War, Morality & Error

...If there is any lesson to be learned at all about intellectuals in 522 government from the Pentagon Papers, it maybe that it is probably a good thing to keep them out of government...

...That, of course, is the problem with policies...

...The blindness, ignorance, stupid * When the author refers to the Pentagon Papersas a whole, not specifically to the Bantam Books edition, we do not use italics.—En...

...We will not make the Vietnam mistake again...

...it is clear we should...

...We may not like such a moral justification but the problem about falling back on moral argumentation is that one man's morality is another man's madness...

...In retrospect, we stuck to this policy too long, and applied it to both times and circumstances where it was not only not pertinent but devilishly dangerous...

...You never know when to abandon them, and the record of the human race generally forces us to the conclusion that policies are almost always abandoned when it is too late...

...but men's capacity to learn from their past mistakes seems to be tragically limited...

...Will they say that the Vietnamese tragedy was a necessary prelude to an era of peace and perhaps a good relationship between the United States and China...

...but how can we be so sure that we are any less wrong than they were...

...It is clear now that we should not have become involved in the Vietnam war...

...But if all the Pentagon Papers had been released to the public as they were written, it is unlikely that the slow but implacable pace of public disenchantment with the war would have been much accelerated...

...A second lesson may be that the American government should never get into long-term, limited wars in faraway places where the casualty rates will be high and the national interest not obvious...

...yet, the level of intelligence, both academic and administrative, during the Kennedy and Johnson years was probably higher than it had ever been before in the nation's history...

...Few people are explicitly immoral...

...Plowing through Liddell Hart and the Bantam Books edition of the unabridged New York Times excerpts from the Pentagon Papers simultaneously is not an experience 520 calculated to give one much confidence in the human race...

...I am not saying that we should not have new policies...

...Men make a mess out of things...

...Most of the great victories that occurred were more the result of mistakes of the losing side than the genius of the winning side...

...Would we find in them any more serious questioning of "the collective security" approach than in the Pentagon Papers...

...These qualities were present in abundance during World War II and probably in every previous war in which men have engaged...

...Perhaps we will solve the problem if we build into the government guarantees that there are men who will say "no...

...In Hart's view, World War II was unnecessarily begun and unnecessarily prolonged...

...I simply want to assert that the policy was viewed as successful by most sections of the American public and even by most liberal intellectuals...

...We have learned the lesson of Korea all over again and maybe twice in a quarter-century is enough to make the lesson stick...

...Harry Truman justified the bomb on Hiroshima in terms of the American and Japanese lives it would save, compared to the lives that would have been lost if an invasion of Japan had been necessary...

...I don't really believe that, but I wonder whether that astute domestic politician, Lyndon Johnson, would have proceeded down the path to disaster if he had not felt intellectually inferior to the brilliant Ph.D.s from Harvard who were advising him on foreign policy...

...Acheson's viewpoint it would seem that the only good president is a president who is supremely and serenely confident...

...What is needed among policy-makers and critics is more self-doubt, not the self-doubt that paralyzes, but the kind that saves us from absolutism...

...Will future historians see a connection between the Vietnamese war and Nixon's new policy toward China...

...We have had too many of the latter making policy during the 1960s, and we have too many of the same sort criticizing that policy today...

...It is my melancholy conclusion after readNOTEBOOK ing the Pentagon Papers that there is little reason to be hopeful about our capacity to avoid other equally serious tragedies in the future...

...But scarcely a decade after we ought to have learned this definitively in Korea, we seem to have had to learn it all over again...

...Acheson presided—displayed such self-doubts the Vietnam crisis might never have become as bad as it did...

...In the final analysis, the human race divides not into Left or Right, liberal or conservative, but into those who see the world as complicated, confused, uncertain and ambiguous, and those who see it as clear and simple...

...One wonders why the New York Times does not reprint some of its own editorials in the late '50s and early '60s...

...Sometimes I am prompted to think that the wisdom of a policy stands in inverse proportion to the certainty of the men who advocate it...

...I do not know whether they will say this, it is a possibility, a possibility that does not justify the Vietnamese war but suggests that human affairs are appallingly complicated and confused...

...It may not be my or your moral stance, but it is a moral stance...

...We have had few secretaries of state more moral than John Foster Dulles, and as the Pentagon Papers make clear, he was of decisive importance in beginning America's postGeneva involvement in Vietnam...

...It was a vigorous, consistent, well thought-out policy and in many respects a successful one...

...When I was growing up during World War II, my slightly older friends returning from the military kept saying, "If we win this damned thing the only reason will be that the other side makes more mistakes than we do...

...Long before Daniel Ellsberg's arrival on the scene, the American people did not believe they were being told the truth about the war...

...IT IS FREQUENTLY ASSERTED the United States did not have a clearly thought-out foreign policy, but the Pentagon Papers make it clear that we did...

...But if I find the absence of doubt reprehensible in the men who wrote documents in the Pentagon Papers, I also find it reprehensible in their critics...

...Even if Lyndon Johnson had announced before November 1964 that the war in Vietnam might have to be expanded, he still would have beaten Barry Goldwater...

...q...

...The casualties and destruction caused by stupidity on both sides were immense and disasters like Hiroshima and Dresden are ample evidence that even in a war in which one side is engaged in legitimate self-defense, folly can lead to the worst kinds of immorality...

...Dean Acheson has spoken contemptuously of John F. Kennedy's indecisiveness at the time of the Cuban missile crisis...

...It was not for lack of hearing the opposite side of the question that the Vietnam tragedy came into being...

...Acheson's judgment, not worthy to lead the country...

...But the Pentagon Papers make clear that there were "no" men all along the way...

...Yet there are many people who are confident on this subject...

...not only such men of limited intelligence as General Westmoreland and "Bomber" Harris, but men with considerable intelligence, such as Dean Rusk and Walt W. Rostow...

...Had it not been for the failure of the first Tunisian campaign, the Germans would not have poured massive troups into the second Tunisian campaign and would then have been able to put up a much more vigorous fight in Sicily...

...Roeer Hillsman opposed its escalation...

...The human race is not very good at arranging its behavior, and when it comes to such matters as foreign policy and war, the historical lesson is that it always makes bad things worse...

...Western Europe was preserved, the expansion of the Soviet empire prevented, and the slow breakup of Communist unity may very well have been facilitated by the check to Russian ambitions that "containment" created...

...Dean Rusk in a TV interview lamented that the war did not have the kind of public support necessary to get it through to a successful conclusion, but what in the world made Mr...

...Indeed, I don't see how anybody can get much beyond ambivalence on any of the issues of public policy that face the United States...

...NOW WE ARE GOING THROUGH an orgy of pinning responsibility on people...

...The men who inhabit the Pentagon Papers are remarkably like those who inhabit the allied side in Liddell Hart's History...

...It was called "containment" when George Kennan first enunciated it in the 1940s and it came to be known as "collective security" and, more recently, as the "domino" theory...

...I envy such men their certainty...

...What was lacking was a man of the kind of influence in the administration that Robert Kennedy had in the prior one, a man who could have said in 1965 the equivalent of Kennedy's famous "You're not going to make my brother the General Tojo of the 1960s...

...The question is, how badly do they fail...

...One must simply add that such clarity was enjoyed by very few people seven years ago...

...Reading Liddell Hart's History of the Second World War in an accidental but bizarre counterpoint to the Pentagon Papers, I am forced to conclude that that judgment could be made not only about World War II but about most human history...

...And I am troubled and confused by the unintended-consequence phenomenon Liddell Hart saw so frequently in World War II...

...Will any public in the world be moved by arguments more sophisticated than that...

...Perhaps more...

...The appalling thought is that there is no real way to guarantee that it won't happen all over again...

...We must also take our stands with a full awareness that we may be wrong and that those who disagree with us may not only do so in good faith but possess as much wisdom as we do...

...Political shrewdness might have been more appropriate than intellectual brilliance and systems analysis...

...One must take a stand, of course, for one cannot be so befuddled by the confusion and complexity of events as to stand paralyzed before them...

...A lot of straight lines grow crooked in human NOTEBOOK affairs but occasionally it turns out that a crooked line may grow straight...

...It is not good to lie to the people...

...Was there ever a time when there were more Ph.D.s in the government or more men who could claim to be intellectuals...

...A good rule...

...Those who directed the war in Southeast Asia, it will be said, had little concern for human life, but they would surely reply that they had immense concern for human life, that they were convinced it was necessary for the United States to take the stand it did so that many millions of human lives would not subsequently be blotted out...

...I was against the war in 1965, though ambivalently so, mostly because I did not see how anybody could pretend to certainty on such a complicated subject...

...His ill-conceived campaign in Greece caused the English to lose the advantages they had gained in the western desert, and the long series of disasters in the desert were responsible, in turn, for the fall of Singapore as Churchill poured vast quantities of personnel and resources into each new blunder in the desert...

...But given the folly of man, the complexity of the human condition, and the ever more sophisticated power of self-destruction available to us, do we have any reason to believe that we will not make other mistakes that will be equally bad...

...It might be suggested that what we need is more intelligent men in government...

...NOTEBOOK ity, folly, arrogance, narrowness, rigidity, and inflexibility that led to Vietnam did not come into the world in 1950...

...A side that produced a "Bomber" Harris might hesitate to be terribly critical of an Adolph Eichmann...

...I do not wish to get here into a detailed argument about post-World War II foreign policy, particularly in Europe...

...At one point, it seems, the President may have stopped listening to everyone but the military, but apparently that period did not last very long...

...From Mr...

...General Taylor did not like "search and destroy...

...I am not saying I accept this argument or agree with its morality, but I am saying that while concern for morality and respect for human life are admirable, they do not automatically dictate policy decisions...

...I am simply saying that I am terribly uneasy in the presence of men convinced they know the answers...

...Some of the most notable Allied triumphs, for example, were caused by previous Allied defeats that enticed Hitler to overextend himself...

...It might be said that we have learned not to lie to the people, but there is little reason to think that if all the secret decisions had been revealed when they were made, there would have been much difference in the public attitude toward the war...

...They are guilty of immense folly, a folly that is as easy for us to recognize from hindsight as it was difficult for them to recognize it at the time...

...Harry Truman would NOTEBOOK undoubtedly endorse it...

...Public disillusionment with the war is based on the fact that it went on too long and involved too heavy a price for something that did not seem worth it...

...One hears no more selfdoubt from the critics of the men responsible for the documents collected in the Pentagon Papers than one can find in the documents themselves...

...Surely no one can read the Pentagon Papers with the perspective of hindsight and not conclude that there was a vast amount of stupidity in our government during the 1950s and 1960s...

...One fights a limited war, the argument goes, in order to avoid a total war...

...For what have we learned from the Pentagon Papers that we did not already know...

...I do not mean, of course, there are not facts that the Papers reveal to us which were previously known only to a very few Americans...

...Most political policies fail...

...If we had not learned the lessons by 1960, what reason is there to think that we had learned them by 1970...

...Winston Churchill emerges as a blunderer...

...A president who speaks about "Pearl Harbor in reverse" is, in Mr...

...Or, it may be urged, more attention should be paid to questions of morality in determining public policy issues but, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan has observed, defending democracy in Southeast Asia is, or can be seen as, an exquisitely moral stance...

...It is not hard to find moral rationalizations for almost any policy decision but even beyond such cynicism, men of sincerity, integrity, and good will can disagree endlessly on what moral policy is...

...That sort of political shrewdness and historical perspective combined with a very high position in the decision-making structure is probably an accident, and such an accident is a very thin reed on which to build our hopes for the avoidance of more tragedy...

...but we ought to take our stands with the full awareness of the uncertainties, complexities, unintended consequences, good and evil, and the possibilities of mistake that are inherent in the policies we advocate...

...dishonesty— be it that of Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940s or of more recent administrations in the 1960s— destroys the credibility of a government...

...I do mean that the lessons of the Vietnam War were all known before the war and they did not prevent us from getting into it...

...Yet there seems to be an abundance of men who are very sure of themselves, confident that they know what is to be done, and certain that their wisdom and morality are superior to the wisdom and morality of those who governed in the '60s...

...George Ball opposed involvement in the war...

...Even McNaughton and MacNamara came eventually to disagree, but they had sold the President on a policy and the policy was now being carried out against their wishes...

...I do not, however, understand how they come by it, for in style, though not substance, it is the same sort of certainty that marked the positions of "Bomber" Harris and W. W. Rostow...

...not only evil and malicious men, but also good and wellintentioned men...

...Without getting into an argument about the Kennedy policy on Vietnam, I will simply assert that if more people—especially those over whose political careers Mr...

...Rusk think such a war could sustain public support for very long...

...How can those who so eagerly support new American policies in world affairs be so certain that disaster, suffering, and death will not follow from their policies, too...

...How can we prevent the same things from happening all over again...

...These are the men who could destroy us all...

...This is less to critize the Times than to suggest that we did indeed have a policy, and a policy that was endorsed by just about everyone...