No Ear for the Music
ROCHE, JOHN P.
No Ear for the Music The Keeper of the Keys: A History of the National Security Council from Truman to Bush By John Prados Morrow. 632 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by John ? Roche THIS book is...
...Prados seems unaware as well of the genesis and fate of the McGeorge Bundy committee on the Middle East...
...LBJ, like other Presidents since, decided in the wake of the 1967 War that the time had come for superior American vision to end the strife in theregion...
...Plowing through this compendium, however, did confirm my conviction that what began in 1947 as a modest little coordinating shop has become a Rube Goldberg monstrosity...
...Like most people, he did not love opposition, yet disagreement per se was no cause for excommunication...
...Reviewed by John ? Roche THIS book is a triumph of logistics over intellect: John Prados has put some 300,000 words between covers by collecting every computer printout that exists relating to that curious Presidential institution known as the National Security Council...
...actually, no nation present "signed" it, but we and the South Vietnamese went further and refused to "take notice" of it...
...He reciprocated in his memoirs by explicitly excluding me from his White House enemies, but he never learned that we have only one President at a time...
...I only just verge on ridicule when I say that if Komer had been asked how many Vietnamese in the IV Corps area had not been influenced by Vietcong propaganda, he would in 13 hours and 20 minutes have sent back a "Critic, Top Secret, Tamale, Noform, Nodis, Eyes Only the President" cable definitively stating: "2,634,201...
...They vanished into the mist, but Prados takes the cosmetic exercise at face value...
...He thinks, for example, that we (and the South Vietnamese) signed the 1954 Geneva Final Declaration on Indochina...
...Prados seems to have taken Robert Komer's press releases seriously, too...
...if he and the Secretary of State James A. Baker III have a division of opinion, he does not make it the subject of a press conference...
...The NSC until Nixon was a small operation...
...Later, in December l967, LBJ told me that he had come to agree with those of us arguing for "Vietnamization...
...I was an early opponent of the strategic bombing strategy (see my "Liberals and Vietnam,"NL, April 26,1965) and had urged Hubert to weigh in against it...
...As my memos to President Johnson after I joined his staff will document, I did not change my position on strategic bombing, but I saw no reason to distribute my contributions to outsiders...
...He has done some interviewing, but makes no qualitative evaluation of the evidence thus included either...
...Johnson did not, as Prados claims, exclude HHH from his "inner circle" on Vietnam because he had opposed bombing Hanoi while Soviet Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin was there on a visit in February 1965...
...Finally, I think it is worth noting that the contrast between the Nixon-throughReagan NSC and the Bush NSC (something Prados obviously could not include) is becoming apparent: Brent Scowcroft, Bush's national security adviser, has been around a long time but keeps a low profile...
...A hyperactive ex-spook, Komer today would be dubbed the "NSC Viet Tsar...
...the President did so because Hubert leaked his opposition...
...Where he hasn't found one on an event it has been involved in —e.g., the monumental, phony Laotian "crisis" of 1959-62—there is a void...
...Yet Prados' account of the Zbigniew Brzezinski NSC during Jimmy Carter's reign, and of Ronald Reagan's bizarre menagerie adds little to existing materials...
...It's about time...
...It was not featured in the American press for seven weeks precisely because neither Hanoi nor Phnom Penh considered it in their interest to scream...
...For my sins the President handed me a file containing irate back-channel complaints from Komer in Saigon that the military command had denied him a four-star flag for his limo and said, "Think of something...
...I suggested orange neon stars—and have no idea what happened...
...It was, I would shortly find out, far too late...
...A significant number of top participants in the Vietnam decision-making process considered him the Court Astrologer, and viewed his data (e.g., the Hamlet Evacuation Scheme, in which every South Vietnamese village was rated from 1 to 5 in terms of security—a numerological exercise that taxed the creative imagination of all hands) as analytically useless...
...Suddenly, Mac Bundy and a troop of Wise Men were summoned to the Cabinet Room, trumpets were sounded, and the word went out that, after millennia of chaos, a serene Great Society would soon materialize in the Levant...
...Moreover, Prados is addicted to the conventional wisdom of the post-1960 era...
...Similarly, despite the fact that in the late '50s the Soviet Union nominated North and South Vietnam for UN membership, the author refuses to believe that the ' 54 di vision of Vietnam was, no less than the breakup of Korea and Germany, a "Cold War settlement...
...Which is another way of saying that, like LBJ, George Bush doesn't want any staffer "playing President...
...once it metastasized under Kissinger, it became virtually an independent state...
...I tried on numerous occasions gently to explain this to Hubert...
...Since one of my tasks as an adviser in Lyndon B. Johnson's White House beginning in 1966 was to act as interlocuteur valable between the President and my old Americans for Democratic Action colleague Hubert H. Humphrey, then sentenced to the Vice Presidency, this seems a good occasion to straighten out a much misunderstood aspect of their relationship...
...Prados never suggests this, nor does he adequately emphasize how the route to high office —both military and civilian—has been facilitated by NSC networking...
...The only treaties signed there were military agreements between North Vietnam and Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam...
...and that (2) Mac had called him to find out what his band of peacemongers was supposed to be doing...
...Having been closely acquainted with NSC operations from 1960 to 1982, both from inside and then as a scholar and nationally syndicated columnist, I found his approach superficial and numbing: He has a mass of words, but no ear for the music...
...Nevertheless, I was appalled when he called me—I was then still ADA national chairman and a professor at Brandeis— to tell me how vigorously he had tried to persuade the President not to go through with the bombing of the North...
...Although President Richard M. Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, may have been unworldly enough to consider it secret, the North Vietnamese (who were on the receiving end), Prince Sihanouk (who thought blowing up all Vietnamese a splendid notion), and numerous other players knew what was going on...
...If I could find so many errors of judgment and fact (not to mention failures to engage seriously in analysis) where the book covers the period I know well —even after omitting two major John F. Kennedy-Johnson NSC issues, Laos and the Averell Harriman negotiation capers—how many are there in the remainder of the work...
...Our relationship was always very candid so I told him, in essence, "Great, but for Christ's sake, shut up...
...A month or so later Johnson's special counsel, Harry McPherson, who handled this account, told me that (1) the President had inquired, "What am I going to do with that Bundy group...
...He undoubtedly had a genius for simulated progress: At a moment's notice "blowtorch Bob" in Saigon could provide Washington with an avalanche of largely meaningless data to fortify the conviction that all was well on the ground...
...Prados also perpetuates the myth of the "secret" 1969 bombing of Vietnamese base camps in Cambodia...
Vol. 74 • May 1991 • No. 7
