COMMENTARY - SESSION 5
Comments on INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE
by Steve Sherman

In Session 2, we heard Dr Kimball mention the strategic pessimism among American elites in the late fifties and early sixties about the direction the third world was going. Here we have an example where Jack Valenti is thinking "There has never been an insurgency that didn’t prevail against a mighty power." Greece, Malaya, and Indonesia on our side, Tibet, Hungary and Chechoslovakia on the other are examples that come to mind.

Another lesson from Mr. Valenti is "if you are going to fight an enemy, you’ve got to know who they are." I suspect that we were not as culturally attuned to the Germans and Japanese as we might have been in World War II. Perhaps we should have deferred our entry into that war in order to study the matter.

A third lesson from Mr. Valenti is that "we were operating under a delusion called the domino theory. Eisenhower believed it. Kennedy believed it. Johnson believed it. I don't know about Nixon and Ford. But it turned out to be a piece of defunct mythology, the idea that if Vietnam fell, all of Indochina would fall." Let's see, there was Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. What part of Indochina did not go Communist?

Two of Valenti's other lessons deserve scrutiny. "One, that no president can win a war when public support for that war begins to decline and evaporate." I agree. But if the war was deemed necessary to begin with, how can a President maintain that public support in the contrarian media atmosphere? And finally "I learned in Hollywood that nobody knows anything." Valenti applies this to the Pentagon, Wall Street, Hollywood, everyone. The problem is that someone has to make decisions and they have to use their best judgement to do so. It is good to recognize human imperfection, but you cannot be paralyzed by it. And you do not have the luxury of hindsight. Jack Valenti was right about one thing: the President's greatest fear is that he might start World War III. All Presidents labor under that fear. They cannot be paralyzed by it, but we should all remember that this is a heavy burden sitting on one man's shoulder and he makes the final decisions..

We move from "vacant" Press Secretary Valenti to Speechwriter Sorenson, who is wanting a wordsmith. Were there any meanings to the words you wrote for JFK or was it all platitudes? Vietnam may have been at a lower level of urgency than Cuba or Berlin, but four of the 25 FRUS volumes on the Kennedy Administration deal with Vietnam plus another on the Lao Crisis and one on the rest of SE Asia. The Harriman Accords on Laos, increasing the advisors, and the decision to condone a coup certainly were items that should have risen to a level to be called crises. Maybe that was Kennedy's problem; his staff made everything a crisis. Sorenson takes pride in the facts that Eisenhower warned Kennedy that he would probably have to send combat troops to Laos. And Kennedy never did." and "Kennedy listened to all three [of his advisors'] reports but never once did he send combat troop divisions to South Vietnam or bomb North Vietnam." Were these really the correct decisions?

Sorenson moved from being Kennedy's wordsmith to an ardent participant in the anti-war movement. This transformation is not as egregious as that of Robert Strange McNamara, but it deserves examination. Is his defense of Kennedy a rationalization to permit him to "come to the table with clean hands." He is intelligent enough and was close enough to the seat of power to understand what the protest movement was doing to our institutions and our society. He could cross the barriers between all the factions. Was his portfolio truly so shallow that he could only carry other's tunes?

Then we come to the Eminence Gris, Henry the K. If it weren't for the availability of Richard Nixon, he would be the "Man We All Love to Hate." It's hard to argue with him because he frames each argument with Teutonic precision. But as we read his own reports on the private Paris Talks, we see how adroitly he is being played by Le Duc Tho and Xuan Thuy. We have to question whether he dismissed the Vietnamese people on both sides and the American military as obstacles to his grand program of realpolitik, multi-polar great power geopolitical gaming, and self-promotion?

Under Kissinger’s advice, making Vietnamization work gave way to a “decent interval” before total withdrawal; in accord with his precepts, the Vietnamese Communists were asked about POW’s “in the context of normalization” rather than in fulfillment of the terms of the Paris Accords. That condemned hundreds of Americans and millions of Asians to disappear into the Gulag and/or to suffer even worse fates.

Among the things he was right about is that "we need to learn from Vietnam [about] . . . having a more unified public discussion and an ability to look at these issues from the point of view [so] that serious people on all sides ..[can] come together." [I hope my edits didn't change the meaning of his statement.] We are not going to get very far if we talk past each other. I hope our efforts on this website might turn this interesting but uni-dimensional conference into something less onanistic.

While we are debating about what Presidents would or would have not done, I believe that Richard Nixon, had he remained in office, would have ordered tactical and punitive strikes against the North Vietnamese when they began the 1975 invasion. Whether it would have succeeded in halting the invasion and whether it would have been met with effective congressional action, I don't know. But I believe the pilots would have proudly flown the mission, if asked, and that Nixon would have felt obliged to honor his obligation to President Thieu. I find no evidence that Dr. Kissinger, then Secretary of State, firmly urged such an action on President Ford.

Alexander Haig, finally, was in charge, at least of this asylum. He "Spoke Truth to the Inmates" and they ignored what he said. he said, e.g.,:

1) "So whatever the historians may say about nationalism versus ideological Marxism, it’s irrelevant."

2) There was a belief, which we used to call the Poodle Blanket [Incrementalism], that "the best way to control the escalation of conflict was to match it, step by step. . . .And that that will bring you conflict management, the outcome of which will be non-conflict. My judgment is precisely the opposite in reality if one reads history."

3) "No Domino Theory?. . .Where have you been?"

4) "There is no discipline with any committee on the Hill. There is no way a president could bring in a few leaders and make a consensus decision that they will support. Because the more outrageous you are on the Hill, the more attention you get from the press."

5) "Do you believe that the Vietnam War could have been won by the United States? Of course. There is no doubt about it."

These are the issues that should have been resolved here, with principals and historians both in attendance, but the latter chose to ignore the former, leaving it for the rest of us to pick up the pieces. Sadly, academia and the media have a louder megaphone; through the entertainment industry, the educational system and the mainstream media, they have been successful in marginalizing other voices.