The Pentagon Papers The Immorality of Error
Clark, Joseph
We print below two comments, from different points of view, on the Pentagon Papers. As usual in DISSENT, each author is responsible for his own opinions. No doubt, other contributors will return...
...The actions themselves should be taken as rapidly as practicable, but in ways that should minimize any appearance of sudden changes in policy, and official statements on these troopmovements will be made only with the directapproval of the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Secretary of State...
...historians have been telling what a quagmire Vietnam was from the beginning...
...President, General Taylor said yesterdayhe would be bringing you some definitive proposals [on Vietnam] today...
...That was when Vice President Nixon tended to agree with Admiral Radford that intervention, up to and including nuclear intervention, was a good thing...
...3 Quoted in Theodore Draper, Abuse of Power (New York: Viking, 1967), p. 126...
...IV THOUGH THE JOHNSON ADMINISTRATION wrote the sorriest chapter of the Vietnam story, it's wrong no matter where you start reading...
...The horror of it is that they did so with a ghastly massacre of Indonesian Communists...
...the story was to be planted by soldiers of the Vietnamese Armed Psywar company in Hanoi dressed in civilian clothes...
...Any number of congressional committees, hundreds of federally subsidized scholars, and scores of Intelligence experts studied Lenin to discover the COMMENTS AND OPINIONS secrets of Communism...
...V THE PENTAGON PAPERS came at an opportune moment, and Judge Gurfein and the Supreme Court majority performed a service in the ceaseless struggle to keep the Bill of Rights a vital part of American life...
...But others have seen that the action of the Times and other newspapers in publishing the Pentagon Papers has in itself been a vindication of democracy...
...public that we are behaving with good purpose and restraint...
...And then, lo and behold...
...Mao told Snow that the Chinese government would be admitting Americans from Left, Middle, and Right...
...President Johnson repeated this statement many times right up to election eve...
...But the war against the Axis was unavoidable, and it was fought for just and necessary ends against a direct threat by German and Japanese imperialism to conquer the world...
...This is true for all suchparallels...
...Assistant Secretary of Defense John T. McNaughton described that policy in his memorandum of September 3, 1964...
...policy in Vietnam...
...What was wrong at the beginning was our support of French colonialism in Vietnam...
...None of this can vindicate any of the administrations which pursued policies that drove us to war through an overweaning use of the executive power and disregard for the other branches of government...
...He adds: The main further question is the extent to whichwe should add elements to the above actions that would tend deliberately to provoke a DRVreaction, and consequent retaliation by us...
...In a memorandum dated September 8, 1964, Bundy cites the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a model for U.S...
...Here I'm not considering truthfulness or the use of unclean means to obtain political objectives...
...But, if the contingent condition is something as wide-open as maintaining a puppet regime in South Vietnam, and if that regime lacks popular support, and if the only way to enable that regime to hang on is to launch a large-scale war causing millions of casualties and destroying the country you are supposed to be saving, what article of the American Constitution, what precept of morality and what "contingency" can possibly be cited to defend the deception that actually occurred in 1964...
...The settlement of the Vietnamese problem must be performed on the basis of the freely expressed will of the people of Vietnam, without intervention from any quarter...
...It is not at all, as John P. Roche would have it, that the Times and other papers were displaying nothing but "historical hindsights...
...military intervention in Vietnam will disclose the same "solidarity" between Vietnamese and Chinese Communists that we have witnessed between the Russians and Chinese...
...There is some importance to the reports of reduced military aid from China to the North Vietnamese...
...If ever the issue was immediate withdrawal of American forces, that is the issue now...
...For the good advice that said neither bombing nor fighting on the ground was the proper means for saving Vietnam was not taken...
...For that reason we have tried very carefully to restrain ourselves and not to enlarge the war...
...By early October, however, we may recommend such actions depending on GVN progress and Communist reactionin the meantime, especially to U.S...
...Surely one of the villains in the escalation of the war from the Kennedy to the Johnson administration was Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara...
...Now, it seems, they will seek to accomplish what they might have done before, win all of Vietnam through the peaceful mechanism of coalition politics...
...public, wemust act with special care—signaling to theDRV that initiatives are being taken, to theGVN that we are behaving energetically despitethe restraints of our political season, and to the U.S...
...Perhaps a major lesson of Vietnam is that there is a sense in which the theory of "permanent revolution" is valid...
...armed forces...
...With masterly understatement and with foresight, not hindsight, Lukacs wrote: "it is strange how Dulles and Admiral Radford could believe that the intervention of American air power alone could turn the tide of this guerrilla war fought in millet fields and rice paddies...
...Of any of the complex relationships among the political groups in Vietnam, the Lansdale report shows not the faintest understanding...
...Let atleast a few people know we have a prophet in ourmidst...
...If anyone in 1938 had thought that thiswould have helped to stop Hitler, he would nothave been very realistic...
...I say this with full recognition that there are always degrees of guilt, of bad and good...
...Publication by the Times of the Pentagon Papers has served a useful purpose...
...Indeed, one aspect of the Vietnam tragedy is that American policy served to bring traditional foes, China and Vietnam, into tight embrace...
...We print below two comments, from different points of view, on the Pentagon Papers...
...They couldn't be more pleased than to have us spend our billions in these distant jungles where it does us no good and them no harm...
...the Times was in the dock...
...On the contrary, the Indonesians routed the Communists...
...The French were capitulating to the Vietminh at Geneva...
...It was almost too late...
...naval patrols...
...That is how the war was announced, or rather denied: a war that has taken, since that April 1, over 1 million lives, created 3 million refugees, destroyed thousands of villages and hamlets, divided the American nation more than ever before in at least a century, defoliated a good part of an entire country, produced the horror of My Lai, and introduced heroin on a large scale in the U.S...
...He would be welcomed because, Mao explained, at present the problems between China and the U.S.A...
...Eisenhower, for example, looks good by comparison with Johnson, especially when he rejected large-scale military intervention at the time of the French defeat in 1954...
...Since bombing alone can't win any war, let alone a guerrilla war, on April 1, 1965, President Johnson took a number of momentous steps...
...The point is that successive American administrations supported colonialism, even of the ruthless French type in Southeast Asia, backed landlord-based regimes and undemocratic military juntas instead of the necessary social, political, economic transformations—the democratic revolution...
...It certainly does not mean that wars such as the one against the Axis, or even the UN-backed war against the North Korean invasion of South Korea, were unjust or to be condemned...
...cit., p. 123...
...Surely the comparison with Germany and Czechoslovakia in 1938, with Russia and/or China in the past decade, is a gross misuse of historical parallels...
...I'm simply stating the advantage the Communists derive from their precept of "putting politics in command...
...The Lansdale mission confronts us with a faulty aphorism, that you must fight fire With fire...
...Galbraith urged:] Keep up the threshold against the commitment of Ameri can combat forces...
...position in Southeast Asia...
...It is valid because wherever there is social organization, any social organization, there will be germs of elitism, of threats against the rights of others, attempts of the powerful to subjugate the weak...
...If war is contingent on such circumstances, and if a constitutional declaration of war is to be avoided, a policy of enlarging the war requires secrecy, stealth, and provocative actions...
...Perhaps one of the most pernicious concepts that came out of the Cold War was that we had to use Communist methods to fight Communism...
...Vietnam continued to live with its tragedy—North and South, there was no democratic revolution...
...Obviously, with the Eisenhower administration giving military support to the French and with American "Psywarfare" experts working with the French colonialists, Lansdale was not going to achieve much more than planting a rumor, sabotaging the bus company's oil (in conformance with the Geneva agreement...
...And Germany and Japan had the means and the power as well as the ideology to make that a very real threat...
...And there are degrees of wrong in policy and politics...
...Democracy must always be fought for...
...The apologists for this deception now say that the documents published by the Times were only "contingency plans...
...Indeed, the same point can be made about all the Pentagon Papers thus far released: how little effort they show at coming to grips with the social and political complexities of Vietnam, how utterly absorbed they are in the amoral labyrinths of technique...
...Surely Robert Kennedy was one such person, and perhaps Lyndon Johnson knows whereof he speaks when he suggests that McNamara and Kennedy got together to see to it that a history would be written...
...it THE PENTAGON PAPERS TEND TO BRING OUT the crucial aspect of America's military intervention— that it was wrong from the beginning...
...Serious opponents of the war have told in detail the reasons for the failure of American COMMENTS AND OPINIONS policy...
...Something must be added in the coming months," Taylor urged...
...Failures following from a lack of democracy, fiascoes that flow from waging a war in defiance of law and the Constitution, do not disparage the idea of democracy itself...
...That's all that was happening in 1964, Roche says...
...killed in action in World War I. The war was wrong when President Nixon took over and sought to "Vietnamize" it...
...The troops received their instructions silently, dressed in civilian clothes, went on the mission, and failed to return...
...Communist revolutions mobilized oppressed nations to fight for their liberation and then reduced those nations to subjugation, even eliminating entire nations...
...One TV network, in covering the Times story, cleverly replayed President Johnson's speech of August 29, 1964: I have had advice to load our planes withbombs and to drop them on certain areas thatI think would enlarge the war and escalate thewar, and result in our committing a good manyAmerican boys to fighting a war that I think COMMENTS AND OPINIONS ought to be fought by the boys of Asia to help protect their own land...
...His supplementary comment indicates what a "contingency" the elections were...
...The year for better politics is 1972...
...Rumor campaigns were added to the tactics and tried out in Hanoi...
...Things were rough...
...Heroism there was, but democratic revolution there was not...
...A session of this rump Congress might well be the scene of a messy Republican effort...
...COMMENTS AND OPINIONS pansion is wrong...
...This involved bombing of villages and the killing of innocents...
...were not fighting in Vietnam, the Indonesians would not have been able to destroy the Communists...
...Not at all...
...It seems to me that not only here but in Russia and other Communist countries too, some of the values of a free press, of an independent judiciary, and of constitutional government will be imparted by the saga of the Pentagon Papers...
...This is of the utmost im portance—a few will mean more and more and more .2 Walt Rostow and General Taylor were not giving that sort of advice to Kennedy...
...he ordered two additional Marine battalions to Vietnam along with a Marine Air squadron...
...One wonders how much provocation the Congress of the United States was going to take in view of the Executive action based on keeping the Congress in the dark, but at this point the Congress was shamefully quiescent...
...The contention here is not that all wars are unjust and avoidable...
...Russia was far from being directly involved...
...When President Kennedy increased the number of military advisers by thousands and allowed secret operatives to go into battle in Vietnam he was tempting an escalation of the war...
...The genius of the Founding Fathers was that they sought a basis for permanently assuring freedom and power to the people...
...Meanwhile, in his campaign the President was repeating the phrase again and again, that this was a war not for American boys, but one "that I think ought to be fought by the boys of Asia to help protect their own land...
...It is not that the aim of preventing the expansion of Communist tyranny is wrong...
...Whatever they learned, this government never grasped two fundamental aspects of Lenin's revision of Marxism...
...Ever since 1954 the Vietnamese Communists have, politically speaking, lived in the best possible world...
...VI A CAREFUL READING OF THE PENTAGON PAPERS does little to support the notion of a conspiracy by "ruling circles" in this country to get us into and keep us in the Vietnam war...
...They too are war-weary...
...The plan became action because, as Bundy noted in a paper dated November 5, 1964...
...They were, and there is little that can be said to justify those bombs...
...No more than John P. Roche, Rostow and Taylor were offering that order of foresight to President Johnson as he chased the chimera of military victory, hoping to nail the "coonskin on the wall...
...As usual in DISSENT, each author is responsible for his own opinions...
...VIII WHAT Now...
...If we say we want to contain China, then we have to take the problem in its ownterms...
...The stage is set for a novel, at least by Graham Greene...
...They would have startedbombing Bratislava and intervening in whatcould only have been a civil war in Czechoslovakia...
...The year for ending the war is 1971...
...Do you envisionanything very dramatic in these proposals...
...Earlier we had come to see how political figures can change for the better and become positive forces in political life...
...The Pentagon Papers reveal that all those elements were supplied...
...The Communists know the importance of politics...
...I hasten to add that this is no argument for the view that Mao only has to speak a word and the Vietnamese Communists will obey...
...He authorized the dispatch of 18-20,000 additional ground troops to Vietnam...
...Our hands-off policy when Indonesia was actually threatened by a Chinesebacked Communist coup in October 1965 did not cause Indonesia to fall to the Communists...
...The Pentagon historians describe the results of the meeting over which President Johnson presided: "the new year was anticipated as the occasion for beginning overt military operations against North Vietnam...
...Some apologists for U.S...
...In opting for a deal with the U.S., Mao was playing a trump card against his Soviet Communist neighbors...
...Publication of the Papers brought back most vividly the issue of the 1964 election campaign...
...How odd, to say no more, that Roche charges the Times with "retrospective omniscience...
...John P. Roche, writing in the AFL–CIO News, June 26, seeks to overcome the impression conveyed by the Pentagon Papers with the argument that military officials "are paid to plan for wars...
...naval patrols increasingly close tothe North Vietnamese coast and/or associatingwith 34A operations...
...In that Memorandum the Joint Chiefs indicated that the U.S...
...What started as reprisal raids after the Gulf of Tonkin attack in August 1964, became sustained and large-scale aerial bombardment in early 1965...
...It has been argued, for example, that if the Communists win, there will be terrible massacres of antiCommunists...
...Ho Chi Minh murdered thousands of peasants when the Communists betrayed their promise 'Quoted in Draper, op...
...Even that kind of aid, Johnson conceded, produces casualties, and he cited the nearly 200 men lost on aid missions to Vietnam over a period of several years...
...No matter what period we use as a starting point, we come to that same conclusion...
...Instead, the advice that promised victory at hundreds of junctures from 1965 to the present was taken...
...intervention in Vietnam have argued that if the U.S...
...There is a difference between the Kennedy part and the Johnson part in the Vietnam war...
...But what can be mildly entertaining on television proves to be utterly ridiculous in reality...
...this would have been again the wrong war against the wrong enemy, in the wrong place and at the wrong time...
...The Pentagon historians record the "direct role" of the United States "in the ultimate breakdown of the Geneva settlement," the accord that ended the war between France and Vietnam in 1954...
...There was no question among President Johnson's advisers that their plans for escalating the war were the President's plans— except that a small unpleasantness intervened, the national elections...
...military action "outside the borders of South Vietnam": deteriorating conditions in South Vietnam, little support by the populace to the Saigon regime, and "war weariness . . . apparent...
...from "Containing China: A Round-Table Discussion," Commentary, May 1966...
...In the last days of the French colonial occupation of Hanoi, Lansdale's team succeeded in "contaminating the oil supply of the bus company...
...What the National Security Council discusses at its meetings becomes apparent from the Pentagon Papers...
...The switch was signaled by Mao Tse-tung in an interview, presumably read by millions of people, which has called forth a surprising lack of response...
...And since the U.S...
...Emphasis added] On April 1, 1965, the date of the White House meeting which authorized the transformation of the war into a large-scale American war, President Johnson had a press conference...
...Then, after Kosygin himself came to see him, Mao would make his "concession": "After their talk Mao told him that he would take off 1,000 years, but no more...
...It is not difficult to foresee that an end to U.S...
...Yet at least a partial hero of the revelations is the same McNamara, who came to see the evil of the war he himself had pressed and was the major mover to get its history written in a way that did not whitewash the war-makers...
...How closely President Johnson was associated with this policy was made clear by Assistant Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs William P. Bundy...
...At the time of the Bay of Pigs disaster Walter Lippmann pointed out how we are doomed to fail whenever we attempt to imitate the Communist tactics...
...The Defense Department outlined a course of action to provoke military response to its own military actions, partly in order to make the involvement in a large-scale war seem inevitable...
...One great service of the Times was that it brought us closer to a policy that would cease so neatly to accommodate the Soviet and Chinese Communists...
...Were the Pentagon plans and the Taylor cables merely "contingency plans" when Johnson made that speech...
...Walt Rostow, John P. Roche, and General Maxwell D. Taylor use this argument as though the "contingency" had not, in fact, become actual policy...
...1 John Kenneth Galbraith, in Ambassador's Journal, also discussed the politics of Vietnam, reproducing a letter he wrote to President Kennedy from New Delhi, March 2, 1962...
...military intervention...
...But even their work needs constant vigilance, at the least...
...Matters the Vietnamese, Chinese, or even Soviet politburos discuss at their meetings are quite different in at least one respect...
...adherence to the Geneva agreement prevented [the American team] from carrying out the active sabotage it desired to do against the power plant, water facilities, harbor and bridge...
...The argument is made that the bombing of Dresden in World War II and the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also terribly destructive of civilian lives...
...Should rightists like Nixon, who represented the monopoly capitalists, be permitted to come...
...The CIA, it seems, was going to change all that...
...Immediately after the Geneva agreement, which we refused to sign but said we would "respect," the Eisenhower administration dispatched a CIA sabotage team, headed by Colonel Edward G. Lansdale, to organize guerrilla warfare in North Vietnam...
...They had deserted to the Vietminh...
...III WITH MONOTONOUS FREQUENCY the Pentagon Papers describe the "contingency" that will and that did call forth a large-scale war by the U.S.: the inability of the unstable Saigon regime to gain the support of the people...
...After receiving General Taylor's cable, President Johnson devoted his election campaign to a denunciation of the idea of enlarging the war...
...and he approved "a change of mission for all Marine battalions deployed to Vietnam to permit their more active use...
...Surely the fate of Vietnam is 1 John Lukacs, A History of the Cold War (GardenCity, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961), p. 111...
...Communist saboteurs were blowing up ammunition dumps at the airport...
...No doubt, other contributors will return to these matters in forthcoming issues.—EDITOR WE DIDN'T NEED THE PENTAGON PAPERS TO FIND OUT that the war was wrong...
...Though President Nixon was "winding down" Ameri can ground participation in the war, he announced two conditions for full withdrawal, One was understandable, the release of American prisoners...
...Once you really pursue them, they explode...
...The regimes we supported in Vietnam and later discarded, or helped overthrow, were all characterized by their lack of democracy, by their failure to bring social and political reform, their inability to win popular support...
...It was an undeclared war, but American battle deaths reached the toll of U.S...
...In many ways this pronouncement by Mao is the most important to come from a Communist chieftain since Stalin signaled his forthcoming switch to Hitler's side in March 1939...
...It is valid to the extent that all power corrupts...
...We believe such deliberately provocative elements should not be addedin the immediate future while the GVN is still struggling to its feet...
...2 John Kenneth Galbraith, Ambassador's Journal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), p. 270...
...Congress was not consulted, but by September 7, 1964, the die had been cast at a highlevel White House meeting...
...The largest immorality of U.S...
...When he turned down General Taylor's proposal to send a force of 8-10,000 men to fight in Vietnam, he was on the side of right...
...But Lansdale had his triumph when weeks later Tonkinese told a story of the misbehavior of a Chinese division in Vietnamese territory...
...Lenin saw the power and scope of the national and colonial revolutions in the underdeveloped two-thirds of the world...
...The Western powers did not come to the aid of Czechoslovakia, so not only that country, but peace was lost...
...intervention was the incredible devastation of the land and its people...
...Quickly, Lansdale describes how he helped devise "a new psychological warfare" campaign...
...Publication of the Papers helped recreate revulsion against policies of deceit, secrecy, bad judgment, and the endless suffering, death, and destruction caused by a war that could bring no good...
...The war was wrong and American policy was at its worst when President Johnson escalated it into a large-scale ground, air, and sea war...
...The other—enabling the South Vietnamese regime to prevail against the Communists— was a formula for endless war...
...The something that had to be added, Taylor explained, was "deliberate escalation of pressure against North Vietnam...
...Izvestia fell back on a transparent shibboleth—the "contradictions among the ruling circles...
...The mission tells us many things of great value, especially because of the heroic aura that has surrounded Lansdale's operation and his reputation as a proponent of a "democratic revolution" against Communism...
...At this point we should note a changing aspect of Communist policy with respect to the war.* One reason we may extricate our country from a morass where a small country kept a giant in a pitiable state is that the Communists, especially the Chinese Communists, have reason to switch policy...
...We read Lansdale's report of how he "arrived in Saigon with a small box of files and clothes and a borrowed typewriter...
...That this was a policy of planned COMMENTS AND OPINIONS provocation is further underlined by McNaughton's caution that "the timing and crescendo should be under our control, with the scenario capable of being turned off at any time...
...Hannah Arendt disposed of this argument with devastating effect: It is as if France or England would have triedto stop Hitler, not by making war on him, butby making war on Slovakia as being somehowin collusion with the Nazi government againstthe Czech government...
...True, after the Geneva accords there were massacres in North Vietnam...
...The "contingency" alibi falls on its face un der the impact of the events described in the Pentagon documents...
...At its most explicit, the argument in defense of our Vietnam policy used the tired old figure of the falling dominoes...
...He disclaimed any intention of going beyond the policy of giving advice and providing the Vietnamese with "equipment to help themselves...
...Nevertheless, Lukacs is critical of the Dulles policy that has involved us in Vietnam, though not because Lukacs opposes the containment of Soviet and Chinese Communism...
...Observe the difficulties the Communist newspapers have had in trying to explain both the government's prosecution of the Times and the action of the Supreme Court...
...The first action of this "democratic revolution" was "a carefully planted story," as Lansdale puts it, of how a Chinese Communist regiment in Tonkin was raping the girls...
...The Communist betrayal of both the national and peasant revolutions—whether in China, Russia, Vietnam, or Cuba—is not at question here...
...Bernard Fall wrote that the number of peasants killed between 1954 and 1956 "is variously estimated at between 50,000 and 100,000...
...To revive Khanh's morale, the Taylor cable called for "a carefully orchestrated bombing attack on NVN directed primarily at infiltration and other military targets...
...Yet, because the methods used to fight the Communists in Vietnam were wrong, and if anything helped Communist propaganda the world over, it does not mean that efforts to preserve an independent Berlin or to prevent Communist ex a Bernard B. Fall, Vietnam Witness (New York: Praeger, 1966), p. 124...
...The Vietnam situation was being compared to, say, the moment in history when Hitler threatened to seize Czechoslovakia...
...They could win in war or in peace...
...The Pentagon Papers helped get this country out of a kind of stupor into which it had fallen after the seeming ineffectiveness of continuous protests against the war and the confusion caused by Nixon's policies...
...They could choose the advantage of holding the most powerful nation in the world at bay, or they could attain their objectives by ending the war...
...Division and discord here and abroad, as well as the destruction of the war itself are consequences of continuing the war...
...Directly or indirectly, the makers of American policy were shaping it by historical analogy...
...Also, there is now a greater Vietnamese Communist interest in ending the war...
...What Kennedy would have done, whether he would have followed the advice of Galbraith and Schlesinger, if he had not been killed, can only be guessed at...
...I'm not discussing here what soon became obvious, that the Communists were manipulating and exploiting these issues...
...In his memorandum of September 3, 1964, McNaughton describes the reasons for U.S...
...During the next two months [McNaughtonwrote] because of the lack of "rebuttal time" before election to justify particular actionswhich may be distorted to the U.S...
...had used and would continue to use a policy of deliberately eliciting Communist military retaliation...
...policy...
...Even the villainy portrayed in the Pentagon Papers is not black on black...
...that there are grays as well as blacks and whites in historical records...
...It was wrong when Dulles and Admiral Radford sought to replace the French after Dienbienphu...
...But Eisenhower looks good only by comparison with what came a decade later...
...The heart of the "discourse" was that Mao wanted to make a deal with Nixon...
...The President replied: I think that we are inclined to be too dramatic about our prophecies and our predictions andI might say too irresponsible sometimes...
...Dramatically Lansdale decribes the situation: "Dien Bien Phu had fallen...
...It is a National Security Action memorandum dated April 6, 1965, signed by McGeorge Bundy and addressed to the secretary of State, the secretary of Defense, and the director of Central Intelligence, in which the order to manipulate the public is made clear in paragraph 11: The President desires that with respect to theactions in paragraphs 5 through 7 [the paragraphs ordering large-scale American groundforces into action in Vietnam] premature publicity be avoided by all possible precautions...
...Our chance for seeing to it that in the future Executive power operates in the light of day, and in recognition of policies arrived at by public debate, lies in active and successful politics...
...Examples of actions to be considered would berunning U.S...
...And the most ironical indication that it is not American military intervention that might help stop the Communists in some situations is what happened in Indonesia...
...policy in Vietnam from the beginning, it is the belief that the problem could be resolved by a military solution...
...No conceivable "contingency" alibi is possible to ex COMMENTS AND OPINIONS plain away the official order that spells out the President's orders...
...Communists mobilized peasant armies to overthrow landlord-based regimes and then the land was taken away from the peasants, who were subjected to the exploitation of a primitive accumulation of capital such as Marx describes so vividly in Capital...
...To maintain the morale of the Khanh government then in office, Taylor wanted to give him "assurance of our readiness to bring added pressure on Hanoi...
...John Lukacs, author of A History of the Cold War, has no illusions about the guilt of the Communists in the Cold War, and he sternly refutes the revisionist historians...
...and providing plots and treatments for at least two novels...
...It is composed in the spirit and on the level of Mission Impossible...
...military actions, he wrote, "should be likely at some point to provoke a military DRV response" and "the provoked response should be likely to provide good grounds for us to escalate if we wished...
...Moreover, while I don't think the Russians are clever enough to fix it that way, we are surely playing their game...
...to give them land and instead began collectivization...
...The brutal policy of the Ho regime led to a peasant rebellion...
...What is more, the plans for bombing and large-scale use of ground forces were "contingent" on only one condition —to defeat the Communists in battle, or at best, prevent them from taking over South Vietnam...
...Perhaps with an assist from 11 million new young voters the quality of our politics can be improved...
...Indonesia maintains her demand that the U.S...
...Of the Dulles plans to involve us in the war in 1954, Lukacs wrote as far back as 1961...
...Still more drastic steps were taken...
...5 Citing these murders and condemning them, Michael Harrington wrote in the pages of DISSENT that terrible as the figures mentioned by Fall are, the number of people killed as a result of our continued intervention in Vietnam was 10 times as great...
...Lansdale was a shining example of the "new Intelligence," the kind that saw the value of politics and the real issues in Southeast Asia...
...had identified its interests with that regime, on August 26, 1964, the Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted a memorandum backing up General Taylor's recommendations as "essential to prevent a complete collapse of the U.S...
...If we let Vietnam fall, the rest of Southeast Asia will fall, first Thailand, then Indonesia, and so on across the globe...
...But the value of the Pentagon Papers is that they help show what made this war so wrong, and also why the Soviet and Chinese Communists were so pleased, indeed anxious, COMMENTS AND OPINIONS to help keep the United States mired in this war...
...The action of the Times, the Washington Post, and other papers, and their vindication by the courts have again placed the Vietnam issue at the center of politics...
...Mao made it clear why he was seeking to close a deal with Nixon: he wanted to avoid Armageddon with his Soviet Communist neighbor...
...Their memorandum said: "As part of the program for increased pressures, the OPLAN 34A operations and the Desota patrols in the Gulf of Tonkin should be resumed, the former on an intensified but still covert basis...
...And then he pressed the argument home against his Republican opponent, who was openly advocating an enlargement of the war: "But we think it is better to lose 200 than to lose 200,000...
...In the spring 01 1971 Mao authorized publication of the interview, and it appeared in Life on April 30...
...To many, especially among the youth for whom this has been the war and the major factor in politics and life, it may seem as though the Pentagon Papers prove the futility of working "within the system" and the failure of democracy itself...
...Thus the big war got under way...
...And the denouement, with Lansdale reporting, not Woody Allen...
...Izvestia, it seems, had just exposed the Times as the major organ of American imperialism...
...On August 18, 1964, General Taylor, then Johnson's ambassador in Saigon, cabled that pacification plans were not working...
...The President is clearly thinking in terms of a Gulf of Tonkin rationale, whether for an action that would show toughness and hold the line till we can decide the big issue, or as a basis for starting a clear course of action under the broad options...
...As the Times recorded it in a feature entitled, "What They Said in Public and in Private," the question was asked: Mr...
...Ho had his prison camps, Thieu his tiger cages...
...The ancient precept of ends and means comes back to haunt us in the Vietnam war...
...COMMENTS AND OPINIONS a poor example for any small nation threatened by invasion, which might be tempted to seek that kind of "help" from America...
...For example, it is estimated that fully 30 percent of all civilian casualties, and these approach a million, are children under 13...
...Mao made one "concession" to the Russians, explaining to Snow that polemics with the Russians would "have to be carried on for 10,000 years if necessary...
...They did not believe that there were people who would not do so and that one of them was his humble self...
...Bundy's paper of November 5, 1964, shows how the constitutional issue was handled: "We probably do not need additional Congressional authority, even if we decide on very strong action...
...It was wrong when the French fought to retain their control of Indochina, and when President Truman gave them military aid for their colonial war...
...But most of the evidence of the Pentagon Papers has appeared before...
...Mao would be happy to talk with him, either as a tourist or as President...
...He warned: We are increasingly replacing the French as the colonial military force and will increasingly arouse the resentments associated therewith...
...The President's desire is that these movements and changes should be understood as being gradualand wholly consistent with existing policy...
...He also saw the importance of the peasants' hunger and demand for land...
...no parallels will help, we have to look to China itself.3 As to the dominoes, the sad fact is that Russia has been enabled to push dominoes around the world more easily because of our involvement in Vietnam...
...withdraw its military forces from Vietnam, and leave the settlement of the Vietnamese problem to the Vietnamese people themselves .4 VII SHORTLY AFTER the Times began publication of the Pentagon Papers, James Reston noted that in all the thousands of pages the discussion was never about right or wrong...
...Why the bus company's oil supply can be sabotaged in accord with the Geneva agreements, but not the power plant, is never explained by Lansdale...
...Edgar Snow had a five-hour "discourse" with Mao in Peking on December 18, last year...
...That's about as many as were lost because of Fourth of July accidents in Texas, Johnson added...
...What was wrong as we intensified our intervention was that we sought to settle by military means problems which could only be solved by political means...
...It was wrong when President Kennedy sent secret operatives into Vietnam, North and South, to organize guerrilla warfare against the Vietnam Communists...
...Ably assisted by Dulles and Rusk, Johnson and Nixon, they chose the former option...
...even Chinese involvement was but indirect...
...Who were the imperalists...
...If there is a single failure that was attached to U.S...
...Foreign Minister Adam Malik of Indonesia declared in the Indonesian Parliament on May 5, 1966: But the Indonesian government is still firmly of the opinion that it supports the struggle of the Vietnamese people against U.S...
...I know of no far-teaching strategy that is be ing suggested or promulgated...
...that they only had to speak the word and all people would listen and obey...
...For a brief period the North Vietnamese press printed graphic accounts of the terror and torture in the North Vietnamese concentration camps...
...Mysteriously, Lansdale says, "U.S...
...In matter-of-fact manner Mao described the Soviet Communist mentality: "They thought * The editor wishes to testify that Joseph Clark'sarticle containing the next few paragraphs reachedhis desk two days before the announcement ofPresident Nixon's projected trip to China...
...Mao made it clear that whether or not he was a student of Confucius, he definitely was a student of Stalin...
...The evidence of the Pentagon Papers shows President Johnson in obvious agreement with his secretary of State, his ambassador to Vietnam, his defense secretary, and his military advisers in preparing a carefully orchestrated escalation of the war because they realized in August of 1964 that "something must be added" to save the South Vietnam regime...
...Aside from the dazzling non sequitur in this argument, the Indonesian regime that came to power after the Communists were defeated, rejected the U.S...
...would have to be solved with Nixon...
Vol. 18 • October 1971 • No. 5
