Vietnam Syndrome Continues

‘Gray is the color of truth.” So said McGeorge Bundy, 31 years ago, in a speech about the Vietnam War. Historical truths are always ambiguous, never more so than those that deal with a failed war. Most Americans long ago concluded that President Lyndon B. Johnson and his key aides--the Bundy brothers (McGeorge and William P.), Robert S. McNamara and other bright lights of the establishment--stumbled into that quagmire out of hubris and ignorance.

Now, new archival evidence suggests that the truth is far more painful. These powerful men fully understood the dangers of intervention, resisted Americanizing what they knew was a Vietnamese civil war, then proceeded to lead the country where they did not want to go. When things went badly, they loyally stood by their president.

Thirty years later, most Americans have become highly skeptical about the integrity of their public servants. But at the same time, elite opinion, particularly inside the foreign-policy establishment, still penalizes dissent within government. It is the rare public servant who risks public dissent from the official line.

There are exceptions. Diplomat Richard C. Holbrooke’s forthright criticism of the Clinton administration’s Bosnia policies and former Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services Peter Edelman’s public resignation in 1996 to protest welfare reform are two rare examples of public dissent. But Holbrooke couched his dissent in language that allowed him to be nominated this year as ambassador to the United Nations. As a rule, the establishment still frowns on public displays of dissent.

When former defense analyst Daniel J. Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, William Bundy, a key architect of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ war policies, penned a note to his Groton schoolmate Joseph Alsop: “What a wallowing in self-righteousness is this. . . . Ellsberg is just the Whittaker Chambers of the New Left, but those who exploit him deserve less charity.”

Even today, Ellsberg is regarded inside the Beltway as a pariah, so much so that when the Washington Post celebrated the 25th anniversary of its publication of the Pentagon Papers, he was not invited to the celebrations. Such an explicit snubbing of the man who made this journalistic coup possible is extraordinary. It can only be explained by understanding the old establishment code of discretion by which Washington policymakers thrive.

If you had a policy disagreement with the president, you dissented privately, like George W. Ball did, in 1965, over Johnson’s Vietnam policy. Ellsberg’s public dissent was offensive to the establishment on two grounds: Not only was it public, but it also threatened to undermine the notion that such men as the Bundy brothers and McNamara stumbled into Vietnam out of sheer ignorance. Perversely, a claim of ignorance based on a Eurocentric lack of curiosity about things Vietnamese was a better defense than having to explain they knew the odds against military victory and still persevered in a losing war.

The hard truth, however, is that the war’s primary architects were deeply reluctant to intervene with U.S. troops in what they recognized was an anticolonial civil war.

During 1964 and ‘65, crucial decision-making years, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy told Secretary of Defense McNamara that his proposal to introduce large numbers of U.S. combat troops was “rash to the point of folly.” His brother, William, then assistant secretary of state for the Far East, warned against making the conflict a “white man’s war.” Instead, William proposed a withdrawal plan, in November 1964, that would have allowed a communist-led unification of Vietnam under the guise of neutralization.

Both brothers understood the futility of this war. In October 1964, William Bundy wrote a long memo to senior Cabinet officials about why the U.S. should walk away from Vietnam. It is “a bad colonial heritage of long standing,” he wrote, “a colonialist war fought in a half-baked fashion and lost, a nationalist movement taken over by communism ruling in the other half of an ethnically and historically united country, the communist side inheriting much the better military force and far more than its share of the talent--these are the facts that dog us today.”

But when Johnson rejected any recommendations for withdrawal, the Bundy brothers remained loyal to their president and endorsed a policy of gradual escalation. They did so with a heavy sense of pessimism and even foreboding, but did so nonetheless.

Why, when they seemed to know better, did they persevere in 1965 and then defend the war for many years afterward? At the time, McGeorge said he feared “the wild men in the wings.” If liberals abandoned South Vietnam, the McCarthyite right wing would be given a second wind. So, for domestic political reasons, the Johnson administration opted for a policy of gradual military escalation.

In fact, these Cold War liberals always wanted to avoid a land war in Southeast Asia. In April 1962, according to a previously unpublished, top-secret White House memo, President John F. Kennedy told McGeorge’s aide, Michael V. Forrestal, that he wanted “to seize upon any favorable moment to reduce our involvement [in South Vietnam], recognizing that the moment might yet be some time away.”

We don’t know what Kennedy might have done if he had lived. But whatever dovish instincts he had were tempered by the fear that Republicans would reignite the “who lost China?” demagoguery of the 1950s if Vietnam were reunited under a communist regime. Vietnam was thus born out of a failure of liberal courage.

By late 1965, when McGeorge Bundy quietly left the White House, 1,636 Americans had died in Vietnam. Over the next three years, as William Bundy persevered at the State Department, more than 20,000 additional Americans died, together with hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. The war dragged on, while the liberal “experts” knew the futility of any military solution.

This is why men like the Bundy brothers and McNamara evoke such anger. They knew better, and out of misplaced loyalty to the president, they betrayed their own promise and intelligence. For them, resignation was not an honorable course of action, nor was public disagreement.

Today, self-described centrist liberals like President Bill Clinton display the same compromising political instincts in foreign policy as their “vital center” liberal cousins in the 1960s. They haven’t learned that pandering to simplistic notions of toughness abroad allows their right-wing opponents to define America’s foreign-policy agenda. This is the real “Vietnam syndrome” that still hobbles liberal policymakers as they grapple with a post-Cold War world, in which such problems as terrorism, ethnic cleansing and proliferation require the hard work of diplomacy to broker coordinated international actions, not U.S. unilateralism.

But how often do we see liberals in government today dissenting from cruise-missile diplomacy and “wag-the-dog” acts of interventionism? Liberals seem to have learned nothing from the mistakes of their predecessors.