Halberstam, FitzGerald, Ellsberg: the Reporter, the Poetess, the Analyst
Branch, Taylor
Halberstam, FitzGerald, and Ellsberg reporter, poetess, and analyst by Taylor Branch With a nervous eye on Nixon’s trigger finger, we watch the prisoners and the bombers return as...
...He’s fairly sympathetic to LBJ, who was torn 011 the war and overwhelmed by those smart fellows Jack Kennedy brought in to manage national security...
...Chop...
...The explaining is left to Frances FitzGerald...
...Chop...
...They would accommodate the NLF and the North Vietnamese, who continually found men willing to die for the cause of their revolution...
...Such obliviousness to cost (even someone else’s cost) might be acceptable if we were fighting for survival or some noble ideal, but we never did...
...Chop...
...IMcNamara was a character of awe, of ]hyperbole-the most rational, most acidic, most efficient, the toughest, a vital quality of the Kennedy era...
...It is this carried boldly forward through the whole war-a pragmatic demonstration that victory in Vietnam is not possible, at the expense of believers like McNamara and Bundy...
...This beginning put me off a little because it sounded like the standard contradictory beginning of liberal books on Vietnam: the United States is doomed to fail because the Americans do not really understand the Vietnamese, the authors would say, and the Americans are ignorant because they fail to perceive that the Vietnamese are essentially like this...
...No President could win public and congressional support for a military conflict in Asia by stating honestly that he knew his program would most likely produce a stalemate...
...That has been done before, and she merely does it berter...
...Rule 2: Do not commit the U. S. to a land war in ~ ~eithier...
...The first round of books of understanding on the Vietnam war is over, with much success...
...Again and again, he spits out words to capture McNamara’s tough logic: If you did show a flash of irrationality or support the wrong position, he would change, speaking faster, 1:he voice like a machine gun, cutting into you: chop, chop, chop...
...Relying on air power would mean greatly increased civilian casualties and refugees among the Lndochinese, but that would be all right because Rule 1 required only that we keep the communists from marching into Saigon-it did not mean that we had to do anything ?or the rest of the population, such as letting them live, The number of dead, wounded, and homeless Indochinese is simply not a factor relevant to our Vietnam policy, exclaims Ellsberg, and no American President has ever asked for an estimate of the number of non-Americans likely to die from his policies...
...The color of her writing adds something rare to political analysis-the strong smell of reality...
...He did not serve himself nor the country well...
...In the meantime, he would escalate as slowly as necessary to avoid defeat...
...They constitute one of the first major breakthroughs in understanding the Vietnam policies of the various Presidents and their advisers, and for this you can forgive Ellsberg the clay-tablet effect in the rest of the book...
...You neglected this...
...Once I had concluded, in 19677 that we were not going to succeed in Vietnam,” he writes, “I worked actively toward ending our involvement-’’) But what came to obsess him upon reading the Pentagon Papers was the very consistency of American policy over 20 years...
...That’s the ball game for Halberstam throughout the whole bookmeeting the best and the brightest right there in their tough intellects and showing them to be fools...
...Chop...
...This may have been foolish, but it was not irrational...
...What made the leaders seem irrational was their overblown public rhetoric claiming that they would win...
...Halberstam seems to hold the Vietnam “players” responsible in proportion to their rleputations for brilliance...
...Chop...
...If the war was winnable, Ellsberg the true believer would be there with strategies...
...There was a powerful but camouflaged impact on the other end of all those LBJ orders and McNamara memos, and Fire in the Lake is a vitally important ground-level view of the awesome effect that even bumbling governments can have on lives and reality far away From those who make the decisions...
...Frances FitzGerald speaks as poetess in Fire in the Lake.* She cradles her knowledge of Vietnam in her arms as she explains how the American war dollar shredded up the delicate tissue of Vietnamese culture...
...When the war was a “problem,” Ellsberg worked on it with his analysis...
...Thus all these documents and opinions had to be concealed, by secrecy and deception...
...If Halberstam had focused more on the Ellsberg motive for the war-avoid defeat-he would have made more of his material on another aspect of the Kennedy toughness, the macho equation of toughness with virility that complemented the flinty intellectualism...
...According to Schlesinger, the leaders of the Administration were drawn in by their belief that each successive escalation of the violence promised success, promised a conclusion to American involvement...
...This view is precisely the opposite of Ellsberg’s...
...Unfortunately, it is organized around a series of dusty quarrels-can we win, who is smarter...
...And he is replete with Averell Harriman stories: at a State Department meeting, Dean Rusk searches furiously for a way to contact a visiting Harold Wilson, while Harriman sits quietly and patronizingly neglects to tell Rusk that Wilson is his house guest...
...Halberstam’s image of Vietnam as a tar baby reinforces the idea of the war as a product of stupidity: “In the late fall of 1965 Johnson learned the hard way that the slide rules and the computers did not work, that the projections were all wrong, that Vietnam was in fact a tar baby and that he was in for a long, difficult haul...
...Thus, President Kennedy told Mike Mansfield that Vietnam was rotten and that he would pull the United States out of the war, but that he could not afford to do so until after his reelection...
...Finally, Daniel Ellsberg speaks as prophet in his Papers on the War.* His is a book of revelations, to and from himself, and it is remarkable that his incandescent spiritual traumas interfere with the brilliance of his writing as little as *The Best and the Brightest...
...He is engaged and challenged by the aura of rigorous pragmatism that followed men like Bundy and McNamara, and he spends the whole book triumphantly exposing their stupidity...
...Chop...
...His analysis shows that the most fruitful area for a character study like Halberstam’s is that piece of grit in the policy-makers, livers that made them want to win, and defiantly refuse to acknowledlge that they couldn’t...
...I can only conclude that Halberstam has so much invested in the rational battles over optimism and pessimism that he can’t bear to leave them, especially when doing so means leaving a field where he can best the Kennedy mystique on its own terms and thus remain part of it...
...Three major reflective books on the war appeared last year...
...The world of Halberstam’s sources is full of subtlety and wit, a chessboard with a Kennedy flavor, *and the author is clearly attracted to that world, seeking its respect...
...That’s why Ellsberg is a secrecy freak...
...The penalty for frankees could be to ally against his programs those who might conclude they were not worth attempting at all, and those who would condemn him for not doing much more...
...Ellsberg finds his own leaders so psychologically intent on avoiding the final “loss” of South Vietnam that, even as late as 1969, Henry Kissinger would eliminate “withdrawal” from the “comprehensive list” of options available to President Nixon...
...Therefore, you’re a fool...
...Instead of depending upon and serving the villagers, the cadres relied upon the United States for money and protection and import goods, as did a large part of the Vietnamese population...
...But somehow the blasts of analysis and reporting never tell you how the people will react when the computer sends a shiny new cadre into their village...
...The authors demonstrated by their own sensitive knowledge of the Vietnamese people that Americans were congenitally ignorant of those same people...
...And yet the main structure of his book is built around the tar baby image and the Schlesinger quagmire theory...
...In fact, Ellsberg’s book contains a brilliant essay called ‘‘The Quagmire Myth and the Stalemate ~ ~ ~ h iin~ w~hic,h ’hey b uilds a model to show the rationality and predictsbility behind each escalation Over the last 20 years...
...The Reporter has delivered a chunky volume of enjoyable stories and yams...
...When she finishes discussing what has happened to the people in Vietnam, you feel you have a sense of what’s going on inside all the various groups-the American officials and soldiers, the NLF, the South Vietnamese Army, the villages...
...Mac, get in here...
...Perhaps they would have reconsidered their gritty pride if they had known it would be exposed as the naked motive for the war, if they had known that the public would learn all about their knowledge and their cynicism in Vietnam...
...The President had all the information he needed...
...4 1 the American Presidents, he says, were caught between two conflicting rules...
...It doesn’t make sense...
...At first, Ellsberg did not oppose the war because he thougt it was immoral or unworthy, but because he concluded-as did Halberstamthat it was unwinnable...
...It’s not simply that top officials are deceived or inadequately informed, for in Vietnam they could clearly see where they were goingand they still slid right along the rusty knife...
...Chop...
...This dloes no credit to his acuity-but that is not necessary for a book to sell well...
...Rule 1 is too important...
...Chop...
...glasses and drawing rooms of the nation’s great foreign policy managers -McNamara, the Bundys, Rusk, Harriman, JFK, LBJ, Maxwell Taylor, and so on...
...Taking it from there, Halberstam asserts that each escalation was grounded in prideful miscalculationreaching for the knock-out, the Americans foolishly stuck to a tar baby, victimized by their own misguided hopes for winning...
...President Nixon realized, he says, that to comply with Rule 2 (avoid big wars in Asia) he could merely reduce those parts of the war most salient to the American public, such as U. S. casualties and draft calls...
...FitzGerald’s writing is rich...
...But Daniel Ellsberg pulls off something new...
...In The Best and the Brightest,* David Halberstam speaks as the literate reporter looking back at the war’s early years through the sherry Taylor Branch is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...
...Halberstam was staying busy writing about how stupid our policymakers were for thinking they could win, but Ellsberg saw that they knew they weren't on the path to victory but went ahead, anyway...
...If we Americans lack understanding of the Vietnamese, then by God we’ll get some understanding from those liberals...
...The villagers might acquiesce in Saigon’s authority, but they knew that the Americans would leave some day, undercutting ’I’hieu, and that there would be a whole new struggle for the Mandate of Heaven...
...but they went ahead because they couldn’t help themselves...
...Once we had the slightest commitment to Vietnam, this attitude made instant sissies of anyone in the national security bureaucracy who proposed a course of less violence or who advanced moral arguments against the war...
...In effect, it is a tough defense of the pessimism in his own New York Times reports of the early sixties, for which he was so roundly attacked by the Kennedy Administration...
...The price of victory was so high-if it was deemed feasible at all-that the President always selected a military plan inadequate to win but adequate to keep from losing-hence Ellsberg's "Stalemate Machine...
...Halberstam’s book is the biggest commercial success of the three, mostly because it is filled with juicy “insider” stories about the famous people involved in the war...
...There’s still room for a psychoanalytic book on what drove them to pay such a hi& cost in blood and innocence for a stalemate...
...He takes extra time with McNamara, the most powerful bureaucratic aldviser to both Kennedy and Johnson...
...Halberstam’s stories give you the feeling that he got his material from innumerable interviews with secondand third-level foreign service typesthose who live and breathe the life style of foreign policy, taking pride in their knowledge of “the players,” talking quietly but colorfully of intricate bureaucratic battles, letting you know that they are close to the major figures involved in Vietnam but not “signed on” to the policy...
...Through the sheer force of her political analysis of the Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, FitzGerald overwhelms these suspicions against the mongers of understanding...
...And Frankie FitzGerald would be dragged in with her I Ching to direct the political war for the hearts and minds of the people...
...Halberstam cites no sources at all for his material, but I would guess that most of the anecdotes (except, possibly, the Harriman ones) did not come from the principals themselves but from the bright young aides and special assistants a few layers below...
...It’s much easier to argue about these reflective matters when we aren’t bombing anybody...
...He was so much a prisoner of his own background, so unable, as indeed was the country which sponsored him, to adapt his values and his terms to Vietnamese realities...
...Something of a gut fighter himself, Halberstam labors long over McNamara in preparation for the assault, setting him up as the pretended supreme rationalist and then striking at him as the Secretary himself would have done it...
...You have a feel for both the extraordinary motivation and organization of the NLF and for the corruption in the Thieu government . By the end of the book, you can predict subsequent developments, because the pieces fit together...
...Your precious calculations and projections are all nonsense...
...It’s all there in a kind of boy’s toughness in “putting up the dukes” quickly and talking about toughness all the time, all the signs of a biting sense of inadequacy...
...They felt compelled to make great claims for their policies, because they could not face the prospect of sending American troops into battle while telling the American public honestly that they realistically expected to take enormous losses just to keep from losing and that no victory was in sight...
...A barrage of pejoratives all fly straight at McNamara’s intelligence, at his tough mind: He could not have been more wrong, he simply had all the wrong indices...
...and the former would desert him, he suspected, if he took their advice and lost Vietnam...
...If the war was impossible, Ellsberg would be there battling with his data and his formulations to convince the President...
...You realize that he is so taken with admiration for the qualities of the Kennedy era, those brains and that class, that he feels he has to fly right into their best arguments and beat them down...
...You are lying to yourself and to the country...
...Halberstam manages to catch LBJ whispering to a friend shortly after he became President that the Kennedy assassination was heavenly retribution for the U. S. role in the assassination of Vietnam’s President Diem...
...In the end, Halberstam does not explain how the architects of Vietnam went to war with their eyes open...
...Atlantic-Little, Brown, $12.95...
...But he really has to wind up and pitch at McNarnara and the Bundys...
...Also, Ellsberg’s rationalist ego learned that he, the Analyst, was irrelevant, because the Presidents already had the insight he was trying to give them...
...The authors, sensing the public’s boredom with political tracts exhorting us out of Vietnam in one way or another, treated the war almost as if it were over...
...This characterization of the war conforms with the classic Arthur Schlesinger theory of Vietnam as a quagmire...
...Our Presidents and their principal advisers knew that they were fighting a negative, almost spiteful, war of denial...
...What is striking about Halberstam’s criticism of the war is that, by his own criteria, the criticism would be absolutely pointless if we were winning, as we did in the Dominican Republic...
...he was, there is no kinder or gentler word for it, a fool...
...Writing authoritatively from her experience in Vietnam, she sets the conflict indelibly in the midst of a revolutionary war-a totally new way of mobilizing and sharing political power, created by the National Liberation Front...
...Against them, the NLF threw up the idea that its soldiers were subordinate to the people and dependent upon them...
...Some noble purpose...
...the portraits are excellent in capturing the essential spirit of the characters...
...Chop...
...It is not clear whether we will profit from looking back on the bloody stalemate in Vietnam any more than we learned from other anti-communist interventions, such as the consummate failure at the Bay of Pigs or the tidy success in the Dominican Republic...
...Ellsberg changed radically, he writes, when ‘‘the Pentagon Papers revealed to me that the President was part of the problem,” Already having revelations, the analyst was becoming the prophet...
...Papers on the War...
...None of this worked, of course...
...FitzGerald makes the culture vivid, the people alive and believable...
...She accomplishes on the vast stage of Vietnam what few writers can achieve in describing a single incident...
...This is compulsive behavior, but not irrational...
...He establishes Vietnam as a loser’s playground, but beyond that he can say little about the wisdom or morality of our purposes and intentions there...
...This comprehensiveness seems like a reward for FitzGerald’s sticking to Vietnam, for not bubbling off to Washington to take the pulse of national leaders who were thousands of miles from the effects of their policies...
...Get Frankie In Here, Quick “In the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes,” declares FitzGerald, “lie all the: clues to the basic design of the Siino-Vietnamese world...
...When he saw that it was a criminal mania for pride and manhood, he opposed it just like the zealots who kept it going-that is, from the gut...
...he was just not trying to win...
...They saw the Saigon government as corrupt and haughty, like the old mandarins and the French...
...By focusing resolutely on what happened in Vietnam (as opposed to Kissinger’s brief case or Fulbright’s hearings or Johnson’s pancreas), FitzGerald produced what I think is the best single volume yet written on Vietnam...
...It is a revolution against both Chinese mandarinism and French colonialism-two systems which placed Vietnamese peasants in a position of inflexible, automatic obeisance to their government...
...squee,zed between these two pressures, the Presidents would inevitably choose a course that promised to hold off defeat at the lowest cost...
...The American-inspired “revolution” was hamstrung by the fact that none of its non-communist aspects, so precious to Americans, had the slightest salience for Vietnamese peasants...
...For example, we learn at least three times about how Maxwell Taylor did not resign as Eisenhower’s Army Chief of Staff, as those sloppy Kennedy people thought, but actually retired from the Army at the completion of his term...
...He documents in great detail from the Pentagon Papers that the American leaders knew, at the time of decision for each escalation, that the military steps they were taking did not promise success...
...Some of the stories, unfortunately, crop up more than once-a reflection of the book’s abominable editing...
...Meanwhile, American dollars and arms ripped through the Vietnamese society, tearing up its people with firepower, and tearing up its values with whorehouses and refugee slums and Polaroid cameras...
...The Poetess has landscaped our failures in Vietnam, and knitted our images together -chunk, say, a little more U. S. economic aid into Vietnam and you can watch it reverberate through the system, invariably to everyone’s detriment...
...I could imagine a pacification officer in Vietnam reading Fire in the Lake, after which he would throw down his charts and yell, “Get Fitzgerald in here...
...He de-idealizes the intergtions of the American war leaders...
...You miscalculated here...
...Or it could come into the war on the side of the “revolutionaries” in Saigon, who would inevitably become politically weaker the more they depended on the Americans and associated with the foreigners...
...So there was pne tortuous course available: The President’s resolution of the conflicting demands and constraints upon him called for suppression of any indications of possible inadequacy of the programs he proposed...
...They were brought up to believe that the people needed them rather than vice versa,” FitzGerald writes, “and their faith was confirmed by the fact that their job was to dispense American goods to the people...
...However, it appeared, would only earn him opposition whatever he did, and sooner than otherewise...
...He tries, half-heartedly, to express sympathy for the moral views of those who were disdained for not being tough-for Bowles, “wearing his high hopes for mankind right there on his sleeve,” and for Adlai Stevenson, who “was someone to take Jackie to the theater.’’ But Halberstam, like the Kennedys, actually dismissed these men with easy one-liners...
...Ellsberg’s whole existence de pended on the assumption that the President and his advisers needed information and ideas from people like himself, good purposes being fed by professional rationality...
...And Saigon’s cadres had no sense at all of depending upon the villagers...
...David Halberstam...
...You left this out...
...It is something in very short supply within both government and the publishing world...
...Random House, $1 0. Fire in the Lake...
...Halberstam concentrates on his penchant for numbers and precision in Vietnam, the mind sliced up into rows of steel...
...The moral edge in Ellsberg’s writing cuts sharply because it follows so logically from the analysis in his “Stalemate Machine...
...The CIA has always said that things have looked bad in Vietnam, and so have scores of reporters...
...That is left to Ellsberg...
...Chop...
...They could not face the prospect of humiliating defeat, so they went ahead anyway, fully aware that they were walking into a stalemate and buying time...
...Yet, internal analyses, estimates, reports, planning, recommendations, all indicated that in a variety of ways these chosen programs were inadequate...
...He pities Rusk, the long-suffering lightning rod for public insults...
...He finds that the culture of the national security specialists drew them into Vietnam through a combination of hubris and stupidity-like getting stuck to a tar baby, his favorite image of their entanglement...
...Pulling Out-After the Election ~ FitzGerald de-idealizes what the United States accomplished in Vietnam...
...He finds that their driving motivation was not a principled desire to assist South Vietnam but a fear of defeat-of a McCarthyite backlash at the polls, of backing down into humiliation, of admitting error...
...Halberstam upbraids the national security managers for not knowing what they were doing...
...Where else can you learn how Lyndon Johnson mortified Mac Bundy, the impeccable Brahmin, by making him deliver briefings to LBJ in the john...
...Ellsberg’s anger grows out of precisely the opposite belief-that they did kinow what they were doing...
...Rule 1 : Do not lose south Vietnam to communism before the next election...
...Special “revolutionary cadres,” modeled on the NLF, would go out into the villages to eliminate “wicked village notables,” set wrongs right, and win the grassroots support of the people...
...Simon & Schuster, $2.95...
...But the stakes are higher now, and, incredibly, books on Vietnam still sell...
...In order to be accepted in the Kennedy world, and in the foreign policy world of his own sources, Halberstam has to beat the Kennedys on their own ground...
...Halberstam the storyteller...
...Yet the latter could be expected to oppose him if he did ask and do much more, unless he won quickly, which he did not expect...
...Chop...
...His mission is a very modest one...
...he never saw nor smelled nor felt what was really there, right in front of him...
...The aftermath will witness the first efforts to understand the long war in stillness, without its battle noises and rhetorical hogwash ringing in the background, and the flat uncelebration of the cease-fire is a sign that such understanding is still needed...
...More importantly, the Thieu government was dependent on the Americans, which meant that it was incapable of drawing strong respect...
...And Ellsberg has laid bare the gritted teeth and the emotional, cornered men behind our Vietnam policy...
...Halberstam sets as his own mission the vindication of pessimism about the chances of success...
...This has made him unrespectable in the tough, cerebral world of Halberstam’s sources-an extremist convert, a little unbalanced, they say with some truth-but it is hard to fault his argument...
...His theoretical passages on the behavior of Presidents toward Vietnam are long streaks of crystal lucidity...
...The United States was trapped...
...And the sophisticated ones like Lansdale and Robert Shaplen (and the early Daniel Ellsberg) said that you win the political war by engendering an equally powerful, but non-Communist, revolution in competition with the NLF...
...Mac, come closer...
...Daniel Ellsberg...
...they do...
...But Halberstam passes over this gut force behind Vietnam to concentrate on winning his intlellectual duels with the Bundys and the McNamaras, which are largely irrelevant...
...She goes on from there to show how the Americans were grievously ignorant of the enormous gaps in culture and values between themselves and the Vietnamese...
...They knew from their own intelligence that they were conducting an increasingly bloody holding operation to stave off defeat, not to achieve success...
...Beyond that, Ellsberg’s book indicates that governmerital reform is much more difficult than just forcing the right information up to the person in charge...
...Halberstam, FitzGerald, and Ellsberg reporter, poetess, and analyst by Taylor Branch With a nervous eye on Nixon’s trigger finger, we watch the prisoners and the bombers return as the Vietnam aftermath tentatively begins...
...Through counterinsurgency and the Revolutionary Development Ministry, the U. S. painted the Saigon government as revolutionary in its own right-creating what FitzGerald calls a “Special Forces mystique, the principle behind which was that the Americans could win the war if they imitated enemy tactics...
...Halberstam acknowledges a large intellectual debt to Ellsberg and sprinkles his narrative with Ellsbergsounding passages about how the Americans were psychically driven by their fear of defeat...
...The “wicked village notables” were usually relatives or corrupt partners of high South Vietnamese officials...
...It could withdraw and watch the Thieu government collapse from weakness...
...Halberstam’s stories are sprinkled throughout his portraits of the major Vietnam policy-makers...
...And he doesn’t really explain why it was impossible for us to win, preferring to anchor his case in the objective fact that we did not...
...No, you cannot win the war, says Halberstam...
...This dealt a double blow to Ellsberg The true believer in him was shocked to find that our purpose was not to bring freedom’s blessings to South Vietnam but to deny South Vietnam to communism out of crass fear, even if it meant obliterating the civilian population with potshot air power...
...Chop...
...Limitless killing for a shady goal looks like murder to Ellsberg...
...How do we oppose this revolution, then, asked the Americans...
...He has the raw material-from Joe Alsop’s praise of John Kennedy as “a Stevenson with balls,” to Alsop’s challenges to LBJ to prove his manhood by standing up in the crunch, and LBJ’s defiant resolution not to be the first American President to lose a war...
...The theory is so tight that even the Presidents’ lying and news management become rational...
...Therefore you’re wrong...
...Frances Fit zGerald...
...But the Pentagon Papers showed that all this analysis was unnecessary...
Vol. 5 • March 1973 • No. 1
