The Pentagon Papers and Historical Hindsight

...Without getting into disputes on how the war was fought, one could (as I do) suggest that the President's reluctant decisions were a natural and legitimate consequence of the American people's then staunch commitment to freedom for South Vietnam...

...In fact, if Hitler had not gone completely off his rails and declared war on the United States, we might well have gone roaring off into the Pacific in 1942 and left Europe to its fate...

...In short, especially given the paranoia that has been generated, I think the full Pentagon history should have been declassified...

...The same thing was done in Korea after the Pueblo crisis, but the planes never took off...

...Rusk was known to sit down and type up his "eyes only" memos to the President, and the latter openly held the opinion that to send any sensitive material to the State Department was to guarantee its publication in the next morning's paper...

...In the U.S...

...It was also argued from another quarter that bombing the North would stiffen morale in Saigon and affirm the credibility of American commitments...

...But the optimists who looked for a stable successor regime, one that would inspire South Vietnamese resistance to the ever-increasing infiltration from the North, were grossly disappointed...

...Now this triumph of "investigative reporting," as the New York Times calls it (a strange description of having a truckload of documents dumped on your doorstep), does provide a case study of contingency planning, using entirely second- and third-echelon sources...

...Unfortunately, Ho Chi Minh was not impressed...

...So let us, as we read the memos floating back and forth between assistant secretaries, ask the simple question: Why would Lyndon Johnson have wanted to get mixed up in a war in Indochina...

...During my years at the White House, for example, I was convinced that certain men stamped their missives "Top Secret" simply to attract attention, presumably figuring that nobody would bother to read a merely "Confidential" memo...

...He said to Secretaries Rusk and Mc-Namara, in effect, "Put your men to work and give me the options...

...The answer: Of course not...

...Hanoi, it was argued, would appreciate the seriousness of American support for the Republic of Vietnam, calculate that the stakes were too high, and call off its "liberation" movement...

...It is seldom hard to construct conspiracy theories of history in retrospect...

...The men went to work and the results of their efforts have been chronicled in the Times and several other papers...

...THE JOINT CHIEFS are paid to plan for wars...

...They have over at the Pentagon an immense welfare program (Aid to Dependent Colonels, I call it) dedicated to contingency planning...

...THE PENTAGON PAPERS AND HISTORICAL HINDSIGHT BY JOHN P. ROCHE THE REAL PROBLEM created by publication of excerpts from the Pentagon's history of our involvement in Vietnam lies not so much in the act itself as in the effect it will have in the realm of demonology...

...In November 1967, for instance, he canvassed a number of advisers on a radical deescalation of the war, and no word of it leaked out...

...Distinguished Southern historians, for example, worked diligently for many years to demonstrate that President Lincoln had deliberately tricked the South into the Civil War, that after the innocent Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, Lincoln rubbed his hands with glee and used the incident to justify mobilizing Union troops...

...At that time it was the consensus among policymakers that Diem and his brother Nhu were hindering an effective anti-Communist response in Vietnam...

...The documents have provided a lot of background...

...Hung up between two basic responsibilities—one to peace, and the other to limiting Communist aggression—he did what he always did under such circumstances: He told Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara to go on refining their policy options and to set the wheels in motion, so that whichever approach he finally selected could be implemented at once...

...Now whatever the assistant secretaries may have written to each other, and despite the optimism of the "air marshals" (as those of us who distrusted the policy called them), bombing North Vietnam was seen as a way of avoiding war...

...A number of Right-wingers looked on this as a vindication of Otepka, who had been fired by those wicked liberals over at the State Department for bootlegging classified information to congressional committees...

...And, in fairness, the Times and other papers that have been oozing with virtuous editorials about freedom of information and the absurdity of the classification system should immediately support Otepka's appointment...

...the documents themselves were, of course, classified, yet various authors had drawn on their knowledge of classified sources to make the substantive points...

...President Johnson, still fully occupied with the transition from the Kennedy era, acted appropriately: JOHN P. ROCHE, in his third decade as a New Leader contributor, was Special Consultant to the President in 1966-68...

...Similarly, Franklin D. Roosevelt was attacked in immense detail by as distinguished an American historian as Charles A. Beard for instigating the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor...

...And the Pentagon study has two enormous gaps: the President and the Secretary of State...

...What is important, though, is not what the documents show but what people think they show...

...Part of the historical bias built into the Pentagon papers arose from the fact that such old hands as Dean Rusk and Lyndon Johnson profoundly distrusted the security system...

...You name a country, they have a man on it equipped with detailed maps, target analysis, etc...

...As this article went to press, the Supreme Court had not yet arrived at a decision regarding the publishing oj the Pentagon papers...

...What did exist in 1964 was general agreement at the second and third echelons of the relevant agencies that bombing North Vietnam was a sound policy...

...This thought is advanced not in a cynical spirit, but rather to make the point—obscured in the rhetorical mist these past weeks—that, as usual in American politics, one's views on leaking classified material tend to depend, in FDR's phrase, on "whose child has the measles...

...When President Johnson wanted opinions, he sidestepped the system...

...Presidents, on the contrary, are paid to keep us out of wars whenever that is conceivably possible...

...One of the unfortunate by-products of Joe McCarthy's "loyal American underground" was that dissenters in the State Department responded by keeping unorthodox views to themselves...

...With retrospective omniscience—a widespread malady these days—one can argue that he should have gotten off the escalator in 1964 or '65...

...By a strange coincidence, almost as the Times was proofreading the Pentagon papers, the Senate Judiciary Committee was approving the nomination of Otto Otepka to the Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB...

...In fact, he hadn't...

...Lincoln did not want war...

...one can argue that their publication was imprudent, but that raises an entirely different issue...

...There was nothing new about the idea of using air power to "punish" Hanoi...

...Anyone with a reasonably specialized knowledge of events in 1964 knows, and has known for years, that contingency plans were being considered to deal with the worsening Vietnamese situation...

...Saigon was characterized by revolving-door governments, and the North Vietnamese regulars and Main Force Vietcong began chewing up ARVN at a terrible rate...

...Enter the air-power spokesmen...

...Nothing has emerged from the series that was not already in the public domain...

...It had been included as a possible option in General Maxwell Taylor's report to President Kennedy back in 1961 and it popped up regularly in subsequent years...

...Nixon's "National Security Council System," which has papers flowing up, down and sideways, is a sitting duck for an ambitious leaker...

...And no one ever sent the minutes of the Tuesday lunches—where crucial decisions were hammered out— anywhere except to the White House files...

...Thus the next step was to raise the ante, employing a minimal force level to indicate that we meant business...

...This is a tricky one, particularly since one of the worst tendencies in the State and Defense Departments was to over-classify just about everything...

...Obviously a good deal of this is necessary in our uncertain world, but the important thing to note is that most contingencies never occur...

...That brings us to the issue of disseminating classified information...

...Let us therefore try to escape from an atmosphere dominated by editors reciting Milton, and government lawyers predicting the end of the bureaucratic world, and take a hard look at some of the real questions before the Supreme Court as this article is being written...

...Viewed from this perspective, Step Number One was deterrence, that is, letting the enemy know that if it did certain things, it would get hurt...

...Recent events, though, may lead the Senate Judiciary Committee, and President Nixon, who nominated Otepka, to rethink their stance...

...But we can survive on that basis...

...But when the Times says that a "consensus on bombing" had been reached before the 1964 election, it misstates the case, or perhaps overstates the reality...

...1971 kfs...

...government, there is no consensus on anything without the President...

...But the documents present no evidence that President Johnson had made up his mind one way or the other before November 1964...

...Barry Goldwater has turned out to be helpful on this matter and is, for the first time in his life, being treated by the doves as a serious authority on current events...

...Second, has the publication of these documents damaged the operation of the government...

...This was also the view of David Halberstam and the New York Times...

...it was simply a rewrite of the one passed by Congress in 1958 on the Formosa Straits, which worked...

...But history is a very different thing when you are approaching it head-on, rather than with 20-20 hindsight...

...Once I have seen them, we can talk concretely about how to deal with the crisis...

...And while President Johnson, like his predecessors, was committed to containing Communist aggression (whether monolithic or polycentric), the first item on his agenda was how to do so and avoid war...

...Back in the 1930s they spent a couple of years deciding how to cope with a combined attack by the British and the Japanese...

...He was well aware of the unpopularity of wars, he recalled vividly the treatment Harry Truman had received over our Korean intervention, and he wanted above all to get down to the serious business of the Great Society...

...Johnson ended up with more than 500,000 men in Vietnam and a full-scale land war by opting at each stage for the least repellent alternative...

...Let us arbitrarily begin with the deposition of Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963...

...Roosevelt did—but with the Nazis, not the Japanese...

...There is no need to detail the rest of the gloomy progression...

...There is nothing to hide...

...Already the foreign press, as well as some of our more hysterical domestic papers, are trumpeting that the study "proves" that the United States got involved in the Vietnam war through a sinister conspiracy, that while Lyndon Johnson was preaching peace in the 1964 campaign the boys in the back room were drawing up battle plans...

...The advocates of air strikes were a strange united front: the Air Force and Navy because they believed it would be effective, and others from the Armed Services who, while pessimistic about its effectiveness, saw it as an alternative to a "land war in Asia...

...It hardly took a task force to devise the Tonkin Gulf Resolution...

...When deterrence works (as it has, notably with the Soviet Union and Communist China), nobody cheers...

...Publication of the documents will undoubtedly encourage bureaucrats to be more noncommittal in their memoranda, and will probably stimulate President Nixon to follow the Johnson-Rusk format...

...At the same time, if one expects high government officials to lay their convictions, no matter how unpopular, on the line, there should be some guarantee that confidentiality will be maintained...

...Abraham Lincoln put it tersely when he found himself the only member of his Cabinet in favor of the Emancipation Proclamation: "One for, five against—the ayes have it...

...If Otepka deserves a slot on the sacb for the trivia he leaked, surely whoever conveyed the Pentagon study to the Times merits a spot on the Federal Communications Commission...

...FIRST, has the publication of these documents endangered "national security...

...Naturally McNamara increased our airpower assets in the Far East, but we were not committed to bombing...

...Although these studies had a lunatic logic, they suffer from one overwhelming liability: They are not true...

...If leaking classified materials is a blow for freedom, one really can't exclude the late Joe McCarthy's "loyal American underground" from the warrior band...