of the doubters dwelled on dealt with how to find an honorable way out. But within months, American exceptionalism began to turn on itself. The proposition that morally there was little moral difference between Hanoi and Saigon undercut the ethical moral justification for the war. The protesters increasingly argued that the ultimate cause of the crisis was not an errors in judgment but a moral rot at the core of the American way of life. The victory of the communists in Indo China, which three administrations of both parties had sought to prevent for nearly two decades, became for the radical protesters a desirable national catharsis. The critique expanded from the worthiness of America's allies to challenging the worthiness of America itself, and its conduct not only in Vietnam but around the world globally.

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Vietnam became *turned into* the first war in which
prominent Americans visited the enemy
capital to oppose their own country *during highly publicized visits*.

By the time Richard Nixon
became President, the battle lines were
drawn. The demoralized Establishment,
which had launched us into the quagmire,
abdicated from the task of extrication, leav-
ing the field to the protesters or joining them
in attacks on the argument that extrication was prevented above all by the short-sightedness and
warped mentality of the new
administration America's leaders. The radical protesters, cer-
tain of their moral superiority, saw no need

for restraint in the methods they used to
pursue their ends aims. Indeed, they dismissed
considered rules of conduct as the invention of a system
they meant to overthrow. Through By street
demonstrations and deliberate subversion
of undermining of all authority, from universities to the U.S
government, which they blamed for America's alleged crimes they sought to wreck any poli-
cy designed to vindicate in Vietnam the values on which
America's post-World War II policy had
been based.

Nixon, who inherited this
impasse, lacked the human qualities to tran-
scend it, if indeed it was possible to do so.

VIETKISS

APR 18 '00 05:03PM EDITORIAL ADMINISTRATION

VIETKISS

DEPT: PG:

Still, for all his railing against the
Establishment, he too Nixon was a product of "the
greatest generation." And he sought to
implement what he understood to be the
demand of the moderate critics for an honorable
withdrawal. Starting with the first negotia-
tions with the Vietnamese Politburo member Le
Duc Tho, Nixon offered a timetable for
withdrawal and a variety of formulas to per-
mit the people of South Vietnam a genuine
choice. What Nixon would not accept—and
what, until the end, Hanoi never ceased
demanding—was the abandonment of all the
millions who, relying in reliance on the words of our
predecessors, had thrown in their lot with
the United States.

When a negotiated solution
seemed unattainable, Nixon proceeded uni-
laterally to implement his campaign
promise to extricate America from Vietnam.
In the process, he reduced U.S. American casualties
from twelve hundred a month at the end of
the Johnson Administration to thirty a
month at the end of Nixon's first term. And
he unilaterally reduced American troops
from the five hundred fifty thousand he found to thirty
thousand.

VIETKISS

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DEPT: PG:

Many of the stages in this process
were highly controversial and they deserve
fuller treatment than this article permits.
But it is symptomatic of the schism Vietnam
created in America that so much of the literature
on Vietnam focuses on the charge that he needlessly pro-
longed the war and sacrificed American
lives, implying that there was some honor-
able way out that he refused to take. The
--------- End of column ---------

issue is not historical justice toward individ-
ual presidents, but historical justice toward
a national tragedy. Mistakes should be
debated and lessons learned. But when self-
flagellation turns into assaults on the good
faith of all leaders, the ability to build a coher-
ent national purpose ultimately suffers.
America owes itself an objective assessment
of the that Vietnam experience, which after 25
years has not yet happened.

The political schism was sharp-
ened by a similar split in the intellectual
community. When I was in graduate school,
intellectuals rarely achieved high positions
in government. If they wanted to affect poli-
cy, they had to write lengthy papers on
longer-range issues. The Kennedy

VIETKISS

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DEPT: PG:

Administration awakened their taste for political power. After Kennedy's assassination, they sought to shape policy-making *the immediate issues* from the outside, in the process dividing into two groups — job applicants and revolutionaries. The job applicants replicated the debates of *the policymakers*; and the revolutionaries, the arguments of the protest movement. In either case, they contributed little to helping America overcome the tragedy of Vietnam.

## Vietnam's Legacy

Vietnam broke the fusion of ideology and strategy that underlay *in American exceptionalism*. Though its *the principles* continue to be affirmed by all sides, its application is now subject to profound dispute.

Since the Vietnam war, there have been three main camps *currents* in *among American foreign policymakers*:

- Advocates of continuing to adapt *of adaptations* of the Cold War strategy of the 1950s and 1960s.

- *The Members of the protest movement, who came to high office in the Clinton Administration.*

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- And, a new generation that does not remember and has not experienced the Vietnam schism, and now faces a world radically different from the one that formed either the Cold Warriors or the <u>both the Cold War and the Vietnam</u>

------- End of column -------

protesters <u>perceptions</u>.

When... Under the impact of Vietnam, liberals and intellectuals retreated from the field of strategy and redefined exceptionalism in terms of "soft issues" which could be achieved without the use of military power. As a result, traditional American strategy became largely the provenance of conservatives and neo-conservatives. Always uncomfortable with commitments on distant battlefields, the American right concentrated on rigorous anti-communism and vigilance in maintaining the strategic balance, especially with respect to arms control negotiations. And during the Reagan Administration, against a Soviet adversary weakened by decades of overextension, it achieved great successes.

Yet with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the need for a national strategy adapted to the post-Cold War world has

VIETKISS

Page 12 of 19

APR 18 '00 05:04PM EDITORIAL ADMINISTRATION

P.16

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DEPT: PG:

thought it treats the Cold War as a misunderstanding, if not an American creation. It

---

End of column

---

recoils before the concept of national interest and shrinks before the use of power

unless it can be presented *present it as being* in the service of

some "unselfish" cause—that is to say, no

more in the interest of America than of anyone else. On many occasions and many conditions, President Clinton has apologized

for American actions that stemmed from

*for* what he derogatorily describes as Cold War

obsessions *preoccupations*. But the Cold War was not

imaginary; profound issues of survival and

national purpose were involved. And this

*the* denigration—often quite inaccurate—of the

actions of U.S. *American* presidents from Eisenhower

to Bush must raise doubts about American

constancy, even on the part of the

paradoxically even with respect to the Administration offering the apology.

Apologies for fifty years of

American history are matched by uneasi-

ness with the use of American power. *This is illustrated by* In

Kosovo, for example, the argument that the

conflict transcended pure *absence of a purely American interest*

was one of the *ultimate justifications for the enterprise*. But six months later, our *the* reluctance to

VIETKISS

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DEPT: PG:

apply the Kosovo principles to Chechnya—
for fear of Russian power—proved that even
universalists must learn the maxim that for-
eign policy is the art of the possible. Or con-
sider the difference between the Clinton
Administration's attitude toward Iraq and
toward Kosovo. The Clinton Administration's attitude is [further evidenced] by the differential treatment of [its] two military operations in
1998-99. In December 1998, Iraq
inflicted a strategic defeat on us by expelling
the U.N. inspectors placed there as a condition
for ending the Gulf war. The
Administration responded by bombing for
four days. But three months later, it bombed
Yugoslavia for seventy eight days in pursuit
of what was perceived as a humanitarian
interest. In each chase, the conduct of oper-
ations was undertaken with a reluctance to
accept casualties that ultimately conveyed
to the American public the absence of any
vital interest. For Americans surely would not recoil from casualties in defense of their vital interests.

VIETKISS

APR 18 '00 05:05PM EDITORIAL ADMINISTRATION

P.20

VIETKISS

DEPT:

PG:

world, it the nation state is breaking down, either into hitherto ethnic entities subgroups or by joining larger regional groupings. And the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction represents a challenge faced by no previous society.

Yet If our new generation of national leaders is embarrassed to deal with the concept of national interest or with the unapologetic use of power as a last resort, it will achieve not moral elevation but progressive paralysis. Certainly any concept of national interest would not be American if it did not flow from our derive motivation from America's democratic tradition or its concern with collective security. But we must also be prepared to face up to some hard questions imposed by reality. What, for our survival, must we seek to prevent no matter how painful the means? What, to be true to ourselves, must we seek to accomplish no matter how small the attainable consensus or and, if necessary, on our own alone?

What wrongs is it essential that we right? Which are beyond our capacity or not consistent with compelled by the national interest?

VIETKISS

Page 18 of 19

VIETKISS

DEPT: PG:

national consensus on these issues. And this
requires mutual respect among the dis-
putants and a conviction, nearly lost in the
Vietnam period, that we they are engaged in a
common enterprise rather than a fight to
the finish. Our political leaders may be able
to evade these issues during the presidential
national campaign that is about to begin. But the
winner will not be able to escape them once
he enters the Oval Office.

VIETKISS

Page 19 of 19

1

3205 WORDS

KISSINGER NEWSWEEK ARTICLE 4/18/00

Not too long ago, former President Gerald Ford and I were
reminiscing about his Presidency and our respective
experiences in government service. And we concluded that the
high points have a way of becoming blurred with the passage of
time. But we had shared one experience that will never lose
its immediacy: the pain and anguish of the day when the last
Americans and a pitiful band of refugees were evacuated from
the roof of the American embassy in Saigon.

Movies and television present great crises in terms of
frenetic activity, showing images of officious aides ripping
telephones off the hook and shouting instructions to scurrying

subordinates. In reality, crises are distinguished by the
stillness induced by the awareness that choices are narrowing.
The number of those involved in decisions shrinks to those
still in a position to affect events, their solitude magnified
because, the more severe the crisis, the fewer volunteers
there are willing to assume responsibility.

Thus [it was that] on that final day in April 1975, Ford
and I were quite alone; he in the Oval Office, I in the
Security Advisor's suite down the hall, interrupted only by
the periodic phone call as the Pentagon reported the departure
of each helicopter. For a month, we had refereed the
interdepartmental debates that marked the end of the tragedy;
whether to speed up the withdrawal of the last few Americans
to avoid needless risks, or to stretch it out to permit the

maximum numbers of Vietnamese to escape; whether to give up on
requests to the Congress for aid that would never reach
Vietnam, or maintain the request so that America would not be
perceived as having stabbed an ally in the back during its
[adversity]. Ford and I had fought for slow extrication and
continuing the request to the Congress, and the President
prevailed. Now that debate was overwhelmed by events. We had
become spectators of events we could no longer influence,
suspended between a pain we could not still and a future we
were not yet in a position to shape.

For those who have lived through the final day, any
account must appear fragmentary and dominated by the
perspective of wherever the author found himself as chaos
engulfed two decades of sacrifice. For those who were spared

4

And historians are no help, since their [accounts] have
replicated the bitter schisms of the period. Radical critics
endlessly repeat their litany of bloodthirsty leaders pursuing
a war to satisfy twisted psychologies. The right either
ignores the war as a liberal aberration or sublimates it to
the strident anti-communism of converts to conservatism who,
in reality, had been on the radical side while the war was
going on and who have their own reasons for avoiding its
memory. Reluctant to come to grips with the most traumatic
experience of the past half century, Americans find it
difficult to draw the real lessons from what America did to
itself during that sad period.

Vietnam tragedy: what it did to American exceptionalism - the
faith in the universality of our values - and the impact this
has had on the conduct of American foreign policy.

Entering Indo China and Leaving It

It was what has been described as the "greatest
generation" that entered Indo China in the heyday of American
exceptionalism in pursuit of the strategy with which it had
stabilized the post-World War II world, rebuilt Europe,
restored Germany and Japan to the community of nations and
arrested the Soviet advance into Europe and in Korea. A
mixture of the experiences of World War II and a philosophy
drawn from the New Deal, American strategy concentrated on
stopping Soviet aggression and economic and social progress
in regions under American protection to remove communist

opportunities for internal upheavals.

Though the conduct of the Cold War is often presented as
reflecting a nearly unanimous consensus, there was always
significant opposition, especially in the intellectual and
academic communities. They argued either that the communist
threat was exaggerated or that the United States was
associating with too many questionable regimes to sustain its
claim as a defender of liberty. But their critique was
confined to the wisdom of specific policies, not to the
validity of the American experience.

By the advent of the Kennedy Administration, this policy
was given its most sweeping formulation in the new president's
inaugural address, to the effect that the United States would
"bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend,

7

oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of
liberty." There was no opposition to that open-ended
commitment, or to the conventional wisdom that Indo China was
an essential outpost in the defense of liberty.

In the interregnum between presidencies, President Dwight
Eisenhower recommended to his successor military intervention
in Laos if North Vietnamese pressure continued. Within a month
of his inauguration, Kennedy sent Marines to Thailand,
adjoining Laos. He recoiled from intervening directly (though
the CIA was used for covert measures). But when Hanoi opened a
supply line to South Vietnam through Laotian territory and
intensified the guerrilla war, Kennedy sent sixteen thousand
US military "advisers" to South Vietnam in 1962. President
Lyndon Johnson escalated this commitment until it reached over

8

five hundred thousand by the time he left office. Initially, there was no significant opposition, either within or outside the Administration, to that massive deployment. Though later on the decision was blamed on Johnson, it was in fact Kennedy's closest advisers - McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk - who urged the escalation.

By the end of the Johnson Administration, frustration had set in. The strategy that had worked in every previous American war of wearing down the adversary by attrition, could not succeed against guerrillas defending no territory and therefore in a position to choose when and where to fight. Nor could any of the non-communist countries of Indo China be called a democracy. For those who had made the decision to send American troops, growing self-doubt compounded despair

While the leaders were seized by emotional turmoil, the
critics went ever further toward challenging the very essence
of American foreign involvement. The argument that the war was
unwinnable and that the cost of the war exceeded its benefits
escalated almost as rapidly as the American deployment. The
initial argument of the doubters dealt with how to find an
honorable way out. But within months, American exception?
began to turn on itself. The proposition that, morally, there
was little difference between Hanoi and Saigon undercut the
moral justification for the war. The protesters increasingly
argued that the ultimate cause of the crisis was not an error
in judgment but a moral rot at the core of the American way of

10

life. The victory of the communists in Indo China, which three
administrations of both parties had sought to prevent for
nearly two decades, became for the radical protest a desirable
national catharsis. The critique expanded from the worthiness
of America's allies to challenging the worthiness of America,
not only in Vietnam but globally. Vietnam turned into the
first war in which prominent Americans visited the enemy
capital to oppose their own country during highly publicized
visits.

By the time Richard Nixon became President, the battle
lines were drawn. The demoralized Establishment, which had
launched us into the quagmire, abdicated from the task of
extrication, leaving the field to the protesters or joining
them in the argument that extrication was prevented, above

11

all, by the short-sightedness and warped mentality of
America's leaders. The radical protesters, certain of their
moral superiority, saw no need for restraint in the methods to
pursue their aims. Indeed, they considered rules of conduct as
the invention of a system they meant to overthrow. By street
demonstrations and deliberate undermining of all authorities,
from universities to the US government, which they blamed for
America's alleged crimes, they sought to wreck any policy
designed to vindicate in Vietnam the values on which America's
post-World War II policy had been based. Nixon, who inherited
this impasse, lacked the human qualities to transcend it, if
indeed it was possible to do so. Still, for all his railing
against the Establishment, Nixon was a product of the
"greatest generation." And he sought to implement what he

understood to be the demand of the moderate critics for an
honorable withdrawal. Starting with the first negotiations
with the Vietnamese Politburo member Le Duc Tho, Nixon offered
a time table for withdrawal and a variety of formulas to
permit the people of South Vietnam a genuine choice. What
Nixon would not accept - and what, until the end, Hanoi never
ceased demanding - was the abandonment of all the millions
who, in reliance on the words of our predecessors, had thrown
in their lot with the United States.

When a negotiated solution seemed unattainable, Nixon
proceeded unilaterally to implement his campaign promise to
extricate America from Vietnam. In the process, he reduced
American casualties from twelve hundred a month at the end of
the Johnson Administration to thirty a month at the end of

13

Many of the stages in this process were highly controversial and they deserve fuller treatment than this article permits. But it is symptomatic of the schism in America that so much of the literature on Vietnam focuses on the charge that he needlessly prolonged the war and sacrificed American lives, implying that there was some honorable way out that he refused to take. The issue is not historical justice toward individual presidents, but historical justice toward a national tragedy. Mistakes should be debated and lessons learned. But when self-flagellation turns into assaults on the good faith of all leaders, the ability to build a coherent

14

national purpose ultimately suffers. America owes itself an
objective assessment of that Vietnam experience, which has not
yet happened.

The political schism was sharpened by a similar split in
the intellectual community. When I was in graduate school,
intellectuals rarely achieved high positions in government. If
they wanted to affect policy, they had to write lengthy papers
on longer-range issues. The Kennedy Administration awakened
their taste for political power. After Kennedy's
assassination, they sought to shape the immediate issues from
the outside, in the process dividing into two groups - job
applicants and revolutionaries. The job applicants replicated
the debates of the policymakers, and the revolutionaries the
arguments of the protest movement. In either case, they

15

Vietnam's Legacy

Vietnam broke the fusion of ideology and strategy in
American exceptionalism. Though the principle continues to be
affirmed by all sides, its application is subject to profound
dispute. Since the Vietnam war, there have been three main
currents in American foreign policy.

- The advocates of adaptations of the Cold War strategy of the 1950s and 1960s.

- The members of the protest movement, who came to high office in the Clinton Administration.

16

radically different from both the Cold War and the Vietnam protest perceptions.

When, under the impact of Vietnam, liberals and intellectuals retreated from the field of strategy and redefined exceptionalism in terms of "soft issues" - which could be achieved without the use of military power - traditional American strategy became largely the provenance of conservatives and neo-conservatives. Always uncomfortable with commitments on distant battlefields, the American right concentrated on rigorous anti-communism and vigilance in maintaining the strategic balance, especially with respect to arms control negotiations. And in the Reagan Administration, against an adversary weakened by decades of overextension, it achieved great successes.

Yet with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the need for
a national strategy adapted to the post-Cold War world has
baffled many conservatives. In the aftermath of Reagan, some
of his disciples emphasize the rhetorical side of his efforts
at the expense of the hard-headed strategy with which he
pursued the 1980s equivalent of a containment policy. They
seem torn - especially in the neo-conservative group - between
searching for some equivalent danger to the Soviet Union, in
opposition to which all foreign policy can be organized; or
the pursuit of American exceptionalism in a global crusade.

But China - the target for much of this effort - is as yet too
weak, its ideology too national, and its potential danger too
distant to allow foreign policy to be organized on this basis
or to be reconciled with a concert of powers. And pursuit of

18

hegemony has always exhausted any country attempting it, both domestically and, eventually, internationally. To be true to itself, America must always stand for democracy; but to shape the world, it must also be able to understand both its interests and their limits, and not recoil from defining either.

By far the greatest challenge to American foreign policy is the conclusion much of the liberal community has drawn from the Vietnam war, as exemplified by the Clinton Administration. It treats the Cold War as a misunderstanding, if not an American creation. It recoils before the concept of national interest and shrinks before the use of power unless it can present it as being in the service of some "unselfish" cause - that is to say, no more in the interest of America than of

19

anyone else. On many occasions and many continents, President
Clinton has apologized for American action for what he
derogatorily describes as Cold War preoccupations. But the
Cold War was not imaginary; profound issues of survival and
national purpose were involved. And the denigration - often
quite inaccurate - of the actions of American presidents, from
Eisenhower to Bush, must raise doubts about American
constancy, paradoxically even with respect to the
Administration offering the apology.

Apologies for fifty years of American history are matched
by uneasiness with the use of American power. This is
illustrated by the difference between the Administration
attitude toward Iraq and toward Kosovo.

In Kosovo, the absence of a purely American interest was

one of the ultimate justifications for the enterprise. But six
months later, the reluctance to apply the Kosovo principles to
Chechnya for fear of Russian power proved that even
universalists must learn the maxim that foreign policy is the
art of the possible.

The Clinton Administration's attitude is [further
evidenced] by the differential treatment of [its] two military
operations in 1998-99. In December 1998, Iraq inflicted a
strategic defeat on us by expelling the UN inspectors placed
there as a condition for ending the Gulf war. The
Administration responded by bombing for four days. But three
months later, it bombed Yugoslavia for seventy eight days in
pursuit of what was perceived as a humanitarian interest. In
each chase, the conduct of operations was undertaken with a

What Vietnam has bequeathed to the new generation is two
exceptionalisms: one in search of riskless applications,
another in quest of a strategy. It is not that this generation
is obsessed by the debates of the Vietnam war, with which it
is largely unfamiliar. Nor does it have feelings of guilt
about self-interest, which it pursues strenuously in its
economic activities. But it has little knowledge of history or
of national policy and hence lacks a sense of direction in the
international political arena.

In the globalized economic world, the post-Cold War

generation looks to Wall Street as mine did to service in
Washington. This is not only a question of financial
remuneration but, in part, also reflects reluctance to enter a
calling marked by battles that leave too many victims, and in
which too many political disputes are transmuted into matters
of criminal law.

But abdication from politics threatens American
exceptionalism with an erratic reliance on a world that runs
itself by automatic economic forces. It is possible to believe
this because our world has, in fact, been freed to a large
extent of the dangers of general war. And in such a world, the
post-Cold War generation (whether from the protest movement or
the business schools) is tempted to define national interest
in terms of instructing the rest of the world in the

advantages of free trade, non-proliferation and human rights,
and to turn negotiations into attempts to achieve compliance
with an American agenda.

When vast economic and military power is coupled with
condescension and righteousness, dominance turns grating and
leadership comes to be perceived as hegemony - which, nearly
automatically, elicits resistance. In addition, the legacy of
Vietnam remains [in the form of] a fear of domestic
convulsions and a recoil[ing] before the decisive use of
American power. And that, paradoxically by its very
hesitations, ends up making crises more frequent (which is why
the Clinton Administration has been drawn into more military
operations abroad than any previous administration).

The post-Vietnam generation is inheriting the

intellectual paralysis left by the Vietnam factional
disputants. Economics will not provide a safe haven from the
need for a national strategy. The globalized world will emerge
only by way of dislocations and new tensions, both within and
among societies. The nation state remains the unit of
political accountability - even while it is itself in a
process of transition. In many regions of the world, the
nation state is breaking down, either into hitherto ethnic
subgroupings or by joining larger regional groupings. And the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction represents a
challenge faced by no previous society.

Yet if our new generation of national leaders is
embarrassed to deal with the concept of national interest or
with the unapologetic use of power as a last resort, it will

25

American if it did not derive motivation from America's
democratic tradition or its concern with collective security.

But it must also be prepared to face up to some hard questions
imposed by reality.

What, for our survival, must we seek
to prevent no matter how painful the means? What, to be true
to ourselves, must we seek to accomplish no matter how small
the attainable consensus and, if necessary, alone? What wrongs
is it essential that we right? Which are beyond our capacity
or not compelled by the national interest?

We will not have overcome the Vietnam legacy - or be able
to meet our new challenges - until we can achieve a national
consensus on these issues. And this requires mutual respect

26

among the disputants and a conviction, nearly lost in the
Vietnam period, that they are engaged in a common enterprise
rather than a fight to the finish. Our political leaders may
be able to evade these issues during the national campaign
about to begin. But the winner will not be able to escape them
once he enters the Oval Office.

OFFICE OF
HENRY A. KISSINGER

April 18, 2000

Dear Rita:

Enclosed is the diskette of the Newsweek article prepared by Dr. Kissinger. Please let me know if you would prefer to receive the document via email.

Dr. Kissinger asked to receive Mr. Whitaker's comments tonight. Dr. Kissinger will be in California, staying at the Ritz Carlton Huntington Hotel in Pasadena. The telephone number is 626-568-3900 and the facsimile number is 626-568-3700. He will likely be checking in late afternoon (NY time). He is accompanied by his aide, Gil Gamboa.

Generally when we send fax transmissions, we direct them to the security aide who retrieves them and delivers them to Dr. Kissinger. Dr. Kissinger said that he will receive Mr. Whitaker's comments at any time tonight. He will be departing the hotel tomorrow, Wednesday, April 19th, at 6:00 a.m. (California time), to return to New York.

Thank you for your help.

Sincerely,

Rebecca Nelson

Ms. Rita Guttman
Office of Mr. Mark Whitaker
Newsweek
251 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019-1894

TWENTY-SIXTH FLOOR • 350 PARK AVENUE • NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10022 • (212) 759-7919

APR-17-2000 00:01

GOLDHAMMER

212 4213334

7.01/24

1

3389 WORDS

KISSINGER NEWSWEEK ARTICLE 4/16/00

Not too long ago, former President Gerald Ford and I were
reminiscing about his Presidency and our respective
experiences in government service. And we concluded that the
high points have a way of becoming blurred [with] the passage
of time. But we had shared one experience that will never lose
its immediacy: the pain and anguish of the day when the last
Americans and a pitiful band of refugees were evacuated from
the roof of the American embassy in Saigon.

Movies and television present great crises in terms of
frenetic activity, showing images of officious aides ripping
telephones off the hook and shouting instructions to scurrying
subordinates. In reality, crises are distinguished by the
stillness induced by [awareness] that choices are narrowing.

APR-17-2000 00:01

GOLDHAMMER

our moil and the anguish, the passions will seem incomprehensible. And history is no help, since the writing of it has replicated the bitter schisms that opened up during that tragedy. Radical critics endlessly repeat their litany of bloodthirsty leaders pursuing a war to satisfy twisted psychologies. The right either ignores the war as a liberal aberration or sublimates it to the strident anti-communism of converts to conservatism who, in reality, had been on the radical side while the war was going on, and who have their own reasons for avoiding its memory. Reluctant to come to grips with the most traumatic experience of the past half century, Americans find it difficult to draw the real lessons from what America did to itself during that sad period.

I will therefore concentrate on what America did to itself during that sad period: what it did to the Vietnam Tragedy; and what it did to the real victim of that era, was

APR-17-2000 00:01

VOLVUMHITIMER

## Entering Indo China and Leaving It

APR-17-2000 00:01

GOLDHAMMER

Though the conduct of the Cold War is often presented as if inflicting a nearly unanimous consensus, there was always significant opposition, especially in the intellectual and academic communities. They argued either that the communist threat was exaggerated, or that the United States was associating with too many questionable regimes to sustain its claim as a defender of liberty. But their critique was confined to the wisdom of specific policies, not to the validity of the American experience.

By the advent of the Kennedy Administration, this policy was given its most sweeping formulation in the new president's inaugural address, to the effect that the United States would "bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty." There was no opposition to that open-ended

APR-1'-2000 00-01

Lyndon Johnson escalated this commitment until it reached over
five hundred thousand by the time he left office. ~~Again,~~ there

APR-17-2000 00:02

GOLDHAMMER

closest advisers - McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara and Dean
Rusk - who urged that escalation.

By the end of the Johnson Administration, frustration had set in. The strategy that had worked in every previous American war of wearing down the adversary by attrition, could not succeed against guerrillas defending no territory and therefore in a position to choose when and where to fight. Nor could any of the non-communist countries of Indo China be called a democracy, by any stretch of the imagination. For those who had made the decision to send American troops, growing emotional insecurity and self-doubt compounded the despair and doubt about the entire political process which was triggered by the assassination of their hero, John F. Kennedy.

While the leaders were seized by doubt and paralysis, the critics went ever further toward challenging the very essence of American foreign involvement. The argument that the war was

APR-17-2000 00:02

GULVMHIMITER

unwinnable and that the cost of the war exceeded its benefits
escalated almost as rapidly as the American deployment. The initial
argument that the Americans dealt with
out, to the proposition that, morally, there was little
undercut the
difference between Hanoi and Saigon since they saw no moral
justification
basis for the war, the critics argued that pursuit of what was
ultimately cause of the war
involved was not an error in judgment but a moral rot at the
core of the American way of life. The victory of the
communists in Indo China, which three administrations of both
parties had sought to prevent for nearly two decades, became
for the radical protest nothing less than a desirable national
catharsis. The critique expanded from the worthiness of
America's allies to challenging the worthiness of America, not
only in Vietnam but globally. Vietnam became the first war in
which prominent Americans visited the enemy capital to oppose
their own country during highly publicized visits.

APR-17-2000 00:02

GOLDHAMMER

212 4213934

By the time Richard Nixon became President, the battle lines were drawn. The demoralized Establishment, which had launched us into the quagmire, abdicated from the task of extrication, leaving the field to the protesters or joining them in the argument that extrication was prevented, above all, by the short-sightedness and warped mentality of America's leaders. The radical protesters, certain of their moral superiority, saw no need for restraint in the methods chosen to pursue their aims. Indeed, they considered rules of conduct as the invention of a system they meant to overthrow. By street demonstrations and deliberate undermining of all authorities, from universities to the US government, which they blamed for America's alleged crimes, they sought to wreck any policy designed to vindicate in Vietnam the values on which America's post-World War II policy had been based. (We have [had] a small-reminder of these-methods in the Seattle and Washington.)

Bill in the East.

["APR-17-2000 00:02", "GOLDHAMMER", "10選的这个词是______的______，它选______了______，这______了______，这______了______，这______了______，这____

APR-17-2000 00:02

GOLDHAMMER

13

a minstrel act in a intellectual
The political schism was sharpened by the community. When I was in graduate school, intellectuals rarely achieved high positions in government. If they wanted to affect policy, they had to write lengthy papers on longer-range issues. The Kennedy Administration awakened their taste for political power. After Kennedy's assassination, they sought to shape the immediate issues from the outside, in the process of dividing into two groups - the job applicants and the revolutionaries. The job applicants replicated the debates of the policymakers, and the revolutionaries the arguments of the protest movement. In either case, they contributed little to helping America overcome the tragedy of Vietnam.

## Vietnam's Legacy

Under the influence of the split, the legacy of American exceptionalism has been healed. The era of Ideology and American exceptionalism has been broken. Though the principle of all sides of American exceptionalism continues to be affirmed, its

APK-17-2000 00:05

the hard-headed strategy with which he pursued the 1980s equivalent of a containment policy. Yet, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the need for a national strategy adapted to the post-Cold War world has baffled many conservatives. They seem torn - especially in the neo-conservative group - between searching for some equivalent danger to the Soviet Union, in opposition to which all foreign policy can be organized; or the pursuit of American exceptionalism in a global crusade against freedom and democracy. But China - the target for this effort - is as yet too weak, its ideology too national, too unideological and its potential danger too distant to allow foreign policy to be organized on this basis or to be reconciled with a concert of powers. And pursuit of hegemony has always exhausted any country attempting it, both domestically and, eventually, internationally. To be true to itself, America must always stand for democracy; but to shape the world, it must also be able to understand both its

APR-17-2000 00:03

19

liberals who insisted that the absence of a purely American interest was the ultimate justification for the enterprise. But six months later, Chechnya proved that even universalists must learn the maxim that foreign policy is the art of the possible.

By the same token, the Clinton Administration's attitude is [shown by] the differential treatment of [its] two military operations in 1998-99. In December 1998, Iraq inflicted a strategic defeat on us by expelling the UN inspectors placed there ~~at our insistence.~~ We responded by bombing for four days. But [in 1999] we bombed Yugoslavia for seventy eight days even though the traditional American national interest

far less clearly involved. And in each chase, the endloss

APR-17-2000 00:04

What Vietnam has bequeathed to the new generation is an
<u>one in need of</u> <u>richless application</u> <u>applied by an</u>
<u>exceptionalism looking for definition, and a strategy of</u>
<u>exceptionalism andler in quest of a strategy</u>
<u>slogans rather than national purpose.</u> It is not that this

When I was in graduate school, public service was considered
<u>a high calling</u>. In the globalized economic world, the post-
Cold War generation looks to Wall Street as mine did to <u>revenue</u>,
Washington. This is not only a question of financial
renumeration but, in part, is also <u>due to the reluctance to</u>

APR-17-2000 00:04

enter a calling marked by battles that leave too many victims,
and which turns too many of its political disputes into
matters of criminal law. Abduction from politics threatens
American exceptionalism (with an erratic reliance on a world
that runs itself by more or less automatic economic forces. It
is possible to believe this because our world has, in fact,
been freed to a large extent of the dangers of general war.

The post World War II period was a period of rapid generalization.
And in such a world, American leaders are tempted to define
national interest in terms of instructing the rest of the
world in the advantages of free trade, non-proliferation and
human rights, and to turn negotiations into attempts to
achieve compliance with an American agenda.

When economic and military power in a democracy is coupled
with condescension and righteousness, dominance becomes
grating and leadership comes to be perceived as hegemony -
which, nearly automatically, elicits resistance. In addition,

HFR-11-2000 CO 1

22

The post-Vietnam generation is inheriting the intellectual vacuum created by the paralysis left by the Vietnam factional disputants. Economics will not provide a safe haven from the need for a national strategy. The globalized world will emerge only by way of dislocations and new tensions, both within and among societies. The nation state remains the unit of political accountability - even while it is itself in a process of transition. In many regions of the world, the nation state is breaking down, either into hitherto ethnic subgroupings or by joining larger regional groupings. And the

APR-17-2000 00:04

GOLDHAMMER

APR-17-2000 00:04

GULVIRNI ICN

essential that we right? Which are beyond our capacity or not compelled by the National interest?

We will not have overcome the Vietnam legacy - or be able to meet our new challenges - until we can achieve a national consensus on these issues. And this requires mutual respect among the disputants and a conviction, nearly lost in the Vietnam period, that they are engaged in a common enterprise rather than a fight to the finish. Our political leaders may be able to evade these issues during the national campaign about to begin. But the winner will not be able to escape them once he enters the Oval Office.

TOTAL P. 24

APR-17-2000 00:01

GOLDHAMMER

212 4213934

P.01/24

1

3389 WORDS

Not too long ago, former President Gerald Ford and I were
reminiscing about his Presidency and our respective
experiences in government service. And we concluded that the
high points have a way of becoming blurred (with) the passage
of time. But we had shared one experience that will never lose
its immediacy: the pain and anguish of the day when the last
Americans and a pitiful band of refugees were evacuated from
the roof of the American embassy in Saigon.

Movies and television present great crises in terms of
frenetic activity, showing images of officious aides ripping
telephones off the hook and shouting instructions to scurrying
subordinates. In reality, crises are distinguished by the
stillness induced by awareness that choices are narrowing.

APR-17-2000 00:01

GOLDHAMMER

212 4213934

P.03/24

3
turmoil and the anguish, the passions will seem
incomprehensible. And history is no help, since the writing of
it [has] replicated the bitter schisms that opened up during
that tragedy. Radical critics endlessly repeat their litany of
bloodthirsty leaders pursuing a war to satisfy twisted
psychologies. The right either ignores the war as a liberal
aberration or sublimates it to the strident anti-communism of
converts to conservatism who, in reality, had been on the
radical side while the war was going on, and who have their
own reasons for avoiding its memory. Reluctant to come to
grips with the most traumatic experience of the past half
century, Americans find it difficult to draw the real
lessons from what America did to itself during that sad
period.

I will therefore concentrate on what America did to itself
y the Vietnam War: what it did to
during that sad period. For the real victim of that [era] was

APR-17-2000 00:01

GOLDHAMMER

212 4213934

P.04/24

It was what has been described as the "greatest generation" that entered Indo China in the heyday of American exceptionalism in pursuit of the strategy with which it had stabilized the post-World War II world, rebuilt Europe, restored Germany and Japan to the community of nations and arrested the Soviet advance into Europe and in Korea. A mixture of the experiences of World War II and a philosophy drawn from the New Deal, American strategy concentrated on <u>combating</u> <u>promoting</u> stopping Soviet aggression and <u>economic and social progress</u> in regions under American protection to remove communist opportunities for internal upheavals.

APR-17-2000 00:01

GOLDHAMMER

212 4213934 P.05/24

Though the conduct of the Cold War is often presented as if it had been based on nearly unanimous consensus, there was always significant opposition, especially in the intellectual and academic communities. They argued either that the communist threat was exaggerated, or that the United States was associating with too many questionable regimes to sustain its claim as a defender of liberty. But their critique was confined to the wisdom of specific policies, not to the validity of the American experience.

APR-17-2000 00:01

GOLDHAMMER

212 4213934

P.06/24

In the interregnum between presidencies, President Dwight
Eisenhower recommended to his successor military intervention
in Laos if North Vietnamese pressure continued. Within a month
of his inauguration, Kennedy sent Marines to Thailand,
adjoining Laos. He recoiled from intervening directly (though
the CIA was used for covert measures). But when Hanoi opened a
supply line to South Vietnam through Laotian territory and
intensified the guerrilla war, Kennedy sent sixteen thousand
US military "advisers" to South Vietnam in 1962. President
Lyndon Johnson escalated this commitment until it reached over
five hundred thousand by the time he left office. Again, there
was no significant opposition, either within or outside the
Administration, to that massive deployment. Though later on
the decision was blamed on Johnson, it was in fact Kennedy's

APR-17-2000 00:02

GOLDHAMMER

212 4213934

P. 07/24

By the end of the Johnson Administration, frustration had set in. The strategy that had worked in every previous American war of wearing down the adversary by attrition, could not succeed against guerrillas defending no territory and therefore in a position to choose when and where to fight. Nor could any of the non-communist countries of Indo China be called a democracy, ~~by any stretch of the imagination~~. For those who had made the decision to send American troops, growing ~~emotional insecurity~~ and self-doubt compounded the despair and doubt about the entire political process in~~ the~~ USA~~, as~~ the w Wake of the assassination of their hero, John F. Kennedy.~~

APR-17-2000 00:02

GOLDHAMMER

212 4213934

P. 08/24

unwinnable and that the cost of the war exceeded its benefits
escalated almost as rapidly as the American deployment. The military
of the Viet Cong dealt a blow
argument seen left the plane of how to find an honorable way
But with this moment in time, the enemy's goal is no longer
out, to the proposition that, morally, there was little
undercut the
difference between Hanoi and Saigon. Since they saw no moral
justification, the enemy means to appeal to the moral
basis for the war, the critics argued that pursuit of what was
ultimately cause of the war
involved was not an error in judgment but a moral rot at the
core of the American way of life. The victory of the
communists in Indo China, which three administrations of both
parties had sought to prevent for nearly two decades, became
for the radical protest nothing less than a desirable national
catharsis. The critique expanded from the worthiness of
America's allies to challenging the worthiness of America, not
turned away
only in Vietnam but globally. Vietnam became the first war in
which prominent Americans visited the enemy capital to oppose
their own country during highly publicized visits.

APR-17-2000 00:02

GOLDHAMIER

212 4213934 P.09/24

9

By the time Richard Nixon became President, the battle lines were drawn. The demoralized Establishment, which had launched us into the quagmire, abdicated from the task of extrication, leaving the field to the protesters or joining them in the argument that extrication was prevented, above all, by the short-sightedness and warped mentality of America's leaders. The radical protesters, certain of their moral superiority, saw no need for restraint in the methods chosen to pursue their aims. Indeed, they considered rules of conduct as the invention of a system they meant to overthrow. By street demonstrations and deliberate undermining of all authorities, from universities to the US government, which they blamed for America's alleged crimes, they sought to wreck any policy designed to vindicate in Vietnam the values on which America's post-World War II policy had been based. (We have [had] a small reminder of these methods in the Seattle and Washington,

which in that

©

APR-17-2000 00:02

GOLDHAMMER

212 4213934

P. 10/24

D.C. protests against the global economic system → Nixon, who

stall for all his railing against the Establishment was a product of the "greatest generation" (Banked Nixon)

with which to transcend this gulf, if indeed it was possible to do so (bridgeable).

Nixon and Leong to implement what he understands
But now that all the documents and records of the
for the most recent demand of the moderate center
sooner or later feel obliged to credit Nixon for his untiring
effort to keep from compounding defeat by dishonor. To this
day, the liberal critique accuses him of needlessly prolonging
the war, implying that there was some honorable way out that
Nixon refused to take.

Nixon showed without any ambiguity that the Nixon
a time later
Administration offered withdrawal, starting with its first
negotiations with the Vietnamese Politburo member Le Duc Tho.
What the Nixon Administration would not accept was a political

APR-17-2000 00:02

GOLDHAMMER

212 4213934

P.11/24

11

process guaranteeing a Hanoi-dominated communist government.

and

The records will show that we sought, and offered, a variety
of formulas to permit the people of South Vietnam a genuine
choice. What we would not accept - and what, until the end,
Hanoi never ceased demanding - was the abandonment of all the
millions who, in reliance on the words of our predecessors,
had thrown in their lot with the United States. Hanoi's
rejection of any [of a] variety of free choices for the people
of Vietnam is the reason for the prolongation of our
extrication during Nixon's first term.

When a negotiated solution named
In liberal and much media rendition of events, Nixon never
unattainable Nixon proceeded unilaterally to mylenium
receives credit for having substantially carried out his
his campaign
In the process
promise of extricating America from Vietnam. (which no serious
observer of his record could have interpreted as involving
unilateral withdrawal): he reduced American casualties from
twelve hundred a month at the end of the Johnson

APR-17-2000 00:02

GOLDHAMMER

212 4213934

P. 13/24

13

The political schism was sharpened by the intellectual community. When I was in graduate school, intellectuals rarely achieved high positions in government. If they wanted to affect policy, they had to write lengthy papers on longer-range issues. The Kennedy Administration awakened their taste for political power. After Kennedy's assassination, they sought to shape the immediate issues from the outside, in the process *splitting* into two groups - the job applicants and the revolutionaries. The job applicants replicated the debates of the policymakers, and the revolutionaries the arguments of the protest movement. In either case, they contributed little to helping America overcome the tragedy of Vietnam.

## Vietnam's Legacy

Vietnam, under Americanycin, The split has never been healed: The fusion of ideology and in American exceptionalism strategy of the early Cold War period has been broken. Though the principle by all sides American exceptionalism continues to be affirmed, its

APR-17-2000 00:03

GOLDHAMMER

212 4213934 P.16/24

16

the hard-headed strategy with which he pursued the 1980s equivalent of a containment policy [Yet] with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the need for a national strategy adapted to the post-Cold War world has baffled many conservatives. They seem torn - especially in the neo-conservative group - between searching for [some] equivalent danger [to] the Soviet Union, in opposition to which all foreign policy can be organized; or [the pursuit of] American exceptionalism in a global crusade for

APR-17-2000 00:03

GOLDHAMMER

212 4213934 P.17/24

17 *revol tion*
interests and their limits, and not be afraid to define
either.

By far the greatest challenge to American foreign policy is
the conclusion the liberal community has drawn from the
Vietnam war, as exemplified by the Clinton Administration. It
treats the Cold War as a misunderstanding, if not an American
creation. It recoils before the concept of national interest
and shrinks before the use of power [unless] it can present it
[as being] in the service of some "unselfish" cause - that is
to say, no more in the interest of America than of anyone
else. On many occasions and many continents, President Clinton
has apologized for American support of past authoritarian
actions for
leaders during what he always derogatorily describes as Cold

But the Cold War was not unimportant.
War preoccupations. [But] where did America suppress
profound influences of survival & naturalasadie
democratic alternatives, since almost all the first generation
were involved. And the elenification - after
leaders of Africa emerged from the independence struggle? And
quite ineminate - of from the actions of Americans
presidents from Eisenhower to Bush, most
raise doubts about American consistency
paradoxically even with respect to his
administration, especially his apology.

APR-17-2000 00:03

GOLDHAMMER

212 4213934 P.19/24

19

liberals who insisted that the absence of a purely American one of interest was the ultimate justification for the enterprise.

there ~~at our insistence.~~ We responded by bombing for four
~~as a condition for ending the Gulf war.~~ The Administration,
days. But [in 1999] we bombed Yugoslavia for seventy eight

~~Alice months later~~
days even though the traditional American national interest
in pursuit of what was perceived as a unifying理想
was far less clearly involved. And in each chase, the end result
...

APR-17-2000 00:04

GOLDHAMMER

212 4213934 P.20/24

What Vietnam has bequeathed to the new generation is an
*(one in read of a riskless application of an exceptionalism looking for definition, and a strategy of exceptionality andeller in quest of a strategy slogans rather than national purpose.)*

When I was in graduate school, public service was considered
*(a high calling.)*

In the globalized economic world, the post-Cold War generation looks to Wall Street as mine did to *revenue* in Washington. This is not only a question of financial *reputatio* but, in part, is also *due to the* reluctance to

APR-17-2000 00:04

GOLDHAMMER

212 4213934 P.21/24

21
enter a calling marked by battles that leave too many victims,
and ~~which turns~~ too many of its political disputes into
matters of criminal law. Abduction from politics threatens
American exceptionalism (with an erratic reliance on a world
that runs itself by ~~more or less~~ automatic economic forces. It
is possible to believe this because our world has, in fact,
been freed to a large extent of the dangers of general war.

The post World War II Cold War was generational.
And in such a world, American leaders are tempted to define
national interest in terms of instructing the rest of the
world in the advantages of free trade, non-proliferation and
human rights, and to turn negotiations into attempts to
achieve compliance with an American agenda.

The vietnam war was a democracy in which, with economic and military power comes condescension and righteousness, dominance becomes grating and leadership comes to be perceived as hegemony - which, nearly automatically, elicits resistance. In addition,

a letter from the vietnam movement or from businesspeople is

APR-17-2000 00:04

GOLDHAMMER

212 4213934

P.22/24

22

APR-17-2000 00:04

GOLDHAMMER

212 4213934 P.23/24

23
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction represents a
challenge faced by no previous society.

achieve
demonstrate not moral elevation but progressive paralysis.

Certainly any concept of national interest would not be
American if it did not derive motivation from America's
democratic tradition or its concern with collective security.
But it must also be prepared to face up to some hard questions
imposed by reality.

APR-17-2000 00:04

GOLDHAMMER

212 4213934 P.24/24

24

essential that we right? Which are beyond our capacity or not compelled by the [national interest]?

We will not have overcome the Vietnam legacy - or be able to meet our new challenges - until we can achieve a national consensus on these issues. And this requires mutual respect among the disputants and a conviction, nearly lost in the Vietnam period, that they are engaged in a common enterprise rather than a fight to the finish. Our political leaders may be able to evade these [issues] during the national campaign about to begin. But the winner will not be able to escape them once he enters the Oval Office.

TOTAL P.24