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GOLDHAMMER

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3389 WORDS

KISSINGER NEWSWEEK ARTICLE 4/16/00

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

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

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The number of those involved in decisions shrinks to [the ones] still in a position to affect events, their solitude magnified because, the more severe the crisis, the fewer volunteers there are willing to assume responsibility.

Thus it was that, on that final day in April 1975, Ford and I were quite alone; he in the Oval Office, I in the Security Advisor's suite down the hall, interrupted only by the periodic phone call as the Pentagon reported the departure of each helicopter. Freed of other duties, we had become spectators of events we could no longer influence, suspended between a pain we could not still and a future we were not yet in a position to shape.

For those who [have] lived through it, any account must appear fragmentary and dominated by the perspective of wherever the author found himself as chaos concluded two? years of American efforts. For those who were spared the

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GOLDHAMMER

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

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

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GOLDHAMMER

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American exceptionalism - the faith in the universality of our values - and the impact this has had on the conduct of American foreign policy.

## Entering Indo China and Leaving It

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

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

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

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GOLDHAMMER

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commitment, or to the conventional wisdom that Indo China was
an essential outpost in the defense of liberty.

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

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

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

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

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