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Appendix 1:
Analysis and Comment
THE LESSONS OF
VIETNAM
by Max Frankel
The Pentagon
papers on how the United States went to war
in Indochina probably mark the end of an era in American
foreign policy-a quarter of a century of virtually unchallenged
Presidential management and manipulation of the instruments
of war and the diplomacy bearing on war. Yet the
papers cannot be more than the beginning of reflection on
that era and its climax, the nation's painful, disillusioning and
still unresolved involvement in Vietnam.
Massive but incomplete, comprehensive but by no means exhaustive,
remarkably honest but undoubtedly warped by perspective
and experience, the papers are unlike any others ever
composed in the midst of war and published within 3 to 10
years of the secret deliberations and calculations they describe.
They form a unique collection and they have been summarized
under unique circumstances in nine installments in
The New York Times--over unique legal challenge of the
United States Government. The very novelty of the papers and
the contest over their publication have tended to divert attention
from the essential tale they bear. There has already been
dispute not only about what they mean but also about what
they say.
From the perspective of 1971, they could be read as an
anatomy of failure: the misapplication of an earlier day's theories
and techniques for containing Communism and the misfire
of the political wisdom of that day that the United States would
pay any price and bear any burden to prevent the loss of one
more acre of ground to Communists anywhere.
Yet, paradoxically, the Pentagon papers tell the story of the
successful application of those theories and they demonstrate
the great and still-surviving force of those political convictions
and fears.
But they could also be read as a chronicle of success: the
tenacious collaboration of four-and now perhaps five-ad-
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ministrations of both major parties in the preservation of a
commitment to an ally, the demonstration of American fidelity
to an enterprise once begun and the denial of victory to Communist
adversaries.
Yet the Pentagon papers show that despite the sacrifices of
life, treasure and serenity to the Vietnam war, the predominant
American objective was not victory over the enemy but merely
the avoidance of defeat and humiliation.
In sum, the papers and the discussion now swirling about
them command at least a preliminary appraisal-of what they
are and what they are not, of what they reveal and what they
neglect. Who really deceived whom? And how did all this
agony really arise?
Essentially the Pentagon papers are raw material for history
-an insiders' study of the decision-making processes of four
administrations that struggled with Vietnam from 1945 to
1968. The papers embody 3,000 pages of often overlapping
analyses and 4,000 pages of supporting documents. They were
commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara,
in a period of frustration with a war that critics sardonically
gave his name to. But they were written and compiled by 36
analysts, civilian and military, most of them still anonymous,
and they were finally printed and bound into fewer than 20
sets in the early months of the Nixon Administration, which
paid them no heed until they began to appear in The Times.
The study drew primarily upon Pentagon files that are still
sealed and upon some of the most important Presidential
orders and diplomatic materials of the time under review. The
analysts did not have access to the most private White House
documents bearing on the moods and motives of the Presidents.
And in the form obtained by The Times, the study also
lacked several of the 47 volumes, among them four devoted
to the diplomacy that surrounded the war.
But the Pentagon papers also offer more than the most
polished of histories. They present not only the directives, conclusions
and decisions of government in an era of prolonged
crisis, but also many of the loose memorandums, speculations,
draft proposals and contingency plans composed by influential
individuals and groups inside that government.
Whatever is missing, for lack of access or perception, is
more than recompensed by the sheer sweep and drama of this
contemporaneous record.
Unlike diary, which can never escape the moment, and unlike
history, which must distill at a remote future, the Pentagon
study was able to re-enact a fateful progression of attitudes and
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decisions while simultaneously viewing them from a perspective
greater than that of any of the participants.
So whatever its shortcomings, the study will stand as a vast
trove of insights, hindsights and revelations about the plans
and conceptions of small groups of men as they guided the nation
into a distant but grievous venture, about how they talked
and wrote to each other, to friend and foe, in public and in
private. And the study is bound to stand as a new model for
governmental analysis, raising questions normally reserved for
literature: how powerful and sophisticated men take on commitments
while they think themselves free, how they reach decisions
while they see the mirage of choice, how they entrap
themselves while they labor to induce or coerce others to do
their will.
As the coordinator of the Pentagon study, Leslie H. Gelb,
recently said of this story, "It was and is a Greek tragedy."
As written at the Pentagon and as recounted by The Times,
the study found no villains or heroes. It made no historical
value judgments. It argued no brief.
The portraits of the principal actors-especially those such
as Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who were wary of betraying
their views in interagency meetings and memorandums-are
far from complete or satisfying. The portraits of the Presidents,
even if their own files had been available, would remain
inadequate until they were set against the political and international
imperatives felt at the White House at every stage.
In the absence of a comparable study of the objectives and
tactics of the Vietnam adversaries-notably the Government
of North Vietnam and the coalition of insurgents in South
Vietnam-the Pentagon papers could not presume to judge the
morality or even the wisdom of the policies they record and
describe.
And although many of the authors appear to have become
disillusioned doves about the war, their study could stand almost
as well as a brief for frustrated hawks; its central conclusion,
that the nation simply pursued excessive aims with insufficient
means, leaves entirely unresolved the central question of
whether it would have been better to do more or to seek less.
Of all the revelations in the Pentagon papers, the most important
deal with the patterns of thought and action that recur
at almost every stage of the American involvement in Indochina:
• This was a war not only decreed but closely managed by
the civilian leaders of the United States. The military chiefs
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were in fact reluctant at the start, unimpressed by the strategic
significance of Vietnam and worried throughout that they
would never be allowed to expand the size and scope of the
war to the point where they could achieve a clear advantage
over the enemy.
• This was not a war into which the United States stumbled
blindly, step by step, on the basis of wrong intelligence or military
advice that just a few more soldiers or a few more air raids
would turn the tide. The nation's intelligence analysts were
usually quite clear in their warnings that contemplated escalations
of force and objective would probably fail.
• Yet military considerations took precedence over political
considerations at almost every stage. Since none of the Americans
managing the Vietnam problem were prepared to walk
away from it, they were forced to tolerate the petty political
maneuvering in Saigon and Saigon's political and economic
policies, even when Washington recognized them as harmful.
As a result, even the military chiefs, and notably Gen. William
C. Westmoreland, yielded to the temptation of seeking victory
on the ground, although it was known that the enemy could
always resupply just enough men to frustrate the American
military machine.
• The public claim that the United States was only assisting
a beleaguered ally who really had to win his own battle was
never more than a slogan. South Vietnam was essentially the
creation of the United States. The American leaders, believing
that they had to fight fire with fire to ward off a Communist
success, hired agents, spies, generals and presidents where they
could find them in Indochina. They thought and wrote of them
in almost proprietary terms as instruments of American policy.
Ineluctably, the fortunes of these distant, often petty men became
in their minds indistinguishable from the fortunes of the
United States.
• The views of the world and the estimate of the Communist
world that led the United States to take its stand-in Indochina
remained virtually static for the men who managed the Vietnam
war. The "domino theory"-that all the other nations of
Asia would topple if Indochina fell into Communist handsmoves
robustly through the Pentagon papers, even by momentous
events such as the split between the Soviet Union and
Communist China, Peking's preoccupation with its Cultural
Revolution or the bloody destruction of the Communist challenge
in Indonesia.
• The American objective in Vietnam, although variously
defined over the years, remained equally fixed. Disengagement,
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no matter how artfully it might have been arranged or managed,
was never seriously considered so long as a separate, pro-
American and non-Communist government was not safely installed
in Saigon.
• The American Presidents, caught between the fear of a
major war involving the Soviet Union or China and the fear of
defeat and humiliation at the hands of a small band of insurgents,
were hesitant about every major increase in military
force. But they were unrestrained in both their public and private
rhetorical commitments to "pay the price," to "stay the
course" and to "do whatever is necessary."
• The American military and civilian bureaucracies, therefore,
viewed themselves as being on a fixed course. They took
seriously and for the most part literally the proclaimed doc"
trines of successive National Security Council papers that Indochina
was vital to the security interests of the nation. They thus
regarded themselves as obligated to concentrate always on the
questions of what to do next, not whether they should be
doing it.
But the principal findings of the Pentagon papers cannot be
fully understood without some recollection of the traditions,
the training and the attitudes of the men who led the United
States in the generation following World War II.
As The Economist of London has observed, these men were
reared in the habits of the internationalist Presidents, notably
Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who also felt
duty-bound to lead the nation into war after vowing to avoid
it. The British weekly goes so far as to suggest that secret maneuver
and public deception may be the only way to take great
democracies to war.
Moreover, as Senator Frank Church of Idaho, one of the
early Congressional critics of the war in Vietnam, remarked
in Washington the other day, Presidents Truman, Eisenhower,
Kennedy and Johnson were all reared to the conviction that
only Presidents and their experts can have the perspective and
knowledge needed to define the national interest in a hostile
world.
They lived with the memory of Congress destroying Wilson's
League of Nations and hampering Roosevelt's quest for safety
in alliances against Germany and Japan.
They lived with the memory of two costly world wars, both
of which they judged avoidable if American power had been
arrayed soon enough against distant aggression.
They lived with the nightmare that "appeasement" would
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only invite more aggression and lead directly to World War III,
as the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia to Hitler at Munich led to
World War II.
And they lived with the knowledge that another major war
would be a nuclear war unless it were deterred with frequent
demonstrations of American resolve and readiness to honor
promises to friends and threats against adversaries.
These are the convictions that the men who made the Vietnam
war carried into the post-world-war rivalry against the
Soviet Union and against what they regarded for many years
as a highly disciplined international Communist conspiracy,
directed from Moscow and aimed at worldwide revolution and
conquest.
After the "loss" of half of Europe to Communism, the American
leaders set out to draw the line, wherever possible, to
"contain" the Communists without major war.
They were imaginative and cold-blooded about the techniques
they used in this effort. They broke the Berlin blockade
without firing a shot. They poured $12-billion in economic aid
into the revival of the economies of Western Europe. They led
the United Nations into war in defense of South Korea. They
sent military missions, military equipment, spies and agitators
to all parts of the world. They sought to make and to destroy
governments. They tried to "build" nations where none had
existed before.
But they paid a profound psychological price. Their summons
to sacrifice at home gave the contest an uncontrollable
ideological fervor. The "loss" of China to Communism in 1949
and the further frustration of war in Korea in 1950 inspired
a long hunt at home for knaves and traitors, in the White
House and below, from which American politics is only beginning
to recover.
Politicians and the politicians who became Presidents goaded
each other to the conclusion that they could not "lose" another
inch of territory to Communism, anywhere. The Republicans
took after Democrats by saying they had been weak or
treacherous about China and had accepted less than total victory
in Korea. The Democrats took after Republicans by saying
they had lost Cuba and dissipated American prestige and
missile strength.
As President Eisenhower reached the end of his Administration,
his greatest fear was the "loss" of Laos. And as President
Kennedy assumed office, the Government's greatest ambition
was the "liberation" of Cuba. No matter how small the nations
or how marginal their threat to the United States, their "loss"
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came to be seen as an intolerable humiliation of American purpose
and a dangerous invitation to aggression elsewhere.
Thus whenever aid and intrigue had failed, the cold-war instinct
was resort to overt force. And the failure of force in one
place only magnified the temptation to use it elsewhere. The
simultaneous fiasco at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba and dissolution
of anti-Communist forces in Laos in 1961 was uppermost in
the minds of the Kennedy men who then proceeded to raise the
stakes in Vietnam.
As the Pentagon papers show, they were motivated by the
desire to contain China and what they considered to be the
Asian branch of "international Communism," to protect the
"dominoes" of non-Communist Asia, to discredit the Communist
theories of guerrilla war and "wars of national liberation"
and to demonstrate to allies everywhere that the United
States would honor its pledges and make good on its threats
no matter how difficult the task or insignificant the terrain.
These objectives were widely supported in the United States
throughout the nineteen-sixties. But the Presidents who progressively
decided on an ultimate test in Vietnam never shared
with the Congress and the public what is now seen to have been
their private knowledge of the remoteness of success.
As the Pentagon papers show, every President from Truman
to Johnson passed down the problem of Vietnam in worse
shape than he had received it. The study gives special point to
President Johnson's recently disclosed remark to his wife in the
spring of 1965, at the very start of his massive commitment
of troops:
"I can't get out. I can't finish it with what I have got. So
what the hell can I do?"
What he and his predecessors did not do was to inform the
country of the dilemma and invite it to help make the choice.
The Pentagon papers reveal that all the difficulties of defining
the Indochina problem date from the very earliest American
experiences there, under Presidents Truman and Eisenhower.
They show that Gen. George C. Marshall, a Secretary
of State for Mr. Truman, recognized the Vietnamese Communists
to be also the leaders of a legitimate Vietnamese anti-colonialism.
He thus recognized their challenge as different
from any other Communist bid for power, but the distinction
was soon lost.
The papers show that even after President Eisenhower reluctantly
let the French go down to defeat in Indochina, his
Administration refused to accept the compromise settlement of
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Geneva in 1954. It set out to supplant the French and to carry
on the struggle, with hastily organized acts of sabotage, terror
and psychological warfare against the new Communist Government
in North Vietnam and with programs of aid and military
training to establish a rival anti-Communist nation of
South Vietnam.
The stories now revealed make vastly more complicated the
official American version of Vietnam history, in which the
Hanoi Communists alone were charged with aggression and a
ruthless refusal to leave "their neighbors" alone. Clearly, the
American commitment to save at least half of Vietnam from
Communism antedates the whole succession of Saigon governments
to which it was nominally given.
Even in these early years of American involvement, the
Governments of South Vietnam were perceived as mere instruments
of larger American objectives. It was Gen. J. Lawton
Collins, acting as President Eisenhower's personal representative
in Indochina, who first proposed the ouster of Ngo Dinh
Diem. The Vietnamese leader was saved at the time by agents
of the Central Intelligence Agency, but several of those agents
were still available to help arrange a coup against Mr. Diem
eight years later.
Even in those early years, the Pentagon papers show, Washington's
public optimism about the prospects for anti-Communists
in Vietnam masked a private pessimism.
And even then the North Vietnamese Communists were
being held responsible for the direction of the insurgency in
the South, even though it was not for lack of trying that the
Americans in the South failed to cause equal difficulty in the
North.
In hindsight, with the benefit of the Pentagon papers, it is
plain that the Kennedy years brought more, much more of the
same.
The "domino theory" was now expanded to embrace concern
about the fate of Indonesia, loosely regarded as also in
Southeast Asia. The fiasco in Cuba and tension over Berlin
made it seem even more imperative to take a stand somewhere,
if only for demonstration purposes.
Despite the Eisenhower warnings, Laos was deemed to be
a poor place to make a stand. So it was partitioned among
three rival factions, with the North Vietnamese gaining a convenient
corridor for systematic infiltration into South Vietnam.
The deal had the effect of making the defense of South
Vietnam vastly more difficult at the very moment when the
American commitment to its defense was taking deeper root.
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The same paradoxical effect was achieved many times during
the years of American involvement in Indochina.
The character of that involvement, it is now clear, also underwent
a portentous though subtle change during the Kennedy
years: American military and political activities came to
be valued less for their intrinsic benefits than for the general
encouragement they might give to the struggling South Vietnamese.
They also came to be valued less for the damage they
might inflict on the North Vietnamese than for the fear of still
greater American involvement they were supposed to arouse.
Even though the Kennedy Administration knew the sad facts
of instability, corruption and tyranny in South Vietnam, it consistently
gave priority to military measures that would express
its activism and bespeak its determination. Its vain but constant
hope was that morale would improve in Saigon and that the
threat of massive American intervention would somehow persuade
Hanoi to relent.
So for practical as well as domestic political reasons, private
realism yielded even further to public expressions of optimism
and confidence. Three weeks after the Bay of Pigs in April,
1961, Mr. Kennedy felt it necessary to order the start of new
covert operations against the territory of North Vietnam and
Communist regions in Laos.
Later in 1961, he heard so much debate about the growing
need for American ground troops in Vietnam that the decisions
to send several thousand military "advisers" seemed a
relatively modest and cautious move.
But the pressure built for a more direct American management
of the entire war, an impulse that found its ultimate expression
in Washington's complicity in the overthrow of President
Diem. Once again, more than the President realized and
perhaps more than he wanted, the obligation of the United
States had been simultaneously deepened and made more difficult
to redeem.
Along with the Kennedy term and the Kennedy men, President
Johnson thus inherited a broad Kennedy commitment to
South Vietnam. And twice in Mr. Johnson's first four months
in office, Secretary McNamara returned from Saigon with the
news that things were going from bad to miserable. Stable government
now seemed impossible to achieve and the countryside
was fast falling into Vietcong control.
Mr. McNamara and many other officials began to press for
action, including new covert attacks against North Vietnam
and at least urgent planning for open bombing and border
patrols. They acknowledged privately that the real problems
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were in the South, but they could not yet conceive of any effective
form of intervention.
So they built on the old formula of the Kennedy years action
for action's sake, not because it would achieve anything
tangible but because it might help morale in Saigon and
cause Hanoi to recognize that it could never "win" the war
without confronting American power.
As the Pentagon papers show, these "scenarios" for threat
and escalation were written in the glib, cold but confident
spirit of efficiency experts-the same experts whose careful
plotting of moves and countermoves against the Soviet Union
in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis had so gloriously vindicated
the new political science of gamesmanship and probability
theory.
Assistant Secretary of Defense John T. McNaughton, who
eventually turned against the war with a pathetic confession of
ignorance of the Vietnamese people, best typified this style of
thought and planning at the upper levels of government.
In his memorandums, choices of more or less war were
reduced to "options": "B-- fast full squeeze. Present policies
plus a systematic program of military pressures against
the North ... "; "C--progressive squeeze-and-talk. Present
policies plus an orchestration of communications with Hanoi
and a crescendo of additional military moves ... "
Countries and peoples became "audiences": "The relevant
audiences" of U. S. actions are the .Communists (who must
feel strong pressures), the South Vietnamese (whose morale
must be buoyed), our allies (who must trust us as 'underwriters'),
and the U. S. public (which must support our risk-taking
with U. S. lives and prestige) . . . Because of the lack
of 'rebuttal time' before election to justify particular actions
which may be distorted to the U. S. public, we must act with
special care-signaling to the DRV that initiatives are being
taken, to the GVN that we are behaving energetically despite
the restraints of our political season, and to the U. S. public
that we are behaving with good purpose and restraint."
Many of these memorandums were only "contingency plans"
that contemplated what else the United States might do in one
or another eventuality. But there was nothing contingent in
their definition of American purposes and objectives, in their
analyses-in the crucial years of 1964-65--of the rapidly deteriorating
situation in South Vietnam and in their revelation
of the state of mind of the dozen or so top officials whose persistent
clamor for action could be delayed but never ultimately
denied by a President who shared their purpose.
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And there was nothing "contingent" about the direct orders
of the National Security Council and the Presidential messages
that have turned up with the Pentagon papers. The lines of
reasoning and decision from the action papers to the contingency
papers are direct and unmistakable.
The Pentagon papers and The Times's reports on them confirm
the judgment of contemporary observers that President
Johnson was reluctant and hesitant to take the final decision
at every fateful turn of his plunge into large-scale war.
Mr. Johnson and other officials were often evasive or coy
with the press by creating the impression that plans for bombing
were only "recommendations" without "decision" or that
"requests" for more troops from the field were not "on my
desk at this moment" because they lay formally elsewhere.
But these are not the most important deceptions revealed
in the Pentagon papers.
There is, above all, much evidence that the four Administrations
that progressively deepened the American involvement in
the war felt a private commitment to resist Communist advance,
and then a private readiness to wage war against North
Vietnam and finally a private sense of frustration with the
entire effort much sooner and to a much greater extent than
they ever acknowledged to the Congress and the nation.
There is evidence in the papers that the Congress was rushed
into passing a resolution to sanction the use of force in Vietnam
in 1964, ostensibly to justify retaliation for an "unprovoked"
attack on American vessels, even though the Administration
really intended to use the resolution as the equivalent
of a declaration of war and withheld information that would
have shown the North Vietnamese to have had ample reason
for "retaliating" against the United States.
There is evidence that all the elaborately staged offers of
negotiation and compromise with the Communist adversary
were privately acknowledged in the Administration as demands
for his virtual "surrender."
And there is evidence, scattered over the years, that the oft-proclaimed
goal of achieving "self-determination" for the
South Vietnamese was in fact acceptable to the United States
only as long as no South Vietnamese leader chose neutralism or
any other form of nonalignment. As President Johnson put it
in a cablegram to his ambassador in early 1964, "Your mission
is precisely for the purpose of knocking down the idea of
neutralization wherever it rears its ugly head."
The evidence for two very specific charges of deception that
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have been leveled against President Johnson since publication
of the Pentagon papers is much less clear.
The Pentagon study itself did not make any charges, and
neither did The Times in its reports on the findings of the
study. But many readers concluded that Mr. Johnson had lied
to the country in 1964, when he denounced his Republican opponent,
Senator Barry Goldwater, for advocating full-scale air
attacks against North Vietnam, and again in April, 1965,
when he secretly authorized the use of American troops in an
offensive combat role.
The Pentagon study describes a "general consensus" among
the President's advisers, two months before the 1964 election,
that air attacks against North Vietnam would probably have to
be launched. It reports an expectation among them that these
would begin early in the new year. As The Times report
added, the papers also showed the President "moving and
being moved toward war, but reluctant and hesitant to act
until the end."
Mr. Johnson and those who defend his public statements at
the time are undoubtedly right in their contention that the
President made no formal decision to authorize more bombing
until there were additional attacks on American bases in February,
1965.
But the President also knew that most of his major advisers
regarded such a decision as "inevitable"-because they thought
South Vietnam to be in danger of imminent collapse, because
the forces to conduct more air attacks were in place, because
the target lists had long ago been prepared and because even
sustained bombing was destined to be merely a stopgap measure
until more troops could be rushed to South Vietnam.
In a search through his own dispatches from Washington at
the time, this reporter has come upon three interesting accounts
that help to explain the confusion but tend to support
the much more thoroughly researched judgment of the Pentagon
papers.
On Oct. 9, 1964, The Times reported on a news conference
question to Secretary Rusk about reports "here and in Saigon
that the Administration was considering a 'major turn' in policy
but deferring a decision until after Election Day, Nov. 3." Mr.
Rusk refused to predict "future events" but said that domestic
politics had no bearing on any such decisions.
On Feb. 13, 1965, after a new "retaliatory" raid on North
Vietnam but before the start of sustained bombing, this reporter
quoted two unidentified high officials as follows:
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"There is no doubt that the President remains skeptical about
a deeper involvement in Asia, but he is getting some very belligerent
advice from very intimate quarters."
"History may determine that it was already too late, that the
die is cast, but I am sure that the Government's strategy is not
yet determined."
In other words, even high officials sensed that their President
was still reserving final judgment and "decision," but they
did not really know how much real choice remained.
Even after the decision had been made, however, there was
no simple way to get a straight answer from the Johnson Administration
in those days, as is evident in the opening lines of
a dispatch on March 2, 1965:
"The Administration described today's air strikes against
North Vietnam as part of a 'continuing' effort to resist aggression
and made no effort, as in the past, to relate them to particular
provocation. . . . The White House said only that
there had been no change in policy. The State Department said
nothing. . . ."
Some officials at the time, and Mr. Johnson on at least one
occasion since then, suggested that such coyness after decision
had been deemed necessary to avoid provoking intervention
in the war by Soviet or Chinese Communist forces. They never
explained, however, why either nation would make such a
grave decision on the basis of announcements in Washington
rather than on the facts of the bombing, which were well
known to them.
A far more plausible explanation, one that sounds strange in
matters of such weight but rings true to those who could observe
Lyndon Johnson closely and sympathetically in those days,
has been offered by Stewart Alsop in Newsweek: "President
Johnson was trying to fool not the people but himself-and
temporarily succeeding."
What really emerges from the Pentagon papers, Mr. Alsop
wrote approvingly, "is a picture of a desperately troubled man
resisting the awful pressures to plunge deeper into the Vietnam
quagmire-resisting them as instinctively as an old horse resists
being led to the knackers. The President bucks, whinnies
and shies away, but always in the end the reins tighten-the
pressures are too much for him."
And, he adds: "A precisely similar sequence of events mounting
pressure from his advisers, instinctive resistance by
the President, final agonized agreement-preceded the President's
decision to commit additional troops and to give the
marines an offensive role. When he made these decisions, the
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President did not realize-because he did not want to realize that
he had crossed his Rubicon. He still hoped and prayed
that a bit more air power, a few more troops on the ground,
would bring the Communists to the conference table in a mood
to 'reason together.' Hence there really had been, in his own
mind, nothing 'very dramatic' about his decisions, no 'far-reaching
strategy.' "
As the Pentagon papers further show, Mr. Johnson was to
make two or three other big decisions about troop commitments
and carve them up into smaller, more digestible numbers,
as if this could hide the magnitude of the American involvement.
He knew that he was not winning the war and he
knew that he was playing only for some unforeseeable stroke of
good fortune, and it may be that his sense of statesmanship led
him to conclude that the nation would be preserved longer if
he minimized the task.
Whatever the motives, the methods for handling the awkwardness
of Vietnam had then become almost traditional. But
it was Mr. Johnson's misfortune to be President, as Mr. Gelb,
the coordinator of the study has written, when the "minimum
necessary became the functional equivalent of gradual escalation"
and the "minimal necessity became the maximum" that
international and domestic constraints would allow.
The overriding evidence in the Pentagon papers, quite apart
from the timing of decisions or the candor with which they
were disclosed, is that the United States Government involved
itself deeply and consciously in a war that its leaders felt they
probably could not win but that they also felt they could not
afford to lose.
Gradually, some of the leading advocates of the war lost
their enthusiasm for it, but even in disillusionment they felt
a higher duty of loyalty to the President and his policy than
to the public that had become deeply divided and tormented
by the war.
As early as 1966, Mr. McNaughton perceived an "enormous
miscalculation" and an "escalating military stalemate." By
1967, Mr. McNamara and probably others were recommending
a reduction of objectives and perhaps a face-saving exit
through the formation of a coalition government in Saigon.
But Mr. Johnson thought more unhappy Americans were
hawks than doves and he was also forced, amid fears of noisy
resignations, to negotiate with his military leaders, who were
demanding more, rather than less, commitment.
Not until the shock of the enemy's Tet offensive in 1968,
and the need to mobilize reserves if he was to meet the military's
request for 206,000 additional men for the combat zone,
did Mr. Johnson set a final limit on the American commitment,
cut back the bombing of North Vietnam and announce
his plan to retire without seeking a second term.
No one knows to this day whether by these moves the President
intended to hurry out of the war in some face-saving manner
or merely to buy still more time from the American voters
for a final effort at vindication.
As the Pentagon papers disclose, his Administration did not
expect much from the bombing limitation or the new offer to
negotiate with Hanoi.
"We are not giving up anything really serious in this time
frame" of four weeks, the State Department informed its embassies,
noting that poor weather would have curtailed the raids
for that period in any case. It said that some of the air power
would be switched to targets in Laos and South Vietnam and
that in any case Hanoi was expected to reject the bid for talks
and this would "free our hand after a short period."
Hanoi accepted the bid for talks, but has offered very little
so far that interests Washington. Neither on the way in nor
on the way out, it is now clear, was the American hand in
Vietnam ever "free."
-July 6,1971
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EDITORIALS FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES
The Vietnam Documents
In an unprecedented example of censorship, the Attorney
General of the United States has temporarily succeeded in preventing
The New York Times from continuing to publish
documentary and other material taken from a secret Pentagon
study of the decisions affecting American participation in the
Vietnam War.
Through a temporary restraining order issued by a Federal
District judge yesterday, we are prevented from publishing, at
least through the end of the week, any new chapters in this
massive documentary history of American involvement in the
war. But The Times will continue to fight to the fullest possible
extent of the law what we believe to be an unconstitutional
prior restraint imposed by the Attorney General.
What was the reason that impelled The Times to publish
this material in the first place? The basic reason is, as was
stated in our original reply to Mr. Mitchell, that we believe
"that it is in the interest of the people of this country to be informed
.... " A fundamental responsibility of the press in this
democracy is to publish information that helps the people of
the United States to understand the processes of their own government,
especially when those processes have been clouded
over in a hazy veil of public dissimulation and even deception.
As a newspaper that takes seriously its obligation and its
responsibilities
to the public, we believe that, once this material
fell into our hands, it was not only in the interests of the American
people to publish it but, even more emphatically, it would
have been an abnegation of responsibility and a renunciation
of our obligations under the First Amendment not to have
published it. Obviously, The Times would not have made this
decision if there had been any reason to believe that publication
would have endangered the life of a single American soldier
or in any way threatened the security of our country or
the peace of the world.
The documents in question belong to history. They refer to
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the development of American interest and participation in
Indochina from the post-World War II period up to mid-1968,
which is now almost three years ago. Their publication could
not conceivably damage American security interests, much less
the lives of Americans or Indochinese. We therefore felt it
incumbent to take on ourselves the responsibility for their publication,
and in doing so raise once again the question of the
Government's propensity for over-classification and mis-classification
of documents that by any reasonable scale of values
have long since belonged in the public domain.
We publish the documents and related running account not
to prove any debater's point about the origins and development
of American participation in the war, not to place the finger of
blame on any individuals, civilian or military, but to present
to the American public a history-admittedly incomplete--of
decision-making at the highest levels of government on one of
the most vital issues that has ever affected "our lives, our fortunes
and our sacred honor"-an issue on which the American
people and their duly elected representatives in Congress have
been largely curtained off from the truth.
It is the effort to expose and elucidate that truth that is the
very essence of freedom of the press.
-June 16, 1971
Decision for Freedom
District Judge Murray L. Gurfein's decision yesterday denying
the Government's plea for a preliminary injunction to bar
this newspaper from publishing articles about a secret Pentagon
study of the Vietnam war marks a significant victory for press
freedom in the United States and for the right of the American
people to be informed about the operations of their Government.
"A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, an ubiquitous
press, must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve
the even greater values of freedom of expression and the
right of the people to know," Judge Gurfein declared. "These
are troubled times. There is no greater safety valve for discontent
and cynicism about the affairs of government than freedom
of expression in any form."
After hearing the Government's arguments in a lengthy
secret session, the District Judge agreed with this newspaper's
contention that publication of the articles and documents did
not endanger national security. "Without revealing the content
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of the testimony," he said, "suffice it to say that no cogent
reasons were advanced as to why these documents except in
the general framework of embarrassment . . . would vitally
affect the security of the nation."
The case now goes to the Appeals Court which we hope will
speedily clear the way for resumed publication of the articles
and documents based on the Pentagon study. By any definition
of democratic government and freedom of the press, the public
is entitled to the information contained in this history, which in
fact is indispensable to an understanding of the evolution of
American policy in Vietnam.
-June 20, 1971
The Vietnam Papers
On Nov. 25, 1964, some three weeks after President Johnson's
election, The Times observed editorially that "another
Vietnam reassessment is under way . . . [and] if there is to
be a new policy now, if an Asian war is to be converted into
an American war, the country has a right to insist that it be
told what has changed so profoundly in the last two months
to justify it." The country was not told.
Six months later, after repeated demands for "a straightforward
explanation" of what was clearly becoming a major land
war on the continent of Asia, this newspaper noted that "there
is still no official explanation offered for a move that fundamentally
alters the character of the American involvement in
Vietnam" and pleaded "for the President to take the country
into his confidence .... "
These comments illustrate how Congress and the American
people were kept in the dark about fundamental policy decisions
affecting the very life of this democracy during the most
critical period of the war. The conviction even then that the
Government was not being frank with the American people
has been fully confirmed by the massive Pentagon history and
documentation which The Times began to publish last week until
the Government undertook to censor it.
The running commentary and documents that did appear in
this newspaper before the Government moved to block them
throw a clear spotlight on the decision-making process during
the period up to and including the major escalation of the
Vietnam War in 1964 and 1965. The multi-volume study on
which The Times' account was based shows beyond cavil how
the decisions affecting American participation in and conduct
655
of the war were planned and executed while their far-reaching
political effect and profound significance, fully appreciated at
the top reaches of government, were either deliberately distorted
or withheld altogether from the public.
Even more important, the papers as published thus far suggest
that almost no one in the upper ranks of the Administration
during this crucial period six and seven years ago was
probing into the basic political issue on which the military
operation depended: Was the Saigon Government's control of
South Vietnam of such vital, long-range interest to the United
States that it warranted an open-ended American military involvement-
or was this really an unexamined conclusion that
had already become an article of faith? Nearly every official
concerned was discussing the tactics and strategy of the war,
how to handle it, how to win it, how to come out of it, what
plans to make under various contingencies. These were important
matters indeed and the officials in question would not
have been doing their duty if they had failed to consider them.
They should not be faulted for this; nor was it in any way
improper to have planned for every conceivable military eventuality.
But the missing factor was discussion or argumentation over
the raison d' etre of the war and the rationale for continuing
massive American involvement in it. It seems to have been
accepted without question by virtually everyone in the top
ranks, except Under Secretary of State George Ball, that the
interests of the United States did indeed lie, at almost any cost
and overriding almost any risk, in military victory for the
South Vietnamese Government even to the point of major
American participation in a war on the land mass of Southeast
Asia.
This was the premise, this the context, and this the fateful
error. If, as the principal officers of the Government saw the
country being drawn into such a war, a full and frank debate
and discussion in Congress and outside had been undertaken, it
is quite possible that events would have moved in a different
way. No one will ever know, for this "open covenant, openly
arrived at" between American Government and American
people never materialized.
This, then, is what the Vietnam Papers prove-not venality,
not evil motivation, but rather an arrogant disregard for the
Congress, for the public and for the inherent obligation of the
responsibilities of leadership in a democratic society. The papers
are not only part of the historical record; they are an essential
part of that record. They are highly classified documents and
656
so is the analytical study on which The Times running commentary
was based. But they carry the story of Vietnam no
farther than 1968-now three years ago; they in no way affect
current plans, operations or policy; and there seems no longer
any justification for these papers-along with many other~ in
governmental files-to bear the kind of classification that keeps
them from general public access. Overclassification and
misclassification
of documents is at best a normal reflection of
governmental inertia; but, as here, it is often used to conceal
governmental error.
The material was not published by The Times for purposes
of recrimination or to establish scapegoats or to heap blame
on any individual in civilian or military ranks. It was published
because the American public has a right to have it and because,
when it came into the hands of The Times, it was its function
as a free and uncensored medium of information to make it
public. This same principle held for The Washington Post
when it too obtained some of the papers. To have acted otherwise
would have been to default on a newspaper's basic obligation
to the American people under the First Amendment,
which is precisely the point that Federal District Judge Murray
Gurfein suggested in his memorable decision in this newspaper's
favor last Saturday.
And yet the Government of the United States, in an action
unprecedented in modern American history, sought and is continuing
to seek to silence both The New York Times and The
Washington Post, claiming that "irreparable injury" to the
national security would be caused by publication of further
chapters in the Vietnam study. The fact is that "irreparable
injury" has been done to the Government itself, not because
of anything that has been published but, quite the contrary,
because of the extraordinary action the Government took to
thwart and subvert in this manner the constitutional principle
of freedom of the press which is the very essence of American
democracy. Judge Gurfein's decision-whether or not it is sustained
on appeal-surely represents a landmark in the endless
struggle of free men and free institutions against the unwarranted
exercise of governmental authority.
-June 21, 1971
"An Enlightened People"
The historic decision of the Supreme Court in the case of
the United States Government vs. The New York Times and
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The Washington Post is a ringing victory for freedom under
law. By lifting the restraining order that had prevented this
and other newspapers from publishing the hitherto secret Pentagon
papers, the nation's highest tribunal strongly reaffirmed
the guarantee of the people's right to know, implicit in the
First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
This was the essence of what The New York Times, and other
newspapers were fighting for and this is the essence of the
Court's majority opinions. The basic question, which goes to
the very core of the American political system, involved the
weighing by the Court of the First Amendment's guarantee of
freedom against the Government's power to restrict that freedom
in the name of national security. The Supreme Court did
not hold that the First Amendment gave an absolute right to
publish anything under all circumstances. Nor did The Times
seek that right. What The Times sought, and what the Court
upheld, was the right to publish these particular documents at
this particular time without prior Governmental restraint.
The crux of the problem lay indeed in this question of prior
restraint. For the first time in the history of the United States,
the Federal Government had sought through the courts to
prevent publication of material that it maintained would do
"irreparable injury" to the national security if spread before
the public. The Times, supported in this instance by the overwhelming
majority of the American press, held on the contrary
that it was in the national interest to publish this information,
which was of historic rather than current operational nature.
If the documents had involved troop movements, ship sailings,
imminent military plans, the case might have been quite
different; and in fact The Times would not have endeavored
to publish such material. But this was not the case; the documents
and accompanying analysis are historic, in no instance
going beyond 1968, and incapable in 1971 of harming the life
of a single human being or interfering with any current military
operation. The majority of the Court clearly recognized
that embarrassment of public officials in the past-or even in
the present-is insufficient reason to overturn what Justice
White described as "the concededly extraordinary protection
against prior restraint under our constitutional system."
So far as the Government's classification of the material is
concerned, it is quite true, as some of our critics have observed,
that "no one elected The Times" to declassify it. But it is also
true, as the Court implicitly recognizes, that the public interest
is not served by classification and retention in secret form of
vast amounts of information, 99.5 per cent of which a retired
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senior civil servant recently testified "could not be prejudicial
to the defense interests of the nation."
Out of this case should surely come a total revision of governmental
procedures and practice in the entire area of classification
of documents. Everyone who has ever had anything to
do with such documents knows that for many years the classification
procedures have been hopelessly muddled by inertia,
timidity and sometimes even stupidity and venality.
Beyond all this, one may hope that the entire exercise will
induce the present Administration to re-examine its own attitudes
toward secrecy, suppression and restriction of the liberties
of free man in a free society. The issue the Supreme Court
decided yesterday touched the heart of this republic; and we
fully realize that this is not so much a victory for any particular
newspaper as it is for the basic principles of freedom on
which the American form of government rests. This is really
the profound message of yesterday's decision, in which this
newspaper rejoices with humility and with the consciousness
that the freedom thus reaffirmed carries with it, as always, the
reciprocal obligation to present the truth to the American
public so far as it can be determined. That is, in fact, why the
Pentagon material had to be published. It is only with the
fullest possible understanding of the facts and of the background
of any policy decision that the American people can be
expected to play the role required of them in this democracy.
It would be well for the present Administration, in the light
of yesterday's decision, to reconsider with far more care and
understanding than it has in the past, the fundamental importance
of individual freedoms-including especially freedom of
speech, of the press, of assembly-to the life of the American
democracy. "Without an informed and free press," as Justice
Stewart said, "there cannot be an enlightened people."
-July 1, 1971
The Court's Decision
The decision of the Supreme Court allowing The Times and
other newspapers to continue to publish hitherto secret Pentagon
documents on the Vietnam war is in our view less important
as a victory for the press than as a striking confirmation
of the vitality of the American democratic form of government.
Despite the potentially far-reaching significance of doubts
and reservations expressed in the confusing welter of individual
opinions--each of the nine Justices wrote his own-the out-
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come of this case is a landmark for the press in its centuries-old
battle against the efforts of Governmental authority to
impose prior restraints. But we believe its real meaning goes
deeper than that, in the context of the present time and place.
We believe that its more profound significance lies in the implicit
but inescapable conclusion that the American people
have a presumptive right to be informed of the political decisions
of their Government and that when the Government has
been devious with the people, it will find no constitutional
sanction for its efforts to enforce concealment by censorship.
For this is the essential justification of The Times' grave
decision to take on itself the responsibility of publishing the
Pentagon papers. It was a decision not taken lightly; but The
Times felt that the documents, all dating from 1968 or earlier,
belonged to the American people, were now part of history,
could in no sense damage current military operations or
threaten a single life, and formed an essential element in an
understanding by the American people of the event that has
affected them more deeply than any other in this generation,
the Vietnam war.
The decision had to be made whether or not the embarrassment
to individuals, or even to governments, outweighed the
value to the American public of knowing something about the
decision-making process that led into the war and its subsequent
escalation. Furthermore, it was evident that Governmental
documents have been so generally overclassified and
misclassified for so many years that the mere fact of labeling
bore no necessary relationship to the national security. An
intensive review of classification procedures is sure to be one
beneficial result of this affair.
But there will be other results. We hope that the great lesson
to have been learned from publication of the Pentagon papers
is that the American Government must play square with the
electorate. We hope that this Administration and those to come
will realize that the major decisions have to be discussed
frankly and openly and courageously; and that the essence of
good government as of practical politics is, in Adlai Stevenson's
phrase, to "talk sense to the American people."
The Pentagon papers demonstrate the failure of successive
Administrations to carry out this policy in respect to Vietnam.
We do not think it is a question of personal morality, but
rather of private attitudes. We do not think that the respective
officials involved made recommendations or took decisions that
they did not conscientiously believe to be in the public interest.
660
As an early opponent of the escalation of American military
force in Vietnam, this newspaper has never attacked the motives
of those leaders, but we have criticized and we continue
to criticize their wisdom, their sense of values and their failure
fully to apprise the people and Congress of the implications of
decisions taken in secret.
Even if these decisions, now being revealed in the Pentagon
papers, had been generally understood by the public at the
time, we are not at all sure that in the climate of those days,
the results would have been any different. Given the fear of
Communist penetration and aggression throughout the '50's
and most of the '60's, it is quite likely that the American
public would have supported the basic rationale on escalation
even if the respective Administrations had been as forthcoming
as democratic procedures demanded.
The fact remains that out of the publication of this material,
the American people emerge the gainers. They have gained in
knowledge of the past, which should serve them well in the
future. They have gained in an understanding of their rights
under the Constitution. And they have gained in the perennial
effort of free men to control their government rather than
vice versa.
-July 4, 1971
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