The Web of Falsehood
MORGENTHAU, HANS J.
The Web of Falsehood The Best and the Brightest By David Halberstam Random House. 688 pp. $10.00. Reviewed by Hans J. Morgenthau Leonard Davis Distinguished Professor of Political Science,...
...He noted that conformity, to Americans, is a good in itself...
...Having debated many of the men who constitute The Best and the Brightest, I am amazed at how many defended our Vietnam policy in public when they had serious reservations about it in private...
...Halberstam's study is important not only because of its fascinating subject matter, but because of its high intellectual and literary qualities...
...If you knew what was good for you, you would keep the truth to yourself and tell your superiors what they wanted to hear...
...A wise and courageous President could have ended the war in '64 or '65...
...The opposer himself had to be assailed and his credibility destroyed, for his existence as the mouthpiece of the truth threatened government policies...
...Although parts are overwritten Halberstam tries at times to squeeze more juice out of a good story than it contains—overall it is an eloquent, witty, perceptive, and not infrequently profound discussion of America's leaders and of their methods of operation...
...More importantly, once they came to question the soundness of U.S...
...It is also the best work yet on the politics of the Vietnam war, exceeding in historic interest even the Pentagon Papers...
...For an answer we have to reach back to Tocqueville...
...But as Halberstam makes clear, there was neither enough wisdom nor enough courage at the top, among the best and the brightest, to turn America's Vietnam venture around before that senseless undertaking was allowed to run its own persuasive course...
...policy, why did they suppress their doubts and speak and act as if they believed what they doubted...
...His examples are legion...
...If there were sex in the narrative, one could compare it with some of the accounts of government in the memoirs of 18th-century French observers...
...The United States cannot, like other societies, rely upon dynastic continuity, ethnic identity, religious unity, or a long historic tradition to integrate it and keep it integrated...
...Questioning the soundness of the two propositions was inadmissible, since this introduced an element of uncertainty and ran the risk of destroying the structure of beliefs that sustained the government and the society...
...Will they approach future crises with higher moral and intellectual standards than those which resulted in the Vietnam war...
...Most of these menby no means all—were experienced, intelligent, and honorable...
...I am not speaking merely of those who made expedient ex post facto conversions to a new orthodoxy that is critical of the war (though there are lots of instances of that, too...
...Imagine yourself a junior officer returning home from the field to Saigon to participate in a briefing with the Secretary of Defense, and being pounced upon by generals determined to prevent you from speaking honestly...
...The unsung and unrewarded heroes of the war, they were humiliated by their colleagues, their careers placed in jeopardy, or they were forced out of their positions altogether...
...By now we have come to take for granted that the public has been consistently deceived about Vietnam...
...And why did many end up accepting what, at a lower level of consciousness, they knew could not be true...
...Thus, dissent is not only a nuisance to America's rulers but a threat to the social order itself...
...It was only the overwhelming impact of a failure that could not be ignored that changed the government's picture of the world, and its role within it...
...Yet the men responsible for our futile policy in Southeast Asia continue to govern us, either directly from Washington, or indirectly from powerful posts that help determine the nature of our society...
...Halberstam shows us, though, the comprehensive extent to which the people in government lied to each other...
...The stubborn reality of Vietnam compelled a disillusionment, culminating first in Robert S. McNamara's psychological crisis of '67, and then Lyndon B. Johnson's psychological disintegration of '68...
...To hold on to the political fiction against the pressures of reality, it was not sufficient simply to refute this or that argument or set this or that fact straight...
...The need to maintain this web of falsehood intact—for the sake of one's career as well as one's psychic health—resulted in the ferocious attacks against outsiders who were dubious about the soundness of the war...
...Here are high military officers arriving at surprisingly favorable conclusions about North Vietnam's recuperative capacities, but submitting lower figures to their commanding general that are more in tune with his expectations...
...And here is a top government official, convinced in 1965 that airpower could not win the war, expressing his support for the bombing policy when asked his opinion by the President...
...Why did they lie...
...Yet these rather evident observations do not fully explain how otherwise valuable men could create and pursue a fraudulent policy for so long...
...Halberstam set himself the task of telling us what kind of people were responsible for our Vietnam policy and how they made it...
...Reviewed by Hans J. Morgenthau Leonard Davis Distinguished Professor of Political Science, City University of New York David Halberstam already has several good books to his credit, but his latest volume is by far the finest that he has written...
...or opposed it altogether...
...Ultimately, only the President, setting the tone of his Administration by rewarding truth and not falsehood, can provide the answer to this ominous question...
...The first substantive proposition to which America demanded allegiance in the period after World War II was anti-Communism...
...Halberstam does not raise these questions explicitly, yet his story ineluc-tably leads up to them...
...In trying to summarize the impact of this book one is struck first of all by the inescapable fact that we have been governed by liars...
...And in all probability, so could have 10 high-ranking dissenters in '66 or '67, if they had resigned as a group, explaining their reasons in a manifesto to the American people...
...Instead, the main tie that binds our nation together is a voluntary consensus, an allegiance to certain basic propositions—such as those of the Declaration of Independence...
...not occasionally but habitually, as a matter of principle...
...Here is an American ambassador in Saigon excising from a CIA report, to be read by the President, the paragraphs giving a pessimistic assessment of the situation...
...One answer is provided by the fate of that small minority of civilian and military officers who saw the truth and dared to speak it...
...Halberstam provides convincing proof that in numerous cases private doubts were contemporaneous with public support of our policy, and that the numbers of skeptics increased with time...
...What we have here, therefore, is less a history of the decisions taken during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations than a psychological analysis of the policymakers and their interaction...
...Not to be a teamworker, not to get along, to be out of step, to rock the boat, these are considered crimes against society...
...But there is a qualitative difference between deception as a part of the human condition and employing The Lie as a fundamental principle of statecraft—producing a government that makes a liar even of Adlai Stevenson...
...The second was the belief that resisting Communist expansion would inevitably succeed if the country only put its mind and resources to the job...
...The issue, of course, is not that politicians sometimes lie to each other and that governments sometimes lie to their citizens...
Vol. 55 • December 1972 • No. 24
