OUR CRUMBLING CREDIBILITY

...It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the dominant factor in these instances in which U. S. credibility has been impaired was a desire to paint a tortuously complex problem in simplistic, appealing shades of black and white, to pander to the lowest common denominator of American credulity...

...perhaps not, in the midst of war, the unvarnished truth, but even the varnished truth would mark a considerable improvement over past and present practice...

...and during the second pause, it sent Hanoi two messages, one in response to a reply from Hanoi...

...Rusk, while he embarrassedly evaded the Senator's terminology, gave Long the assurance he sought...

...Our promise was to help South Vietnam, not to destroy it...

...A friend asked how he had done...

...Yet in both instances the United States indeed did receive replies...

...Commitment "Our commitment was to a 'legitimate government' and what we now have in Saigon is neither 'legitimate' nor a 'government.' Our commitment was to help them win the war, not to replace them on the battlefield...

...Lafayette, We Are Here...

...John F. Kennedy, of course, became a party to great deception in the Bay of Pigs, a role he regretted ever afterward...

...Would the Administration be better or worse off if the truth were generally known that, before the massive introduction of troops began in 1965, American policy makers seriously canvassed the possibility of pulling out of South Vietnam entirely, including the 17,000 men President John F. Kennedy put in...

...Internally, particularly in a democracy, a sense of commitment is created which makes backing down extremely difficult politically...

...facts that are known but not officially admitted publicly or privately, and facts that are always officially denied...

...As to the third game, I asked him to agree to a draw, but he wouldn't...

...President Johnson sought to maintain that there was no change in policy (even his own advisers wince at that formulation), and the United States juggled the juridical justification for its policy to whatever point of legislation or law it found handiest at a given time...

...President Roosevelt employed the bases-for-destroyers device in World War II to circumvent the Neutrality Act and supply aid to Britain...

...Small wonder that suspicion developed about the credibility of official utterances...

...Whether the United States should or should not be in Vietnam is not the subject of this critique...

...The message is this: In an era of unimaginable uncertainties, what nations do, and what they say they are doing, are being subjected to unusual scrutiny, to determine if what they do matches what they say...

...We have a great problem here maintaining our credibility," he conceded...

...it is more standardized...

...What is the explanation for what often has been a self-defeating course of government behavior...

...Perhaps it is not abnormal for the United States to try to polarize its problems in international affairs in absolutes...

...The projection of this style similarly has caused great mischief for the credibility of U. S. action in Vietnam...

...There are innumerable other facts that, had they been widely known at the time, would have stimulated greater public debate...

...It is not unprecedented for leaders of the United States, where military conflict is involved, to edge their way into commitments...

...On the domestic scene the game of political legerdemain is honored by American tradition...

...The Johnson style, which he practiced so productively as Majority Leader of the Senate, is based on operating in zigzags, with the real direction of policy often concealed...

...During the televised hearings on Vietnam before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Russell Long of Louisiana, the Majority Whip, with only a slight smile on his face asked Secretary of State Dean Rusk: "Are we the international good guys, or the international bad guys...

...He is also, in international affairs, often the victim of his own style of political leadership...

...President Kennedy once said that a domestic mistake can only embarrass a nation...

...It said the proposal to meet with a North Vietnamese representative in Rangoon was spurned because the United States, caught in a weak military bargaining position, concluded that Hanoi was only offering it a face-saving way to "surrender" South Vietnam...

...They struggle through the morass of publicly admitted facts about U.S...

...A totally unintended controversy swept over the Administration about the credibility of its lists...

...Unlike President Kennedy, he employs the extreme Congressional style of internal political maneuver for much of his public behavior: hinting he may turn left, or right, but doing the reverse, or perhaps neither...

...He had vastly misspoken...

...The definition offered was: "It represents a perceptibly growing disquiet, misgiving, or skepticism about the candor or validity of official declarations," especially those that concern Vietnam...

...There is a practical reason for this uniform code of international behavior, or misbehavior...

...There is a Chinese tale of a proud but mediocre chess-playing diplomat who one day lost three chess games in a row...

...Centuries of experience have gone into building up a pattern of acceptable circumlocution...

...The hall-hearted diplomatic explanation offered is that the United States sought to protect the avenues of secret diplomacy...

...The great discrepancies between what the United States originally did in the Dominican Republic, and what it said it was doing, have become known...

...They regard it as a sign of amateurism...

...After the death of Adlai Stevenson, when Eric Sevareid wrote in Look magazine that Stevenson privately said he was dismayed about the way the Administration had concealed the truth about Hanoi's willingness to talk to our side, the government, to its profound embarrassment, was forced to admit the deception...

...The prime purpose, as disclosed later (and then only to justify the failure of the air strikes to stop infiltration from the North), was to boost the collapsing morale of the badly buffeted South Vietnamese forces...

...James Reston in The New York Times...

...this nation is not only the leader of the West, but in world affairs it trades on its claim of being the most democratic and open of societies...

...Next, having asserted that Communists had gained control of the rebel movement, the Administration had to explain why it was negotiating with the side that it had labeled Communist...

...There are far more arguments on both sides than could be encompassed here...

...Then, having claimed that, the Administration felt impelled to back up the President by releasing lists of Communists in Santo Domingo...

...The President has played cat-and-mouse with his momentary adversaries in aluminum, in steel, and in other areas of national life...

...The history of U. S. policy in Vietnam since 1954 has been marked by a consistent lack of candor for which the present Administration is paying the accumulated cost in damage to U. S. credibility...

...It is worth examining what might have happened if more truth had been used about the conduct of policy in Vietnam...

...To the diplomatically initiated, that was a dead giveaway...

...In domestic politics we permit even lower standards: We tolerate gross exaggerations, soaring promises, the blackest accusations, double-dealing, party-switching, vote-trading...

...Jerome D. Frank of Johns Hopkins continued, is that each side selectively emphasizes the other's hostile gestures, and discounts its intended overtures to ease tension: "When nations are heavily armed and mutually fearful, this kind of conflict spiral can lead to war with breathtaking speed...

...Johnson himself destroyed in one statement the distinction they labored to create...

...Technically, by diplomatic standards, the United States did not exactly lie...

...there is no merit whatever to the far-out suspicion that President Johnson deliberately set out to put the United States where it is in Vietnam today...

...It has been reported, and even today stands unchallenged, that early in the Johnson Administration's Vietnam policy-making, powerful Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told the President: "I'd spend whatever it takes to bring to power a government that would ask us to leave...

...All this does not imply sini iter motives...

...employing hyperbole, oversimplification, postures to bargain from, not to stand on...

...no "positive and encouraging" reply, and no "responsible, or encouraging or constructive reply from the other side...

...The dilemma is not all the making of the Johnson Administration, but it has contributed more than its share...

...There is a simple cure: greater candor...

...Words can carry more impact than bullets...

...Once impaired, there is the devil to pay to make it whole again...

...What counts, as a favorite British phrase aptly emphasizes, is not just what is done, but what is seen to be done...

...But what it did not wipe clean was the unnecessary damage done to U. S. credibility in the interim...

...French President Charles de Gaulle masterfully employs the same technique...

...Good diplomats abhor outright lying...

...A psychiatrist who was called before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in May, in an effort by Chairman J. William Fulbright to experiment with gaining insight on national behavior patterns, noted: "Once nations find themselves in a position of mutual antagonism, each interprets all actions of the other as based on bad motives, just as its own acts always spring from good ones...

...He acknowledged that there was official concern about a "crisis of confidence" in the Administration's Vietnamese policies...

...The Administration was trying to knock the story down, without flatly denying it, by making it appear that it was denying it...

...We have different standards of credibility for our personal, our national, and our international affairs...

...But the requirements of the United States in world affairs run in the opposite direction...

...actions that are only acknowledged in private background meetings with the press but never on the public record...

...Until the Fulbright hearings were held—and I would be happy to document this—there was more information on the public record in Britain about some aspects of U. S. activity in the war in Vietnam than there was on the official public record in this country...

...In both instances, following its tactics of polarizing the "good guys" against the "bad guys," the Administration originally sought to create the impression that North Vietnam simply had ignored its action...

...And the United States, with its overwhelming might, is subject to the greatest scrutiny of all...

...For good or ill, the United States got there by eclectic day-to-day decisions, not by conspiracy or grand design...

...A world leader's assertion of fact, which proves to be a statement of unfact, can rebound with boomerang force...

...U. S. forces increased from 327 men to a figure now heading toward half-a-million...

...In the second, even after having been trapped in the damage to its credibility in the exchange with U Thant over the proposal to meet a North Vietnamese representative at Rangoon in late 1964, the Administration still employed highly evasive tactics of diplomatic verbiage to imply that it was getting no response at all from Hanoi...

...Suppose it were publicly realized that the Administration, at the outset, avoided like the plague a public declaration that it was making Vietnam a testing ground to challenge Communist China's concept of wars of national liberation...

...That is the international risk that has been run beyond the domestic discord over morality, ethics, and politics by what has become known as the U. S. "credibility gap...

...Here President Johnson is most vulnerable...

...Such Presidential behavior caused great mischief when the United States last year intervened in the Dominican Republic...

...What if it were widely known that many of President Johnson's advisers thought—and they believed he agreed —that all the Administration originally intended to do in 1965 was to put in a limited number of American troops as chips on the table, to serve as bargaining power to try to negotiate a graceful exit from Vietnam that would not undermine the world prestige of the United States...

...The war in Vietnam is a jungle of fractured principles of international law, ethics, and moral standards...

...The costs of Vietnam grievously have impaired President Johnson's twin hopes: his Great Society ambitions at home, and his burning, however unattainable, ambition to be hailed as the Western architect of peace—aspirations that equally eluded his post-World War II predecessors...

...the figure was not even 150 or fifteen, and subsequent evidence of atrocities pointed most heavily at the anti-rebel, not the rebel, side...

...why did its spokesmen not simply say just that, instead of building doubts about the U. S. government's own credibility that later exploded against it when the facts became known...

...When we can combine our sense of righteousness with a slogan, we often believe we have a policy: "Liberate the Oppressed," or "Let Them Leave Their Neighbors Alone...

...In the first five-day pause, the Administration initially said that "no response" was received from Hanoi...

...facts about U.S...

...activities in Vietnam, Laos, or Thailand...

...The diplomat replied, "Well, I didn't win the first game, and my opponent didn't lose the second...

...A short time later, in making public an account of peace-soundings taken in Hanoi by two traveling Italian professors, Arthur Goldberg, U. S. Ambassador to the United Nations, admitted as much...

...He was brought back to power in 1958 by men certain that he would, as they wished, keep Algeria French...

...President Johnson has been more the captive of the consensus concept than any of his predecessors...

...Foreign affairs has its own moral plane...

...With supreme de-viousness, he did exactly the opposite, in one of the great acts of political obfuscation of all times, and disengaged France from the bottomless Algerian pit...

...style for circumventing the truth...

...But it is too dangerous an indulgence for a nuclear age...

...In no crisis in memory have U. S. declarations about what was happening been so glaringly inconsistent with what actually was happening...

...President Johnson plays, and overplays, it to the hilt...

...The "hot line" between Washington and Moscow is a symbol of the danger of misstatement or miscalculation...

...When the United States later publicly displayed, for the first time, a super-secret hydrogen bomb to prove it really was fished out of the sea off the coast of Spain, an American official said that the United States was obliged to display evidence to support its statements, because the "international credibility" of the United States was at stake...

...As the United States tried one unsuccessful approach after another, military advisers slipped into the role of combat troops...

...But in the dilemma over Vietnam an added factor is involved...

...We joke about "political platforms built to run on, not to stand on," and "deals made in smoke-filled rooms...

...We have seen some of this occur in the pauses in the bombing of North Vietnam in May, 1965, and in December, 1965-January, 1966...

...Concealed behind the announced objective of intervening to save lives was the objective of preventing what was thought, rightly or wrongly, to be the threat of a Communist takeover...

...It might have been awkward for policy officials to admit that when the United States launched its continuing air strikes against North Vietnam in February, 1965, the underlying motive was not, as announced, retaliation for guerrilla attacks on U. S. forces in South Vietnam...

...For example, to the dismay of officials in the State Department, who dutifully were trying to employ the President's favorite strategy of keeping the options open, Mr...

...So it was that while Administration officials were leaking reports that there was danger the Communists might seize control of the revolt, the President announced they already had...

...The State Department and the White House tried to use the same technique last year in the now infamous incident of U. N. Secretary General U Thant's exasperated charge that the United States had rejected a peace feeler from Hanoi...

...Last December, in attempting to explain the breach that was developing between the Johnson Administration and many of the most observant citizens, I first employed the term, "the credibility gap...

...But having employed the device of circumlocution so often in the Vietnamese crisis, the Administration overstepped the toleration point...

...De Gaulle, however, is the leader of France, not the United States...

...This June, the Administration pointed with pride to the free election held in the Dominican Republic, implying that the election was evidence to justify everything said or done in the Dominican Republic by the United States...

...The danger to peace, Dr...

...The most extreme example of hyperbole, which surprisingly escaped notice until I cited it weeks later, was the President's statement at a press conference on June 17, 1965, in the heat of justifying Administration action, that in the revolt, "some 1,500 innocent people were murdered and shot and their heads cut off...

...But having insisted at the time, in statements to the world press, that it was prepared to bargain if Hanoi would just come to the conference table, and never having admitted that it was in too weak a position to negotiate, U. S. diplomacy had trapped itself in its own rhetoric...

...The degree of belief, doubt, or disbelief accorded to the words and actions of a nation is akin to the susceptibilities of a credit rating...

...OUR CRUMBLING CREDIBILITY by MURREY MARDER /~iN the pragmatic measuring rod of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who has been accused of many things but never of pie-in-the-sky diplomacy, the crux of the conduct of foreign policy is the maintenance of a nation's credibility...

...Remember the Maine...

...They might also have made it more difficult for the Administration to pursue the policy it employed...

...Instead, public damage to the credibility of the United States often has been inflicted doubly: once for withholding or distorting the truth, and a second time when the truth, or part of it, became known...

...This has been the Achilles' heel of the U. S. involvement in Vietnam...

...A favorite device is his annual stimulation of speculation that the national budget will rise to some horrendous figure, to produce a public sigh of relief later, when it rises by several billions, but not as high as the prophesied amount...

...The Administration's response, when questioned publicly about U Thant's statement, was that "no meaningful proposals," and "no substantive proposals," had been submitted to the United States...

...Our arms were provided to fight the aggressors and not to start a civil war...

...But the country would have been basing its decisions on realities, not contrivances...

...There the need for the United States is to demonstrate clarity, constancy, dependability, predictability...

...It has its own unwritten but recognized level of toler-ability for hyperbole, distortions of fact, secret protocols, trickery, double-crossing, and an elaborate, formalized MURREY MARDER is diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Post...

...The original, official comment on questions about responses to the second, thirty-seven day bombing pause, was that the Administration had received no "serious response" from Hanoi...

...The United States was totally dissatisfied with the replies from North Vietnam...

...One explanation is the one that U Thant gave in 1965, to the great indignation of the White House: "In war, the first casualty is truth...

...To do so, Administration strategists believed, would have impaired U. S. prestige and would have made it more difficult, or impossible, to execute the preferred intention of bargaining a way out of Vietnam...

...If nuclear weapons are used again in war, their credibility as a deterrent to war has failed, to quote another non-dove, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara...

...In personal life we allow great latitude in small deceits, overblown praise, excuses, apologies...

...an international miscalculation can kill it...

...This axiom takes on double significance in a nuclear age...

...No matter whether history marks Vietnam as a plus or minus for U. S. policy, the manner in which the United States carries out its strategy there will affect the weight that is accorded to the word of the United States in world affairs: its credibility factor...

...If that was the case, it surely failed to do so, and only damaged its own credibility...

...When Communist China leaped in to claim that Vietnam was indeed such a test, the Administration's own escalating talk of "commitments," plus its burgeoning troop input, had reached a level where it felt compelled to accept the prestige challenge...

...United States has been needlessly hurt by its self-created credibility gap...

...We Americans yearn for simplified answers to complex problems, preferably served as slogans: "54-40 or Fight...

...I sometimes pity my friends who are official spokesmen in government...

...The question of credibility, in its most immediate sense, concerns the tactics employed by the Administration in explaining and sustaining the U. S. involvement in Vietnam...

...One retrogression that we have suffered in very recent years in the field of public enlightenment is a turning away, by the government, from the kind of encouragement of public debate, of public questioning, of public examination that was Adlai Stevenson's greatest contribution to our time, and which carried over into the Kennedy years—at least at the outset of that Administration...

...It is not necessarily higher...

...Morality aside, and even apart from the bitter struggle in Vietnam where American lives and prestige are unquestionably now heavily committed, the realistic self-interest of the...

...Each increase in tension," suggested another witness, psychologist Charles E. Osgood of the University of Illinois, "makes it more difficult to achieve the accurate communication and the shared understandings that are necessary for de-escalation of tension...