The Adlai Stevenson Institute
Conference on Vietnam

3-5 June 1968

Adam Yarmolinsky

SOME THOUGHTS ON PROGRESSIVE INVOLVEMENT

President Kennedy once remarked, "If this planet is ever ravaged by nuclear war - if the survivors of that devastation can then endure the fire, poison, chaos and catastrophe - I do not want one of those survivors to ask another, 'How did it all happen?' and to receive the incredible reply: 'Ah, if only one knew.'" The process of U. S. involvement in Vietnam seems, in retrospect, just this kind of process. And yet there were all kinds of warnings, from within the government as well as from outside, warnings that were heard and even listened to at the highest levels of government. At no point could anyone properly say, "We didn't know it was loaded."

Why then did otherwise intelligent and humane persons persist in error? This paper will argue that they did so because they underestimated both the strength of the antagonist and the bandwagon characteristic of the intervention process iteslf - a characteristic that made escalation progressively easier and reversal of course progressively more difficult. At the same time we tended to underestimate the difficulty for our antagonist of reversing his course. Minimizing this kind of underestimation may be one of the great tasks of our foreign policy machinery in the post-Vietnam period. In other words, we ought to find ways to make it harder to get in and easier to get out.

Clearly, U. S. intervention in South Vietnam changed not only in degree but in quality at least once, and probably more than once, during the Kennedy-Johnson Administration. No facile analogy (however often repeated) to the commitments assumed under the Eisenhower Administration is particularly illuminating. But two observations about that period in history may be relevant here:

2

First, the Eisenhower Administration was extraordinarily lucky. Its one critical decision on escalation in Vietnam - the decision not to intervene at Dien Bien Phu - was presented as a major step, not to be disguised as anything less. The representations of the Joint Chiefs as to the likelihood that nuclear weapons might be required were enough by themselves to alert all concerned to the gravity of the choice. Even a true believer in massive retaliation was given pause.

But by the same token, the Eisenhower Administration in a sense contributed one of the key elements that went into the makeup of the later decisions to go up rather than to go down. That was the fundamentalist anti-communism exemplified by John Foster Dulles - an anti-communism that remained as an emotional and political factor long after it had been succeeded by a more sophisticated analysis of relationships within and beyond the communist world.

Indeed, the decision to undertake even the limited amount of military assistance provided to the Diem regime immediately after the Geneva Accords was based on three factors, presumably in descending order of importance:

1) Anti-communist solidarity;

2) Concern over the domination of Southeast Asia by the Chicomos and their friends; and

3) Concern over any shift in the locus of the iron or bamboo curtains accomplished by force.

The significant fact about these three concerns is that between Eisenhower and Kennedy their relative priorities were completely reversed. This reversal suggests the more general shift in concern from ideology to influence. A series of events early in the Kennedy Administration had an important impact on Vietnam intervention issues. The Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy-Khrushchev confrontation in Vienna, and the decision not to intervene in the civil war in Laos, each argued in its way for some countermove to demonstrate American firmness in the face of

Soviet or Soviet-backed probes, whether verbal or physical. In some situations, timing becomes all important, and if Vietnam was the wrong place to increase our military commitment, it looked like the right time.

Another factor undoubtedly contributing to the early escalatory decision in Vietnam was, in a negative sense at least, an Eisenhower and a Foster Dulles legacy. The Kennedy Administration early rejected the doctrine of massive retaliation, and with considerable relief. The realization that nuclear weapons could not be brandished as an all-purpose threat made the use of force at the non-nuclear level seem somehow less frightening. There was even a kind of euphoria about the newly expanded Special Forces, who were being trained, it was said, as much in the arts of peace as in the arts of war, and who might reduce the use of force from the level of megaton monstrosity to the level of individual human effort. The enthusiasm for "counter-insurgency" as a new technique was a part of the same pattern, and what it lacked in specificity, it made up for in energy. Because what was called for in Vietnam was an increase in just these new kinds of forces and techniques, which were felt to be both more effective and less dangerous than conventional (or indeed nuclear) military means.

But the process of gradual involvement did not stop with the decisions taken in 1961 and 1962. Clearly the major escalatory steps were those taken in 1964 and 1965: the first retaliatory bombing raids, the initiation of strategic bombing as a continuing activity, and finally the introduction of combat troops on a massive scale. It has been argued that these later decisions were in effect predetermined by the earlier ones. But to accept that argument is only to assume that no great power can reverse course after it has become initially involved - and this is not an acceptable assumption. If a commitment of even as much as 50,000 men is an irrevocable commitment, for a great power, until it achieves its initial objectives, then Armageddon is even closer than we thought.

4

Again, several factors need to be sorted out in this latter phase of decision-making. The primary focus of these decisions seems to have been on shoring up the (or a) Saigon regime, rather than on blunting the force (or the determination) of Hanoi. When all the arguments advanced in favor of initiating the bombing of the North are critically analyzed, the most persuasive one turns out to have been its effect on crumbling morale in the South. There was no enthusiasm, at the level of political decision, about any of the new escalatory moves. But there was at least less disinclination to examine these alternatives than to examine the alternatives on the down side of the scale. Accounts of the period make it clear that there was unanimous agreement within the government that the only course of action no longer available was not to change course. But one senses that there was more concern with minimizing necessary escalation than with maximizing feasible de-escalation.

The pause in the decisional process because of the intervention of a Presidential election was also a factor to be reckoned with. The pacific promises of the campaign, however deeply felt, were probably a less significant determinant of policy than the effect of the practical moratorium on decision-making induced by the campaign. Decisions that are postponed end up being accelerated by the accumulated pressure of events. The impact of regularly scheduled elections on the conduct of foreign affairs, as in Korea, Suez, and Cuba, is a subject deserving of separate study.

After 1965, one enters the Aeschylean stage of United States intervention in Vietnam. The character of the problem changes significantly. It is perhaps more aptly described as a manifestation of hubris than as the evolution of rational, if misguided policy. To reverse our course, as we seem to be doing at long last, called for a change of heart at least as much as a change of mind.

5

It is on the earlier stages, then, that one might focus, in order to try to draw lessons for the future conduct of American foreign policy. One can identify three elements that can help to make the process of gradual involvement more conscious and more controllable. These are the collection of comprehensive and sophisticated intelligence about the arena of possible involvement, the prompt communication of that intelligence to the responsible policy makers, and the preservation, by a variety of means, of maximum flexibility in the face of domestic political constraints - as well as constraints imposed by foreign policy problems in other parts of the world.

Collecting intelligence, like playing a musical instrument, is not a matter of volume but of quality. In fact, as Roberta Wohlstetter has pointed out, the more noise, the more likelihood that no one will hear the tune. The intelligence failures of the war in Vietnam are not attributable to any dearth of statistics. A few critical insights may be worth more than any amount of routine information. The problem of obtaining these insights is not primarily a problem of getting better people. Of course there is no substitute for brains. But the general level of people in the intelligence services - including the reporting services of the Department of State - is remarkably good for a bureaucracy, which is what any permanent service has to be. It could be enhanced by more free lateral entry and career movement back and forth between government and academia at the professional level. But one can't always have the best people in the most important place at the critical time. The attachés from the military services assigned to the U. S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic in the spring of 1965 were not men at the top of their profession. But it would be unreasonable to suppose that the military services should assign their very best people to such a post, given all the other demands that were being made on them at the time. What might be tried out would be to apply the adversary system to the collection of intelligence on critical

6

issues, so that one team would be assigned to attempt to prove a particular
proposition, while another team would be assigned to attempt to disprove it. If
this method proved too artificial, it might be worthwhile to bring in outsiders
to examine particular situations, as the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
examines the overall picture, but on an ad hoc basis, so that these advisors did
not in their own minds become identified with the Establishment. If these ad
hoc advisors created a security problem by including too large a group in the
need-to-know class, they might be given a mixture of real and hypothetical raw
material, without identifying which was which, but asking them to make alternative
judgments, eliminating one or another set of facts. The object of the exercise would
be to loosen up some of the inhibitions on judgment imposed by the communal sense
of the intelligence community.

Even the best intelligence is no good unless it reaches the decision makers, and reaches them without so much other miscellaneous stuff that it's drowned out in the general noise level. Here the principal problem is to eliminate layering. Information almost always looks better, the farther away you are from the source. It is less flawed, less ambiguous, and it tends more to conform to your original premises. One of the great sources of Robert McNamara's strength as Secretary of Defense was his ability and determination to penetrate more deeply into the factual bases of decision than any of his predecessors, or, indeed, of his associates. Cultivation of this faculty is essential for policy makers who would avoid being misled into untenable positions.

Finally, flexibility is a matter of concern even for policy makers who have
avoided obsessive concern with keeping options open. The President of the United
States has very considerable latitude in shaping issues in public debate,
particularly issues of foreign policy. If the President says that the war in
Vietnam is a test of U. S. commitments to its allies around the world, then the

7

Vietnamese war does indeed become such a test. If he suggests that our reasons for being in Vietnam are peculiar to the local situation, then it will be rather differently regarded, 'round the world and back home. If the President describes Cuba as a major source of subversion in Latin America, he will be under greater (domestic) pressure to take positive action against Cuba than he might be otherwise. It takes two parties to maintain a bipartisan foreign policy, but if the President suggests that a particular foreign policy issue is indeed a partisan issue, he cannot continue to rely on bipartisanship in that connection.

Whatever the President says, of course, has endless reverberations. Issues of national security are particularly difficult to defuse and treat dispassionately, as President Kennedy discovered to his sorrow in the civil defense shelter crisis of 1961. But the reasons why the American public and its opinion leaders regarded the tension between Libya and Egypt, or between Ethiopia and Somaliland with relative indifference, had less to do with objective reality than with the public posture of the United States government. Both of these situations involve Soviet interests, potential East-West confrontations, and a danger of internal subversion. But they have attracted the attention only of a few area specialists. The difference in popular American attitudes towards accommodation in Laos and towards confrontation in Vietnam only points up further the differential effects of differences in U. S. policy.

The political influence of the United States military establishment in these premises seems much overstated. The military make themselves heard on the conduct of military operations, although even this close to home they are increasingly and remarkably responsive to civilian direction and control. But on the crucial issue of the initiation of military operations, the military respond to requests for proposals, but they are disinclined to press their proposals. It is in the nature of military bureaucracy, as of any bureaucracy, that it tends to

12

buildings, these dissident groups can engineer a confrontation that appears at least in some aspects as a confrontation of equals. If government is to function, it may at some point have to resort to force against these groups. But if it is to maintain its authority it must find other and more ingenious means than force to demonstrate that it is indeed superior. Otherwise it will wind up on the same level as its opponents.

JUL 25 1968

INDEX

Eqbal Ahmad 11-12, 19-27, 206-208, 347-365, 385-386, 428-430
Richard Barnet 75-105
Chester Cooper 120-124, 148-149, 151, 152, 284, 369-371, 411, 420-421
Theodore Draper 38-45, 50-52, 63-64, 128-130, 213-215, 271-272, 273, 379-380
Luigi Einaudi 134-136, 319-321, 373-375, 376-378
Daniel Ellsberg 5, 53-56, 61-63, 151-152, 155-157, 265-268, 312-315, 375-376
John King Fairbank 28-29, 194-195, 196-197
Frances Fitzgerald 262, 425-426
Fred Haynes 209-210
Stanley Hoffmann 6-7, 130, 132-134, 147-148, 151, 160-194, 269-270, 285-300, 308-312, 317-319, 371-373, 423-424, 430-432
Samuel P. Huntington 1-4, 30, 56-61, 152-154, 264, 278-281, 322-346, 365, 367-369, 375, 380, 383-385, 386, 387, 389
George McTurnan Kahin 209, 261, 281-284
Henry Kissinger 15-19
John McAlister, Jr. 196
John McDermott 45-47, 127B-128, 130, 131, 247-260, 272-273, 273-274, 386-387, 388, 424-425
Hans Morgenthau 5, 417-420
Richard Pfeffer 124-126, 195, 196, 307-308
William R. Polk 127A, 262-264
Ithiel de Sola Pool 197-205, 208, 300-307, 315-317
John Rielly 149-151, 381-383

June 27, 1968

TO: Eqbal Ahmad, Richard Barnet, Chester Cooper, Theodore Draper, Luigi Einaudi, Daniel Ellsberg, John Fairbank, Frances FitzGerald, Fred Haynes, Stanley Hoffmann, Samuel Huntington, George Kahin, (Henry Kissinger), John McAlister, Jr., John McDermott, Hans Morgenthau, Ithiel de Sola Pool, John Rielly, Edwin Reischauer, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., James C. Thomson, Jr., Sir Robert Thompson, Leroy Wehrle, Albert Wohlstetter and Adam Yarmolinsky.

FROM: Richard M. Pfeffer

Within the next 10 days or so you will be sent at this address a draft of the manuscript of the book we plan to publish based on the conference. If you will not be at this address, please notify us immediately.

We will expect any corrections of your own remarks you may make to be back to us in legible form within 10 days.

A lot of work has gone into putting his manuscript together. I hope you will all be judicious in limiting yourself primarily to correcting any possible misinterpretation of your remarks. If we wish to get a book out in the foreseeable future, we simply cannot have each participant making major changes in his remarks.

Thanking you in advance for your cooperation.

JUL 51 1968
JUL 22 1968

THE ADLAI STEVENSON INSTITUTE
OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

ROBIE HOUSE 5757 SOUTH WOODLAWN AVENUE
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 60637
312-684-3200

July 17, 1968

To: Eqbal Ahmad, Richard Barnet, Chester Cooper, Theodore Draper, Luigi Einaudi, Daniel Ellsberg, John King Fairbank, Frances FitzGerald, Fred Haynes, Stanley Hoffmann, Samuel P. Huntington, George McTurnan Kahin, Henry Kissinger, John McAlister, Jr., John McDermott, Hans Morgenthau, Ithiel de Sola Pool, John Rielly, Edwin Reischauer, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., James C. Thomson, Jr., Sir Robert Thompson, Leroy Wehrle, Albert Wohlstetter, Adam Yarmolinsky

From: Ric Pfeffer

Re: Vietnam Conference Manuscript

I have just finished putting together the manuscript, newly entitled "Vietnam and the Future of American Foreign Policy." It is presently being copied by a photo offset process and will be sent out to you by the end of this week.

I hope you all will be very judicious and self-denying in exercising the prerogative to edit your contributions to the conference. Needless to say, I expect you will primarily concern yourself with correcting any errors or misinterpretations of your remarks. This is not the time to refine your arguments, since with a manuscript in written dialogue form a refinement process could go on ad infinitum. Any suggestions you have about further cutting or rearranging of sections will be welcomed.

Since it now appears that *The Atlantic* may publish much, if not all, of the manuscript in its next few issues, it is imperative that we get the completed manuscript to them as early as possible. As agreed upon at the conference, we will allow two weeks from the date we mail out the copies for you to get them back to us with any corrections you feel necessary. (In many cases, by the way, footnotes have been omitted for our convenience at this stage. I expect to put them into the final draft.)

We will presume (irrebutably) that those of you whose manuscripts we do not receive by the stipulated time are satisfied with the manner in which your remarks were handled. And we thank you for that.

I would hope that in the interests of educating the public none of you will feel it necessary to withhold what you said at the conference from the public.

Finally, you will find a stamped, addressed post card enclosed with the manuscript. Please return it to us immediately as an acknowledgement of your receipt.

Copy

[LC]

Editorial changes:

p. 16, line 4, can becomes could

p. 16, line 6, The official military line for as long as I can remember is that

p. 16, line 8, in becomes into

p. 16, line 10, lies in becomes depends on

p. 16, line 17, After the word Vietnam, period. Applying lessons learned in the New Deal, we try etc.

p. 17, lines 6 and 7, if our policy becomes altruism is a guarantee for the correctness of a policy.

p. 18, line 6, after another, period. This process in turn, etc.

**Arthur Schelsinger:** In common with everyone else, I have had enormous trouble in defining how we got into the ghastly business of Vietnam. There is, however, an historical framework which may help throw some light on our vulnerability to an act of intervention which bore no relationship to any rational assessment of our interest. The historical framework is comprised of two creditable, traditional extremes in American thinking about our role in the world. In time past, the impulses in the two extremes were responsible for some of the most splendid moments of our behavior in the world, but they reached a final and tragic misapplication in Vietnam.

For the lack of a better word, one of the extremes can be called Stimsonianism. It stands for the view that an orderly world requires a durable structure of world security, which must be protected against agression: if aggression were permitted to go unpunished in one place, the event would lead by infection to a general destruction of the system of world order. I call this Stimsonianism because it was the basis of Secretary of State Henry Stimson's reaction to the Japanese incursion into Manchuria. The underlying idea, nourished by all the thinking associated with the League of Nations, gave rise to the phrase "collective security," which gained currency in the 1930's. The idea was nourished all the more extensively

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by the events of the Second World War.

The human carriers of Stimsonianism have a clear line of descent. They extend from Secretary Stimson to his assistant, the father of McGeorge Bundy, then to McGeorge Bundy personally when he was Special Assistant for National Security Affairs in the administrations of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. On a parallel line of descent, they extend from Stimson, when he was Secretary of War during the Second World War, through General George C. Marshall, then Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army and later Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense, and from there to his former aid, now Secretary of State, Dean Rusk. McGeorge Bundy and Dean Rusk are the personal executors of the Stimsonian tradition. They jointly comprise the carriers of one of the ideas that made us vulnerable to an entrapment in Vietnam.

The second creditable tradition that can be traced out is the concept that the United States has a saving mission in the world. Woodrow Wilson had rekindled this idea in his own time, but the Second World War enlarged the concept into a kind of global New Dealism. Global New Dealism meant that we must not only meet threats to justice, freedom and democracy in the world, but we likewise had an obligation to help poor people. The concept led to many post-Second World War undertakings

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such as UNRRA, the Marshall Plan, and economic and technical
assistance programs. The human carriers for this idea had a line
of descent extending from Woodrow Wilson, through Franklin D.
Roosevelt, and then through Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey --
two New Dealers of the 1940's. The sense that we ought to create
New Deals on a global basis, again, made us vulnerable to an
entrapment in Vietnam.

This second strand of thinking -- the liberal evangelism
of the 1940's which came out of the Second World War -- was
reinforced from several sides. Because of the tremendous power
vacuums created by the war, America and Russia appeared for a
moment in history to be the world's two super powers. At the
same time, the phenomenon of Stalinsim gave rise to an American
anti-Communism which viewed Communism itself as being a relatively
unified world movement, directed from a single center. For many
people in the 1940's, this anti-Communism hardened into a series
of conditioned reflexes, which continuted to guide their thoughts
after Communism was beginning to be transformed under the stress
of nationalism. Thus, for example, when Vice President Hubert
Humphrey in October, 1967 declared that the threat to peace is
militant aggressive Asian Communism with headquarters in Peking --
of which the action in Vietnam is a current and immediate express-
ion -- he was talking from the conditioned reflexes of the liberal
evangelism of the Forties.

Speaking for myself alone, I once subscribed to the

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anti-Communism of the 1940's in response to Stalinist Communism.
And until 1965, I also went along with the strands of Stimson-
anism and global New Dealism which established the framework
for American thinking about foreign affairs. Yet, I now recognize
the measure of the tragedy we got into in Vietnam -- a tragedy
that is all the more poignant because of its conceptual roots:
the noble tradition of Stimsonianism and the tradition of
liberal evangelism -- both of which, in times past, expressed
some of the best moments in American foreign policy.

**Eqbal Ahmad:** It seems to me that other aspects inherent in American political culture should be singled out as being driving factors in pushing the United States toward relationships that are likely to lead to intervention.

The first is an extraordinary tradition, clearly charac-
teristic of American political culture: the management of
dissent par excellence -- a management growing out of the
immigrant character of American society.

It now appears, however, that the same immigrant nature of
American society which gave this political culture its extra-
ordinarily flexible character, also makes for a certain kind
of intolerance. It makes for a greater need to insist on the
general consensus -- on a rather authoritarian super-structure --
within whose boundaries bargaining can take place.

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Now it seems to me that Americans very often carry this
particular attitude to countries abroad. They expect that a
certain amount of bargaining will take place, and may often
quite unconsciously define its boundaries. But when they find
dissent unfolding outside the defined boundaries in totally
unmanageable ways, they become intolerant, just as they do at
home when they face movements which seem to threaten funda-
mentals. It also seems to me that when the United States finds
itself in a situation where it feels dissent to be quite
unmanageable, its immediate intolerant response reinforces its
belief in the efficacy of violence.

**Arthur Schlesinger:** I disagree. I do not think American society responds in any unified way in terms of tolerance or intolerance on questions of dissent. The diverse responses to the war in Vietnam makes this clear. By the terms of your thesis, there should have been a kind of united American support for the policy of escalation, whereas, in fact, the division within American society is tremendous.

Your remark about violence raises another question.
Most of the theories of imperialism were inspired by European
experience and I think it is interesting, as an exercise, to try
to apply these theories to what has been done and what has gone
on in Vietnam. Lenin's theory that imperialism is the result

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of a search for investment outlets, obviously, does not apply
to Vietnam. No one seriously supposes that the United States
is in Vietnam for economic reasons. But it does seem to me
that, in a special sense, one view of imperialism does explain
a good deal of the Vietnam business.

You will remember that Schumpeter argues that the essence
of nineteenth century imperialism in Europe was a reversion to
the habit and outlook of a warrior caste, which felt itself
squeezed out of the picture by the rise of a commercial society.
Now, not all of this view applies to the case of Vietnam. Yet,
it seems to me that a great deal of the pressure leading to an
enlargement of the war in Vietnam had links to the creation in
the United States -- during the Second World War and for the
first time in American history -- of what might be described
as a warrior caste in American society. The policies on which
our Vietnam course were based, as well as the internal momentum,
were largely generated by military machines. This included the
tendency to dramatize the problem as a military problem, the
desire on the part of the military to have testing grounds for
tactics and for weapons, and the pressures that a concentrated
military lobby had in the government, in the Congress.

All this coincided with the ideological susceptibility
that was the result of Stimsonianism and liberal evangelism.

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But the hard thrust which pushed through the policy of enlarging
the Vietnamese war was the existence of a "warrior caste" -- a
sort of self-generating, escalating type of machine. This, as
you will agree, is a very important factor which ought to be
considered when we are trying to avoid getting into future
difficulty.

**Adam Yarmolinsky:** I must take issue both with Mr. Ahmad and with Mr. Schlesinger. The point that Mr. Ahmad advanced is inconsistent with the events of the last few months, particularly with the impact of growing dissent within the United States. In fact, it is fair to say that the decision of President Johnson to step down was largely effected by the dissent to his policies.

I would suggest that what Mr. Ahmad is talking about really
concerns the way the bureaucracy works. A bureaucracy will
tolerate a good deal of dissent within the organization because
dissent is necessary to make the organization work. On the
other hand, because bureaucracy is so preoccupied with making
the organization work, it tends to see everything outside as
dimmer and smaller than it is in fact and, therefore, is rela-
tively intolerant of dissent. Further, when the bureaucracy
functions outside its natural boundaries and even outside the
hemisphere in which we live, it shows an even greater degree

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of misunderstanding or non-understanding, and is even more
disposed to ride roughshod over things standing in its way.

As for Arthur Schlesinger's point about the "warrior caste",
the influence it wields is really more of a long-run than a
short-run factor. It is more likely to affect the general
atmosphere in which decisions are made than to determine any
particular decision by bringing direct pressure to bear on it.
I don't think the military tell the civilians what to do. But
the military alternative attracts more people, more talk, more
preparation, more money. The general climate is thus affected,
rather than there being a direct conflict about a particular
situation in which the warrior caste takes one position.

**Henry Kissinger:** It seems to me that many of our difficulties in Vietnam have turned out to be conceptual failures and almost all of our concepts, the military ones as well as some of the traditional liberal ones, have really failed and have failed for two reasons.

One of these reasons is because many of them were irrelevant
to the situation. Secondly, they failed for a reason that
requires careful study -- the degree to which our heavy bureau-
cratic and modern government creates a sort of blindlessness
in which bureaucracies run a competition with their own programs
and measure success by the degree to which they fulfill their own

norms, without being in a position to judge whether the norms
made any sense to begin with.

It is a source of infinite wonder to me how General Westmoreland, for example, could continue to come back every time repeating exactly the same phrases, impervious to the lessons that were learned. The official military line for as long as I can remember is that I have heard it explained that the Viet Cong meant to cut the country in two pieces. Now, why should they want to do that when they already have it cut into fifty pieces? Why should they want to hold territories when their whole strategy depends on the fact that they never have an identifiable territory that is their own. Our blindness here really reflects the predominance of our traditional concepts, under which you measure success and failure by the control of territories.

The liberal concept that you can remove the causes of war by removing economic distress has led to another sort of massive difficulty in Vietnam — in which we try to alleviate distress, which may not even have been felt as distress by the rural population, at the price of destroying whatever small vestiges of local responsibility there may be. I don't know enough about Vietnamese culture to judge, but I have been very impressed by some things I have plagiarized from John Fairbank. On that basis, I doubt whether in a Chinese

type culture legitimacy is established, as is the case in
the United States, by a pluralistic sort of election. It seems
that our insistence on the election process in Vietnam also may
be an example in which we are simply running ~~a~~ competition with
our own criteria.

There is a tendency in the United States to believe that ~~our policy is altruistic~~ this is a guarantee for its correctness. I would not accept the proposition that we have to support every moral government in the world which gets into difficulty, and I would think that in the kind of world toward which we are heading we will have trouble enough establishing a conception of the American interest without getting into a global conception by which we judge everything in terms of perfectability.

The problem of defining a national interest under present
circumstances is most elusively complicated, one. We all talk,
for example, in terms of balance of power, equilibrium, and the
traditional concepts of international relations. But, even if
our original assumption had been correct -- even if Peking were
the seat of aggressive Asian Communism -- we come up against a
curious paradox: the acquisition of Vietnam by Peking would be
infinitely less significant in terms of the balance of power,
than the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Peking. Yet, we have
been able, quite correctly, to accept the acquisition of nuclear
weapons by Peking.

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We have no real concepts suited to guide our response to non-territorial change. We have no real concepts suited to guide our response to the most significant source of change that may be occurring at the moment -- the sort of moral wave going through the world, whereby one sort of rebellion leads to another, which in turn, cannot be encompassed at all by traditional theories of balances of power. Vietnam is more than a policy failure. It is really a very critical failure of the American philosophy of international relations.

Moreover, as Stanley Hoffmann has argued in his book, there is a kind of national psychology which leads Americans to conduct their foreign policies with a lack of historical knowledge. For example, it is amazing that no one seems to have systematically studied before we went there what the French experience was in Vietnam. I never understood, even before I knew anything about Vietnam, why we thought we could achieve with 16,000 men what the French could not do with 200,000 men.

When one is asked for advice, the constant American tendency has been to respond by looking for a gimmick. Every year we have had a new program in Vietnam and have carried out each program with the obsessive certainty that it was the ultimate solution to the problem.

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I don't know whether there will be "another Vietnam."

But I feel that we have to make a really prayerful assessment of
what we went in there for, not to pin blame on any particular
set of conditions, but to assess the whole procedure and concepts
that got us involved there. We have to do this if we are not
going to have another disaster that may have a quite different
look but which will have the same essential flaws.

**Eqbal Ahmad:** Let me spell out what I meant in my previous
remarks. The United States, the protestations of its leaders
and scholars notwithstanding, has been, in effect, opposed to
third world nationalism, historically in South America, and
recently in its client states. This opposition, however, has
been manifest not in the initial stages of the demand for self-
determination from Spanish, French, Dutch or British colonialism,
but in the stage when a particular nationalism has begun to
acquire a diplomatic, economic and social expression. The anti-
nationalist thrust of the United States, as well as its inter-
ventionist tendencies, is not rooted in American ideology. It
is related, perhaps, to certain aspects of American political
culture.

1) *The paranoid strain in American politics*, which has
been analysed at some length by Richard Hofstadter. It forms
the basis, at least in part, of America's crusading zeal, which

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the realists like Morgenthau and Kennan have bewailed. It also constitutes the most important component of a conspiratorial view of history -- a sort of Manichaean outlook, which panics over the imagined subversion of the forces of good by the forces of evil. Hofstadter states: "The distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies here and there in history but that they regard a vast and gigantic conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of political give and take but an all out crusade."

The deep hold, among the American people, of an almost theological anti-Communism becomes more understandable when viewed in this light. The habit of viewing historical events and social processes in *ad hoc*, technical terms derives, partly too, from this view of history. Even the social scientists are conditioned by it. The official literature on counter-insurgency is a case in point. Revolutionary warfare is viewed essentially as a technical problem, i.e., a problem of plotting and subversion, on the one hand, and of intelligence and suppression, on the other. As the chief conspiratorial groups the Communists are believed to be the most likely initiators and beneficiaries of revolution. This belief produces a pessimistic posture

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toward a transforming world, and underlies the nearly unqualified commitment of the U.S. to stability and order in the countries under its influence. It was this attitude which led to the quashing of what was construed as the Dominican Communist Con-spiracy.

A logical extension of this attitude is the belief that any revolutionary movement is inspired, directed and controlled from abroad. In times of stress, it may lead to a ridiculously simplified Puppeteer View of history, which disregards the force of nationalism. Dean Rusk's famous description of China as being a Soviet Manchukuo is now legend. The Johnson Administration's belief, perhaps once sincere, that the National Front for Liberation (South Vietnam) was a puppet of the Northern regime, and that the D.R.V. in turn a puppet of one or the other of the larger Communist powers, may fly in the face of facts, but it has been held with tenacity in this country and is still plausible to most people.

2) *Tradition of Management of Dissent.* Owing perhaps to its immigrant character which necessitated the successful integration of diverse groups within the system, the American political culture is management oriented. Historically, group demands have been managed through the process of political bargaining, and selective rewards. Ideological and social

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dissent has been managed by the cooptation both of individuals
and ideas. Insofar as the society was endowed with expanding
resources as well as an extremely mobile social structure, the
politics of management within a pluralistic framework was poss-
ible. It was further facilitated by the existence of a basic
consensus to which all aspiring groups tended to subscribe.

Yet the same forces which produced a flexible tradition
of bargaining and cooptation, also produced an overemphasis on
the maintenance of a basic consensus which would admit of diff-
erences but not cleavages on how society was to be organized.
Unmanageable dissent has, therefore, often encountered swift
and ruthless repression in America. The I.W.W. immediately
comes to mind. Those groups that were defined as being outside
of the political boundary faced extermination, as did the
Indians, or were forcibly kept on the outer limits, as were the
blacks. The result is an authoritarian superstructure, allowing
for a well defined but extremely permissive infrastructure.
This cultural complex has important ramifications for the American
response to the stresses of social change in underdeveloped
countries.

First, there is an expectation that the Asian and Latin
versions of robber barons and party bosses will, out of self-
interest, get around to seriously introducing reforms and
achieve an orderly resolution of conflicts arising from the

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pressures of participation and distribution. Hence the tendency to cling obstinately to the hope that institutions will be promoted and social progress will be achieved under a Diem, the Thai generals or the Philippine politicians. This view misconstrues the value system and class characteristics of the rulers in traditional and feudal societies, their concept of self-interest, and their relationship to the society, upon which their defense of the status quo is predicated. It is the reason for America's alliance with conservative nationalism whose legitimacy erodes as social pressures mount and foreign involvements augment. The U.S., in turn, gets progressively committed to defending conservative factions.

Second, since rewards and bargains are essential aspects of the American political style, the U.S. increases its economic and military commitments to client states often in the hope of using these commitments as a leverage to press for reforms.

Third, the consensus upon which the American system of bargaining and boundary management is predicated does not exist in underdeveloped countries. It is likely to be particularly lacking in the client states where foreign alignments tend to exacerbate internal divisions. There is a growing trend in the third world toward the radicalization of conflict. The super-imposition and infiltration of modern technology and values are drastically altering the social and economic

- 24 -

configurations which in the traditional societies had circumscribed discontent within the boundaries of religiousity and rebellions. These countries are witnessing a fundamental shift in the equation of human condition, and this change marks their transition from rebellion to a revolution whose basic drive is not merely the fulfillment of limited goals, like raising the per capita income and level of food consumption, but the transformation of all relationships -- political, economic, and social -- between groups and individuals. As new groups of people, previously outside the political realm, force their way into politics, the common man becomes politically relevant. For many newcomers in politics, this mass constitutes the only capital. Politics, thus, ceases to be a mere struggle within a privileged minority for spoils of power. It becomes, progressively, a contest between the contenders of different social systems and political ideals. The opposition in such societies is frequently unmanageable because it does not share the values of an often ill-defined and sometimes illegitimate authority.

In such conflictual cultures the U.S. is aligned, by inclination no less than by reason of diplomatic priority, with the ruling, generally conservative regimes. When faced with unmanageable dissent in countries of its paramount influence, the U.S. inclines to intervene, responding in a traditional

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American style. The opposition is defined as being outside the
legitimate political boundary (it often does not matter if
legitimacy as well as a defined boundary are absent).

Paranoia seeks plausible enemies; the conspiratorial
theory is invoked; radical nationalists, socialists, all become
Communists; repression against outside agitators is carried out.
After listening to a State Department official's defense on
Vietnam at Tougaloo College, Mississippi, a black woman remarked
that he spoke exactly like the white leaders in the South:
there was the assertion that Negroes in the South were generally
satisfied; trouble began only when agitators from the North
infiltrated; there was Communist subversion. For the same
reason Ambassador Nolting came to remind David Halberstam "of
some white community leaders in Mississippi and Tennessee."

3) Perhaps the most important single factor in influencing
<u>American</u> style in the underdeveloped countries has been its
<u>experience in Latin America</u>. Before entering the world scene,
America had exercised power outside of its own boundaries
mainly in the Latin American countries; and this seems to have
shaped its attitudes and methods of dealing with weaker nations.
Here radical nationalism has been the greatest threat to American
interests; here the pattern of alliance with oligarchies was
established and paid economic and political dividends. The
dialectic of intervention that developed in South America

- 26 -

confirmed America's belief in the efficacy of violence as an
instrument of foreign policy.

4) *Belief in the efficacy of violence.* There has been some discussion in recent years of the role of violence in American culture. However, I have seen insufficient analysis of the extent to which a belief in the efficacy of violence appears to be an important aspect of the historical outlook and socialization in the U.S. As a newcomer, I was struck by the thematic consistency of films on American colonization ("Westerns") and American audiences' reactions to them. The whites are a human grouping in all their diversities, emotions and failings. Tension builds up around the pioneer group united by a common enterprise, threatened by an invisible, elemental enemy. The Indian is an outsider, and dehumanized. One does not learn of his family life, hopes, fears and grievances. Indians come in hordes, screaming primitives. White guns, strategically placed and skillfully fired, wipe them out. They fall in stylized movements which bring smiles or laughter to the audience. Efficiency and superior technology in the service of a mission overcomes the Indian; violence is seen as an instrument of national purpose.

At first one refuses to believe that this constitutes a fundamental source of socialization. But an examination of decades of school history texts confirms one's fears. In the texts there is some pity, but little self-examination, considerable chauvinism and self-righteousness, and much that conforms to the

- 27 -

TV version. There is some respect for the Indian but only in his role as a noble savage, an honor denied the Negro who suffered another form of violence, also as an excluded group. The Indians' extermination is accepted as the natural offering to manifest destiny. The destruction of a people and a culture has become the object of public entertainment and children's games. Instead of deriving a sense of tragedy from it, America has institutionalized even its genocide.

The violence which has been practiced against the Indian or the Negro is not genocidal in intent. It is instrumental, political and ethnocentric. Violence is seen as a natural vehicle for the attainment of societal goals, especially when it involves confrontation with culturally and racially alien groups who are often perceived as inferior and expendable. The belief in the efficacy of violence when reinforced by the feeling of racial superiority augments interventionist tendencies, brutalizes the resulting conflict beyond legal or necessary bounds, and also produces miscalculations regarding the will and tenacity of the enemy. All of these have been true in Vietnam. Asians as an alien and colored people are particularly vulnerable, which is one reason why a rapid military disengagement of the U.S. from Asian countries will be highly desirable.

**John King Fairbank:** The history of Sino-American relations also is part of the soft background of Vietnam. It involves the American image of China, the assumptions and expectations, the feelings about this area in the public mind.

In essence, I would say the American image of China grew up with the American expansion to the East involving missionaries, overseas trade, etc. This, in turn, produced an American-Chinese style of interaction.

In this regard, I would make only two points in relation to recent history. The first is that Vietnam is a continuation of this interaction, at least to some degree. Vietnam has in its background on the American side some relation to American benevolence toward China, fear of China, disappointment about China -- the combined love and hate feelings inherited from our nineteenth century contact. Vietnam is perhaps getting back at the Chinese for their going Communist, or it is standing firm against "the evil" that grew up in China. In short, it is a further round in our relationship with China.

Second, in the nature of our relationship with China, culture conflicts inevitably arose every time Americans and Chinese were in contact, because they were operating on different bases. The essence of the whole interaction was that when the culture conflict became insoluble, the West resorted to force -- Americans relied first on British

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gunboats, and eventually on American gunboats. In this context,
at least until very recently, the Chinese did most of the adjusting.

With the cultural conflict, a meeting on peaceful terms has
been impossible. So, part of the soft background provides a
feed-in to the American propensity toward violence. On the Chinese
side there is a tradition of Boxerism, as the treaty boys used to
call it, which reminds one very much of the Cultural Revolution,
destructive both against the established order and the foreigner
who is a part of it.

I raise all of this to indicate one of the dimensions of our
problem. We are talking about American psychological propensities.
The relationship with China is part of the American past, which
has triggered in Asia the case of Vietnam.

<table><tr><td>CLASS OF SERVICE</td></tr><tr><td>This is a fast message</td></tr><tr><td>unless its deferred char-</td></tr><tr><td>acter is indicated by the</td></tr><tr><td>proper symbol.</td></tr></table>

WESTERN UNION
TELEGRAM

®

<table><tr><td>SYMBOLS</td></tr><tr><td>DL = Day Letter</td></tr><tr><td>NL = Night Letter</td></tr><tr><td>LT = International<br/>Letter Telegram</td></tr></table>

[1C]

The filing time shown in the date line on domestic telegrams is LOCAL TIME at point of origin. Time of receipt is LOCAL TIME at point of destination

1133A EDT AUG 24 68 BA139 MA185

M-CCY048 CCZ3 CCZ3 NL PDB CHICAGO ILL AUG 23

PROF HENRY KISSINGER CENTER FOR INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

6 DIVINITY AVE HARVARD UNIVERSITY CAMBRIDGE MASS

HARPER AND ROWE IS GOING TO PUBLISH THE ENTIRE MANUSCRIPT
AS CORRECTED IN EARLY DECEMBER IN PAPERBACK AND HARDCOVER FORM
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY IS EXCERPTING SOME PARTS OF THE MANUSCRIPT
TO APPEAR IN THE NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER ISSUES WE ARE DELIGHTED
THE CONFERENCE WILL GET THE ATTENTION IT DESERVES
WILLIAM R POLK ADLAI STEVENSON INSTITUTE.

<table><tr><td>No.</td><td>To</td></tr><tr><td>By</td><td>To</td></tr><tr><td>At</td><td>To</td></tr><tr><td>Da 1097</td><td>cr</td></tr></table>

SF1201(R2-65)