PENTAGON PAPERS DOCUMENTS ARE VOICES FROM A DIFFERENT U.S.

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32659, 15 July 1971, Page 10

PENTAGON PAPERS DOCUMENTS ARE VOICES FROM A DIFFERENT U.S.

(Bi/ the Washington. D.C.. office of the "Economist")

(Reprinted from the "Economist" by arrangement)

AH the time, in reading the summaries and excerpts of the Pentagon Papers (or “History of the United States Decision-making Process on Vietnam Policy,” as they are officially called), one has to remind oneself that the world was different then, in the early 19605, and that the men whose positions are recorded were speaking and acting for a different America.

The idea that an object of policy might be desirable but still beyond their country’s Strength came only very slowly to them. “Perhaps the world has passed me by,” reflected Mr Dean Rusk, who was Secretary of State to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and is now a professor in Georgia, in a television interview on July 2. Preventing the third world war, protecting the reputation of the United States (ideas which, to Mr Rusk, are largely . synonymous), i were “unfashionable” ideas! now, he reflected, when half the American people had no memory of the Second World; War. ; Mr Rusk used his hour of television time to defend the integrity of his colleagues and his chief and to brood on the change that had occurred in the national mood. He admitted two substantial errors of judgment: “I , personally, I think, underestimated the persistence and the tenacity of the North Vietnamese” and “I overestimated the ability of the American people to accept a protracted conflict.”

The actors talking The interest of the Penta-! gon Papers is not in telling: us what happened; that, broadly speaking, we knew already. But suddenly, by courtesy of Dr Daniel Ellsberg, we are able to listen to the actors talking business to one another over a period of 20 years and it is a different experience from listening to their press conferences or their television chats. When an ambassador talks of “assuring the South Vietnamese the opportunity to determine their future without outside interference,” we think we know what he means, but in the Pentagon Papers we have it in black and white: “The United States should commit itself to the clear objective of preventing the fall of South Vietnam to communism” (Mr Rusk and Mr McNamara, then Secretary of Defence, to President Kennedy, November, 1961). Mr Dulles’s dislikes . That Mr Dulles disliked the Geneva accords which were intended to put an end to the conflict in Indo-China in July, 1954, and refused to

join in the final declaration, is not news. But the official American position was one of dignified aloofness, coupled with a promise “to refrain from the threat or use of force to disturb” the accords. The Pentagon Papers put the attitude of the Eisenhower Administration, under the guidance of Mr Dulles, in sharper relief. The National Security Council took three weeks to decide that the Geneva accords !were a disaster and then set out on an American policy iof building a new South | Vietnamese state round the person of Ngo Dinh Diem. The accords had been categorical that Vietnam was not ; two states but one; the northern and southern halves were merely “the regrouping zones of the two parties” and everybody concerned including the United States in its unilateral declaration —subscribed to the “unity” of the country. But American actions were dictated by the haste to stem “a major forward stride of communism which mav lead to the loss of South-East Asia,” as the decision of the National Security Council put it, and they paid no heed to the country’s notional unity. The i fact has more than momenItary significance, since it led to the sincerely held belief of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations in the 1960 s that the trouble in Vietnam was a simple case of international aggression by one I state against another.

A vital interest It had become accepted, and remained accepted under successive Administrations in Washington, whether Democratic or Republican, that a stable anti-Communist state in South Vietnam was a vital American interest. Among the procession of men formulating policy the only difference of any consequence was whether the interest was vital in itself, or merely for the symbolic -reason that the United States, as the chief pillar of world security, must never be seen to give ground.! While the principle remained, constant, the price tended to I mount.

President Kennedy took office more worried about , Cuba, Berlin and Laos than 5 about Vietnam, but he did ' quickly decide (in April, 1961) ’ to send an extra 500 men 1 secretly to expand the mili- ] tary training mission and initiate a phase Of more energetic action against both the Viet Cong and the North. He sent the then Vice-Presi-dent, Mr Johnson, out in the next month and reported: “the battle against communism must be joined ffi South-East Asia with strength and determination.” Kennedy’s attitude One has to remind oneself that those were days when a President, looking over his shoulder at his home public, feared to show lack of pugnacity, not lack of concilia-] tion. President Kennedy has! always been depicted by his! associates as either bored or' sceptical about Vietnam and, as the war has come to be hated, while the Kennedy legend has lived on, the idea has been established that he would not have plunged as deep into the war as President Johnson did. It is not an idea that can be proved or disproved, but the Pentagon Papers do nothing to support if and something to discredit it At all events, President Johnson inherited from President Kennedy a much larger commitment in men, money and national prestige than Kennedy had inherited from Eisenhower. President Johnson also inherited a Saigon! government that was disorganised and unstable following the overthrow of Diem, a Viet Cong upsurge in the countryside and ample 1 portents of impending mili- 1 tary collapse. The Pentagon ■ Papers confirm what was 1 supposed at the time, that 1 the Kennedy Administration ; and the American embassy , in Saigon connived at the, 1 overthrow Of Diem, but that 1 the American military com- ; mander thought this a mis- , take.

General Maxwell Taylor, who was then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, agreed with the military commander that it was fool? ish to allow the coup without having any political combination in view to take Diem’s place. General Tavlor was on television last Sunday week to say that he had not changed his mind and that the North Vietnamese took advantage of the coup to throw their army into the South. President Johnson,' who had succeeded Kennedy by then, simply responded to ; this escalation.

Contemptuous eyes

President Johnson, for his part, felt keenly that he was being measured against his predecessor by contemptuous eyes, some of them belonging to his own nominal ser-

vants, in hopes that he would be found inadequate; and the

standards of adequacy were set to some extent bv Kennedy’s great triumph, the Cuban missile crisis. In his first year, 1964, President Johnson was beset by warnings that he must do something to stop the rot in Vietnam. But his own principal interest in 1964 was to I obtain re-election by not

/merely an adequate majority, but an overwhelming one, • and to bring in an overwhelm- , * ingly Democratic Congress with him, to pass a pro- ■ i gramme of economic improvement and social reform i Mr Johnson succeeded :| brilliantly in his own political /plans, but at the cost of exposing himself today to the charges, set off by the publication of the papers, that t he bamboozled the electorate ' in 1964 and went on deceiving the public in 1965. There are some embarrassing facts about the famous : skinhish in the Gulf of Tonkin, on the strength of which ihe obtained an enabling /resolution from Congress to ;do anything that he thought 1 necessary in the Far East : (“like Grandma’s nightgown,” he used to say, “it ’ covers everything”). Con- ' gress did not know at the ' time that South Vietnamese commando raids and patrol . boat attacks on the . North Vietnamese coast . were being carried out on . President Johnson’s orders i and simultaneously with patrols of American deI stroyers. But Congress was . not very inclined at that ; time to be critical of strong American action.

j Charge not supported I This is quite a different thing from saying that Mr ! Johnson had formed the in- : tention of engaging in sustained air warfare against ! North Vietnam (as against | the limited reprisal raids which followed the skirmish in the Gulf of Tonkin) at the very time that he was slaughtering Senator Goldwater on the campaign platforms with the suggestion that as President Mr Goldwater would enlarge the war while he, Mr Johnson, would not.

The Pentagon Papers do not, in fact, support the charge. They show that his advisers were at him to make military decisions, that the collapse of the government in South Vietnam | was coming manifestly (closer unless something ! violent were done to ward jit off and that his advisers had formed their own “con- | census” that more action would be needed. The papers do not show that M r Johnson had made his decision and in fact he went on turning down demands for authority to bomb North Vietnam until February, 1965.

More substantial is the charge that when he had decided to make the United States a participant in the war in the full sense, in the spring and summer of 1965, when the nation was launched down the road that has led it into its present frustration and gloom, Mr Johnson continued to softsoap the public, talking of negotiation when none was in mind, expressing optimism when none was justified, causing changes of policy to be denied when important decisions had. in fact, been taken.

There is something in this. Some of it arose from a sheer failure to appreciate the war situation properly. Mr Johnson did not then have the experience that is available now. Thus he talked privately to a group of correspondents in June, 1965, to the effect that the Communists would not negotiate until it was demonstrated to them that the United States would and could prevent them from winning and that this would take time—“on the most hopeful estimate,” your correspondent noted, "it will take until the monsoon is over.” That was six years ago. Bellicose times No doubt the underestimate of what was involved encouraged Mr Johnson to balk at the obvious ways in which the nation might have been alerted to the fact that it had engaged in a vast, fateful, hard and dangerous enterprise: calling up reserves, imposing war taxes with wage and price controls, declaring a state of emergency, perhaps even declaring war. But he had other reasons for balking and they were not disgraceful reasons.

Once again, it is necessary to remember that American governments in those days feared not the pacific instincts of the public but its bellicose instincts. Mr Johnson feared the war party more than he feared the pacifists and he wanted to keep the freedom to launch in Congress the first sustained Democratic programme of social reform since the 19305. Thus he let the public be told that the war was not such a deadly serious thing as it turned out to be and he probably told himself the same. His misfortune was that, though the legislation was passed, its execution was largely frustrated by the cost of the war.

i : i Savage club korero.—Fifty

members of the South Canterbury Savage Club attended the annual korero at the Christchurch Savage Club in the Edgeware Road Scottish Society Hall. The visitors were entertained by musical items, sketches, and Maori action songs and hakas. They (were also taken on a guided tour of the Town Hall site.