secrets (Ellsberg)
Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers
by Daniel Ellsberg
Ellsberg, Daniel.
Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers / daniel ellsberg.
1. vietnamese conflict, 1961─1975──unitd states.
2. pentagon papers.
3. ellsberg, daniel
DS558 .E44 2002
959.704'3373──dc21
Adobe garamond
Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers, 2002
(Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers / daniel ellsberg., 1. vietnamese conflict, 1961─1975──unitd states., 2. pentagon papers., 3. ellsberg, daniel., DS558 .E44 2002, 959.704'3373──dc21, 2002, )
www.ellsberg.net
chapter 1
The tonkin gulf : August 1964
p.10
As negative evidence accumulated, within a few days it came to seem less likely that any attack had occurred on August 4; by 1967 it seemed almost certain there had been no second, by 1971 I was convinced of that beyond reasonable doubt. (in 1966 credible testimony from captured North Vietnamese officers who had participated in the August 2 attack refuted any attack on August 4. IN late 1970 journalist Anthony Austin discovered and gave me evidence that intercepted North Vietnamese cables supposedly confirming an August 4 attack actually referred to the attack on August 2. Finally, in 1981 journalist Robert Scheer convinced Herrick ── with new evidence from his ship's log ── that his long-held belief in the first torpedo report was unfounded.)
However, on August 4, given Herrick's repeated assurances and those of a number of seamen over the next few hours, I concluded that afternoon, along with everyone else I spoke to, that there probably had been an attack of some sort.
At the same time, there was clearly a good chance that there had been been none.
•─‘’“”
p.13
But before the August 2 incident the Maddox had been frequently 8 miles from the North Vietnamese mainland and 4 miles from their islands. The purpose of this was not merely to demonstrate that we rejected their claims of limits on our “freedom of the seas” but to provoke them into turning on coast defense radar so that our destroyers could plot their defenses, in preparation for possible air or sea attacks. Thus it was true that the August attack had been 28 miles out to sea, but that was because a warning attack when the Maddox was just 10 miles from the coast had led the skipper to change course and to head out to sea, with torpedo boats in pursuit.
p.13
In top secret testimony to congressional committees in close hearings over the next two days, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and McNamara acknowledged such attacks but insisted that they could not realistically be considered U.S. provocations that justified or were intended to evoke North Vietnamese counter attacks because they were entirely “South vietnamese” operations, run by the South Vietnamese navy, aimed at stopping infiltration from the North.
p.13
Each of these assertions was false.
•─‘’“”
pp.13─14
In my new job I was reading the daily transcripts of this secret testimony, and at the same time I was learning from cables, reports, and discussion in the Pentagon the background that gave the lie to virtually everything told both to the public and, more elaborately, to Congress in secret session.
Within days I knew that the commander of the destroyers not only knew of the covert raids but had requested that his patrol be curtailed or terminated after the first attack on August 2 because he expected retaliatory attacks on his vessels as a result of the raids. He request was denied. Moreover, I learned, these weren't South Vietnamese operations at all, not event joint operations. They were entirely U.S. operations, code-named 34A ops.
p.14
For the raids against North Vietnam, of which Hanoi had publicly complained, the United States owned the fast patrol boats known as Nastys (which the CIA had purchased from Norway), hired the crews, and controlled every aspect of the operations.
p.14
For one thing, the DeSoto missions in that particular area were timed to take advantage, in their plotting of coastal radars and interception communications, of the heightened activity that was triggered in North Vietnamese coastal defenses by the 34A raids.
pp.15─16
Some of these operational details, such as the placement of anti personnel weapons and 81-mm mortar rounds, might have seemed rather petty to be occupying the attention of these officials, but this was the only war we had. Of course it was precisely the “sensitive” nature of the operations ── their illegality, the danger both of exposure and of escalation, and their covertness, defined as “plausible deniability” ── that required such high-level officials to lie to the Senate if questions were raised and therefore to need such detailed prior awareness and control of what it was they would to lie about.
This wasn't the end of the coordination in Washington. After a monthly program like this was approved, General William Westmoreland, U.S. military commander in Vietnam, requested approval for execution of each individual maritime mission, and I again carried these around for approval. When an attack that had earlier been approved in Washington for the following month actually took place ── the exact timing would depend on weather and sea condition ── that fact and its results were reported back to Washington before another attack was approved by Washington. On August 2, during the Sunday morning meeting in which President Johnson was told of the daylight attack on the Maddox, there was discussion of the results of the July 31 covert attack on the islands, and the president personally approved the next proposed covert raids, for the nights of August 3 and August 5.
•─‘’“”
p.16
There was some unease expressed regarding the unusually vague and open-ended scope of the resolution drafted by the administration. Senator Wayne Morse called it a predated declaration of war.
p.16
On the evening of the 4th, at an NSC (national security council) meeting when the president asked, “Do they want war by attacking our ships in the middle of the Gulf of Tonkin?” Director of Central Intelligence John McCone answered: “No. The North Vietnamese are reacting defensively to our [sic] attack on their off-shore islands. They are responding out of pride and on the basis of defense considerations.” He was referring to the July 31 raids, but his answer covered the supposed attack that morning, since there had been another raid, this time on the North Vietnamese mainland, the night before.
p.16
On August 7 Congress approved the Tonkin Gulf Resolution,
•─‘’“”
p.17
Several senators,
George McGovern, Frank Church, Albert Gore, and the Republican John Cooper, had expressed the same concern as Nelson.
Fullbright acknowledge that the language was broad enough to permit the president to launch direct combat involvement, including U.S. infantry divisions, which was what worried them. But they accepted Fullbright's assurances ── reflecting his talks with officials including the president ── that there was no consideration in the administration of using the resolution as an authorization for changing the American role in the war. He had “no doubt that the president will consult with Congress in case a major change in present policy becomes necessary.”
p.17
Fullbright's assurances, all of them, were as unfounded as those of Johnson, Rusk, and McNamara. The difference was that he didn't know it.
He had been deceived, and in turn, unwittingly, he misled the Senate. Of all the week's deceptions, these were by far the most significant.
pp.17─18
pp.19─20
Pham Van Dong
Then he had said that the prospect for the United States and its friends in South Vietnam was “sans issue”: no way out, a dead end. Now, in the aftermath of the American raids, he said that the United States had found “it is necessary to carry the war to the North in order to find a way out of the impassed ... in the south.”
He had gotten the message. (It remained a secret from the American electorate, and from Congress, for the next 8 months.) A wider war on the way.
pp.29─30
I came back to Harvard to do independent research, as a junior fellow in the Society of Fellows, in the area that had most interested me since my senior year in college (when, at the advice of my faculty adviser, I had switched my special field from labor to economic theory). I had became fascinated with the new field of decision theory, the abstract analysis of decision making under uncertainty. My degree was in economics, and I had written my senior economics honors thesis and was later to write a Ph.D. thesis on the question of how to describe and understand, and perhaps to improve, the way people make choices when they are uncertain of the consequences of their actions. That included situations of conflict in which the uncertainty partly pertained to the choices of an adversary, the subject of so-called game theory or bargaining theory.
All this had obvious relevance to military decisions, along with others.
29 Ph.D. thesis: Ellsberg, Risk, ambiguity and decision.
30 uncertain of the consequences: Ellsberg, “Theories of rational choice ...”; Risk, ambiguity and decision.
Daniel Ellsberg., “Theories of rational choice under uncertainty: the contributions of von Neumann and Morgenstern.” Senior honors thesis, Harvard university, 1952.
•─‘’“”
pp.32─33
reflected intelligence estimates of both Soviet intentions and capabilities that made the acceptance of such risks appear necessary to deter a Soviet surprise attack.
However, in the fall of 1961 a highly secret, dramatically revised national intelligence estimate turned the strategic world that had preoccupied me for three years upside down. The missile gap favoring the Soviets had been a fantasy. There was a gap, all right, but it was currently ten to one in our favor. Our 40 Atlas and Titan ICBMs were matched by 4 Soviet SS-6 ICBMs at one launching site at Plesetsk, not by 120, as in the latest national estimate in June, or by the SAC commander's estimate of 1,000 I had heard of at SAC headquarters in August. THe specter of a deliberate Soviet surprise attack suddenly appeared, with the new estimates, to have been a chimera.
For me, reading this estimate in late 1961 had the same shocking effect on my professional worldview as, in a much more restricted context, reading the Herrick cable did three years later. Like that, it might be appropriately have signaled throughout the government's national security apparatus: Stop engines! Investigate in daylight! Reconsider best course! But it didn't.
Like the Herrick cable, the new estimate was kept effectively secret (by me, among others) from Congress, the press, and the public, and it had a comparably imperceptible effect on military programs.
It was after this secret recognition that the Soviets had deployed four liquid-fueled ICBMs to our forty that the Kennedy administration decided, in the late fall of 1961, on the appropriate size for the projected force of U.S. solid-fueled Minuteman missiles: one thousand.
That was less than 1600 to 6000 that the air force had earlier requested, but it was down only to the level that Secretary McNamara had earlier decided on before the new estimate.
pp.29─30
29 senior economics honors thesis: Ellsberg. “Theories of Rational Choice ...,” published partially in Ellsberg, “Classic and current notions ...”;
Ellsberg, “Theory of the reluctant duelist.”
Daniel Ellsberg., “Theories of rational choice under uncertainty: the contributions of von Neumann and Morgenstern.” Senior honors thesis, Harvard university, 1952.
29 Ph.D. thesis: Ellsberg, Risk, ambiguity and decision.
30 uncertain of the consequences: Ellsberg, “Theories of rational choice ...”; Risk, ambiguity and decision.
30 bargaining theory: “The theory and practice of blackmail.”
•─‘’“”
pp.34─35
I spent the first half of 1964 in Washington, as a RAND researcher working on a project that reflected my concerns arising out of the missile crisis. I proposed to explore dangerous patterns in governmental decision making and “communications” ── explicit or tacit and inadvertent ── between governments in nuclear crises. I was not a historian, and I had no interest in producing detailed case histories of particular incidents. I knew that such histories existed, on a highly classified basis, within various branches of the government. What I wanted, and what I got,
was access to an array of these, covering a range of crises, so that I could do comparative analyses. I was looking for problematic patterns that might improve the president's understanding and control of his own bureaucracy and its interactions with an opposing one, in ways that could help him reduce the likelihood of disaster.
I had conceived his project in 1963, expecting it to keep me in Washington only temporarily. << skip the rest of the paragraph >>
An inter agency panel consisting of officials just below the highest level in State, Defense, the CIA, and the Joint Chief of Staff was convened for me by Walt Rostow, chairman of the policy planning staff in the State Department, to sponsor my research. Each had undertaken to facilitate my access to classified studies in his respective agency, dealing with such past international events as the missile crisis, Berlin, Suez, Lebanon, the Taiwan Strait crises, the U-2 shootdowns, and Laos. Some of these studies were classified higher than top secret, and I was granted special clearances so I could see them.
Six months into this research, drawing in particular on a number of detailed studies of the Cuban missile crisis, I had arrived at what I thought were some important tentative conclusions.
I made a partial report to Rostow's interagency discussion group, but what I learned in this period, along with what I had learned in the previous six years, most of it little known to the public, is a long story that remains to be told elsewhere. Meanwhile I was looking forward to at least six months of investigation, working out of Pentagon offices, on the RAND payroll.
p.39
NoDis, referring to an office or offices specified, corresponded to eyes only for an individual or a set of individuals, supposed to be seen “only by the eyes of” the addressees named. The point was to control and direct who knew ── and shouldn't know ── in an elaborate hierarchy of responsibility and secrecy.
I was never a person named in the list of addressees of an eyes only message, nor, for that matter, was John McNaughton usually on the list. When I saw that stamp or heading, I was looking at a copy of a document that in principle, according to the designator, wasn't supposed to be copied at all, or to be seen by me or my boss. Nor was International Security Affairs or its assistant secretary (let alone his special assistant) very often among the addressess of a NoDis State dispatch. Usually no one in the Pentagon, even the secretary, was listed for receiving one of these relatively infrequent messages, which tended to be addressed to the secretary of state or the president. But there it was, in front of me, from the message center. Obviously, NoDis and eyes only were, in practice, relative terms, intended (one had to assume that the senders knew this, from their own experience) to cut the number of people who saw a particular secret or top secret message from thousands or hundreds down to scores or even dozens (apart from secretaries or couriers or special assistants).
To get below even that, senders sometimes put rather desperate warnings in the heading, in capitals, “Literally eyes only of the secretary” or “the President”. I was aware of this of course because I was reading it, and I hadn't stolen it, nor had I made the copy that I was reading.
•─‘’“”
pp.39─40
I gave him the cable number and mentioned that it was from a new series of weekly reports the ambassador was sending personally. It had a special slug, or code word, to designate the series, limiting the distribution, presumably very severely. But I was getting my own copy, as was McNaughton. I told Forrestal these were very interesting, and he should make sure he got on the list.
p.40
(The only sense I could make subsequently of the sensitivity on this was that the code word list must have been devised at Ambassador Maxwell Taylor's request ── for some personal reason that I never learned ── to allow him to communicate to his two bosses in private, specifically keeping the information from his former White House colleague Forrestal.)
p.40
Meanwhile he paid a continuing price for my error. This particular set of messages was no longer sent to his office. Only one copy of these came to the Pentagon, to Secretary McNamara's office. McNaughton had to go there to read the copies, on a clipboard from which he couldn't remove them.
That's how you learn.
•─‘’“”
p.43
Actually, what had made that line usable, as I had suspected, was that it pointed toward an area of covert intelligence collection whose secrecy our own reporters would almost surely respect without trying to penetrate further.
p.43
It is a common place that “you can't keep secrets in Washington” or “in a democracy”, that “no matter how sensitive the secret, you're likely to read it the next day in the New York Times”. These truisms are flatly false. They are in fact cover stories, ways of flattering and misleading journalists and their readers, part of the process of keep secrets well. Of course eventually many secrets do get out that wouldn't in a fully totalitarian society. Bureaucratic rivalries, especially over budget shares, lead to leaks. Moreover, to a certain extent the ability to keep secret for a given amount of time diminishes with the number of people who know it. As secret keepers like to say, “Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.” But the fact is that the overwhelming majority of secrets do not leak to the American public.
This is true even when the information withheld is well known to an enemy and when it is clearly essential to the functioning of the congressional war power and to any democratic control of foreign policy. The reality unknown to the public and to most members of congress and the press is that secrets that would be of the greatest import to many of them can be kept from them reliably for decades by the executive branch, even though they are known to thousands of insiders. (see chapter 3.)
p.45
McNaughton, who as a law school professor had written a standard textbook on evidence, had extreme powers of concentration. So did I, for that matter, but I was used to focusing for long periods, not just hours but days and months, on a particular subject area.
p.45
He had a ritual that I saw him do hundreds of times; I think it was not just a joke but a self-focusing device that was more than symbolic. After taking the 35 minutes he had explicitly allotted to look a pile of papers on a particular problem that had been “staffed out” for his attention and decision ── tabbed for background papers, relevant cables and estimates, and alternative options and analyses of them for choice ── signing off on an option or checking off an “Agree” or “No” box listed for him by a deputy or bureau head, or asking for more work or information, he would look up at the clock and push that pile away from him on the desk. Next he would put his hands, fingers extended, on either side of his head, pause for a moment, then with a decisive motion of his forearms swivel his head to face another pile on which he had to concentrate next, on another part of the desk. Sometimes he would look up and grin at me after he did this, but I often saw him doing it, through the doorway, when there was no one else in the office.
It was his way of deleting from his mind, his short-term storage, what he had just been focusing on and turning his full attention to an entirely different subject that demanded the next 27 minutes.
pp.62─63
It was popularly understood that the legacy of the Korean stalemate was a “never again” club in the u.s. army, meaning “Never again a land war in Asia”. I knew from my earlier work on war planning that the real meaning of that motto was “Never again a land war with China without nuclear weapons.” The files I read in McNaughton's office made it clear that lesson was still doctrine. And not only (though mainly) among the military. Secretary of state Dean Rusk (who had been assistant secretary for the Far east during the first two years of the Korean war) could not have agreed more. In a conference with Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in Saigon in mid-April 1964, he had cited the formular in so many words: “We are not going to take on the masses of Red China with our limited manpower in a conventional war.”
pp.79─81
McNaughton kept next to his desk a bookstand with a row of his most frequently referred to and most sensitive directives, cables, estimates, and memoranda compiled into separate binders and three-ring notebooks. It was on rollers, so that when he left late each evening it could be easily moved from his desk into the closet-size, floor-to-ceiling safe that lined the outer wall of his room, along with the library shelves of classified documents stored there. Each morning before he arrived, his military aide unlocked the safe, which had a top secret combination lock, and wheeled his stand of personal reading materials over to his desk, so that he could reach a reference file easily from his chair.
I had access to the materials on this shelf, as I did to anything in the piles of paper on John's desk. But since he wanted instant access to these when he was at his desk, I rarely, if ever, took one of these binders out of his office into my cubbyhole a few steps away. I had copies of most of these same materials in my own safe. But if I needed to refer to something on his personal shelf, I would walk into his office ── if he didn't have a red light showing in the row of lights above his door ── pull it out, and look at it, standing next to his desk, while he worked away. His power of concentration was such that this didn't bother him, if it was carried out quietly and without my saying anything to him. Even so, I generally did that when he wasn't in the office. Since I often worked later than he did, I had the combination to his closet safe, so I could wheel the stand back into it when I was ready to leave the office. As far as I knew, the only others who had that combination, apart from John, were his military aides.
One day in the late spring his chief military aide abruptly left the office. I never heard an explanation for his apparent firing, but the first sign was that his assistant, the junior military aide, gave me a new combination to McNaughton's office safe. It had been changed that morning, the day of the colonel's departure. Sometime before that, though I hadn't made any connection at the time, John had pointed out to me a large binder at the lefthand end of his personal shelf that he asked me not to look in. The label on it was something to the effect of “Vietnam, McNaughton eyes only”. I could use anything else on the stand or in his files, but these were really for his eyes only. He told me it held papers that he had been directed not to share with anyone else at all, and in this case that included me.
•─‘’“”
p.81
For a number of such nights, I didn't think of looking into the binder that was out of bounds. But John was asking me not to look at high-level policy papers, on Vietnam, in 1965, never to try to find out what was really going on among the “principals”, what they were considering and proposing, what they were writing to one another, even when, it seemed, I could do so without anyone's knowing.
p.85
•─‘’“”
p.91
He got an answer, from General Wallace Greene, commandant of the Marine corps; it wasn't the answer a president facing reelection in three years would want to hear, but he couldn't ask for a clearer one. Greene rephrased the question and answered it: “How long will it take? Five years, plus 500,000 troops.” He added, “I think the American people will back you.”
No one around the table contradicted him or suggested a lower ceiling for troops.
p.92
Yes, we are proposing that we start something we simply can't finish in two or three years. Nor was this the first time Johnson had heard this estimate from the highest military authorities. As early as March 15, 1965, General Harold K. Johnson, chief of staff of the army, had reported to him personally, after a trip to Vietnam at the president's request, that to win the war could take five hundred thousand U.S. troops and five years. Now the president was hearing the same estimate from the commandant of the Marine corps, only with “could” changed to “will”.
p.82
Bundy and George Ball, both written before the night that I glanced at and failed to read them. (I first saw them when they were published 17 years later.)
Bundy's, dated June 30, 1965, was a detailed criticism of McNamara's recommendations of June 26 (drafted by McNaughton), more cogent and devestating than anything I read at the time. His summary response to McNamara's proposals: “My first reaction is that this program is rash to the point of folly.”
A Ball memo of July 1, attacking the rationale for either the JCS or the McNamara-Johnson strategy and proposing a detailed alternative toward extrication, presented the president with extraordinarily prescient judgements:
<block quote beings>
The South vietnamese are loosing the war to the Viet cong. No one can assure you that we can beat the Viet cong or even force them to the conference table on our term no matter how many hundred thousand white foreign (u.s.) troops are deploy.
No one has demonstrated that a white ground force of whatever size can win a guerrilla war ── which is at the same time a civil war between Asians ── in jungle terrain in the midst of a population that refuses cooperation to the white forces (and the SVN) and thus provides a great intelligence advantage to the other side ...
[Such a war will be] almost certainly a protracted war involving an open ended commitment to direct combat they will begin to take heavy casualties in a war they are ill equipped to fight in a noncooperative if not downright hostile country side.
Once we suffer large casualties we will have started a well-nigh irreversible process. Our involvement will be so great that we cannot ── without national humilitation ── stop short of achieving our complete objectives. Of the two possibilities I think humiliation would be more likely than the achievement of our objectives ── even after we had paid terrible costs.
<block quote ends>
─“”
p.83
Thus, Clark Clifford, one of Johnson's closet personal consultants, face-to-face with the president and Robert McNamara at Camp David, July 23, 1965:
<block quote beings>
I don't believe we can win in SOuth vietnam. If we send in 100,000 men, the North vietnamese will meet us. And when they run out of troops, the Chinese will send in “volunteers”. Russia and China don't intend for us to win the war. If we lose 50,000 men there, it will be catastrophic in this country. Five years, billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of men ── this is not for us .... I can't see anything but catastrophe for our nation in this area.
<block quote ends>
Advice to a president, or foresight, doesn't come any better. The urgent counsel by all these men were not merely to avoid further escalation but to cut losses and extricate the united states entirely from the war.
─“”
p.83
The fact that the president enjoyed access to advice like this from men like these was the longest and best-kept secret of the Johnson Vietnam era.
p.83
That revelation would burden the president with personal responsibility for all that followed from his decision to reject their alternative. Hence the need to keep this advice unusually secret from Congress, from the public, and even from the people like me in his own bureaucracy.
p.92
Five hundred thousand plus three hundred thousand: That was getting close to a million, in the very real contingency of Chinese entry. But even without the Chinese involvement, figures in the neighborhood of a million had been mentioned earlier that summer. According to David Halberstam, the president asked General Wheeler in June what he thought it would take to do the job. Wheeler replied: “It all depends on what your definition of the job is, Mr. President. If you intend to drive the last Vietcong out of Vietnam it will take seven hundred, eight hundred thousand, a million men and about seven years.” In a discussion with Clark Clifford [one of Johnson's closest personal consultants, Clifford later replaced McNamara as SecDef, secretary of defense] and the president later that month, Wheeler used the figures 750,000 and six or seven years.
─“”
p.115
casualties would jeopardize his fragile base of support.
p.116
Lieutenant Colonel Tran Ngoc Chau.
For instance, he set up what he called census grievance teams, which went from hamlet to hamlet, finding out about the local grievances of the people and the projects they wanted to support.
p.119
─“”
p.121
It got dark almost immediately. It was a sunny day, but the sky had disappeared. I had heard about double- and triple-canopy forests before, but I'd never been in one. It meant there were several consecutive layers of foliage, corresponding to different types of trees of different heights, each layers interweaving like a separate ceiling. I saw what the advisers in Xuan Loc ahd meant when they said they'd never seen this road from above. The word “jungle” was used rather loosely in Vietnam for what often seemed better called forest or swamp, but this was a storybook jungle.
The road through it was narrow and winding, so we couldn't see very far ahead in the gloom. It was as if a tunnel had been cut through one large bush. I had never seen anything like this. During years of war this road hadn't been kept up, and the jungle had pressed in on it so that in most places it was just wide enough for a single vehicle. I wondered what we would do if we met one coming the other way, let alone if there was an ambush. I had a feeling in some patches that if I stuck my arm out the window into the tangle of foliage just outside, I wouldn't get it back. Not only were we closed in by green walls on either side, but there was usually one facing us about fifty yards ahead at a bend in the road. I was thinking that it would only take one person behind the foliage at one of those curves with an automatic weapon to stop a battalion on this one-way track. Choppers couldn't find him from above, and it would take a long time for infantry to outflank him, if they could get off the road at all.
p.122
An officer asked us when we'd arrived; he hadn't heard a chopper come in. We said we hadn't come by chopper. At that point he looked outside and saw our dirty, unfamiliar vehicle. He did a double take, and asked, “Did you guys drive here?” John said, yes,
from Saigon that morning, through Xuan Loc.
Other advisers gathered around, looking at us as though we'd traveled through time. In a way we had. They said no one had arrived in a single vehicle for almost a year. Someone asked, “Is that road open?”
John said, “It was, today.”
─“”
pp.129─130
─“”
p.131
Also, thanks to my apprenticeship with Vann, I had one important card: I was the only one in that room who had been in the hamlets to see these things. No one else of my rank, civilian or military (except John), was in a position to report on such things from his own observation. Along with the sheer machismo of it, which counted for a lot in that company, that gave my conclusions an authority with which they just couldn't argue or flatly contradict.
p.131
TO give them credit, I quickly had evidence that the reaction of some of the high-ranking officers there was less hostile to this presentation than I had reason to expect. One of the most experienced colonels there, someone I didn't know well, took me aside into an adjoining room after the meeting, sat down at a desk across from me, and said soberly, “What you have said is the truth. You have spoken the truth.” Then he looked me in the eye, nodded, and said, “Good for you.” I nodded, and we got up and rejoined the others, who were leaving.
─“”
p.134
Along the road was an unusual succession of abandoned the fortifications, of varying constructions, that dated from different periods successively further back in time. There were recent Popular Force outposts. WE had supplied the wages for the local militia that had built them and the cement, if there was any. But basically these were mud forts, very primitive little outposts along the road supposedly to protect local hamlets. They had been recently abandoned because of the regional nonviolent uprising against the Saigon regime, which had been paying the troops out of the U.S. aid. Posts like these I'd seen all over Vietnam.
But next to one of them was a pill box of another kind, better constructed and made out of concrete, a cylindrical box with narrow portholes. The interpreter driving with me, a young Vietnamese lieutenant, explained that this had been built by the French. I recognized that it looked like one of the smaller pillboxes I had seen in pictures of the French Maginot Line at the outset of the German invasion of France. We drove by several of those. Most were from the 1946─54 war by France to regain its colony, during which it had run a pacification program very similar to ours. But some of them, the lieutenant pointed out, went back much earlier, to the twenties and thirties (when the Maginot Line had been built) and even much earlier in the French pacification of Vietnam.
In the midsts of these, along the road, were some pillboxes of a distinctly different sort, also concrete but rounded, like ovens. I recognized those from pictures of the Pacific island fighting by the marines in World war II. They were Japanese, built when the Japanese had pacified the area of what was now I Corps in their occupation of Vietnam during the war. Finally, we came to a massive knoll, overgrown with grass and studded with very old stones. I was told it was an ancient Chinese fort, constructed when the Chinese had pacified Vietnam, starting with what was now I Corps, over a period of a thousand years. When the interpreter told me that, I was reminded of that Tran Ngoc Chau had once said to me: “You must understand that we are a people who think of ourselves as having defeated the Chinese though it took us a thousand years.”
─“”
pp.141─142
In October I returned to the States for leave. But in Washington I was ordered to turn around to accompany Nicholas Katzenbach, just made undersecretary of state, on an orientation trip to Vietnam. On McNamara's windowless KC-137, a converted tanker that could fly to Vietnam nonstop, I had the opportunity to show all the memos I'd brought from Saigon to my old boss, John McNaughton. I had the intense satisfaction of seeing John hand each one to McNamara as he finished it and watching them read it page by page. It was a long trip, and they didn't seem to have brought anything else to read. I always thought of that as high point of my bureaucratic career. Normally you never know if a boss had really read what you've written, let alone shown it to his boss. At one point McNaughton took me aside and made two requests, for himself and the secretary: Could I give him an extra copy of my trip report from Nau Nghia, and would I mind refraining from showing that and certain others to General Wheeler, in the interest of civilian-military relations?
On the return flight to Washington a week later, as we got near the end of the journey, McNamara called me to the rear of the plane, where he was standing with Bob Komer, who was still special assistant to the president coordinating Washington efforts on pacification. McNamara said, “Dan, you're the one who can settle this. Komer here is saying that we've made a lot of progress in pacification. I say things are worse than they were a year ago. WHat do you say?”
I said, “Well, Mr. Secretary, I'm most impressed with how much the same things are as they were a year ago. They were pretty bad then, but I wouldn't say it was worse now, just about the same.”
McNamara said triumphantly, “That proves what I'm saying! We've put more than a hundred thousand more troops into the country over the last year, and there's been no improvement. Things aren't any better at all. That means the underlying situation is really worse! Isn't that right?”
I said, “Well, you could say that. It's an interesting way of seeing it.”
Just then the plane began to go into a turn and the pilot announced, “Gentlemen, we are approaching Andrews Air Force Base. Please take your seats and fasten your seat belts.”
Ten minutes later we were on the ground, and McNamara was descending the ladder with us behind him. It was a foggy morning, and there was an arc of television lights and cameras set up at the spot the plane had taxied to. In the center of the arc there was a podium covered with microphones. McNamara strode over the mikes and said to the crowd of reporters, “Gentlemen, I've just come back from Vietnam, and I'm glad to be able to tell you that we're showing great progress in every dimension of our effort. I'm very encouraged by everything I've seen and heard on my trip ....”
─“”
p.143
all of chapter 10
Rach Kien
pp.150─151
The day after Christmas the operations officer sent out two companies to sweep, or walk through, areas not far from the village, and I went out with one of them. Since I was there as an observer, I didn't take a weapon. It hardly seemed necessary, in the midst of a couple of hundred armed men, no matter what we might run into. But this turned out to be have a serious drawback. The men paid no particular attention to me as I joined a column on the march or moved across a rice paddy, after I had introduced myself to the platoon leader. They must have noticed I had no insignia on my field jacket and carried no weapon, but they understood I was some sort of civilian. Some of them assumed at first I was a journalist. If they asked me, I said I was from the embassy in Saigon, and they rarely showed much curiosity about what I was doing there.
But when the unit I was with came under fire, as happened after an hour of walking that first monring, I saw that the men near me seemed to feel a responsibility to look out for me. Apparently it was because I wasn't carrying a weapon, having a job that they understood didn't call for one, like a corpsman or a reporter. As soon as shots came roughly in our direction, they moved in closer to me and a little ahead of me, and I could see they were keep one eye on my whereabouts, as though they had been given the job of taking care of me. It was as if my being unarmed make me more likely to be ht, or their weapons gave them a special ability to protect me from shooters we couldn't see.
Neither was true, any more than the magical notion that having weapons in their own hands made them safer from enemy fire. But soldiers tend to believe that, and what goes with it is that being unarmed under fire makes you seem more vulnerable. So my weaponless state drew attention to me and distracted them from what they were supposed to be doing. It was not an effect I wanted to have. After a day and a half of this I started to carry the weapon I had brought with me.
It was a Swedish K submachine gun that a CIA province representative had given me out of his stores. The CIA men armed with counter terror teams they organized with it. Some Vietnamese and a few Americans who saw me with it were hip enough to assume as a result that I was CIA. It was distinctive-looking, impressively ugly and simple, with an air-cooled metal jacket around the barrel that looked like a piece of pipe with holes punched in it. After I started to carry it with the troops, the weapon itself attracted some attention, but I no longer did.
─“”
p.152
However, it soon turned out that carrying a weapon that you didn't use if you were under fire was also a way of attracting unfavorable attention. A squad I was walking with was ordered to go on line and lead the platoon across a rice paddy. I want along with them, and as I'd been doing for the last couple days. Suddenly, as we were walking through waist-high rice, some shots came at us from the trees ahead, and without needing an order, the men on both sides of be began firing at the tree line. It didn't seem urgent for me to join them, since they were already answering a handful of shots with a dozen of M-16s on full automatic, so I took out my camera and took some pictures of them and our tree line objective.
After we got to the tree line and the firing had stopped, a sergeant came over to me, looking agitated. First he asked me if I was a reporter. I said no, I was from the embassy. He looked pointedly at the camera still in my hand and the weapon hanging on my shoulder and began to get red in the face. He asked me incredulously, “Were you making personal photographs in a firefight?”
“No”, I said evenly. “I'm here observing for the deputy ambassador, and I'm taking pictures for him.” He looked dubious, but he went off, and I made a quick decision. After than, when people around me were firing, I was too. It worked. From then on I was essentially invisible in the field.
─“”
p.168
But about a year later, when I was back in the States, I saw a long article in the New York Times Magazine describing the difficulties of pacifying a VC district, Rach Kien. At first I thought it was reporting the operation I had been in. But it was about a different battalion, 8 months later. All the problems and experiences sounded very familiar. The article said that Rach Kein had always been a Vietcong district up till then, and this was the first time American troops had tried to operate there.
In this guerrilla war in teh delta all the attacks were turning out to be hit-and-run. Usually a few shots from snipers or one or two heavier volleys would come from a clump of trees and brush or a tree line or a patch of forest bordering a paddy. One or two of our troops, or none, would be hit.
p.153
Without a single known enemy casualty at the end of 12 days, there were nine American dead and 23 wounded.
p.153
The radioman's tall whip antenna made him the first target of snipers. We lost four in the battalion while was there.
p.154
Out of a continuous drumroll of shooting from the firing line, the shot aimed precisely in your direction sounds distinctly different ── a sharp, flat crack ── from one fired at the next target just a few feet away, one side or the other.
─“”
p.176
This in a Confucian culture giving highest values to age, dignity, maturity, education, and virtuous example.
p.176
Chau said, “He loved it. I was sure he would. He read every word. He said he didn't know there was any American in Vietnam who understood Vietnamese attitudes so well.”
p.185
There was the fast turnover in personnel and the lack of institutional memory at any level.
pp.185─186
; an operation eight months later in the same paddies that was not even aware American troops had ever visited them before. AS Tran Ngoc Chau said to me in 1968, “You Americans feel you have been fighting this was for seven years. You have not. You have been fighting it for one year, seven times.”
p.188
David Halberstam and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
the policy of one more step
each new step always promising the success which the previous last step had also promised but had unaccountably failed to deliver.
Each step in the deepening of the American commitment was reasonably regarded at the time as the last that would be necessary.
p.189
This included Truman's decision to support the French effort directly in 1950, Eisenhower's commitment to Diem in 1954, and Kennedy's decision to break through the Geneva ceiling on U.S. advisers in 1961.
Within a month of working from the files in the McNamara study offices, I had discovered that this assumption was mistaken. Every one of these crucial decisions was secretly associated with realistic internal pessimism, deliberately concealed from the public, just as in 1964─65.
p.189
─“”
p.190
That contradiction dissolved as soon as I held in my hands Taylor's actual, personal recommendations to the president and the judgements on which he based them. The press accounts of the time had simply been wrong. The official statements were lies.
p.193
I soon got a crucial commentary on this Kennedy paradox, as I thought of it, from his brother.
pp.193─196
I was glad to have the chance to tell him what I had seen and what I thought should be done, but I also wanted to ask him about the period I was investigating for the McNamara study, the Kennedy decision making in 1961.
I told him briefly why I had picked that year to study and how I was now more puzzled than ever by the combination of decisions I found the president had made. In rejecting ground troops and a formal commitment to victory, he had been rejecting the urgent advice of every one of his top military and civilian officials. With hindsight, that didn't look foolish; it was the advice that looked bad. Yet he did proceed to deepen our involvement, in the face of a total consensus among his advisers that without the measures he was rejecting, in fact without adopting them immediately, our effort were bound to fail.
I told Bobby it was hard to make sense out of that combination of decisions. Did he remember how it came out that way? I felt uneasy about describing the problem that way to the president's brother, but I knew it might be my only opportunity ever to get an answer, and his manner with me encouraged me to take the chance.
He thought about what I'd put to him for a moment and then said, “We didn't want to lose in Vietnam or get out. We wanted to win if we could. But my brother was determined never to send ground combat units to Vietnam.” His brother was convinced, Bobby said, that if he did that, we'd be in the same spot as the French. The Vietnamese on our side would leave the fighting to the United States, and it would become our war against nationalism and self-determination, whites against Asians. That was a fight we couldn't win, any more than the French.
pp.195─196
But what wasn't clear to me was how Kennedy could have been so prescient in 1961, or where he would have gotten such a strong personal commitment, as to draw an absolute line against American ground combat in Vietnam. Bobby had not said that his brother had already decided in 1961 to withdraw from Vietnam; he had simply told me that JFK preferred and intended to do that rather than to send ground troops, if it came to the point where those seemed the only two alternatives to imminent military defeat. I hadn't heard any American ── among those reluctant to get out of Vietnam, for cold war reasons ── advancing that precise point of view before 1964 (though some, notably George Ball, didn't want to send even advisers). Obviously none of Kennedy's most senior advisers shared it. I also hadn't thought of JFK as having idiosyncratic opinions, let alone a conviction like that, about Indochina. I asked, a little impudently, “What made him so smart?”
Whap! His hand slapped down on the desk. I jumped in my chair. “Because we were there!” He slammed the desktop again. His face contorted in anger and pain. “We were there, in 1951. We saw what was happening to the French. We saw it. My brother was determined, determined, never to let that happen to us.”
pp.196─197
I wondered after listening to Bobby just what they had seen and heard in Vietnam that had shaped his thinking so strongly (and so well, as it looked to me by this time).
How long had they been there?
It was years before I learned the answer.
One day, it turns out. According to Richard Reeves, Kennedy recalled that day to Taylor and Rostow just before they left for Vietnam in October 1961.
<start of block quote>
Kennedy told Taylor about his own experiences in Vietnam, which he had visited for a day in 1951 as a young congressman on an around-the-world tour. He had begun that day in Saigon with the commander of the 250,000 French troops fighting Viet Minh guerrillas. General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny had assured him that his soldiers could not lose to these natives. He had ended the evening on top of the Caravelle Hotel with a young American consular officer named Edmund Gullion. The sky around the city flashed with the usual nighttime artillery and mortar bombardment by the Viet Minh.
“What have you learned here?” Kennedy asked the diplomat.
“That in 20 years there will be no more colonies”, Gullion had said. “We're going nowhere out here. The French have lost. If we come in here and do the same thing we will lose, too, for the same reason. There's no will or support for this kind of war back in Paris. THe home front is lost. The same thing would happen us.”
<end of block quote>
Ask the right person the right question, and you could get the picture pretty fast.
Reeves, Richard. President kennedy : profile of power. new york: simon and schuster, 1993.
─“”
p.211
A strange statement. Hardly comprehensible. No concept of enemy? How about concepts of sun and moon, friend, water? I came from a culture in which the concept of enemy was central, seemingly indispensable ── the culture of RAND, the u.s. marine corps, the defense and state departments, international and domestic politics, game theory and bargaining theory. Identifying enemies, understanding and predicting them so as to fight and control them better, analyzing the relations of abstract enemies: All that had been for years my daily bread and butter, part of the air I breathed. To try to operate in the world of men and nations without the concept of enemy would have seemed as difficult, as nearly inconceivable as doing arithmetic, like the Romans, without a zero.
p.212
India-China war
p.212
In Gandhi's teaching, no human should be regarded or treated as being “an enemy”, in the sense of someone you have a right to destroy, or to hate, or to regard as alien, from whom you cannot learn, for whom you can feel no understanding or concern. These are simply not appropriate attitudes toward another human being. No one should be regarded as being ── in his or her essence or permanently ── evil or as utterly antagonistic. No people should be seen as being evil persons, as if they were without good in them, a different, less human order of being, as if one could learn nothing from them or as if they were unchange able, even if what they were doing in the moment was harmful and terrible, indeed evil, and needed to be opposed. Thus the whole notion of enemy was both unneeded and dangerously misleading.
p.213
satyagraha (“truth force”)
─“”
pp.232─233
Defining strategic reflecting various objectives and points of view ── in ways that would be acceptable by their respective advocates as expressing their perspectives accurately ── had long been a professional specialty of mine, at RAND and in the government. It was another reason, along with my experience in Vietnam and Washington, that made me a logical coodinator of this project.
p.233
I read cables and estimates and talked at length with Mort Halperin, Les Gelb, and a number of others to get their ideas on what information a new president most required. I concluded that what he needed above all else was to be alerted to a split in thinking within official circles that was sharper and more systematic than had existed for years.
─‘’“”
pp.233─234
Fred and Harry weren't present, but Kissinger had invited Tom Schelling to come to New York to sit in for this. Schelling, an economics professor at Harvard, had been a key influence on my thinking about bargaining theory. He had been the official adviser on my Harvard Ph.D. thesis on uncertainty. Now also a RAND consultant, he had become my close friend. I hadn't realized how close Kissinger and Schelling were too.
p.234
But it was obvious that I had no faith at all in these prediction, or their underlying assumptions, or the respective strategies.
p.234
Tom said, “It seems to me that when you're confronting a new president with a full range of alternatives, you ought to lay out for him a strategy that you think would win, even if you wouldn't recommend it because you think it would cost too much or would be too dangerous, or for some other reason. You'd say, ‘Here's what you'd have to do for victory’, even if you don't think he should do it.”
p.234
I said, “But I don't believe that there is a way to win. It doesn't exist. Some people think they know how to do it, and I've laid out their approaches, but I think they're all kidding themselves. I'm not convinced that any of their hopes are more than illusions.”
There was a short silence. As far as I knew, Kissinger had reached that same conclusion himself years earlier. I went on: “You could put a million troops into South Vietnam, or maybe two million, and you could keep the place quiet as long as they stayed there. Till they left.
“You can invade North Vietnam, like the French, and have a war five times worse than what we've had. You can chase the Communists across the borders, into Laos and China, and pursue them there. How far are you prepared to follow them, and for how long?
“And you could kill all the people, with nuclear weapons. I wouldn't call that winning.” In fact, I added, if anything survived at all, it would probably be the control apparatus of the Lao Dong (Vietnamese communist) party, which could operate from Laos or China, if necessary.
Schelling didn't press the point. But he came up with another, more telling criticism: “You haven't said anything in here about threats. You don't have a threat tactic.”
I was taken aback. Schelling and I both were analysts of bargaining theory and threats, and he was my mentor. For him to have to be the one to point this omission out to me was embarrassing. I said, “YOu're right.”
“”
p.234
Lao Dong (Vietnamese communist)
In fact, I added, if anything survived at all, it would probably be the control apparatus of the Lao Dong (Vietnamese communist) party, which could operate from Laos or China, if necessary.
─‘’“”
pp.234─235
But he came up with another, more telling criticism: “You haven't said anything in here about threats. You don't have a threat tactic.”
I was taken aback. Schelling and I both were analysts of bargaining theory and threats, and he was my mentor. For him to have to be the one to point this omission out to me was embarrassing. I said, “YOu're right.”
p.235
Kissinger finally spoke, in his gravelly accent: “How can you conduct diplomacy without a threat of escalation? Without that there is no basis for negotiations.”
p.235
I told him about the questions McNamara had addressed to various parts of the Department of defense when he had come into the Pentagon and about another set of questions that I had later drafted on the JCS plans for general nuclear war, which the deputy secretary of defense had sent to the Joint Chiefs in the spring of 1961.
In both cases, their value wasn't just for getting information; the questions themselves had great impact. They helped establish McNamara's authority in the building, early.
p.235
Moreover, in the case of Vietnam it was important for the president to learn just how much uncertainty and controversy there was about many important matters. He wouldn't find that out if he followed the usual practice of addressing a question only to the agency that had primary responsibility for a given matter.
p.236
might have information or judgement that were not only different (signaling an area of uncertainty) but actually more convincing, objective, and reliable
p.236
CIA's estimates (before it caved in to MACV in 1967) had been more relevant and accurate.
intelligence branch of State (INR)
civilians in the department of defense (international security affairs and systems analysis)
p.236
expertise, objectivity, veracity
relative information, regional experience, and analytical ability.
many of the experts in these civilian agencies were also highly competent military officers.
different, pessimistic
more reliable
“unqualified” or “renegade” opinions
p.236
but on a one time basis, with a short deadline for response to make coordination more difficult, you could legitimize presentation to the president of divergent and well-informed “rogue” opinion that wouldn't normally ever make it to the top.
pp.236─237
to make coordination more difficult, you could legitimize presentation to the president of divergent and well-informed “rogue” opinions that wouldn't normally ever make it to the top.
This process would guard the new president against two current problems at once. First, the answers he would otherwise get from the principal agency would often be wrong or less reliable than he could get elsewhere. Second, right or wrong, these opinions would be presented with a degree of certainty that was unwarranted and misleading. A onetime collection of contradictory judgements on the same issue might be disconcerting to the White house, but would be a valuable warning of the uncertainties.
─‘’“”
p.237
Moreover, the very revelation of controversies and the extremely unconvincing positions of some of the primary agencies (in light of the unaccustomed challenges and rebuttals alongside of their own answers) would be embarrassing to the bureaucracy as a whole. It would put the bureaucrats off-balance and on the defensive relative to the source of the questions ── that is, Kissinger.
p.237
Nixon intended, with his help, to concentrate the control of foreign policy, including Vietnam, in the White house, and my last point would serve Kissinger's moves to that end. Moreover, he had Morton Halperin drafting for him at that very moment new procedures for coordinating inter agency planning under his chairmanship at the NSC.
In the month ahead, the questions that I was to draft for him and that he issued kept the various agencies distracted and preoccupied while he got these new arrangements into place; he may have foreseen this potential effect as I talked to him.
─‘’“”
pp.237─239
“Henry, there's something I would like to tell you, for what it's worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You've been a consultant for a long time, and you've dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you're about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe 15 or 20 of them, and I've known other people who havae just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn't previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.
“First, you'll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all ── so much! incredible! ── suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by the presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn't, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn't even guess. In particular, you'll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn't know about and didn't know they had, and you'll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well.
“You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you've started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn't have it, and you'll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don't ... and all those other people are fools.
“Over a longer period of time ── not too long, but a matter of two or three years ── you'll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. THere is a great deal that it doesn't tell you, it's often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the New York Times can. But that take a while to learn.
“In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn't have these clearances. Because you'll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations’ And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I've seen this with my superiors, my colleagues ... and with myself.
“You will deal with a person who doesn't have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you'll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You'll give up trying to access what he has to say. The danger is, you'll become something like a moron. You'll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.”
It was a speech I had thought through before, one I'd wished someone had once given me, and I'd long hoped to be able to give it to someone who was just about to enter the world of “real” executive secrecy. I ended by saying that I'd long thought of this kind of secret information as something like the potion Circe gave to the wanderers and shipwrecked men who happened on her island,
THey became incapable of human speech and couldn't help one another to find their way home.
Kissinger hadn't interrupted this long warning. As I've said, he could be a good listener, and he listened soberly. He seemed to understand that it was heartfelt, and he didn't take it as patronizing, as I'd feared. But I knew that it was too soon for him to appreciate fully what I was saying. He didn't have the clearances yet.
“
“
“”
─‘’“”
p.249
In the spring of 1969, Hoang Van Chi, now a friend consulting at RAND, had told me, “You must understand that in the eyes of all Vietnamese we gained out independence in March 1945, and the French set out to reconquer us in the North almost two years later.”
p.249
He was referring to the facts that the Japanese had interned the French occupying force on March 9, 1945, proclaiming Vietnam independent of France, and that the emperor Bao Dai had reasserted independence five months later and abdicated formally to Ho Chi Minh.
Between that time and November─December 1946, when the French began their violent campaign of colonial reconquest, the French purported to regard at least Tonkin, the northern third of Vietnam, as an independent state within the French union, with Ho Chi Minh as its president. Ho's repeated urgent pleas to the United States during that period to recognize Vietnam as a fully independent state were ignored by the State department under Truman.
pp.249─250
Rather, our nonresponse reflected a policy decision, made by President Roosevelt with some reluctance but firmly asserted, to assure the French that we recognized French “ownership” of Vietnam as a colony, despite the war time hiatus and any postwar local claims of independence.
That decision, sustained under President Truman, contradicted the American tradition of anticolonialism (and FDR's personal feelings that the French had exploited and abused this particular colony) and the promises of self-determination in the Atlantic charter, to both of which Ho appealed in his letters to Truman.
p.250
France in Europe
Britain
Atlantic charter
Britain, its own colonial authority in India and Malaya.
p.250
But the French government had no intention of carrying out that agreement.
Its failure to do so, and its clear intention to return Tonkin as well to quasi-colonial status by force, led to the outbreak of hostilities on both sides at the end of 1946. In five years as an American official or consultant dealing with Vietnam, I had remained ignorant of this history or at least of its clear import.
p.250
What was more impressive to me was to find the same appreciation of the situation in the McNamara study's top secret history and documents of that period.
p.250
I already knew from my research in 1967 for the McNamara study on the 1950─61 period that Ho and his colleagues had every reason to feel betrayed in the fifties by France, the United States, and the international community ── perhaps above all by their Communist allies, the Soviets and Chinese ── because of their failure to enforce the exactly comparable agreement in the Geneva accords in 1954.
─‘’“”
p.250
─‘’“”
p.251
Equally brazen, I now realized, was the frequently repeated demand by the United States throughout the sixties for a “return to observance of the 1954 accords” when the United States had never intended, did not support, and would never permit observance of the central political provision of the accords, which called for nation wide elections for a unified regime.
p.251
What I read in 1969 was that an exactly comparable written accord had been violated eight years earlier, in 1946, by the French.
p.251
Ho Chi Minh's somber plea to Jean Sainteny in September 1946 in France, at the close ofhis abortive negotiations: “Don't let me leave this way; arm me against those who seek to surpass me.” (In Vietnam, Ho's colleagues and rivals were bitterly criticizing his concessions in negotiations that he had made in the interests of avoiding a settlement by war.) “You will not regret it .... If we must fight, we will fight. You will kill ten of our men, but we will kill one of yours. And in the end it is you that will tire.”
─‘’“”
p.250
─‘’“”
p.252
─‘’“”
p.253
Ironically, as Vu Van Thai pointed out to me at RAND, it was just at this time that the French effort at reconquest ahd become, in Thai's term, “Sisyphen.”
When Communist forces reached the border of Vietnam in late 1949, the border became open to Chinese communist aid to the Viet minh independence movement.
As Thai put it, “From that time on it became impossible for the French to defeat the Vietminh forces.”
The French had become disheartened (realistic) about their prospects about the same time and wanted out.
•─‘’“”
p.253
But at the same time,
it became politically “impossible” for a u.s. administration to allow the French to be defeated or to withdraw (since the united states was not anxious to send its own troops).
p.254
the burden of the war on the rural population.
pp.254─255
, I now finally read the full analyses in the McNamara study, with documents, of the decision making throughout the fifties, both during the “French war” and the ensuing years of American “support” to a “South vietnamese” political struggle and resumed guerrilla conflict.
I had left these to read last because I had presumed they were least relevant to an understanding of the sixties.
I could not have been more mistaken.
p.255
• There had been no First and Second indochina wars, just one continuous conflict for almost a quarter of a century.
• In practical terms, on one side, it had been an American war almost from its beginning: at first French-American, eventually wholly American. In both cases it was a struggle of Vietnamese ── not all of them but enough to persist ── against American policy and American financing, proxies, technicians, firepower, and finally, troops and pilots.
• Since at least the late 1940s there had probably never been a year when political violence in Vietnam would have reached or stayed at the scale of a “war” had not the u.s. president, congress, and citizens fueled it with money, weapons, and ultimately manpower: first through the French, then funneled to wholly owned client regimes [South vietnam], and at last directly. Indeed there would have been no war after 1954 if the united states and its Vietnamese collaborators, wholly financed by the united states, had not been determined to frustrate and overturn the process of political resolution by election negotiated at Geneva.
• It was no more a “civil war” after 1955 or 1960 than it had been during the u.s.-supported French attempt at colonial reconquest. A war in which one side was entirely equipped and paid by a foreign power ── which dictated the nature of the local regime in its own interest ── was not a civil war. To say that we had “interfered” in what is “really a civil war”, as most American academic writers and even liberal critics of the war do to this day, simply screened a more painful reality and was as much a myth as the earlier official one of “aggression from the North.” In terms of the UN charter and of our own avowed ideals, it was a war of foreign aggression, American aggression.
The last judgement was not one I came to lightly or easily.
•─‘’“”
p.255
It was what “extreme” critics, radicals, and most international lawyers, though I didn't know that, had been saying about the nature of our involvement for years. I had not believed them. Now I had to.
p.255
“Viet cong motivation and morale”
─‘’“”
p.259
, Nixon intended to keep sizable residual u.s. forces in South vietnam indefinitely, as in Korea.
p.260
a secret incursion by marines into Laos (operation dewey canyon).
p.260
It was what Nixon's boss Eisenhower had believed throughout the fifties; what Johnson and McNamara and Walt Rostow had believed, or acted as if they did, in 1965; what the JCS had been urging as an article of faith since 1961.
It was what Nixon's boss Eisenhower had believed throughout the fifties; ([ Kennedy ??; ]) what Johnson and McNamara and Walt Rostow had believed, or acted as if they did, in 1965; what the JCS had been urging as an article of faith since 1961.
p.274
the quagmire myth
p.275
To read the continuous record of intelligence assessments and forecasts for Vietnam from 1946 on was finally to lose the delusion that informing the executive branch better was the key to ending the
p.276
read the Pentagon papers.
p.284
(That was how the French had sounded to us in 1964: “What we couldn't win, you can't win.” But the French had been right!)
p.291
a careful statistical study of the effects on the population of our herbicide program, which was supposedly addressed to denying food to the VC but had a much wider impact.
p.291
analyses that presented our Vietnam policy not as an aberration or misadventure but as being in line with unacknowledged u.s. objectives and covert activities elsewhere in the third world.
p.300
I chose the volumes on 1964─65 to start with.
That was the history I was trying to keep from recurring:
a president making secret threats of escalation,
and secret plans to carry them out if they didn't work, as was almost certain;
a war on the way to get much larger and longer, with the public wholly unaware.
They would prove, at least, it had all happened before.
The truth was, it had happened again and again, over 24 years.
─‘’“”
p.344
Harvard in 1959,
Lowell lecture series, “The art of coercion”
The lectures I had given to his class had had to do with Hitler's blackmail of Austria and Czechoslovakia in the late thirties that had allowed him to take over those countries just by threatening their destruction.
“The theory and practice of blackmail”
“The poltical uses of madness”
Hitler had deliberately cultivated among his adversaries the impression of his own irrational unpredictability.
He couldn't be counted on not to carry out a threat to do something crazy, mutually destructive.
It worked for him, up to a point, because he was crazy, madly aggressive, and reckless.
p.347
the ambitious (publicly undeclared) objectives, the meaning of “peace with honor”; the slow, drawn-out reduction of u.s. forces, down to a sizeable residual force; threats of escalation, which I felt sure would fail to deter or coerce despite demonstative actions like Cambodia; probable future invasions, Laos, perhaps the southern part of North vietnam, and renewed bombing; the ultimate mining of Haiphong; and throughout, deliberate deception of the public.
What lay ahead, as I saw it: and endless, expanding war.
p.347
I said that I thought strongly that he should, at least to read the summaries, which were only a few single-spaced pages at the start of each volume. He could have an assistant read the texts and pick out passages that seemed especially pertinent. But the summaries alone added up to about sixty pages. “They make a very readable story. You really should make the effort.”
“But do we really have anything to learn from this study?”
p.347
Yet in fact each administration, including this one, repeated the same patterns in decision making and pretty much the same (hopeless) policy as its predecessor, without even knowing it.
([ ])
p.347
The Pentagon Papers offered a chance to break this pattern, but its mere existence evidently hadn't done it.
([ ... assuming and that is a big assumption, we, they, and everyone want to break the pattern ... ])
─‘’“”
p.364
“a need to reach their threshold of pain”;
“we all accept the will of the DRV as the real target”;
“judging by experience during the last war, the resumption of bombing after a pause would be even more painful to the population of North vietnam than a fairly steady state of bombing”;
“water-drip technique”;
“one more turn of the screw”
Patricia, “This is the language of torturers.”
p.367
the need for prolonged u.s. ground troops and indefinite u.s. air support.
p.395
p.446
the CIA had (illegally) furnished logistic support for a domestic covert operation, including false identification, a voice-altering device, a gait-altering shoe insert ([ or simply put a small pebble in one of the shoe ]), clandestine cameras, fake glasses, and wigs, and had prepared for the White House two “”psychological profiles“” on me.
p.473
Lansdale, Edward G.
Viet Nam: do we understand revolution?
Foreign Affairs
October 1964
McAlister, John T., Jr.
Vietnam : the origins of revolution.
1971.
McNamara, Robert S.
In retrospect : the tragedy and lessons of vietnam.
1995
Scheer, Robert.
Tonkin──dubious premise for a war
Los angeles time
April 29, 1985.
p.471
pp.471─472
Ellsberg, Daniel. “Theories of rational choice under uncertainty: the contributions of von Neumann and Morgenstern.” Senior honors thesis, Harvard university, 1952.
Ellsberg, Daniel. “Classic and current notions of ‘measurable utility’”. Economic journal 64:255 (September 1954), 528─56.
Ellsberg, Daniel. “Theory of the reluctant duelist”. American economic review 45:5 (December 1956), 910─23.
Ellsberg, Daniel. “The theory and practice of blackmail”. In Bargaining : formal theories of negotiation, ed. Oran R. Young. Urbana: university of illinois press, 1959, 1971.
Ellsberg, Daniel. “The crude analysis of strategic choice”. American economic review 6:2 (May 1961), 472─78.
Ellsberg, Daniel. “Risk, ambiguity, and the savage axioms”. Quarterly journal of economics 75:4 (november 1961), 643─69.
Ellsberg, Daniel. “Vietnam diary──notes from the journal of a young American in Saigon.” Reporter (January 13, 1966).
Ellsberg, Daniel. “”
Ellsberg, Daniel. “Laos : what NIxon is up to.” New york review of books (March 11, 1971). Reprint in Ellsberg, Papers on the war, 259─74.
Ellsberg, Daniel. “The quagmire myth and the stalemate machine.” Public policy (spring 1971). revised version in Ellsberg, Papers on the wars, 42─135.
Ellsberg, Daniel. Interview by Walter Cronkite. CBS news special report, June 23, 1971. For transcript, see: www.ellsberg.net.
Ellsberg, Daniel. Papers on the war. New york: simon and schuster, 1972.
Ellsberg, Daniel. Risk, ambiguity and decision. New york: Garland, 2001. Ph.D. thesis, Harvard university, 1962.
Ellsberg, Daniel. Melvin Gurtov, Oleg Hoeffding, Arnold Horelick, Konrad Kellen, and Paul F. Langer.
•─‘’“”
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