COMMENTARY - SESSION 2
Comments on VIETNAM AND PRESIDENTIAL TAPES
by Steve Sherman

I haven't had the opportunity to work with the Presidential tapes. Perhaps I will look at the cited websites. I hope there will be a transcript to go with them. I found it useful to study this conference with both the video and transcripts, but it is time-consuming. There are a lot of paper documents which I might more profitably study at a faster pace than video.

I would defer to Professor Kaiser's impressions of Kennedy's management style, though in other comments on this conference, I have noted that I was impressed with Eisenhower's handling of meetings (and, by omission, I was not equally impressed with Kennedy nor the quality of his advisors. I have also noted my disappointment with Kennedy's handling of Laos. Perhaps we would have had a war starting in 1961 instead of 1965. Dr Schulzinger remarked in the previous session, regarding another alternate history, that "it is also difficult to believe that they would have been much worse than the way it actually happened." The planning regarding Laos involved basing troops in South Vietnam and Thailand to present a creditable threat to induce North Vietnam to leave Laos alone. It is not likely that North Vietnam would have backed off nor would Kennedy would pursued efforts to discourage them any less incrementally than Johnson did later. Had Kennedy not responded "with vigah'", Diem may have made a move to accomodation earlier and asked the U.S. to leave. This is all pipe dreams, but most outcomes would have been better than the Harriman Accord on Laos and the assassination of Diem. "Forks" taken today "for peace" may extend the cataclysm down the road that tomorrow will bring.

Averill Harriman was in the habit of telling off people with whom he disagreed, a good offense being Harriman's best defense, except when faced with a real enemy. Nolting's memoirs tell of Harriman falling asleep in a meeting with Diem and then waking up and telling Diem he was irrelevant as far as any decision in Laos was concerned.[1] In the meeting that Professor Kaiser appears to be waiting to hear, Harriman does not appear to have a fight with Krulak, whose notes are one of the sources, but he is reported to, "with some heat [, have] . . .said that he had disagreed with Mr. Nolting from the beginning when he first assumed office as Assistant Secretary; that he felt he was profoundly wrong about this; and that he was sorry to have to be so blunt about saying this." [2] This is indicative of Diplomacy Harriman-Style.

There is an argument here and in other sessions of this conference about how significant it would be to admit that our involvement in the war was a mistake and the world would see us as a better people if we would only show our frailties. Despite Ms. Fitzgerald's contention that a Communist victory was inevitable, that is what the war was about. We involved ourselves in Southeast Asia to find a way to halt "Wars of National Liberation" and North Vietnam's proclaimed goal of subjugating non-Communist countries. We accepted defeat by losing our national resolve. During that period, one of our allies, Cambodia's Prince Sihanouk, decided that Communism was the "Wave of the Future" and rejected US assistance. Communism killed millions of Cambodian people. When we left Vietnam, the indigenous guerrilla movement had been virtually eliminated. Vietnam was lost to a conventional cross-border invasion by an aggressive neighbor, which we did nothing to thwart. The military lessons we learned were successfully applied to counter other Communist-inspired guerrilla movements around the world. But we lost credibility by lacking the will to overcome a determined foe. The fall of the Shah and the Hostage Crisis in Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the bombings in Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East, Saddam Hussein's miscalculation to annex Kuwait, Somalia and our current world-wide conflict with Islamo-Fascists, all stem from that perceived lack of resolve on our part. The penultimate battles of the Vietnam War were fought here in the United States. Defeat was avoidable and we seriously damaged ourselves by not fulfilling our commitments to our allies and our soldiers. The military was not stabbed in the back by dissenters, the press, liberals and Congress; the Nation was.

Regarding Mr. Kimball's assessment of the Nixon-Kissinger policies, I am not sufficiently well versed on this period to argue in the level of detail I'd like. This conference was certainly a missed opportunity for Mr. Kimball to do so with both Kissinger  and Haig present. Regardless, it is an unnecessary demonization of Nixon to suggest that his re-election bid drove policy any more or less than it did his predecessors. Dr. Kissinger adequatedly addressed the "Peace is at hand speech" and I accept that, by that time, the McGovern rout was well underway. The pace of withdrawal, as it does in Iraq today, relates to the events on the ground. The newly published first volume of the Nixon Vietnam-era (Vol VI) FRUS [3] amply illustrates the inputs involved in each increment of troop withdrawal. I would agree that reliance on the Soviets (and Chinese) to pressure Hanoi, as Harriman earlier and so amply demonstrated, was doomed to failure. The question of who got the better deal in January 1973 is still an open argument. I am of the school that says we should have bombed them into capitulation, although Haig says if we had  continued bombing,  Congress would have pulled the plug sooner than it did. The Agreement, even with the certain knowledge that the North Vietnamese were going to violate it, was only viable as long as the President was willing and able to respond to ceasefire violations with bombing of both forces in the South, and/or the Hanoi-Haiphong area. I suspect that at the time Nixon and Kissinger believed that the ceasefire would not be workable and I fault them for not extending the bombing to extract conditions in an environment they could still control.

[I need to say something here about the last (green) part of Kimball's presentation] plus the next four items.

Kimball: I would just focus on strategic pessimism among American elites in the late fifties and early sixties about which direction the third world was going in. It is very, very important to keep in mind that all of President Kennedy’s generation was convinced that the Soviets had an advantage in competing for the hearts and minds of the people of the third world.

KAISER: And the default assumption that our leadership seems to have is that when there is a problem in some part of the world, it should be resolved unequivocally to our satisfaction. And that pushed us into many areas in the world during the Cold War, where I think we did not have to go. And now, we see the same thing in dealing with the Muslim world in the Middle East where it is our default assumption, which may very well let us down again, that somehow we are going to find the solution that is extremely favorable to us. And we may not.

KIMBALL: I’m not quite sure how Tim means the North Vietnamese state was aggressive. I certainly don’t want to be in a position of defending Communists, of all things. But, again, we have to remember the history of this war. It began as an indigenous movement against the French. Were Communists involved? Yes. But it was a nationalist movement, which eventually received Soviet and Chinese aid.

NAFTALI: There are. In the August 1962 tapes. Yes. And, in fact, if you want to hear Kennedy’s uncertainty about using defoliants, you can hear that and you can hear the arguments that are being made. Averill Harriman is the greatest opponent and Harriman actually stops the policy. Kennedy was being pushed in a direction and would have go ahead earlier than he did but for Averill Harriman. And that is clear from the tapes.

[1] Frederick Nolting, From Trust to Tragedy, Praeger, 1988 (pg 83ff)

[2] Documents 1 and 2, August 28, 1963, Kennedy FRUS Volume IV Vietnam 1963, RADIX Press CD-ROM Edition

[3] Nixon FRUS Volume VI Vietnam January 1969-June 1970, RADIX Press CD-ROM Edition This volume appears unique in the set of FRUS volumes, since the bulk of the documents included are between Nixon and Kissinger and other points of view are usually only presented in summary, filtered through one of the principals. What is given, however, is not at odds with historical facts from other sources.