To Move a Nation, by Roger Hilsman
Goldstein, Walter
To MOVE A NATION: THE POLITICS OF FOREIGN POLICY IN THE ADMINISTRATION OF JOHN F. KENNEDY, by Roger Hilsman. New York: Doubleday. 602 pp. $6.95. THIS MEMOIR is at once significant in...
...PROF...
...The author's failure to contend with "grand strategic alternatives" leaves him with an incomplete and silly story to unfold...
...First, it insists that the policy-making machinery functions in a tightly elitist yet democratic environment...
...He depicts a system in which the Administration's thousands of bureaucrats —and he himself—would or could work as effectively toward reactionary as toward liberal goals in foreign policy...
...He is not as sharp an observer of the personalities around Kennedy as Schlesinger or Sorenson, nor did he enjoy their dizzy view BOOKS from the summit...
...He is extremely perceptive in defining the complex activity needed to formulate foreign policy...
...And How Do You Know If You're Winning...
...Proof is given on page after page of the false reports and the exaggerated optimism of the U.S...
...Where is the "relative openness" and how can the author judge the policy procedure as "democratic" if an efficient elitism (and not a fluid pluralism) dominates so large a part of the political system...
...hence it posits a "relative openness" of the policy process that exists neither as myth nor in practice...
...It is their job to represent their Departmental positions, to force the discussion of critical issues, and to maintain a lively form of adversary debate...
...Nor does he understand the reforms which were required...
...In poor Administrations, the political chieftains or "front men" simply submit to the President's wishes and thus foreclose a searching review of commitments...
...New York: Doubleday...
...Harkins's predictions were spurious (as even Ambassador Lodge admitted) and that Ambassadors Nolting and Lodge made no progress in securing reforms from the Saigon regime...
...is the title of a chapter—but Hilsman does not tell us how he answered...
...but that he was more Iiberal or flexible is surely implausible...
...These attitudes are shared by most of the New Frontiersmen who found in President Kennedy the energetic Executive and crisis manager par excellence...
...This reviewer has often been touchedby the sentiments privately expressed by wellmeaning career officials at the end of a campus"teach-in" as they revealed how strenuously theyhad tried to reverse the drift toward a disastrous policy in Vietnam...
...It was written by a Columbia professor after three years of hard labor at the Fudge Factory— as the State Department is known to refugees from the Potomac...
...As an Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and then for Far Eastern Affairs, Hilsman probably did as much to warp the State Department's rejection of democratic values as the notorious Mr...
...The faults which this reviewer found with the book are of a different order...
...The striking feature in Hilsman's description is not his unconcern for traditional theories of checks-and-balances or for constitutional guarantees against arbitrary government...
...This, after all, is how most democratic governments have tended to disintegrate...
...Twenty-two American generals moved into Harkins's HQ but none was interested—to Hilsman's dismay—in counter-insurgency or the strategic hamlets...
...What distinguishes Hilsman's position is his total unconcern with political values...
...BOOKS the U.N., while liberal groups (like ADA) are rarely summoned to Capitol Hill...
...Hilsman's book is carefully put together and represents the world-bettering intentions which the Kennedy intelligentsia brought to Washington after eight years of Republican rule...
...instead . . . the system works to find compromises that blur the alternatives rather than sharpen them...
...Nor is mention made of the growing refugee tragedy, of the hatred nourished for Diem's prefects as well as for his family, or of the impact made by the Vietnam War on the domestic or other foreign policies of the United States...
...But his own writing on Vietnam reveals that these limited activities do not adequately reflect public expectations—especially if the electorate judges itself to be in a liberal year...
...Harkins and the Joint Chiefs continued to disregard the political consequences of using napalm on villages or defoliants on their crops...
...Rusk—whom he constantly slights...
...No wonder that the savage Nhus were able to utilize his strategic telligent bureaucrats who remain prisoners of the system...
...An incredible deal was struck, after one of McNamara's many factfinding trips, that he and the Joint Chiefs would agree to a policy of "pressure andpersuasion" on the Diem regime, which theynow [two months before its joyful overthrow] thought necessary, but they would agree onlyif the White House and State Departmentwould in turn agree to a public announcementthat the Pentagon was right about how [well] the "shooting war" had been going...
...As a champion of counter-insurgency warfare, he finds no room to specify the character of the reforms which the State Department is supposed to have urged— against the intransigent opposition of the Joint Chiefs, Mr...
...McNamara, General Taylor, and the wretched Ambassadors and field commanders whom we sent to Saigon (and whom he denounces...
...The author has been severely rebuked for his indiscreet revelations about life "on the inside" and for his betraying of official confidences...
...The professional skills in policy manipulation and power distribution in Washington happened to move in a contrary direction and the aspirations for a Great Society eventually had to be abandoned...
...should appear as a more realistic expression of national identity than the regime we subsidized in the cities...
...The chief personnel would be the same in a Reagan or a Bobby Kennedy regime, it seems, and the policy system would be equally closed to outsiders (other than those pleading special interests...
...Though the overwhelming majority voted in 1964 against a reactionary position there was no way, Hilsman finds, in which their wishes could be respected...
...To MOVE A NATION: THE POLITICS OF FOREIGN POLICY IN THE ADMINISTRATION OF JOHN F. KENNEDY, by Roger Hilsman...
...He records one disaster after another but draws conclusions from none of them...
...3) At what point do the costs in human life and economic sacrifice outrun the advantages that will supposedly be gained by our intransigent position...
...but his book also suggests that the governors must be protected against their own ineptitudes...
...Prof...
...Nevertheless, his unravelling of the Kennedy Administration's techniques of foreign policy formulation is cleverly done and it suffers from only one defect: it is politically banal and historically trivial...
...and the military remained intent upon massive operations to "put the fear of God into the Viet Cong...
...Nor does he appear to worry that the electors' wishes are so weakly heard by policy-makers...
...If even "front men" like Roger Hilsman could fall for the inane pleadings of the counter-insurgency enthusiasts, or write extensively about Vietnam without serious consideration of the National Liberation Front, it is small wonder that LBJ could extend so many of the Kennedy policies without change...
...His description is chilling because at no point does he stop to ask: (1) For whom is the United States fighting this monstrous war...
...Hilsman gives no indication that liberal views will ever be considered seriously by the policy mandarins who govern with our consent...
...2) With whom should negotiations be held to end it...
...Too bad...
...military reports increased, the "humanitarian" faction (Rostow, Harkins, Taylor, and McNamara) called for a more aggressive drive, the bombing of the North, and an acceptance of Diem's authoritarian rule in the South...
...Considering the author's analytical skills and his resignation from the LBJ Administration (in part because of his dissent over the ineptitudes of the Vietnam policy which he had helped shape), his long section on Vietnam will surely survive—but only as an example of how Intelligence chiefs can articulately flounder among unexamined questions...
...Except in times of crisis, each Administration moves slowly and incrementally toward policy decisions...
...From these positions he collected clandestine notes about the various exercises in bureaucratic infighting, inter-Departmental conflict, and the fudging of strategic choices which he labels the "policy process...
...Hopefully, Bobby Kennedy is now looking through the Directory of Directors to find top management types with ruthless organizationalexperience (like John McCone or Clark Clifford) to staff his "liberal" Administration...
...No doubt Hilsman, himself, was better read and more articulate than his predecessors in office...
...THIS MEMOIR is at once significant in content and slightly frivolous in effect...
...In good Administrations, Hilsman finds, the President strives to recruit effective lieutenants and organizational "front men...
...All too many of the congressmen concerned with foreign policy issues are either ignorant or intent upon selfpublicity (such as Senators Dodd and Keating...
...If liberals feel helpless before an Administration that ignores their seriously formed criticisms of foreign policy, they should also feel pity for the thousands of impotent but inTHE BANALITIES of the policy system are most evident when Professor Hilsman describes the manner in which the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations slipped into the absurd involvement in Vietnam...
...Mr...
...As a "closed system" of power, he notes that the Administration rarely concerns itself with grand strategy or with fundamental choices...
...or that the NLF (which he never mentions...
...In no place and in no way does Hilsman indicate how a liberal electorate can prevent a Democratic Administration from sliding toward reactionary or status quo positions...
...No doubt, this cynical process would be repeated if the 1968 Election decided that a battle-to-death in Vietnam should not provide the paramount priority for U.S...
...Their sentiments reflected someof the banalities of orb anizationl evil which Hannah Arendt depicted in Eichmann in Jerusalem...
...no doubt a few academic theorists, like the brothersRostow, can also be recruited as bards and legend makers...
...The author demonstrates these points well in explaining the fierce infighting that occurred after the Bay of Pigs fiasco...
...Hilsman's failure to comment on this cynical piece of "consensus-formation" is characteristic of his analysis...
...foreign policy.2 2 In drawing this cynical portrait of a goal-freeAdministration, Hilsman does not mention the demoralization which the procedures of "incrementalism" have spread among the machineminders...
...urged Diem to win the allegiance of his people by accepting reforms...
...YET THIS IS AN IMPORTANT BOOK...
...For 100 pages he repeats that the U.S...
...To protect government from the governed may be laudable to Hilsman...
...Even though Kennedy determined to act as a liberal President in his own conservative Administration, the resistance offered by soidisant liberals in key places must have been considerable...
...His description of the closed system of Executive decision-making will be praised by professional political scientists for its shrewd observations of the functioning of government...
...Hilsman wanted a better effort of police administration, school-building, and cement pigsties to be imposed upon an alien and peasant culture...
...His data reveal that Gen...
...That the Pentagon could ruthlessly ignore their squeamish policy protests is at last comprehensible...
...At various times reference is made to the impact of Congressional action, to the support or criticism of pressure groups, to communications with the mass media, and to the vocal efforts of attentive public opinion...
...Hilsman occupied two of the key offices in the Kennedy Administration: Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs...
...He writes clearly and carefully about great events, such as the Cuban missile crisis, the settlement in Laos, and the avoidance of conflict with Indonesia...
...indeed, the footnotes reveal—though often in places disjointed from the text—that the number of VC recruits or casualties made nonsense of General Harkins's irresponsible claims...
...This concern about safeguarding "secrets" of state is obviously misplaced: how else would we know about the public service rendered by Top People like Clark Clifford, if there were no such leaks...
...But no one noticed that civiTian fatalities and disaffection soared as the war escalated...
...His own Bureau of Intelligence and Research made a major power play with other Intelligence groups to divest the CIA of some of its advisory functions, of its advantages in secret funds and data storage, and of its controlfree operations...
...In this and other sections he reveals that the best decisions are made by hard-line or big-business "front men" simply because liberal appointees in Democratic Administrations (like Adlai Stevenson or Chester Bowles) are too weak or inexperienced to impose their will upon in-house feuds.' The problem in Hilsman's analysis emerges when he attempts to portray the "relative openness" of the policy system...
...The lacunae in Hilsman's narrative, even granting his disregard for political values, are astonishing...
...BOOKS hamlet program for their own corrupt purposes...
...A narrow-minded specialist, the author is concerned only with valuefree problems of policy administration...
...and the mass media are frequently biased and utterly unreliable (as he reveals in criticizing Joseph Alsop and Marguerite Higgins) . And pressure group activity is often associated with the military-industrial complex or with super-patriots, such as the Committee of One Million to keep China out of 1 This is the best rationalization for governmentby corporation counsel and Wall Street executives since C. Wright Mills wrote the Power Elite...
...Never once does he mention that many province chiefs and ARVN commanders appointed from Saigon were despised by the peasants...
...As the war deteriorated and the mendacity of U.S...
...command...
...It reflects more accurately than the "commentaries" written by Schlesinger or Sorenson the conventionbound, unquestioning attitudes manifest at the second-echelon levels of the State and Defense Departments during the last two Democratic Administrations...
...nor does he refer to land reform or the cancellation of back-rents as urgent political issues...
...It never occurs to him that the satrapy which we established in Saigon was —and still is—totally unable or unwilling to implement such reforms...
...Second, it devotes 100 or more pages to Vietnam without once questioning the fundamental purposes which the United States supposedly pursues there...
...HILSMAN'S ANALYSIS of Presidential leadership, Congressional oversight, and interDepartment struggles provide shrewd insights into the bureaucracy's organizational life...
Vol. 15 • March 1968 • No. 2
