George Ball; Fought Vietnam Policy Under Kennedy, LBJ

George Ball, whose tenure as undersecretary of state in the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations was marked by his outspoken but unsuccessful arguments against expansion of the Vietnam War, is dead.

Ball’s personal assistant, Karen Vaseduva, said he died at New York Hospital on Thursday evening. He had been admitted Wednesday and doctors discovered that he was suffering from terminal abdominal cancer, she said.

“He wasn’t the type to complain. The cancer was in an advanced stage and he never said a word to anyone,” she said. “We feel his loss very deeply.”

He was 84 and lived in Princeton, N.J.

Ball often found himself the lone voice protesting U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.

As early as 1961, he advised Kennedy not to send 15,000 American troops to Vietnam, saying 300,000 more men would have to be dispatched later to get them out. His advice was rejected but turned out to be prescient.

Ball, who was seen by President Johnson as a kind of anti-war “devil’s advocate” in the Administration, held on to the No. 2 job at the State Department from 1961 until he resigned in frustration in 1966.

Despite their differences, the highly respected international and corporate lawyer returned to government service in 1968, when Johnson named him ambassador to the United Nations.

Johnson left office the next year and Ball returned to private banking. He was senior managing director of Lehman Brothers until his retirement in 1982.

In his memoirs, “The Past Has Another Pattern,” published in 1982, Ball said that U.S. intervention in Vietnam had been a “defeat for our political authority and moral influence abroad and for our sense of mission and cohesion at home.”

Ball also became a center of controversy because of his strongly voiced view that U.S. Middle East policy in the 1970s and early ‘80s was tilted too much in favor of Israel and against the Arabs.

A leading U.S. pro-Israel lobbying organization included Ball in 1983 on a list of 21 groups and 39 individuals it said were “active in the effort to weaken bonds between the United States and Israel.”

Ball also was a sharp critic of President Richard Nixon, whom he admitted disliking intensely. He accused Nixon of compounding all of Johnson’s mistakes in Vietnam and adding many of his own, thus intensifying the American involvement.

Ball, born in Des Moines, Iowa, began his career in public service in the Treasury Department after graduating from Northwestern University in 1933.

He spent seven years practicing law in Chicago before joining the World War II Office of Lend-Lease Administration in 1942.

He also directed the Strategic Bombing Survey, ordered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to assess the effects of the Allied air offensive on Germany.

After the war, Ball was an adviser to Jean Monnet in negotiations that led to creation of the European Coal and Steel Community and, later, the European Common Market.

Ball worked as a lawyer in Washington from 1946 until 1961, when he was named by President Kennedy as undersecretary of state for economic affairs. Less than a year later he became undersecretary of state, the second-highest position in the department.

Among his other books was “The Passionate Attachment,” published in 1992, about U.S.-Israel relations.

Looking back at the Vietnam years, Ball testified to a House panel in 1985 that both Johnson and Nixon said they did not want to be the first American President to lose a war.

“Our honor was not served by the unedifying spectacle of the world’s most powerful nation trying to beat to death a small, poor, weak adversary, using napalm and defoliants and killing thousands of civilians in a war we could not win,” Ball testified.

“Our honor would have been far better preserved had we, by stopping the killing, demonstrated a clear sense of compassion, perspective, priority and balance,” he said.

In his last years, Ball continued to pursue his interests, including history and economics.

Vaseduva, Ball’s assistant, also said he was beginning to plan his next book. It was going to be “about the state of the world, the information superhighway and other modern conveniences or inconveniences, and he jokingly referred to it as ‘a book of prejudices,’ ” she said.

He is survived by two sons, John and Douglas, and two grandchildren. His wife died in 1993.