APR-15-2000 23:00

GOLDHAMMER

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decisions shrink to those who are still in a position to affect events, their solitude magnified because the more severe the crisis, the fewer volunteers are prepared to assume responsibility.

This was done on that final day in April 1975, quite so on this last day. Ford and I were alone; he in the Oval Office, I in the Security Advisor's suite down the hall, interrupted only by periodic phone calls as the Pentagon reported the departure of each helicopter. We were freed of all but the most spectaculous at events we could not fully influence; other duties, suspended between a pain we could not still and a future we were not yet in a position to shape.

It is impossible to recreate the mood of that period. For those who lived through it, any account must appear fragmentary, at least where the author found himself pasquinaded and dominated by the perspective of the author. For those who were spared the turmoil of the time, the passions will seem more intense, and the anguished writing of the writer of a comprehensible. And history is no help, since it replicates the schisms that opened up during that tragedy. Radical

107

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in permit of exceptionalism - the faith in the universality of its values - and material power. It pursued 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, *in spite of* a mixture of the experiences of World War II and a philosophy drawn from the New Deal, American strategy concentrated on stopping Soviet *economic + social progress* aggression and *closing the gap between expectation and reality* in regions under American protection to remove communist opportunities for internal upheavals. Though *in retrospect* the conduct of the Cold War is *presented as if based on a nearly unanimous consensus, there was always significant opposition, especially in the intellectual and academic communities, that* argued either that the Communist threat was exaggerated, or that the United States was associating with too many

9

APR-15-2000 23:00

GOLDHAMMER

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questionable regimes to sustain its claim as a defender of

liberty. But their critique was confined to the medium of specific policies + not to the validity of the American experience. But the advent of the Kennedy Administration, their containment policy was given its most sweeping formulation in

the new president's inaugural address, to the effect that the

> "[n]ot any country, meet any challenge, any United States would support any friend, 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 had recommended to his successor military intervention in Laos if North Kennedy recalled at his request, Vietnamese pressure continued. Within a month of his inauguration, Kennedy sent Marines to Thailand, adjoining Laos. He recoiled from intervening but when Hanoi opened a supply line to South Vietnam through Laotian territory and

10

APR-15-2000 23:00

GOLDHAMMER

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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. Though later on the decision was blamed on
Johnson, it was in fact Kennedy's closest advisers [the advisers]

Johnson, it was in fact Kennedy's closest advisers [Bundy,

McNamara and Rusk - who urged that step...

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, did

not work against guerrillas who could choose when to fight.
Nor would any defining military victory be

And none of the non-communist countries of Indo China could be

called a democracy by any stretch of the imagination. For
those who had entered the war, the result was growing

emotional insecurity and self-doubt, compounded by the

["APR-15-2000 23:01", "GOLDHAMMER", "212 4213934 P.08/18", "America's allies to challenging the worthiness of America, not", "only in Vietnam but globally.", "Vietnam became the first\nwar in which American forces\nwere in control of the enemy\ncapital & upper city during the war.\nBy the time Richard Nixon became President, the battle lines\nwere drawn. The demoralized Establishment, which had launched\nus into the quagmire, abdicated from the task of extrication\nfrom the field to the protesters, or joined them in the\nargument that extrication was prevented above all by the\nwarped mentality\nshort-sightedness and psychological warp of America's leaders.", "By the time Richard Nixon became President, the battle lines\nwere drawn. The demoralized Establishment, which had launched\nus into the quagmire, abdicated from the task of extrication\nfrom the field to the protesters, or joined them in the\nargument that extrication was prevented above all by the\nwarped mentality\nshort-sightedness and psychological warp of America's leaders.", "", "", "The radical protesters, certain of their moral superiority,\nsaw no need for restraint in the methods to pursue their aims.\nthey unchided rules of conduct asdinquent in their aims.\nIndeed\nthey unchided rules of conduct as inequitable", "By street demonstrations and deliberate undermining of all\nauthorities, from universities to the US government, which\nthey blamed for America's dilemma, they sought to wreck the\nalleged cause\nthey blamed

["APR-15-2000 23:01", "GOLDHAMMER", "212 4213934", "P.09/18", "9. The "great generation," did not have the qualities to bridge this gulf, if indeed it was bridgeable.", "But now that all the documents and the records of the negotiations [are available], some historians will sooner or later credit him for his effort not to compound defeat by Nixon's keep him dishonor. The liberal critique accuses him of needlessly prolonging the war, implying that there was some honorable way out that Nixon refused to take.", "But the records show without any ambiguity that the Nixon Administration offered withdrawal, starting with its first negotiations with the Vietnamese Politburo member Le Duc Tho. What the Nixon Administration would not accept was the overthrow of a government its predecessors had put into place in favor of a political process that guaranteed a Hanoi-dominated communist government, and the abandonment of all those who, in reliance on the words of our predecessors, had", "⑤"]

APR-15-2000 23:02

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12

- And, a new generation that does not remember nor has it experienced the Vietnam schism, and faces a world radically different from both the Cold War and the Vietnam protest

perceptions. This generation largely focused on economic issues, but not yet developed an ideology or a strategy for a world radically different from that of the Cold War. A few words about each of these.

combined

The Cold War policy represented a fusion of ideology and

strategy, a faith in the universality of American values

to preserve & defend this world until
allied to a strategy that prevented military pressures. When,
the collapse of Communism which was noticed inevitable
under the impact of Vietnam, this link weakened or evaporated,

the liberals and intellectuals retreated from the field of
strategy and redefined ideology in terms of "soft issues" such
as environment and human rights - which could be achieved
without the use of military power. Traditional American
strategy was vindicated by conservatives and neo-
conservatives. Always uncomfortable with commitments on
distant battlefields, the American right concentrated on

12

APR-15-2000 23:02

GOLDHAMMER

212 4213934

13

rigorous anti-communism in the field of ideology and extreme
toughness on negotiations dealing with strategic balance,
especially arms control negotiations. And in the Reagan
Administration against an adversary weakened by decades of
overextension, it achieved great successes.

But in the aftermath of Reagan, some of his acolytes 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. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the need for a national strategy adapted to the post-Cold War world has baffled many conservatives. Some are searching for an equivalent danger like the Soviet Union, in or to precise American exceptionalism with a global opposition to which all foreign policy can be organized. But the most useful target for this effort - China is as yet too weak, too unideological and its potential danger too distant to allow foreign policy to be organized on or to be mounted with this basis as a concert of powers.

APR-15-2000 23:02

GOLDHAMMER

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14

And the other alternative, the conduct of an ideological
foreign policy to spread human rights and democracy as a means
to establish an international order, confuses America's
necessary motivations with an achievable short-term policy. It
is unhistorical in the sense that organically pacific
democracies emerged only at the end of a long process of
evolution while, in the early stages of democratization, an
appeal to nationalism and ethnicity has frequently been used
as a unifying force, as for example in the case of Vladimir
Putin in Russia.

The end of a major adversary should neither lead to the
artificial evocation of one nor to the transformation of
American foreign policy into a crusade in pursuit of a
hegemony that 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

APR-15-2000 23:02

GOLDHAMMER

212 4213934

15
understand both
shape the world, it must also be able to define its interests
their
and its limits and not be afraid to define either.

But the greatest challenge to American foreign policy is the
conclusion the liberal community has drawn from the Vietnam
war, as exemplified by most of the key figures in the Clinton
Administration. They treat the Cold War as a misunderstanding
if not an American creation. They recoil before the concept of
national interest and shrink before the use of power when they
in the name of some
can present it as an "unselfish" cause, that is to say, no
more in the interest of America than of anyone else. On many

occasions, all over Africa, and in many places in Europe,

President Clinton has apologized for American support of
strategically describes as
militant improved
leaders due to its Cold War preoccupations. But where in

But the Cold War mental not an invention
and it's stated America's renewal. But
Africa did America suppress democratic alternatives since
in Africa
almost all the first generation leaders had emerged from the
independence struggle? And why should America apologize for

democratically enforces
e特别in force.

APR-15-2000 23:03

GOLDHAMMER

212 4213934

17

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
Symptomatic of the Administration's attitude is the
differential treatment of the two military operations of 1998-
in December 1998
99. 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 we bombed Yugoslavia for seventy
eight days even though the traditional American national interest was far
less clearly involved. And in each chase, the operation was
[undertaken] with a reluctance to accept casualties. What was
ultimately conveyed to the public [was] that no matter what
our leaders affirmed, any vital interest was at stake, since
Americans surely would not recoil from casualties in defense
of vital interests.

exceptionalism ~~the faith in the universality of its values~~
and material power. It pursued 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
amended ~~the Soviet advance into Europe~~ 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 closing the gap between economic progress
in regions under American protection to remove communist
opportunities for internal upheavals. Though in retrospect the
conduct of the Cold War is presented as if based on a nearly
unanimous consensus, there was always significant opposition,
especially in the intellectual and academic communities, that
argued either that the Communist threat was exaggerated, or
that the United States was associating with too many

p. 4

Apr 16 00 06:09

questionable regimes to sustain its claim as a defender of
liberty. But their cultique was confined to the wisdom of
experts, policies + not to the validity of the American expe-
By the advent of the Kennedy Administration, the
containment policy was given its most sweeping formulation in
the new president's inaugural address, to the effect that the
United States "would support any friend, 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 had recommended to
his successor military intervention in Laos if North
Kennedy recurred at some point to
Vietnamese pressure continued. Within a month of his
inauguration, Kennedy sent Marines to Thailand, adjoining
Laos. He recoiled from intervening but when Hanoi opened a
supply line to South Vietnam through Laotian territory and

g.d

Apr 16 00 06:06P

9. A man called Hanford
the "great generation," did not have the qualities to bridge
this gulf, if indeed it was bridgeable.

But now that all the documents and the records of the
negotiations are available, some historians will sooner or
sooner find it unseemly to question a president's later
credit with his effort not to compound defeat by
 dishonor. The liberal critique accuses him of needlessly
 prolonging the war, implying that there was some honorable way
out that Nixon refused to take.

But the records show without any ambiguity that the Nixon
Administration offered withdrawal, starting with its first
negotiations with the Vietnamese Politburo member Le Duc Tho.
What the Nixon Administration would not accept was the
overthrow of a government its predecessors had put into place
in favor of a political process that guaranteed a Hanoi-
人民的战争 will show that the Vietnamese opposed a
dominated communist government, and the abandonment of all
the millions
who, in reliance on the words of our predecessors, had
if they dare to permit it.

Apr 16 90 06:10p

6.p

c1c 4213334

P. 10/18

Hanoi's rejection of any variety of free choice for the people of Vietnam is seen for the prelude to an expropriation of one group by another. This is why, in 1975, Hanoi launched its first attack.

thrown in their lot with the United States. This is why, in
liberal and much media rendition of events, Nixon never

receives credit for having substantially carried out his

(while no one seems to observe that in most would have integrates
as involving unilateral withdrawal)

promise of extricating America from Vietnam; he reduced

American casualties from twelve hundred a month at the end of
the Johnson Administration to thirty a month at the end of

unilaterally, and then with a majority of American troops from five hundred

fifty thousand to thirty thousand. And of the twenty thousand
casualties Nixon is accused of sacrificing needlessly, twelve

thousand were incurred in the first years and nine thousand in
civilly populated areas of the most industrialized country in the
the first six months, when Hanoi launched an offensive before

the Administration was even organized.

Dear

President Lyndon B. Johnson

The political situation was matched by that in the intellectual
community. When I was in graduate school, intellectuals rarely

stretched beyond the intellectual community
achieved high positions in government. If they wanted to

affect policy, they had to write medium- or lengthy papers on

long-range issues.

p.10

Apr 16 00 06:11P

HFR-13-2000 2:02

13

But in the aftermath of Reagan, some of his associates
expertise in strategy emphasized 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. With the collapse of the
Soviet Union, the need for a national strategy adapted to the
post-Cold War world has baffled many conservatives. Some are
searching for an equivalent danger like the Soviet Union, in
order to promote American comprehension of the global
opposition to which all foreign policy can be organized. But
that must be the target for this effort.
China is as yet too weak, too unideological and its potential
danger too distant to allow foreign policy to be organized on
this basis as a concert of powers. —FEB 14

p.13

Apr 16 2006 06:12P

Apr 16 00 06:12p

leaders due to the Cold War preoccupations. But where in

Apr 16 00 06:12P

By the time Lichtenstein Symptomatic of the Administration's attitude is the differential treatment of the two military operations of 1998-1999. 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 we bombed Yugoslavia for seventy-eight days even though the traditional national interest was less clearly involved. And in each chase, the operation was [undertaken] with a reluctance to accept casualties. What was ultimately conveyed to the public was that no matter what our leaders affirmed, any vital interest was at stake, since Americans surely would not recoil from casualties in defense of vital interests.

2511 WORDS

KISSINGER NEWSWEEK ARTICLE 4/15/00

Former President Gerald Ford and I were reminiscing the other day about his Presidency and our respective reveries to the government. And we concluded that even the high points have a way of becoming remote with the passage of time. But one experience 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.

Movies and television present great crises in terms of frantic activity, with officious aides ripping telephones off the hook and shouting instructions to scurrying subordinates. In reality, crises are distinguished by the stillness that settles over the process. The number of those involved in

2

decisions shrinks to those who are still in a position to
affect events, their solitude magnified because the more
severe the crisis, the fewer volunteers are prepared to assume
responsibility.

So on this last day, Ford and I were alone; he in the Oval
Office, I in the Security Adviser's suite down the hall,
interrupted only by periodic phone calls as the Pentagon
reported the departure of each helicopter. We were freed of
other duties, suspended between a pain we could not still and
a future we were not yet in a position to shape.

It is impossible to recreate the mood of that period. For
those who lived through it, my account must appear fragmentary
and dominated by the perspective of the author. For those who
were spared the turmoil of the time, the passions will seem
incomprehensible. And history is no help, since it replicates
the schisms that opened up during that tragedy. Radical

(4)

3

critics endlessly repeat their version of bloodthirsty leaders pursuing a war to satisfy twisted psychologies. The right either ignores the war as a literal abdication or sublimates it in a strident anti-communism of converts to conservatism who had, in effect, been on the radical side while the war was going on.

I will therefore desist from dissecting the events that had brought us to this pass - shelves in libraries are filled with them. Nor can I do more than assert our sadness for the victims of the tragedy and melancholy for what America had done to itself. Instead, I will deal with what the trauma of Vietnam, of which the departure from Saigon was the culmination, did to the way American foreign policy has been conducted over time.

It was what has been described as the "great generation" that entered Indo China in the heyday of American

4

exceptionalism - the faith in the universality of its values -
and material power. It pursued 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
stopped the Soviet advance into Europe. 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 closing the gap between expectation and reality
in regions under American protection to remove communist
opportunities for internal upheavals. Though in retrospect the
conduct of the Cold War is presented as if based on a nearly
unanimous consensus, there was always significant opposition,
especially in the intellectual and academic communities, that
argued either that the Communist threat was exaggerated, or
that the United States was associating with too many

5

But the advent of the Kennedy Administration, the
containment policy was given its most sweeping formulation in
the new president's inaugural address, to the effect that the
United States "would support any friend, 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 had 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 but when Hanoi opened a
supply line to South Vietnam through Laotian territory and

O

intensified the guerrilla war, Kennedy sent sixteen thousand
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. Though later on the decision was blamed on
Johnson, it was in fact Kennedy's closest advisers - Bundy,
McNamara and Rusk - who urged that step.

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, did
not work against guerrillas who could choose when to fight.
And none of the non-communist countries of Indo China could be
called a democracy by any stretch of the imagination. For
those who had entered the war, the result was growing
emotional insecurity and self-doubt, compounded by the

7

assassination of Kennedy who made many of his acolytes doubt
the entire political process.

But while the leaders were host to paralysis, the critics
went ever further toward challenging the very basis of
American policy. Starting with the argument that the war was
unwinnable and that the cost of the war exceeded its benefits,
critics rapidly extended their critique from looking for an
honorable way out to two planes - that morally there was
little difference between Hanoi and Saigon, and that there was
no ideological basis for the war and, in time, that pursuit of
the war reflected not an error in judgment but a moral rot at
the core of the American system. 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 shifted from the worthiness of

(Y)

8

America's allies to challenging the worthiness of America, not
only in Vietnam but globally.

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
and left the field to the protesters, or joined them in the
argument that extrication was prevented above all by the
short-sightedness and psychological warp of America's leaders.
The radical protesters, certain of their moral superiority,
saw no need for restraint in the methods to pursue their aims.
By street demonstrations and deliberate undermining of all
authorities, from universities to the US government, which
they blamed for America's dilemma, they sought to wreck the
basis for any policy seeking to vindicate the values on which
America's post-World War II policy had been based. Nixon, who
for all his railing against the Establishment was a product of

9

9

But now that all the documents and the records of the
negotiations [are available], some historians will sooner or
later credit him for his effort not to compound defeat by
dishonor. The liberal critique accuses him of needlessly
prolonging the war, implying that there was some honorable way
out that Nixon refused to take.

But the records show without any ambiguity that the Nixon
Administration offered withdrawal, starting with its first
negotiations with the Vietnamese Politburo member Le Duc Tho.
What the Nixon Administration would not accept was the
overthrow of a government its predecessors had put into place
in favor of a political process that guaranteed a Hanoi-
dominated communist government and the abandonment of all
those who, in reliance on the words of our predecessors, had

10

[4]

10

thrown in their lot with the United States. This is why, in
liberal and much media rendition of events, Nixon never
receives credit for having substantially carried out his
promise of extricating America from Vietnam: he reduced
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 American troops from five hundred
fifty thousand to thirty thousand. And of the twenty thousand
casualties Nixon is accused of sacrificing needlessly, twelve
thousand were incurred in the first years and nine thousand in
the first six months, when Hanoi launched an offensive before
the Administration was even organized.

The political schism was matched by that 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 medium? or lengthy papers.

0

11

But with the advent of the Kennedy Administration, they
developed a sense for power, and with Kennedy's assassination
they sought to shape the immediate issues, splitting into job
applicants and revolutionaries. The job applicants replicated
the disuccisons of the policymakers and the revolutionaries
the arguments of the protest movement. In either case, they
contributed little to helping us escape from the tragedy.

The split has never been healed. Since the Vietnam war,
there have been three main currents in American foreign
policy.

- The remnants of the Cold War strategy of the 1950s and
  1960s, now enunciated mostly by conservative and neo-
  conservative groupings.

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

(4)

12

The Cold War policy represented a fusion of ideology and strategy, a faith in the universality of American values allied to a strategy that prevented military pressures. When, under the impact of Vietnam, this link weakened or evaporated, the liberals and intellectuals retreated from the field of strategy and redefined ideology in terms of "soft issues" such as environment and human rights - which could be achieved without the use of military power. Traditional American strategy was vindicated by conservatives and neo-conservatives. Always uncomfortable with commitments on distant battlefields, the American right concentrated on a

(4)

13

But in the aftermath of Reagan, some of his acolytes
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. With the collapse of the
Soviet Union, the need for a national strategy adapted to the
post-Cold War world has baffled many conservatives. Some are
searching for an equivalent danger like the Soviet Union, in
opposition to which all foreign policy can be organized. But
China is as yet too weak, too unideological and its potential
danger too distant to allow foreign policy to be organized on
this basis as a concert of powers.

9

14

O

15

shape the world, it must also be able to define its interests
and its limits and not be afraid to define either.

But the greatest challenge to American foreign policy is the
conclusion the liberal community has drawn from the Vietnam
war, as exemplified by most of the key figures in the Clinton
Administration. They treat the Cold War as a misunderstanding
if not an American creation. They recoil before the concept of
national interest and shrink before the use of power when they
can present it as an "unselfish" cause, that is to say, no
more in the interest of America than of anyone else. On many
occasions, all over Africa and in many places in Europe,
President Clinton has apologized for American support of
leaders due to its Cold War preoccupations. But where in
Africa did America suppress democratic alternatives since
almost all the first generation leaders had emerged from the
independence struggle? And why should America apologize for

O

16

hostility to an Iranian leader who legalized the Communist
party in the middle of the Korean war, when there was a world
wide fear of communist subversion?

The apologetic tone toward twenty years of American history
is matched by an uneasiness with the use of power. This is
illustrated by the difference with which America's
inconclusiveness in the Gulf war was treated as compared to
Kosovo. The Gulf war was conducted on behalf of the national
interest in uninterrupted supplies of oil for America and the
industrial democracies. But it received at best lukewarm
support from Congressional liberals, with the final vote in
the Senate very narrow.

On Kosovo, the attitudes were reversed. It was the
conservatives who inquired into the national interest and the
liberals who insisted that the absence of a purely American
interest was the ultimate justification for the enterprise.

98

17

Symptomatic of the Administration's attitude is the differential treatment of the two military operations of 1998-99. 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 we bombed Yugoslavia for seventy eight days even though the traditional national interest was less clearly involved. And in each chase, the operation was [undertaken] with a reluctance to accept casualties. What was ultimately conveyed to the public [was] that, no matter what our leaders affirmed, no vital interest was at stake since Americans surely would not recoil from casualties in defense of vital interests.

18

This is the legacy of Vietnam for the new generation emerging in positions of leadership in America. They are not obsessed by the debates of the Vietnam war, with which they are largely unfamiliar. They have no feelings of guilt about self-interest, which they pursue strenuously in their economic activities. But they have little knowledge of history or of national policy.

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 Washington. In part, this is due to the reluctance to enter a calling whose battles leave too many victims and which turns its political disputes into legal battles. This abdication from politics sees American exceptionalism turn? to a world that is run by more or less automatic economic forces, has been freed to a large extent of the dangers of general war and

10

19

in which the basic American national interest is to instruct
the rest of the world of the advantages of free trade, non-
proliferation and human rights. But when economic and military
power is coupled with condescension and righteousness,
dominance becomes grating and leadership comes to be conceived
as hegemony, which elicits resistance nearly automatically. In
a way, the emerging generation of American leaders is freed of
the legacy of Vietnam except in a fear of domestic convulsions
that recoils before decisive action and that, paradoxically by
its very ambivalence, makes those actions more necessary
(which is why the Clinton Administration has been drawn into
more military operations abroad than any previous
administration).

The basic trouble is that the post-Vietnam generation is
inheriting the vacuum created by the paralysis that the
Vietnam factional disputants have left. Economics will not

10

20

provide a refuge. The globalized world will emerge only by way
of dislocations and disequilibria that increasingly democratic
publics expect their political processes to handle. And these
processes are themselves 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. The proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction represents a challenge faced by no previous
society.

Embarrassment to deal with them on the basis of some concept
of national interest does not connote moral elevation so much
as progressive paralysis. That concept of national interest
would not be American if it did not derive motivation from
America's democratic tradition. But it must also be prepared
to face the need at some point for these questions.

10

21

What, for our survival, must we seek to prevent no matter
how it happens? What, to be true to ourselves, must we seek to
accomplish no matter how small the attainable consensus and,
if necessary, alone? What can we not accomplish alone? What is
essential? What desirable? What irrelevant?

We will not have overcome the Vietnam legacy until we can
achieve true national consensus on these issues. Our political
leaders may be able to avoid addressing them during the
campaign about to begin. But the winner will not be able to
escape them once he enters the Oval Office.

POLITICS

mantra that the Vietnamese Communists were Asian "Titoists". He argues that North Vietnam in its foreign policy was more like North Korea than Yugoslavia. My own primary research supports the view that unlike Belgrade, but like Pyongyang, Hanoi was never neutral in the struggle between East and West. Instead, the Hanoi leaders, who depised Tito, manoeuvred between Moscow and Beijing, while maintaining the view that the West was an incorrigible enemy.

A major strength of Lind's book lies in the author's ability carefully to rebut the many historical myths and logical nonsequiturs that have characterized the anti-war movement's position. For this pedagogically invaluable performance, the book deserves to be widely read.

But Lind's own argument has three basic weaknesses. First, in maintaining that America should have withdrawn after 1968, he does not explain why abandoning South Vietnam in 1969 would not have discredited American resolve more than it did in 1975, after six years' more commitment. Furthermore, in 1969 the political and economic stability of Vietnam's South-East Asian neighbours — the regional "dominoes" — was much more fragile than it was six years later. The Nixon administration's endurance clearly gave South-East Asia more time to get its political and economic houses in order.

Lind is also wrong in his contention that Nixon never had public support for the Vietnam commitment. He overlooks the important distinction between elite opinion and mass opinion, and fails to realize that Nixon, who like Johnson in 1968 lacked elite support for his Vietnam policy, retained mass support for it up until 1973. Only in 1973 did Watergate, not Vietnam, begin to destroy Nixon's domestic popularity, and with it his ability to pursue his foreign policies in Vietnam and elsewhere. Regrettably the myth that US presidents lacked popular support for their Vietnam policies pervades the entire political spectrum, and influences US foreign policy today.

Finally, Lind is not well grounded on military matters and has not brought new information to bear on the question — critical both to his own argument and those of his adversaries — of whether the war was winnable at a politically acceptable cost. His advocacy for the Johnson years of a focus on counter-insurgency fails to understand how such a strategy could have worked only if complemented by a conventional war strategy that kept North Vietnamese regular forces at bay. Most important, Lind is unfamiliar with the major military changes that did occur in South Vietnam from 1968 to 1973.

A partial attempt to rectify that failing comes from the new book by the military historian Lewis Sorley, *A Better War*. Sorley is the biographer of the late General Creighton Abrams — the man who succeeded General Westmoreland as commander of American troops in Vietnam. He argues that the United States and South Vietnam did much better in the war's later years than most Americans are aware of. He details changes that took place in American military strategies after the replacement of Westmoreland with Abrams in June 1968, especially the abandonment of the strategies of attrition and search-and-destroy, and of reliance on "body count" as a measure of success. In their place came a greater emphasis on defending population centres, attacks on the enemy's logistical supplies, and less use of artillery and air strikes on populated areas.

The South Vietnamese Government undertook mass mobilization of the nation's young men into the armed forces for the first time, emphasizing especially the expansion, training and rearming of regional and local forces, and arming of the rural population in part-time village militias. The much-maligned and

misunderstood Phoenix programme also played a role in "neutralizing" the VietCong infrastructure, mainly through defections and capture of soldiers and cadres, not assassinations, as the anti-war movement has claimed. The result was pacification of most of the countryside and the establishment of South Vietnamese government authority in most of the villages and hamlets, especially in the Mekong Delta rice-bowl.

Unfortunately, Sorley overstates his case. This is a pity, because, as one who visited South Vietnam in 1970 and 1972, I know that there is an important new case to be made that the United States and South Vietnam had made considerable progress between 1969 and 1973. But they had not won the war in late 1970, as Sorley argues. By 1971, they had established something close to victory over the armed guerrilla insurgency in most of the country. However, the conventional threat from North Vietnamese regular forces had not been eliminated. By September 1972, the US-South Vietnamese victory in the Easter Offensive had broken the offensive capability of the North Vietnamese for more than two years, but, for American domestic political reasons, that was not followed through to a final victory. North Vietnam was not forced to surrender.

Sorley relies to excess on the record of conversations and messages of General Abrams, US Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker and CIA chief William Colby, as well as on an enormous number of interviews with other senior officers. But one cannot write an objective military history based largely on the views of the field commanders of one side. Of course, Sorley could not quote from the secret conversations of General Giap and his commanders, which the Hanoi leaders will not reveal. But there was other important evidence available that he did not consult — for example, all of the captured secret Communist documents (not just the ones cited by General Abrams), and also the interrogation reports of prisoners and defectors that are available in the US National archives. Furthermore, he does not take sufficient advantage of the superb historical studies of Dale Andrade and Mike Moyar, and the vivid published memoirs of the intelligence operatives Stuart Herrington and Orrin DeForest. They give a more nuanced view of the situation, but would have buttressed a more modest argument for substantial military progress for the 1969–73 period.

Despite their revisionist bent, both Lind's and Sorley's books have been respectfully received, if not endorsed, in key segments of the American media. In part, this reaction, like the media's swooning celebration of the presidential candidacy of the former Vietnam war POW John McCain, reflects an important change in the intellectual climate of the United States compared with the 1970s and 80s. The rigid defence of the dogmas of the anti-war movement is now more confined to the academy. Still, as this discussion should have implied, the great book on the Vietnam war has yet to be written. The task is intellectually formidable, since it entails an understanding of the history of international relations during the Cold War, the political objectives of the Vietnamese Communists and their Soviet and Chinese patrons, the war's military history and strategies, and the domestic politics of both the United States and South Vietnam. Yet until such a book is written, both our understanding of one of the major events in the Cold War and the intelligent conduct of contemporary American foreign policy will continue to be handicapped by a cloud of historical mythology.

Stephen J. Morris is a Fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and author of *Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia*, 1999.

POLITICS

historical misrepresentation – for it falsified McNamara's historical record, not in order to excuse or justify his past, but rather in order to discredit it. For example, in 1995 McNamara asserted that during his years in office he thought that the Communist world was a monolith. The published record shows no such thing. On the contrary, McNamara's 1964 speech, widely circulated in *The Viet-Nam Reader* edited by Marcus Raskin and Bernard Fall, shows that McNamara then understood clearly the different aims and complex political relations of America's Soviet, Chinese and Vietnamese Communist adversaries.

The self-criticism of *In Retrospect* failed to gain McNamara moral absolution from his detractors. His search for such absolution then took him to Vietnam itself, for a conference to seek common intellectual ground with his former enemies. The result – the collectively authored *Argument Without End* – begins with a recognition that the twentieth century has been the bloodiest in human history. The fact that much of the century's killing was perpetrated by totalitarian regimes pursuing utopian ideological purposes at home and abroad does not occur to McNamara – a fact not without relevance to his current view of the Vietnam war. Instead, McNamara identifies the doctrine of power politics as the culprit. Then, without a hint of irony, he proposes ending world conflict through international dialogue and reliance on the United Nations.

These musings set the intellectual tone for

hension. The book attempts to use the methods of oral history with former policymakers from the United States and Communist Vietnam (former South Vietnamese policymakers were considered unworthy participants), in order to acquire new knowledge and understanding. All the American participants seem blissfully unaware that all the Vietnamese participants, as Communist Party members, were bound by party discipline, and unable to re-evaluate publicly the official party line on the war.

Professors James Blight of Brown University and Robert Brigham of Vassar College opine: "Compared with all other communist leaders of the twentieth century

Ho Chi Minh must rank as one of the least restricted by communist ideology." In so characterizing the one-time Comintern functionalist, Blight and Brigham ignore the fact that in the 1950s Ho invited Chinese cadres to help impose a Maoist dictatorship on Vietnam's "liberated zones", culminating in the deliberate massacre of tens of thousands of "landlords" and "counter-revolutionaries" during 1953-6. They also ignore the fact that all the major Vietnamese Communist institutions which Ho authorized – collectivized agriculture, nationalized industry, the People's Army, the Public Security Bureau with its overt and secret surveillance, and the forced-labour gulag – were copied from Communist models and remained intact until long after his death. Blight and Brigham offer a tendentious historical analysis full of false inferences, with gems like the following: "And nam-

South Vietnam – was really not at stake. What was at stake was only Johnson's personal credibility and his historical reputation. "He saw the war as a test of his own manliness."

Logevall's book shows prodigious research in American, British, French and Canadian archives. But the main focus of the book is a huge intellectual diversion. American public opinion was not well informed, hence not well respected, and could be rallied behind a policy decision by a President who had global strategic concerns as well as domestic politics on his mind. More important still, the NATO allies were not the allies whose opinions mattered most to the United States on this question. It was the Asian allies, especially the South-East Asian Asians, as well as the Australians and New Zealanders, whose security was at stake. And on their opinions Logevall tells us little. He knows that the Australians were unconditionally in favour of American intervention, but then asserts flatly that they were the only enthusiastic supporters. However, he is grossly uninformed on everyone else. Not only has he not done any archival research in Japan, Korea or South-East Asia, which would have been far more useful than archival research in Canada, Britain, France and Sweden; he has not even cited any secondary sources that have done such research on Asian foreign policies. And while he notes the military commitments of the South Koreans, Thais and Filipinos to the defence of South Vietnam, he dismisses the political significance of these actions by pointing to how America greatly compensated these allies financially for their efforts.

The implication is that their support was "bought" (thereby echoing the "mercenary" label applied to these troops by Hanoi propaganda). But how could the leaders of what were then poor Third World economies have contributed troops without American financial compensation?

Logevall also fails to enlighten us on the attitudes of America's major adversaries – the Soviets and Chinese – attitudes that were surely crucial to determining whether American credibility was at stake in Vietnam. Logevall tosses off opinions on Soviet and Chinese policy. But he has done no primary research in Soviet or Chinese archives, nor interviewed their policymakers of the time, depending instead on flimsy evidence from American sources. Any serious evaluation of the "domino theory" would also have to discuss the relationship of the Soviet Union, China and North Vietnam to Communist revolutionary movements in South-East Asia. It would also have to look at political, social and economic conditions in the South-East Asian countries to try and determine the likely prospects of Communist revolutionary success. On these crucial questions, Logevall has strong opinions, but again has done no original research. In a sense, Logevall, a Swedish national, has given us Vietnam as seen from the Foreign Ministry in Stockholm.

The "domino theory" and issues of American credibility are at the centre of a more important new book, by Michael Lind, *Vietnam: A necessary war*. It is a refreshingly original analysis that in many places is brilliant and persuasive, and in others clever but fundamentally flawed. Like most writers on the war, Lind argues that the intervention was an application of America's global policy of containment of Communism. But unlike most other writers, he regards that application as appropriate.

Lind applies realist theories of international politics to the Vietnam war with more sophistication than even realism's high priest, Hans Morgenthau, ever did. He argues that American intervention in Vietnam was, like the US commitments to Taiwan and South Korea, "justified by the need to demonstrate American

credibility both to America's enemies and to American allies and neutrals". He postulates that this credibility was established by the Johnson administration, but that, given the loss of public support for the war by 1968 (squandered by ineffective military strategies), the correct policy was to abandon South Vietnam in 1969, in order to preserve American public support for the other Cold War proxy conflicts with Moscow and Beijing that either were ongoing or were likely to ensue in the Third World.

Lind's book is not based on primary research. But, unlike Logevall, he uses secondary sources very effectively to address many of the central issues involved in the debate about the war. Lind carefully rebuts the anti-war movement's

Robert McNamara and General Vo Nguyen Giap at a four-day symposium on the Vietnam war, June 1997

*Argument Without End*, the ostensible purpose of which is to examine the purported "mindsets" of both sides during the war, in order to confirm McNamara's current assumption that the war could have been avoided and the purposes of both sides achieved, if only they had understood each other better. Unfortunately for McNamara, the Vietnamese Communists would not concur. General Vo Nguyen Giap stated at the conference:

> I don't believe we misunderstood you. You were the enemy; you wished to defeat us – to destroy us. So we were forced to fight you – to fight a people's war to reclaim our country from your neo-imperialist ally in Saigon ... and to reunify our country.

McNamara's humiliation was magnified when his Vietnamese hosts reneged on a promise to release secret documents on their own wartime decision-making – an act of bad faith that might have given some pause to McNamara's faith in the value of signed political agreements not backed by military power. But nowhere does McNamara grasp that the values and goals of the two sides were always incompatible.

But McNamara is not alone in his incompre-

ing the state Democratic Republic of Vietnam reflected in part the fact that the Vietnamese Revolution drew on sources more extensive than merely communist ideology." Just like the German Democratic Republic, no doubt.

A more conventional addition to the academic literature of anti-war history is Frederick Logevall's *Choosing War*. In his study, Logevall takes issue with the idea that Lyndon Johnson's 1965 commitment of combat troops to the war in Vietnam was inevitable. He argues that the tragedy in Vietnam was avoidable, because a negotiated settlement and face-saving withdrawal were possible in 1964-5, but that Johnson instead chose war. To establish this, he first shows that there were important dissenting opinions in the US Congress, the Democratic Party and the mass media, and that US public support for escalation was initially thin.

He also asserts that America's NATO allies were not in favour of military escalation, while her adversaries were interested in a political settlement. The "domino theory" is dismissed as a myth. From this, Logevall concludes that American credibility – the justification frequently cited off the record by all the American administrations for pursuing the commitment to

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Volume 1 in 2000: May and November, Institutions print and electronic: £60/$95, Individuals print only: £20/$30, BISA: £18/$25. ISSN 1468-1099

British Journal of Political Science

*British Journal of Political Science* is a broadly based journal aiming to cover developments across a wide range of countries and specialisms. Contributions are drawn from all fields of political science, and articles from scholars in related disciplines (sociology, social psychology, economics and philosophy) appear frequently.

Volume 30 in 2000: January, April, July and October, Institutions print and electronic: £111/$191. Individuals print only: £54/$92, BISA, PSA, APSA, ASA, AHA: £40/$50. ISSN 0007-1234

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-5-

TLS MARCH 24 2000

POLITICS

# A winnable war?

## Vietnam recanted and revisited

STEPHEN J. MORRIS

Robert S. McNamara et al

### ARGUMENT WITHOUT END

In search of answers to the Vietnam tragedy
479pp. Washington, DC: Public Affairs. $27.50.
1 8916 2022 3

Frederik Logevall

### CHOOSING WAR

The lost chance for peace and the escalation of war
in Vietnam
443pp. Berkeley: University of California Press;
distributed in the UK by Wiley, £21.95.
0 520 21511 7

Michael Lind

### VIETNAM THE NECESSARY WAR

A reinterpretation of America's most disastrous
military conflict
320pp. New York: Free Press. $25.
0 684 84254 8

Lewis Sorley

### A BETTER WAR

The unexamined victories and the final tragedy of
America's last years in Vietnam
528pp. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
$28.
0 15 100266 5

Few historical events have so haunted the memory of an entire generation of Americans as the Vietnam war. For those popularly defined as "baby boomers" - born between 1946 and 1955 - who now dominate American universities, mass media and national politics, the Vietnam war was the defining political event of their lives.

Yet a quarter-century after the end of that war, this generation remains profoundly divided in its understanding of the war. There were always two basic questions at issue for the United States in Vietnam. Did the outcome of the Vietnam war matter to the security of the United States? Was the Vietnam conflict winnable by the United States or its South Vietnamese ally at a politically acceptable cost? The different possible answers to each of these questions continue to divide most Americans.

On one side of the intellectual divide stand most of the academic community, especially historians of American foreign policy and of Vietnam, most of the American journalists who reported the war, and many of the now middle-aged, college-educated professionals and politicians who were educated with or grew up with them. Ever since the late 1960s, they had come to embrace the political perspectives of the American anti-war movement. The smaller, more radical segment always regarded the purpose of American involvement in the war as a crime; the larger, more moderate segment regarded it as a mistake. They have perceived the strategic value that a succession of American presidents had placed on the struggle for power in Vietnam, either as serving the American political-economic elites' desire for global eco-

nomic hegemony (the radicals) or as a misplaced application of the Cold War ideological conflict to a context in which it did not apply (the moderates). The Vietnamese Communist party was not seen primarily as a member of a global Communist movement, menacing to Western security, but instead as a primarily local political phenomenon – the legitimate standard-bearer of Vietnamese nationalism that sought merely to liberate its people from foreign domination. As a corollary, the South Vietnamese Government and its armed forces that fought against the Communists have always been perceived as an artificial creation of foreigners, lacking any domestic legitimacy. Corruption endemic in the South Vietnamese system was seen to be derived from the lack of any legitimate political purpose, and to have crippled the performance of South Vietnam's government and army. It was concluded that the war was unwinnable by the United States and its Vietnamese minions. These propositions have the force of dogma, especially in the universities, where research on American involvement in Vietnam treats them as axioms, rather than as contentious empirical propositions that deserve serious and critical examination.

On the opposite side of the political and cultural divide have resided the majority of military historians of Vietnam (mostly working in war colleges or independently). Their social following includes many of those who served in Vietnam in the American and South Vietnamese armed forces. The professional historians among them have been concerned less with the purposes of the war, the nature of Vietnamese Communism, and American and South Vietnamese politics, than with describing military events and explaining the successes and failures of the military strategies of both sides. Their interest in political questions has been confined mainly to civil-military relations during the war, and how those relations affected military decisions. Most American military historians implicitly reject the disdain of the academic and journalistic historians for American political purposes and their celebration of Vietnamese Communist virtue (though they respect the Communists' military prowess). Until recently, there has been little communication between the military historians on one side and the academic and journalistic historians on the other. This is remarkable, in that while the military historians' focus has been narrower, it has a bearing on broader questions because it addresses, and sometimes has challenged, the assumption of the war's unwinnability. Not so remarkable when one realizes that honours have been bestowed, in both academia and journalism, only upon writings on the Vietnam war that reaffirm at least some assumptions of the anti-war movement. And, until recently, derision and contempt have been the fate of those, like the academic Guenter Lewy and the essayist Norman Podhoretz, who have challenged those views.

Many former officials of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, who initiated American intervention in Vietnam, have come to embrace the views of the anti-war movement. Most striking has been the case of the former Defense Secretary Robert Strange McNamara. His 1995 mea culpa, *In Retrospect*, was a plea for forgiveness from his former critics (including his family). From a historical standpoint, the book had nothing new to say that was true. However, it did break new ground in the annals of

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INTERNATIONAL

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL THURSDAY, MARCH 16, 2000

Coming to Grips With Vietnam

By VIET D. DINH

This week William Cohen went to Viet-
nam, the first defense secretary to do so
since the end of the war. When asked
about the coincidence of his visit and the
25th anniversary of the war's end, Mr. Co-
hen replied that "there is no perfect time"
for such a visit. Yet there is little question
that the timing of his trip raises delicate
issues for America, for Vietnam and for
the millions of people affected by the con-
flict. Despite his unwillingness to admit
the awkwardness of the occasion, visits
like Mr. Cohen's are important.

For America, this year marks a quar-
ter century since our defeat. Despite all
the talk of healing, of mistakes, even of
apologies, Vietnam remains deeply in-
grained in the American psyche as a
gentle reminder of our fallibility. Events
such as last year's hanging of a Ho Chi
Minh portrait in Orange County, Calif.,
continue to prick at our national pride.

The Vietnamese government, mean-
while, would like to play up the anniv-
ersary to its own advantage. Thus, the
commemoration and celebration that
started on March 5 will continue past
the actual April 30 anniversary of
Saigon's fall.

But behind the jubilation lies a sub-
tle humility. For just as surely as Hanoi
won the war, it lost the peace. The same
postwar period that saw America rise as
the dominant world power witnessed the
decline of Vietnam into the ranks of the
poorest nations. The country has imple-
mented only limited economic reforms,
wary of what liberalization could mean to
the government's political control.

But this geopolitical analysis, which
has dominated recent commentary, ig-
nores the war's primary legacy—the mil-
lions of people whose lives were forever
changed by the conflict. The U.S. was not
alone in its defeat. Our ally, the Republic
of Vietnam, and more broadly the people
of Vietnam, also lost. The end of the war
marked the beginning of a new life for
hundreds of thousands of boat people—my
family among them—who risked their
lives to find freedom elsewhere. Those
who remained saw the continuation of war
via border conflicts with China and the
invasion of Cambodia, severe shortages
wrought by economic mismanagement,
and the loss of basic freedom and dignity.

So Mr. Cohen's denial that his trip is
awkward rings hollow. And yet another
high-level delegation-sponsored by the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial Foundation
and including Sen. Chuck Hagel (R., Neb.)
and various business leaders-plans to
visit Vietnam in the middle of commemora-
tive activities. I have agreed to accom-
pany them. Why?

At least for me, the reasons lie in poten-
tial unrealized and promise unfulfilled.
Fortuitous public compassion made me a
U.S. citizen, a rider on the wave of prosper-

ity. But the people of Vietnam remain the
most impoverished in the world. Per cap-
ita income there hovers around $300 a
year, less than two shares of Yahoo!

In 1996 I returned to Vietnam for the
first time since escaping in 1978. What
struck me, aside from the prevalence of
foreign business interests, was the degree
of entrepreneurial activity among the peo-
ple. Not a day passed when I was not ac-
costed by a local businessman seeking in-
vestments or contacts that would make
him a participant in the postembargo econ-
omy. There is no question of capitalist de-
sire, and on any street the pace of commer-
cial activity is pitched.

But activity to what end? Fitful efforts
at reform have yet to produce the eco-
nomic and legal infrastructure necessary
to enable long-term commitments or sus-
tain investments. In January, The Econo-
mist magazine bid "Goodnight, Vietnam"
when it chronicled this "rags to riches to
rags" story.

High-level visits such as those by Mr.
Cohen and Sen. Hagel promise a new chap-

ter in this continuing story. They can en-
courage the signing and full implementa-
tion of a bilateral trade agreement be-
tween the U.S. and Vietnam that contem-
plates the systemic reforms necessary for
economic development. Sen. Hagel's dele-
gation is also expected to launch initia-
tives to assist Vietnam's educational and
technological development. Among them
are a series on the fundamentals of mar-
ket economics to be broadcast over state
television, the donation of computers and
printers for youths, and contributions to
provide wireless broadband Internet
access to some regions. Such visits
may help win the hearts and minds of
a younger generation of Vietnamese
who are less likely to view America as
the enemy.

But the benefits of these visits come
with a very real danger. The Vietnam-
ese government is in the middle of a
propaganda campaign to commemo-
rate its victory of 25 years ago. Wit-
tingly or not, the U.S. delegations may
be used in this effort to validate the
regime's mistakes and abuses. Mr. Co-
hen was right to reject suggestions of
an apology to Vietnam and to concen-
trate on moving relations forward. But
the tension between working toward a
prosperous future and glorifying a re-
grettable past will not disappear.

At best it can be carefully managed,
and for a strict isolationist or a casual
apologist the task of handling this tension
would be easy. But those who believe in
change through engagement must walk a
tightrope that ensures our efforts will
serve our ultimate goals. Those goals are
the same ones that led us to fight in Viet-
nam and in other arenas throughout to
Cold War—advancing U.S. strategic inter-
est, respect for the rights of man, and the
betterment of life for people everywhere.

Henry Kissinger observed that, in post-
Cold War diplomacy, paths are made by
walking. Kudos to leaders like Messrs. Co-
hen and Hagel who have the courage to
take the walk. But if discretion is the bet-
ter part of valor, we should all be wary of
the political and emotional minefield
through which the narrow path traverses.

Mr. Dinh is deputy director of Asian law
and policy studies at Georgetown Univer-
sity Law Center.

AP Photo/Richard Vogel

Victor and vanquished—but which is which?