Goldstein’s book should settle for good the controversy over whether President Kennedy, had he not been assassinated, would have enlarged the war or would have withdrawn the still limited number of American troops in Vietnam. (These at the time of Kennedy’s death consisted of two battalions of Marines, sent to protect the Danang airport, and some 12,000 Americans with missions as advisers and trainers for the South Vietnamese military.) As we shall see, the evidence of the Bundy material is conclusive.¹

Before leaving the White House in 1961, Dwight Eisenhower had warned Kennedy of the crisis posed by the insurrection occurring in Laos, the key to the entire area of Southeast Asia. Clark Clifford attended the meeting as Kennedy’s private counsel and reported that “the outgoing President considered the fate of that tiny, landlocked Southeast Asian kingdom the most important problem facing the US.” The former president said American troop intervention might even be required — a statement in contrast with the position his administration had taken at the time of Dien Bien Phu. When Paris in 1954 had asked for American intervention, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, according to French sources, had offered the French two nuclear bombs to use as they saw fit (they refused), but the position of President Eisenhower at the time was that he would not consider an American troop intervention unless he first had congressional approval and an indication of British support.

He told his staff that “without allies and associates,” military intervention would be the act of “just an adventurer, like Genghis Kahn.” He also recalled that he had been elected to end one war in Asia, in Korea, which could have become a total war with China, at a time when the United States had allies and a UN mandate, and that he “was in no mood to provoke another one in Indochina . . .”²

President Kennedy had repeatedly asserted privately that a guerrilla war could not be won by foreign troops, even in large numbers. Eventually foreign troops go home, he said; the guerrillas stay. No lasting “victory” is possible for the foreigners.

When the Laos issue came up before Kennedy as president, he asserted American support for Laotian sovereignty but was spared the problem of intervention when Britain and Russia conveniently proposed a conference on Laos in Geneva. It was convoked in May 1961 and ended in a neutral coalition government under the restored prime minister Prince Souvanna Phouma, who had been deposed in an earlier military coup. The clandestine fighting did not end, as survivors from the CIA-supported Montagnard tribes of Laos, the first large group of Indochinese made victims of a war they didn’t ask for, would undoubtedly still attest.

With respect to Vietnam, the new President sought the advice of another eminent American soldier. He invited Douglas MacArthur to Washington. According to Robert Kennedy’s account, MacArthur said that it would “be foolish to fight on the Asiatic continent,” and that “the future . . . should be determined at the diplomatic table.” Kennedy’s aide Kenneth O’Donnell has added that MacArthur said to Kennedy that “there was no end to Asia and even if we poured a million American infantry soldiers into that continent, we would still find ourselves outnumbered on every side.”

General Maxwell Taylor, Kennedy’s military adviser (who favored sending combat troops to Vietnam), said that MacArthur “made a hell of an impression on the President,” adding that when presented with further proposals from the Pentagon for military intervention, Kennedy would say, “Well, now, you gentlemen, you go back and convince General MacArthur, then I’ll be convinced.” Taylor said, “None of us undertook the task.”

The pressure on Kennedy was to send combat troops to Vietnam, just as Barack Obama, on taking office, was urged to escalate the American commitment in Afghanistan. As with Kennedy, most of the pressure came from the Pentagon and the Republican opposition (and reinvigorated neoconservatives in Obama’s case), as well as from most of his own appointments and staff from the Washington foreign affairs establishment, and from much of the press (and in Obama’s case, by a radio and television that are partisan and ideological to a degree unthinkable — and indeed which would have been illegal in Kennedy’s time, when the FCC required an overall impartiality in network news broadcasting).

However, Kennedy was in a much better position than Obama to resist. He was a war hero, wealthy and glamorous, well accustomed to Washington power plays, and, above all, the one official who had come out of the Bay of Pigs fiasco as having been right while all the rest were wrong. He had not been overawed by the generals and admirals and intelligence chiefs — including Richard Bissell, who had been one of his professors — all of whom assured him that the exiles’ invasion of Cuba arranged by the Eisenhower administration would succeed, and all of whom secretly believed that if it looked like it was failing, they would have placed the President in a position where he would be compelled to reverse his stated determination not to intervene.

It failed; President Kennedy refused to intervene; and he fired Bissell and Allen Dulles, head of the CIA, and placed the joint chiefs of staff under the authority of the National Security Council. When the Cuban missile crisis arrived, he managed that successfully, refusing to accept advice to bomb Cuba, and he had the self-confidence to make the agreement to remove Jupiter missiles from Turkey without sending it through the Washington bureaucracy.³

The conclusion Goldstein draws from the evidence of the Bundy papers and notes is that Kennedy’s determination at the time of his assassination was to withdraw American advisers from Vietnam. The trainers who had been sent should not be further reinforced, but gradually drawn down in the course of 1964.

Goldstein quotes tapes made of Kennedy’s meetings with Bundy, McNamara, and his military adviser, Maxwell Taylor, on October 2, 1963. McNamara and Taylor were just back from Vietnam. They recommended that 1,000 of the 16,000 US military advisers be withdrawn in the following two months, with most of the rest removed by the end of 1965. Bundy asks why. McNamara says, “We need a way to get out of Vietnam. This is a way of doing it.” Bundy disagrees. Kennedy agrees and gives the orders.

Forty-seven days later Lyndon Johnson was president. In July 1964 the South Vietnamese began clandestine operations against the North. These led the following month to the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Lyndon Johnson authorized bombing North Vietnam. The US had entered the war. Bundy had prevailed.

Among the papers that Goldstein cites in his book is a memo from Bundy to Johnson on May 4, 1967, a year after Bundy left the administration to become head of the Ford Foundation. It said:

“The fact that South Vietnam has not been lost and is not going to be lost is a fact of truly massive importance in the history of Asia, the Pacific and the US.”

Looking back at this memo, nearly thirty years after he had written it in congratulation (or reassurance) to the President, Bundy had noted on it, for Goldstein to read and quote, “McGB all wrong.”

Goldstein’s decisive clue to why Bundy failed came by accident. He found a note written in 1996, when Bundy was asked what had been most surprising about the war. He answered, “the endurance of the enemy.” Goldstein writes that he didn’t understand the enemy “because, frankly, he didn’t think they warranted his attention.” He seemed to have no real interest in the Vietnamese and in what their various motivations might have been. His own basic conviction seems to have been that the United States must not be humiliated.

Dwight Eisenhower left another legacy to President Kennedy, which proved of great significance in the 1960s and 1970s, and is a factor in the making of policy today: the domino theory. This occurred at a press conference in 1954, ironically upon the occasion of the Dien Bien Phu defeat — a “domino” that Eisenhower himself had allowed to fall. He said to the reporters: “You have a row of dominos set up. You knock over the first one. . . .What will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.” The press instantly picked this up; it later became the explanation everyone sought for “Why are we in Vietnam?” The CIA produced studies for a National Intelligence Estimate in 1964 arguing that it was not true. This had no effect. By 1964 it had become doctrine in American government, which no politician or official dared challenge.

Bundy did not believe in the domino theory, and ignored it. In 1995 he commented that it

“was an extraordinarily unfitting simile, a preventor of discourse. . . .States are not little oblongs . . . lined up next to each other. They do not get pushed around by Godlike figures playing a card. . . .The domino theory is a particular formulation — and a rather rigid one — of a broader proposition that in the Cold War every battle lost diminishes you.”

He said that for Lyndon Johnson the theory was just domestic politics. Bundy argued that candidates in US elections could lose because of the domino theory, but governments and armies did not.

He believed in military methods and military escalation: ground troops and bombing. He rejected any idea of withdrawal or neutralization. He ignored studies and war games indicating that American escalation would strengthen support for the North Vietnamese government, prompting it to send still more troops south (as General de Gaulle had warned Washington and as the North Vietnamese did).

It was not of course the domino theory that put the United States into the Vietnam War. It was the domino theory that kept it there. Once President Eisenhower had offered it as a general proposition, it was deemed impossible for a presidential candidate to be elected who opposed it. It still occupies a major place in the American ideological and polemical armories. It was one of the ideological factors responsible for the policies of the George W. Bush administration, and for their continuation in President Obama’s decision to escalate the Afghanistan war. As Obama said in his West Point address:

“If I did not think that the security of the United States and the safety of the American people were at stake in Afghanistan, I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow…. (Afghanistan and Pakistan are) the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al-Qaeda. It was from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new plots are being plotted as I speak. This is no idle danger.”

The second ideological influence currently at work in President Obama’s war is a domestic military and political alliance supporting the war and its escalation, driven by a desire retroactively to validate the military effort in Vietnam and prove that the United States can indeed win an insurrectionary war. The present military determination, clearly endorsed by President Obama’s Afghanistan decision, is to apply successfully the classic strategy for opposing insurrection, currently described as “clear and hold.” This is being done under the leadership of Generals David Petraeus at Central Command and Stanley A. McChrystal in Afghanistan. It would appear to have replaced the nation- and democracy-building program of the Bush administration, initially endorsed by the new president.

The new doctrine follows the argument of many serving officers, expressed in two recent books by Lewis Sorley and David Kilcullen, that the Vietnam War was actually won — but won too late for the victory to be acknowledged by the press, American public opinion, and Congress, which are accused of having abandoned the war at America’s moment of victory, thereby effectively stabbing the military in the back.⁴ It is an argument politically convincing to the conservatives who believe that the history of Vietnam must be rewritten.

“Clear and hold” means ejecting guerrillas from an area and then protecting it from their return. It is not new. The modern version was first applied in postwar Malaya (as it was then) in 1948, where an insurrection originating within the minority Chinese population caused much of it to be confined in guarded villages, leaving British troops free to deal with the Chinese insurgents who escaped this treatment. Eventually a political solution was found.

In Vietnam, where the US copied the method, these villages were called Strategic Hamlets and were employed in conjunction with the Phoenix program to “clear” areas of enemy or unreliable elements, and to defend against the return of the Vietcong. Notwithstanding the argument in the books by Sorley and Kilcullen defending the American army’s performance in Vietnam, no one is in doubt about who won the war. Following the war, none of the international results predicted by the domino theory occurred.

General McChrystal has suggested that the Afghanistan war, if fought on his terms (with troop reinforcements rising to a total of over 100,000 men at least), could begin producing results within two years; but it could also take between ten and fifty years to fully succeed. Afghanistan consists of 249,999 square miles, many of them more or less vertically inclined and less than simple to clear, populated by an estimated 31,230,000 people. Iraq has an estimated population of 30,290,000 and 167,924 square miles, most of them flat. The estimates of how many civilians have died in Iraq range around the figure of 100,000, with some — including the Johns Hopkins-Lancet study — much higher.

Goldstein’s meticulous examination of the record of McGeorge Bundy’s activities and decisions concerning the Vietnam War from the moment of his appointment by John Kennedy to his own departure from the administration of Lyndon Johnson is arranged in six chapters, the title of each illustrating what the author describes as a lesson to be learned from the Bundy papers. The last two lessons are of particular relevance today:

1. Counselors Advise but Presidents Decide.
2. Never Trust the Bureaucracy to Get It Right.
3. Politics Is the Enemy of Strategy.
4. Conviction Without Rigor Is a Strategy for Disaster.
5. Never Deploy Military Means in Pursuit of Indeterminate Ends.
6. Intervention Is a Presidential Choice, Not an Inevitability.⁵

Source: Antiwar.com

Read more by William Pfaff:

• Obama’s New Security Strategy Looks Much Like the Old One – May 26th, 2010
• What Next for NATO? – May 18th, 2010
• The NATO Nuisance – April 27th, 2010
• Obama’s Nuclear-Weapons Conference Fatally Flawed Before It Began – April 13th, 2010
• As Iraq Threatens to Come Apart, US Problems in Afghanistan Mount – April 6th, 2010