Thomson, Moyers, and Ball: Prophets Without Office

...For the most part, the Vietnam dissenters would remain-by default or by choice, more often by banal nepotism than by conscious black-listingprophets without office under the Democrats, just as they were under the Republicans...

...If the dissenters from the Vietnam war were not a part of that government, it was as much because the system was anathema to them as because they were now, for their dissent, anathema to the system...

...At the cabinet level it was the hoary tradition of knowing and discreetly backing the right presidential horse...

...His pronouncements on the Middle East, too clearly critical of Israel and of past U.S...

...So the elder dove would be nowhere in the new regime, as much because of current politics as past policy disputes on the war...

...Having served dutifully as a Foreign Service aide to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in Saigon, Undersecretary Nicholas deB...

...But at no...

...And the character of it all imprinted itself on the men and their methods as they came together to form a new government...

...The Missing Generation Flying back to Washington from Plains in mid-December and sitting within earshot of reporters, Mondale had asked Vance about “this problem” of State Department appointments...

...Vance et al...

...In return for these rewards, the Foreign Service reluctantly accepted political appointments like Holbrooke’s, which otherwise would have been particularly vulnerable to opposition on grounds of lack of experience and stature...

...For his part, Vance practiced similai- office politics in keeping as Undersecretary for Political Affairs Philip Babib, a career relic who shared Vance’s enthusiasm for the Vietnam war, and in hiring as the department’s Executive Secretary C. Arthur Borg, once Dean Rusk’s unflinching aide...

...But it was very different for men younger than Ball and Warnke, men in their thirties and forties like ThornSon, or Bill Moyers, who had opposed the war as LBJ’s press secretary, or William Watts, who had resigned from Kissinger’s staff with Lake at the time of the Cambodian invasion, or Richard Steadman, who as a Pentagon aide had nourished Wamke’s dissent, or Morton Halperin, who had fought against the war policy ur&x both Johnson and Nixon and been wiretapped by the latter, or John Marks, who left the Foreign Service to oppose the war as a Senate aide and later as a writer...

...After the election, Lake headed the State Department transition staff...

...Never Past the Line At 38, William Anthony Lake was a popular protege of Vance and others in the establishment...

...Campaign and patronage politics were equally decisive in the lesser precincts of the UN...

...for damages...

...Members of the transition staff at the State Department were asked to assemble lists of candidates for a dozen key posts, from the undersecretaries through the regional assistant secretaries and their deputies...

...But the same cannot be said for many of the others who will now play vital roles in shaping policies and appointing still other influential officials to the new administration...

...During the following years, Lake wrote with co-authors a handful of articles criticizing various policies, edited a conventional Council on Foreign Relations book on the “lessons” of Vietnam, and eventually, as one of the wiretap victims, sued Kissinger et al...

...It was much the same with the other senior dissenter, Washington attorney Paul Warnke, who as an assistant secretary of Defense in 1967-68 was widely credited with internal opposition to the Johnson war policy...

...Most of all, they variously bucked and broke with the system when it went mad-the most valuable quality in any public servant...

...policy, were a major political liability...

...But Mondale’s missing generation, whether or not he knew it or Vance admitted it, was in some measure the men who had opposed the war...

...On the surface, the new regime went through well-publicized motions toward a broad recruitment for its national security positions...

...We’ll take care of Roger Morris writes about foreign affairs and formerly worked for the Nutional Security coicncil...

...point had the articles been too or the opposition too deep, t him past the line of club respe ability...

...Having admired fellow FSO Lawrence Eagleburger when both served in State’s executive secretariat in the mid-l960s, Moose helped support Eagleburger’s promotion to the National Security Council staff in 1966...

...For the last eight years, Moose, in the Senate, was ostensibly a vigorous opponent of Kissinger’s policies, and Eagleburger, in the upper reaches of the Nixon-Ford regimes, an ardent defender of same...

...Their sheer availability and proximity mattered more than actual past records...

...Though the appointees were by no means limited to the “friends of Tony Lake” (it was part of the process, after all, that everybody had a “friend” somewhere), it was also clear to most of those involved that Lake’s influence with Vance was often decisive...

...Tmture and Direction What distinguished the dissenters from the Carter officeholders most sharply was not their views or courage on the war, but the texture and direction of their lives during the Nixon-Ford years...

...And when Thomson remarked fhkbi he and other dissenters might have broken the club rules so much as to be barred from any future government office, Ball reacted with avuncular sureness...

...Eventually Ball did come to Carter’s camp, but later than either Vance or Brzezinski, both of whom opposed him...

...They also campaigned for the appointment of former Pentagon official, New York Times reporter and Lake co-author Leslie Gelb as director of State’s Office of Political-Military Affairs, a province of obvious interest to both policy planning and the East Asian bureau...

...With Brzezinski’s backing, Holbrooke had also been an enthusiastic recruit to the Atlanta sPaSf...

...But the fact remains that these were figures who saw more clearly than do the men now governing the complex reality of a foreign society-a perceptiveness the new administration could well use in the Middle East and Southern Africa...

...when Eagleburger became one of Kissinger’s chief aides during the Nixon transition in 1969, he recommended Moose as NSC staff secretary, though Moose left shortly thereafter in a falling out ~ t h Kissinger...

...SO too was the State Department employment of Richard Holbrooke, an old friend of Lake’s whose career had covered much the same narrow terrain in Washington, but with visibly more naked self-promotion, less ability and experience, and fewer trusting patrons...

...In any case, Lake reportedly went off to consult the Secretary and returned a few days later with the announced appointme: lfs, which, it turned out, showed that the talent search had been easier than many imagined...

...Moyers let it be known that he was interested in the directorship of the CIA, but after a brief flurry of consideration, he was turneddown...

...In Thomson’s audience that night, however, was at least one old boss with a somewhat different view...

...With similar inspiration, Young also appointed as his principal deputy Donald McHenry, one of the few blacks in the State Department and a former aide to William Rogers...

...To complement Aaron at the House, Lake and Holbrooke b another FSO and an old friend Vietnam, Peter Tarnoff, as an special assistant to Vance...

...History, by way of Time, does not record Vance’s reply...

...And again, like Ball, he would be passed over to a large extent for reasons more current than Vietnam...

...By all accounts, the rest of the jobs were settled according to timehonored criteria...

...The account of how that was accomplished, and how those who were right on Vietnam were largely overlooked, is another revealing and sad glimpse into how foreign policy is run...

...They saw more clearly, too, their own nation’s politics and common sensean understanding President Carter and his men could bring to bear on strategic arms questions and other issues of public mythology and official ignorance...

...In neither man had the war left a lasting aversion to the people and methods of government, or a distaste for the politics of foreign policy job-seeking...

...The process was all too familiar...

...were men who understood, accepted, and, of course, carefully practiced that ritual soft sell with what obviously became ample success...

...Most observers both in and out of government have no doubt of Eagleburger’s considerable intellect and bureaucratic skills...

...But if all this thoughtful career placement seems a bit inbred, consider the history of the Moose-Eagleburger axis, in which Carter’s advent is only the latest episode...

...he and Steadman would be offered second-level positions in the new regime, but would decline them...

...None carried the weight of public controversy...

...But if they weren’t consciously discriminated against for their views on Vietnam, the pity is that there wasn’t conscious discrimination in their favor because of those views...

...Katzenbach in the State Department, and Henry Kissinger in the White House, he resigned over the invasion of Cambodia in the spring of 1970...

...The men backed by Lake, and with lesser clout by Holbrooke, were in the mold either career survivors or congenial in-and-outers...

...It was influence spent in conventional ways and toward predictable ends...

...Ball reportedly said to a Wall Street associate...

...But after the TIP and transition staff candidates had been discussed in late December 1976 for possible submission to Secretarydesignate Vance, the lists of fresh names soon disappeared...

...Here the sociology of job-filling was more varied than it had been with the choices at the top, but hardly more open...

...And in December it would be Lake and Holbrooke who supervised the reviewing of the personnel lists...

...As several eyewitnesses describe those deliberations, most of the nominees were appraised according to a brief litany that ranged from “too young”” to the ultimate disqualification: Who is he...

...And that is why they will be missed so badly, by the rest of the country if not by their nervous peers now on the Treasury payroll...

...The jobs, you see, had already been taken...

...Moyers in a distinguished career in television journalism, Watts as president of his own research group, Halperin and Marks as writers and civil liberties activists, Steadman as a business success in Manhattan, Thomson as a scholar and administrator at Harvard-all had fashioned lives and careers independent of some future restoration...

...In the summer of 1976 he was on Vance’s recommendation, among the first ones hired for Carter’s expanded Atlanta staff...

...The relatively few available State Department plums went to the inner circle: Lake would be director of Planning...

...When the TIP lists had been disposed of and the announcements made, this then was the sort of government that presided over foreign affairs...

...Ambassador Andrew Young would name C. William Maynes Assistant Secretary for International Org ani z at i on Affairs, reportedly largely because Maynes, a former Foreign Service officer, gave Young an impressive briefing on the UN...

...His reputation for strong views and cabinet-table eloquence won him no votes among his would-be peers like Brown and Blumenthal, whatever the issue at hand...

...Not least, after several years at State in the 1960s, Ball was a man with his own circle of aides and old bureaucratic allies, a condition that made him, as one of them told a reporter, a “disaster” as far as men like Lake and Holbrooke vyere concerned...

...Still the most potentially deadly public business, the making of foreign policy is still organized in the last of the great smoke-filled rooms of machine nepotism, and the human meaning of our most savage international debacle is still unlearned...

...ere, Lake and Holbrooke appointment of former y aide David Aaron as Brzezinski’s deputy (having two years before pushed Aaron as an aide to then-senator Walter Mondale...

...Many of the TIP prospects were drawn deliberately from outside the East Coast...

...Why was there such a gap, 8 asked the Vice President-elect, between the junior men like Lake and Holbrooke and the senior people like Vance...

...In 1976-77, as the outgoing Deputy Undersecretary for Administ r a t i on, Eagle burger reportedly backed Moose as his replacement, and Moose, accorc‘ing tu the same reliable sources, promptly urged Eagleburger’s now-pending appointment as ambassador to Yugoslavia...

...In that world, jobs were indeed way-stations, and in a basic sense, a form of exile...

...Cyrus Vance at State, Harold Brown at Defense, Michael Blumenthal at Treasury, and Zbigniew Brzezinski at the White House had all met and impressed Carter as fellow members of the Trilateral Commission, a club of foreign policy moguls and younger politicians that was conceived by Brzezinski and financed by David Rockefeller-among other reasons, precisely to foster the formation of such contacts...

...The Carter organization’s renowned Talent Inventory Program compiled additional names for the foreign policy positions...

...Early last year he made the collosal blunder of telling reporters he was not one of Carter’s foreign policy advisors, after Carter had told reporters he was...

...Thus, Richard Moost!former FSO and aide to Walt Rostow, Kissinger, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee_was named State’s Deputy Undersecretary for Administration mainly because, say several sources, Lake recommended him to Vance as bureaucratically “savvy,” notwithstanding Moose’s near-total lack managerial exp is said to have .o f Dan Spiegle, one of Moose’s close associates in the Senate, as Vance’s special assistant-a friendly ear at the Secretary’s duor...

...Weren’t there good people somewhere in that range to fill some key slots...

...Thomson, Moyers, and Ball: Prophets Without Office by Roger Morris On a soft spring evening in shington four years ago, the American Foreign Service Association held one of its clubby little dinner-seminars for a selected brace of bureaucrats and temporary establishment exiles...

...At the top, Ball seems to have lost the Secretary of State sweepstakes for reasons that had relatively little to do with Vietnam...

...Thomson and Watts sought nothing and were offered nothing...

...Rather than focusing on bringing into the State Department people with certain admirable beliefs, the Carter administration concentrated on getting old faces, the expert and the trusted...

...fused with questions of substance...

...In 1972 he had known Vanc while working as a foreign PO assistant in the stillborn Muskie c paign...

...None, it must be said, eclipsed Lake or even Holbrooke in terms of apparent influence with Vance, at least for the moment...

...Along with them there were younger men, the aides and proteges who would do most of the substantive work of the campaign and transition, the writers and briefers and bureaucratic go-betweens who would in the course of their tasks have their tickets punched for sub-cabinet offices like the ones Vance, Blumenthal, and Brown had held in the Johnson years...

...The men who took foreign policy Power under Jimmy Carter came from a different world, largely bounded by corporate and foundation sinecures, ruled by men who themselves wanted nothing more than to return to government...

...But for the most part, both he and Ball had simply played the system and lost, not unlike a half-dozen other men from the Johnson years with very different records...

...SALT negotiator...

...In that final sense, the dissenters are not there because of their dissent...

...and with ~a11ce’s appointment as secretary, his succession to office was assured...

...We’ll take care of you...

...When President-elect Carter turned to Vice President-elect Mondale (also a member of the Commission), when he looked at his own campaign “task forces,” when he consulted Democratic politicians or even Henry Kissinger, Vance and the others would be prominently, favorably mentioned...

...TIP was overruled, as one disillusioned participant put it, albeit too simply, by “the friends of Tony Lake...

...That Ball languished in Wall Street and Warnke took orders from Cyrus Vance and other, less gifted men was the luck of the roll, not some fated punishment for their foresight ten years before...

...How could I do that...

...There was no single or simple answer to why they were not there...

...To avoid political controversy, the Near Eastern Bureau was simply left in the hands of the colorless, custodial career bureaucrat whom Kissinger had placed there...

...Carter advisor and Yale Professor Richard Cooper undersecretary for Economic Affairs...

...They are absent because the foreign policy establishment is simply not yet able to accommodate, much less encourage, the traits of character and intellect that ignite dissent to begin with...

...The topic was official dissent in foreign policy, and the speaker was James C. Thomson, Jr., a young scholar on Asia who had resigned early from Lyndon Johnson’s National Security Council staff and then written and spoken out against the Vietnam war and its practitionersall of which won him nothing but scorn from his former employers...

...Wamke was thus “inside” at the kind of lesser, subordinate job that Ball would not brook-one of the “walking wounded,” as a former Pentagon aide of his called him...

...And none, except Lake himself by his 1970 resignation, could qualify as an authentic dissenter against the Vietnam war...

...Equally important (every bit as much in the mystical corridors of diplomacy as in the Departments of Agriculture or Transportation) was the gentlemanly bureaucratic incest and b ac k-s cra t ching among appointees...

...Halperin and Marks, by several accounts, were specifically ruled off those Potemkin lists at the Vance State Department, judged too radical and untrustworthy by the carefully jockeying men who put forward names with an eye on possible embarrassment as well as b u re au c r a t i c advantage...

...The story begins with the people who did get the important national security positions in the White House and the State and Defense Departments...

...As with the Council on Foreign Relations and other, similar, settings, the bland papers and illustrious if dull meetings of the Commission offered an uncontested showplace for the apparent stature and authority of the establishment, and thus a powerful soft sell on a then-obscure governor like Jimmy Carter...

...A former undersecretary of State and UN ambassador, at that point working as a Wall Street financier while awaiting a Democratic restoration, George Ball had been the highestranking, most conspicuous and celebrated of the official doves on Vietnam...

...There was a political liability in Wamke’s liberal views on strategic policy-these nearly got him rejected by the Senate when, as a gesture to a restless Democratic left, Vance appointed him head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and chief U.S...

...Like Ball, Warnke was a comparatively late recruit to Carter but clearly a candidate for secretary of either State or Defense...

...Hell, I’d be taking orders from people who used to be my junior assistants...

...The European, Latin American, and African bureaus also went to career officers...

...Nobody wanted to place a potentially stronger rival or to provide superiors with a dependably unorthodox and independent view...

...Not that Ball or Warnke do not labor under the same narrow corporate lawyer’s vision of the universe, or that some of the dissenters are not now capable of mistakes on other issues as grand as their insight on Vietnam...

...These loyalties should not be con...

...Four years later, with Jimmy Carter in the White House, Ball had not “taken care” of returning himself to power, much less Thomson or most of the other former officials who had shown the vision and courage to oppose the most ghastly foreign policy mistake of the century...

...you, Jim,” he murmured in the back of the room...

...And it was simple pride that apparently kept Ball from accepting what he knew would be the vastly lesser offer of an ambassadorship, even to an outwardly prestigious post like Paris...

...Nor is there any automatic +relation between this kind of incest and the competence of its beneficiaries...

...Holbrooke Assistant Secretary for East Asia...

...None brought with him a troublesome reputation for independence or insubordination...