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Union 1812: The Americans Who Fought the Second War of Independence
"...Though not a traditional military history, this book has a few rip-roaring battle scenes, such as Andrew Jackson's famous routing of the British at New Orleans...Langguth's prose is vivid, and he brings to life a panoply of personalities, from Dolley Madison to Tecumseh...he has provided a panoramic view of a decisive event in American military and political history."
--Publishers Weekly, July 31, 2006.

"Never again after this masterly work will 1812 be a forgotten war. Langguth brilliantly restores the war to its rightful place in American history while at the same time giving us a rousing good story that holds our attention from beginning to end."
--Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of "Team of Rivals"

"A. J. Langguth is incapable of writing a dull sentence. Here he brings rousingly to life the perilous, fascinating years between America's first and second wars of independence. With an artist's flair, a scholar's rigor, and the narrative genius of a born storyteller, he gives us presidents and their wives, Redcoats and frontier Caesars, heroes and scalawags--an unforgettable portrait gallery of young America."
--Richard Norton Smith, author of "Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation."

"...expertly guides readers through American history from the country's unsteady years as a sovereign nation to the culminating victories of the War of 1812. In vivid and richly detailed prose that can read like fiction but is based in well-researched fact, Langguth protrays a host of Federalist politicos and young America's many struggles.
"He explains the genesis, in political decisions and military actions, of the "second war of independence" with Great Britain.
"After delineating the war's numerous and diverse causes, he slows the book's pace by describing its disparate, far-flung battles, from the British capture of Fort Mackinac in Michigan to Andrew Jackson's heroism at the Battle of New Orleans, which in fact took place after the Treaty of Ghent had been signed.
"As he did in 'Patriots,' Langguth here relies heavily on letters, personal journal entries, speech transcripts, and other primary sources that are uniformly fascinating and enlightening. While in no way revisionist, this is well-done history and a worthy addition to any academic library's American history collection."
--Douglas King, University of South Carolina, Library Journal.

"A. J. Langguth's "Union 1812" is an excellent companion volume--and handy sequel--to his fine "Patriots," which entertained and enlightened readers with its cast of characters from the Revolutionary War. Anyone now looking for an equally engaging and reliable guide to the principal figures and events surrounding the War of 1812 need look no further. This is it."
--Benson Bobrick, author of "Angel in the Whirlwind: The Triumph of the American Revolution"

"'Union 1812' both fills a gaping hole in our early history and inventively and pesuasively anchors the War of 1812 to the founding process, giving us portraits not only of players like Madison, Tecumseh, Jackson, and Harrison, but also of the revolutionary heroes Jefferson, Adams, and Washington, whose contributions take on new meaning in light of this 'second war of independence' and the true opening of the American West."
--William Hogeland, author of "The Whiskey Rebellion."

"Reporters v. Historians"
Remarks by A. J. Langguth at a panel honoring Professor George C. Herring during the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations conference, Lawrence, Kansas, June 24, 2006
In February, 1983, when the war in Vietnam had been over a scant eight years, the School of Journalism at the University of Southern California held a four-day conference titled, "Vietnam Reconsidered: Lessons from a War." Because feelings still ran high, the Los Angeles Police Department ringed the confence hall with mounted troops to protect against South Vietnamese demonstrators--refugees protesting a number of the panelists, including Mrs. Nguyen Ngoc Dung, Hanoi's observer at the United Nations.

It was an emotional four days. When General Westmoreland's chief press officer, Major-General Winant Sidle spoke, his appearance set off such anguished protests from veterans that counselors from the Veterans Administration had to race through the hall to calm them.

Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times acted as chairman. Arthur Miller and Frances FitzGerald were among the concluding speakers, and the journalists on hand included Morley Safer, David Halberstam, William Tuohy, Peter Arnett, Gloria Emerson and Peter Braestrup.

Crusty Seymour Hersh announced that "I do not think the press is very relevant at all." But it was Robert Scheer, the columnist and former editor of "Ramparts," who surprised me even more when he said, "I personally did not learn much about Vietnam by going there; I learned much more in the stacks of the University of California."

By the end of the conference, I took his point: Among the historians who had spoken were William Appleman Williams, Ronald Steel, James Thomson and, of course, the dean of Vietnam historians, Professor George C. Herring. Lucid and calm, where some panelists had dealt in bombast or histrionics, Professor Herring traced the development of U. S. policy in Vietnam, and his conclusions were considered but firm:

"In retrospect, the assumptions upon which U. S. policy was based in 1950--and after--appear misguided."

He went on to explain that "it seems highly doubtful that the fall of Vietnam would have triggered a chain reaction which would have resulted in Communist control of Southeast Asia."

Professor Herring's appearance came four years after the initial publication of "America's Longest War," the book we are celebrating today, and about the time of his momental "Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War." I had been a reporter for The New York Times in the mid-1960s, and as I began to write historical nonfiction myself, I remembered Professor Herring's example and speculated on the differences between a reporter and a historian.

The most obvious is a question of tense. The reporter is writing about the present, a historian about the past--although sometimes about a past that is recent and still contentious. But there are more significant differences.

Reporters accept the fact that their writing will be incomplete. They cannot wait until they have assembled every piece of a puzzle. The missing pieces often emerge only because a sketchy news story has already appeared. Knowing that their writing will be inherently fragmentary, even inadequate, keeps most reporters humble about their trade.

Historians have the luxury of time and greater resources for their research. Very few historians would ever claim to be writing the definitive account of an event. But they can expect that newly discovered documents or uncovered sources will not invalidate their work. Other historians may very well challenge their theories or conclusions but not, if they have been conscientious, their facts.

Compare that with reporting during the Tet offensive. Peter Arnett of the Associated Press was among the reporters criticized because he had vividly conveyed the unexpected shock and scope of the Communist attack. Peter Braestrup, for one, pointed out afterward in his book "Big Story" that, in military terms, the offensive had failed, and Braestrup claimed that the early reports had been factually wrong and had misled the American public about the progress of the war.

(His contrarian view did not endear Braestrup to his fellow correspondents. One enduring image from the 1983 conference was Gloria Emerson chasing Braestrup through the lobby of the University Hilton, swatting at him with her purse and shouting, "Bad Peter! Bad Peter!")

When the dust settled, figuratively and literally, Professor Herring could get it right. He noted that it was true that the offensve had not achieved its most ambitious military aims, but he also called Tet "a major political victory" for the Communists.

That leads to the question of bias. Diligent reports try to be even-handed, presenting the facts as best they can and letting readers or viewers make up their own minds. Because The Times prided itself on being the newspaper of record, I found that reporting each day from Saigon could require a sort of formula.

A story might begin, "U. S. officials announced today that 45 Vietcong soldiers had been killed in fighting in the Central Highlands."

But the second paragraph would continue, "Observers on the scene,however"--that referred either to me or to one of my colleagues who had called me by field telephone from the battle site--"reported that only eight guerrillas had been killed, and the remainer of their unit escaped from the scene."

When historians come to deal with a skirmish like that one, they can peel away the contemporary puffery and exaggeration. In fact, we look to them for judgments that can uequivocal and even harsh. We don't expect to finish reading 500 pages of undigested information only to be asked, "What do you think?"

Another example of the difference: Leaving Saigon in 1965, I thought I was gone for good,and when the editor of The New York Times Sunday Magazine asked me to sum up my fourteen months in South Vietnam, my article concluded by questioning whether American involvement in the war might now be hurting the people of South Vietnam more than it was helping them.

I asked Seymour Topping, the consummate professional who oversaw The Times' Southeast Asia coverage from Hong Kong to read the piece before I wired it to New York. When he finished, Topping said, "If that's your opinion, Jack, you're obligated to write it. But publishing this article would have made it impossible for you to continue to be reporting from Vietnam."

As a historian, Professor Herring has not been reluctant to put forward his opinions in terms that would be off-limits for a daily reporter. He writes, for example, tht Kennedy and John had "repeatedly misled the public in their optimistic reports of progress." He characterizes South Vietnames President Nguyen Khanh--charitably, in my view--as "devious, opportunistic and ambitious."

And he is unsparing about the way Henry Kissinger used his Democratic connections to spy for the Republicans at the Paris peace talks in 1968.

I spoke a few years ago with Daniel Davidson, who had been a junior member of the American delegation in 1968 and had known Kissinger from his Harvard days. Davidson said he had believed Kissinger when he said he found Nixon repugnant; Davidson agreed to brief Kissinger off-the-record on the status of the talks.

Soon after Kissinger returned to the United States, he went to a pay phone to tell Richard Allen in the Nixon campaign everything he had learned about the secret negotiations. Nixon then encouraged South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu to resist agreeing to the peace terms reached by the Johnson Administration.

Nixon succeeded in denying any last-minute political advantage to Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic presidential nominee. He also guaranteed that the war would continue.

I would not challenge Professor Herring when he calls Kissinger's duplicity "one of the more sordid episodes in recent political history."

Despite their time for reflection, however, and their ability to draw togeter material beyond the reach of most reporters, historians may operate under serious handicaps of their own.

When an entity is as secretive as the Hanoi politburo, historians must wait until its proceedings are eventually published, knowing that if transcripts appear at all they may be highly sanitized. Or else historians must pass lightly over deliberations they cannot document.

That unenviable choice has been apparent in Professor Herring's treatment of Le Duan, the dominant figure in Hanoi policy-making during the American chapter of the war. He is mentioned only once in "America's Longest War," although, as we might expect, Professor Herring again does get it right. On page 80, we read, "Le Duan, a top party official--and a southerner--played a crucial role in decision making throughout the war."

During the 1960s and '70s, speaking with Hanoi's political leaders was impossible for American journalists, of course. But that has changed. Some historians have now taken up the reporter's role in order to flesh out our knowledge of the era. Their interviews with highly placed survivors are casting new light on Le Duan and underscoring the importance of this man, who effectively replaced Ho Chi Minh in the mid-1960s and overruled even Vo Nguyen Giap on military decisions.

Another point: I believe that reporters should resist making predictions. Readers deserve the available information about what has already happened, but they needn't be subjected to fortune-telling. A large and unlamented chunk of today's political reporting--particularly on television roundtables--would vanish if journalists were forbidden to speculate on the future of Senator Hillary Clinton.

On the historian's side, the temptation is not to predict the future but to second-guess the past. Under the fancy name of counter-factuals, they play the children's game of "What if?"

Admittedly, the exercise can be amusing. And as long as we are in thrall to the memory of Jack Kennedy, there will be historians to tell us what--had he lived--he would have done about Vietnam in 1965.

That's a game Professor Herring refused to play. After he indulgently summarizd the speculation about Kennedy's future decision, he concluded, "There is not a shred of evidence to support the notion of a secret plan for extrication."

Those are differeces involving content. But there is also a stylistic difference between reporters and historians that should cause apprehension on both sides. It involves the role of narrative in the writing of news and of history.

On August 5, 1965, when Morley Safer's cameraman showed an American Marine setting fire to a hooch in the village of Cam Ne, the CBS film had to be flown to San Francisco and then on to New York. It was more than a day later before the disquieting footage could reach its home audience. Now tranmission can be a matter of seconds.

Since print reporters cannot possibly match that immediacy, they have been falling back on treating news as a diverting story instead of offering efficient summaries of the facts as they can be known.

Certainly, context is to be encouraged. Too often, readers and viewers can feel as though they have come in midway through a drama with no program notes to guide them. But there is a danger in relying too heavily on novelistic detail. The result can swamp the significance of an event and reduce news to entertainment.

An opposite trend has been occuring for decades in the writing of history. Samuel Eliot Morison warned young scholars long ago that if academic historians did not reclaim the narrative tradition,they would be sacrificing their field to--in his words--"writers and journalists."

From his distinguished publications, we know that Professor Herring is a graceful writer with a talent for pacing and for conveying a sense of character. But it is true that a publisher may severly limit the length of any manuscript intended to be a textbook.

All the same, even the most apathetic student might agree with me that "America's Longest War" could itself be 100 pages longer if that greater length allowed for including more detail from the battle of Ap Bac or the Tet offensive or the My Lai massacre.

Or does my complaint simply reflect the regret I feel whenver a book by George Herring has come to an end?

"Should Intellectuals Be Trusted With Political Power?"

Excerpts from the Provost's Lecture given by A. J. Langguth at the University of Southern California on February 15, 2001; and at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, April 11, 200l
Since we are meeting on a university campus, it may be relevant--if somewhat dicey--to ask that we consider the question: Should intellectuals ever be trusted with political power?
I want to stress that tonight I'll be drawing only on this country's Vietnam experience. I won't be going back through history to Cicero--for whom the answer was probably no.
Nor to Thomas Jefferson--for whom it might be a qualified yes.

But it's a question that occurred to me when I realized that the three National Security Advisers in the White House from 1961 to 1973, the men who presided over America's war in Vietnam, all came to Washington from two universities in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
--McGeorge Bundy had been dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard.
--Walt Whitman Rostow taught economic theory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
--And Henry A. Kissinger was a professor of government at Harvard.
During that same period, two of the three Secretaries of State also had academic backgrounds. Before World War Two, David Dean Rusk had been an administrator at Mills College in Oakland, California. In 1961, John Kennedy appointed him as Secretary of State, and Lyndon Johnson kept him in the job for a total of eight years. Doctor Kissinger, as many of you remember, headed the State Department under both Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

Parenthetically, Robert McNamara's original inclination had also been for a life on the campus. Before he served as Secretary of Defense for both Kennedy and Johnson, McNamara had once aimed for a career at the Harvard Business School.
Then illness struck his family, and he decided he needed a larger income than a university could provide. He went instead to the executive offices of the Ford Motor Company. In Detroit, he rose to become Ford's president, but he shamed his fellow executives by living less like an automobile baron than like a frugal college professor...

I'd like to explore as well whether men from any other background--not academia--met the demands of Vietnam more successfully than the professors did. (We can pause here to note with some chagrin that women were excluded from foreign-policy posts in all three administrations.)...

Of the Vietnam-era presidents, only Jack Kennedy felt comfortable with professors in his inner circle. Kennedy had served on Harvard's Board of Overseers and, after he was elected President, he had turned naturally to Cambridge to staff his new administration...
Although the resumes of the professors I've mentioned had certain similarities, the men themselves were very different in character and outlook.

I'll start with McGeorge Bundy because I knew him best. In 1956, as I waited for the inevitable draft notice from the U. S. Army, I accepted Bundy's invitation to work as his assistant while he was dean at Harvard.
Bundy had the quickest mind I have ever encountered. At Groton, he had achieved perfect scores on his college board examinations, and at Yale he had been a champion debater...
He reminded me of a manic animal tamer, all whip and chair, and it always took some minutes when we met later to let him understand that I was not going to play his game, that I would not be leaping from my perch to try to maul him.
Once he had ratcheted down to my mental speed, we could proceed to have an agreeable evening's conversation...

In 1963, with Bundy installed as Jack Kennedy's National Security Adviser, Newsweek noted that "Dean Rusk was not known for force and decisiveness" and reported that Washington observers were calling Mac Bundy "the real Secretary of State."...

Bundy's practical approach to issues appealed to Kennedy, who was usually ill at ease with abstractions. Both men took a mechanic's approach to the engine of government: Find out what was broken, fix it and keep the ship of state aloft. Leave to others the mysteries of aerodynamics.

When Newsweek's editors asked Kennedy to evaluate Bundy, the President's reply began with the asset he ranked even above loyalty: "First," Jack Kennedy said, "you can't beat brains..."

But what are brains? Certainly, one could hardly be considered an intellectual without them. But alone are they enough to qualify? Most of the time, when we talk about intelligence, don't we simply mean speed and memory?

As I say, Bundy's quickness was dazzling. But if a man makes lightning chess moves and yet loses the game ignominiously, how much has his quickness availed him?

One day in 1964, Bundy was arguing the merits of intervening in Vietnam with Walter Lippmann, the dean of American political columnists.
Bundy startled Lippmann by not knowing when South Vietnam had come into existence. Since Lippmann met every year with Charles DeGaulle, he knew very well that the nation of South Vietnam had been created in Geneva in 1954 as a two-year temporary measure.

It had been intended to survive only until North and South Vietnam could be unified by a country-wide election. And Lippmann also knew, as did every other informed observer, that if those elections had been held as promised, they would have resulted in victory for Ho Chi Minh and his Communist comrades in the North. But Washington and its appointed leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, blocked those elections.

Yet here was Mac Bundy defending the integrity of South Vietnam and showing that he thought the country had a genuine and independent history.

To be fair, the world was large, and Bundy's White House staff was confronting challenges in a dozen other countries. But South Vietnam was the only place in which Americans were dying, and Bundy knew virtually nothing about it.

Robert McNamara suffered from that same ignorance, and in recent years he has been blaming his staff for it. McNamara says now that he never got adquate briefings from them...Bundy may have been no scholar, but his was the more subtle mind. An official who worked with both men compared Bundy's mind to a scapel, McNamara's to an axe...

The effective alliance between Mac Bundy and Bob McNamara, two like-minded pragmatists, had broken down during the Johnson years, and eventually both men left the administration. In the meantime, Bundy's power had passed to another professor, Walt Rostow.

If Bundy was neither a scholar nor an intellectual, Walt Whitman Rostow was arguably both. Before Kennedy's inaugural, Rostow had published a respected study called "The Stages of Economic Growth."
Describing him in "Our Vietnam," I wrote that Rostow "seemed to possess the intellectual rigor that Kennedy hoped would distinguish his administration. Rostow radiated as well a bluff good cheer straight from the pages of Dickens. His years in the classroom had left him impervious to twitting, and he never lost his beaming smile or his professorial aplomb."...

Rostow brought that absolute assurance to the White House where it was as aggravating as it had been at MIT. He has it still. I interviewed him over several days in the mid-90s in his office at the LBJ Library in Austin. There, with many a merry smile, he explained to me why the United States had actually won the war in Vietnam.

From 1966 through 1968, Rostow proved to be the most implacable Cold Warrior among the men whom Kennedy had first brought into government. When Bundy left Washington for the Ford Foundation, he urged strongly that his successor be Bill Moyers, who had been a young Johnson protege. Moyers was clearly the most able of the somewhat lackluster group of Texans whom Johnson had brought to Washington. At once point, in fact, Robert Kennedy had recommended that Johnson replace Rusk with Moyers as Secretary of State.

To Johnson, it was an outlandish suggestion. He had used all of his persuasiveness to keep the Kennedy cabinet intact after the assassination. And the very passivity in Dean Rusk that had frustrated Jack Kennedy had a different effect on Lyndon Johnson. It soothed the new President and made him feel that in Rusk, from a small town in Georgia, he had a kindred spirit. "I love that Dean," Johnson would tell friends...

Bundy was not the only person to be astounded by Johnson's choice of Rostow to succeed him. Around the State Department, Rostow's good-natured eagerness to bomb North Vietnam was considered as bizarre and dangerous as Curtis LeMay's enthusiasm for those bombing raids. But LeMay at least had the excuse of being Chief of Staff of the Air Force...

Rostow's motivation seemed to be his deep-rooted conviction that the Communists must be stopped in South Vietnam or all of Asia would succumb to the threat...

As you'll recall, Johnson announced in March of 1968 that he would not be a candidate for reelection that year, and he made enough concessions to the North Vietnamese Communists to get them to Paris for peace negotiations.

Throughout the rest of the year, Rusk and Rostow did all they could to derail the peace talks. But Johnson held firm, hoping to settle the war that had driven him from office. Perhaps he could salvage a bit of a reputation as a peacemaker to offset the hated label of warmonger.

It was at that moment that the third of the Cambridge professors took center stage. In 1961, Mac Bundy had vetoed Henry Kissinger for a position in Jack Kennedy's administration. From observing him at Harvard, Bundy had concluded that Kissinger was a shameless self-promoter. Now, during the Presidential election of 1968, Kissinger proved Bundy right.

Claiming to be disillusioned with the Republicans, Kissinger went to Paris and hooked up with a young acquaintance from Harvard. Daniel Davidson was by then on the Harriman team that was negotiating peace terms with the North Vietnamese.

Davidson has told me lately that Kissinger probably learned less from their conversation than from reading New York Times accounts of the negotiations. But when Kissinger returned to Cambridge, he got in touch with Dick Allen, who was Richard Nixon's young foreign policy adviser during the 1968 campaign.

Allen told me that Kissinger always called from pay phones to avoid any wiretaps that would reveal his duplicity.

Claiming inside knowledge, Kissinger advised Nixon to hold out on the peace terms being offered to South Vietnam. That same advice was also passed along by the Republicans to South Vietnam's president Thieu.

Kissinger alone did not dash Johnson's hopes for a settlement before he left office, but Kissinger had done what he could. And the war went on for another five years.

In return, Kissinger was named Richard Nixon's National Security Adviser, the same job that Bundy and Rostow had held under Kennedy and Johnson...

Last year, Dr. Kissinger agreed to respond to questions I put to him by fax. I asked about his dealings with the Republicans, which certainly looked underhanded. Kissinger responded brusquely: "My recollection and Dick Allen's differ, as I have repeatedly explained."

Since leaving office, Dr. Kissinger has written three volumes of his memoirs, and they total more than 4,000 pages. But sadly for his reputation, his recollections are not the only account of those years when he was in charge of America's foreign policy.

The diaries of Robert Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff, were published posthumously in 1994, and they present a far different account of Kissinger's advice and behavior. Take, for example, Haldeman's entry for Monday, December 21, 1970:

Haldeman wrote that Nixon was thinking "about going to Vietnam in April or whenever we decide to make the basic end-of-the-war announcement. His idea would be to tour around the country, build up Thieu, and so forth, and then make the announcement right afterwards. Henry argues against a commitment that early to withdraw all combat troops because he feels that if we pull them out by the end of '71, trouble can start mounting in '72 that we won't be able to deal with and which we'll have to answer for at the elections.

"He prefers, instead, a commitment to have them all out by the end of '72 so that we won't have to deliver finally until after the elections and can keep our flanks protected. This would certainly seem to make more sense, and the P(resident) seemed to agree in general, but wants Henry to work up plans on it."

Reading Haldeman's diaries, I was struck by that passage because it showed Henry Kissinger giving cynical political advice to a President who never claimed to be compassionate. Kissinger was saying two things: Whatever accord we reach in Paris is likely to collapse. Therefore, we should let American troops continue to suffer and die for another year in order to assure Nixon's reelection.

Of course, I asked Kissinger about that advice, too. I'll read his response and leave it to you to judge its credibility:

"Your third question implies that Nixon had a plan to withdraw rapidly from Vietnam. You will find no reference to any such thought in any of his many memos to me, in the NSC files, or in the recollections of participants. I cannot reconstruct at this remove what Bob Haldeman claimed."

That then was the contribution of three prominent Cambridge professors over a fifteen-year period.
If intellectuals are identified by the way they can turn the concrete world into a series of abstractions, then both Rostow and Kissinger qualify as intellectuals.

To answer the question of whether those two particular men should have been entrusted with power, we might ask the families of the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians, North and South, who died on their watch.

Turning aside from the professors, how much better did the men from other backgrounds perform once they were in power?

Consider first the professional diplomats. Frederick Nolting was sent from Paris to Saigon in 1961 as ambassador to South Vietnam with no experience in Southeast Asia. His two main directives were to keep South Vietnam's President Ngo Dinh Diem happy and to see to it that he followed Washington's orders.

Those two objectives proved completely contradictory, and Nolting was recalled from Saigon and branded a failure.

In the State Department, however, it didn't always help to be right. Paul Kattenburg, another foreign service officer, was sent to Saigon in 1963 to survey the political scene and report back to the White House. On his return, he told Rusk, McNamara, Mac Bundy and the others that the situation was hopeless under President Diem and that the United States should consider withdrawing entirely.

Kattenburg told me that he understood immediately that morning tht he was far too low-ranking in the State Department to be taken seriously. All he accomplished that day was to end his career.

Although Kattenburg is now on the faculty in South Carolina, we professors can't claim credit for his foresight. He only turned to teaching after his foreign service career lay in shambles.

The best known of the State Department dissenters was George Ball. Like so many of his former colleagues--Dean Acheson, George Kennan and the rest--Ball was not much interested in Southeast Asia.

But even so, he had misgivings about the direction Washington was headed in Vietnam. Here is my account of his response during the last days of Lyndon Johnson's 1964 presidential campaign against Barry Goldwater:

"...From the time Congress mindlessly passed the Tonkin Gulf resolution, Ball had been obsessed with getting his forebodings on paper. He knew tht what he was recommending was too sensitive to let McNamara or the Joint Chiefs of Staff hear of it before he had finished the entire memorandum. Only a few secretaries and his closest aide knew what was afoot.

"On October 4, 1964, it was ready: a single-spaced 67-page analysis of the options the United States faced in Vietnam. When Ball sent copies to Rusk, McNamara and Bundy, he addressed them as 'Dean, Bob and Mac,' an indication that these were still informal thoughts. Ball did not send a copy to the President...

"Ball had titled his memo, 'How Valid Are the Assumptions Underlying Our Vietnam Policy?' In it, he pointed out how little time the President's advisers had given to considering a political way out of the war, and he called for a study in depth without further delay...

"Ball's own recommendation was that 'Washington might try for a political settlement, one without a U. S. military commitment but one that would delay the Communists from taking over South Vietnam.'"

Ball brought a copy of his memorandum to Robert McNamara, and he said later that the Defense Secretary fingered it as though it were a poisonous snake. McNamara was absoluely horrified and seemed to think that even setting down such thoughts was akin to treason...Nevertheless, when the 1964 election was safely won, Ball had a chance to make his argument directly to Johnson.

McNamara had recently returned from Vietnam with a recommendation tht General Westmoreland be given the 275,000 additional troops he had requested.
Here was Ball's chance.

After a brief discussion of Vietcong tactics, Johnson asked if anyone disagreed with McNamara's memo. Looking directly at Ball, he added, "If so, I'd like to hear from them."

By now, Ball had his speech rehearsed, but he delivered it with no real hope of converting his audience of one. Instead, he volunteered a pledge of loyalty that undercut what little leverage he might have had. Ball said that he foresaw a perilous voyage and had great apprehension that the United States could win.

"But let me be clear," Ball added. "If the decision is to go ahead, I'm committed."

With that concession, Ball guaranteed that he could always speak and could always be ignored.

Clark Clifford was another Washington figure somewhat like Ball: a lawyer who had come to town under Franklin Roosevelt and stayed on to become a force in the capital. At first, Clifford had no official position in the Johnson administration, but he had earned Johnson's confidence, even though he, too, had early doubts about expanding the war.

But when Clifford saw that the President had made up his mind to escalate, he put aside those doubts and supported Johnson's policy for the next three-and-a-half years.

It was only after Johnson named him Defense Secretary, expecting he would continue to be a hawk, that Clifford expressed his doubts once again. But by then it was 1968, after the Communists' massive Tet offensive had demonstrated to the whole world that Westmoreland's military strategy had failed.

What undercut Ball, Clifford and others like them in the government was their desperation not to be banished from the White House. It's probably misleading, finally, to talk about any advisers as truly powerful, whether they are intellectuals or not. Harry Truman once said bluntly that the President makes foreign policy, and history bears him out.

But to sit at the President's right hand and offer him one's best judgments at least gives the illusion of being powerful, and none of the men we've considered was willing to give up that illusion.

As for the Presidents themselves, they were, above all, politicians. In our system, that's inevitable and even healthy. But Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon made Vietnam policy with one eye on the next election. All three wanted to win a second term.

And the grim irony, of course, is that none of them was fated to complete it.

Let me touch now on two categories of men and women who are outsiders, and yet often claim to have some impact on decision making--journalists and historians.
If they do not set policy, they often help to determine how we think about it.

Whatever pretensions each group may harbor, they do the same work, just at different times in a politician's career. Journalists write about Presidents while they are still in office, historians after they are out of office or dead.

Most of the embattled early breed on reporters on the ground in Saigon--David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnett--shared Washington's opinion that South Vietnam was worth defending. But even if they had held private doubts, they did not see their role as challenging that government assumption, and few of them did. At least, not those who worked for the major newspapers and wire services.

And any voice raised from the alternative journals, like I. F. Stone's, was easily ignored in Washington. For that matter, when Johnson found no way to muzzle Walter Lippmann's opposition to the war, he succeeded in hounding him out of the capital to New York.

An occasional historian was given entry to the White House, most notably Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who was brought to Washington to document the Kennedy years. Schlesinger did his duty by producing useful but uncritical volumes about both Jack and Robert Kennedy.
But Schlesinger did not speak out against the Bay of Pigs before that debacle was launched, and he offered no insight into Vietnam.

What about the military? I'm not one of those who think that the term "intellectual general" is an oxymoron, even though William Westmoreland once told me that he seldom read books. And I know from observing him in Saigon that Maxwell Taylor could only be considered learned if he were being measured against certain fellow chiefs of staff.

But assessing the Pentagon's role in Vietnam would take another evening, and it would be even more depressing than this one.

Summing up, then, professors, bureaucrats, Washington insiders, politicians, journalists and generals did not distinguish themselves during the Vietnam era.

Clergy--chief among them Martin Luther King, Jr.--often did better, along with some Vietnam veterans and students and housewives. But those protesters were not in the White House. They were in the streets. Any power they wielded came only from reacting against what they called the Establishment.

Were there members of any other profession within the government itself who saw the pitfalls of Vietnam and warned against them? The answer doesn't much please me, but I have to conclude that two of the most perceptive men were Chester Bowles and Edward Lansdale. And they shared a civilian background that may be highly influential in our culture but one which, for good reason, we rarely glorify.

Bowles and Lansdale were both advertising men.

To make matters worse, two other graduates of advertising agencies who also moved into government positions turned out to be less pernicious than most of their counterparts.

Jack Valenti never pursued the war with the bloodymindedness of Walt Rostow. And Bob Haldeman, who worked at the J. Walter Thompson agency in the years before he joined Nixon's staff, may not have been a hero in this story. He urged the invasion of Cambodia in 1970 and the bombing of Hanoi in 1972. But compared to Henry Kissinger, Haldeman was a model of restrained statescraft.

In the case of Lansdale and Bowles, their roles were far more substantial.

Before joining the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, Lansdale had handled the Levi Straus advertising account in New York. After the war, he had helped the Filipinos put down a leftist rebellion, and he did it by plunging himself among the people and their culture.

Advertising executives, like politicians, must be alert to the public's mood and tastes. They must have, or develop, an instinct for what will be popular and how to present it in the most appealing guise. In Lansdale's case, he brought those attributes to the political arena. "It's not enough to be against Communism," Lansdale would say. "You have to be for something."

After the Philippines, Washington hoped that Lansdale could have an equal success in South Vietnam, and Lansdale did in fact become a confidante of President Diem. But by 1954, Ho Chi Minh's men had penetrated the entire country, and Diem was too suspicious and autocratic to endorse the kind of democratic system that Lansdale ws urging on him.

At home, Dean Rusk's State Department was hostile to Lansdale, and when Kennedy considered sending him back as ambassador to South Vietnam, State managed to block the appointment. Instead, Lansdale was shuffled off to cope with Cuba. He had never been to Cuba and knew nothing about it, but all the same he was added to Robert Kennedy's cabal, with its hare-brained plots to unseat Castro...

Chester Bowles is an even more persuastive reason for arguing that, in the case of Vietnam, admen performed better than anyone else.

As a precocious young executive, he had founded the advertising agency of Benton & Bowles. After he made his fortune, he turned to public service. Bowles served as governor of Connecticut, as Truman's ambassador to India and then in the House of Representatives.

During the 1960 campaign, Bowles was one of the first Stevensonian liberals to endorse Kennedy and hoped to be named Secretary of State. But Kennedy didn't want to be overshadowed in foreign affairs, and despite agonized pleading from liberals around the country the new President turned down both Stevenson and Bowles and settled instead on the lackluster Rusk, who had no political following. Bowles became Rusk's deputy.

In the early weeks of Kennedy's administration, Bowles was shut out of the planning for the Bay of Pigs. But he got word of it shortly before the invasion and went to protest to Rusk. Bowles said that a covert operation against Cuba would violate the Charter of the Organization of American States, and it would undercut Kennedy's stature as a new President committed to high principles in foreign affairs.

Bowles urged Rusk to go to Kennedy and oppose the invasion. But if Rusk would not do that, then he should set up a meeting so that Bowles could argue his case directly with the President.

Rusk assured him that the plan had been so scaled down that there was no chance of failure. When Bowles asked if the invasion would end up on the front page of The New York Times, Rusk said no.

And he added that it would not be necessary for Bowles to see Kennedy.

But even those of you who were not alive in 1961 know that the phrase "Bay of Pigs" has become shorthand for abject failure.

Kennedy defused the nation's outrage by going on television and forthrightly accepting responsibility for the fiasco. He did not use the-valid--excuse that its planning had begun under Eisenhower.

But in the shamefaced weeks that followed, Bowles found that he had lost his influence at the Whie House for much the same reason that Paul Kattenburg had--he had been right.

Even worse, Bowles had friends in the press, and he let them know that he had opposed the invasion. For that, the Kennedy brothers could never forgive him.

Bowles limped along as Rusk's deputy for another few months, but he was out of his job by Thanksgiving. Before he was forced to resign, however, Bowles drafted one last memorandum. He urged Kennedy to neutralize not only South Vietnam but to join with the Soviet Union, China, Japan and India in agreeing to neutralize the entire region of Burma, Thailand, Southeast Asia and Malaya.

Bowles again went through channels and sent his grandiose proposal to Rusk. Who never responded.

As Bowles was being fired, he suggested to Kennedy a reason why the two of them had never achieved a rapport:

"I am not one of those tough, terse, yes-or-no types you apparently find it easiest to work with," Bowles told Kennedy. "And there's nothing I can do to become one."

Kennedy politely turned aside that explanation, but Bowles had it right.

Two years ago, I raised the subject with McNamara at his club in Washington.

"You know," I said, "if Jack Kennedy had appointed Chet Bowles Secretary of States, he would have driven both of you crazy with his interminable memos and his gabby speeches at your meetings. But you would have had to rebut his calls for negotiation and for the neutralization of South Vietnam. With Rusk as Secretary of State, you got no political arguments and you concentrated only on a military solution."

"That's right!" For emphasis, McNamara hit the table, as he often does. "Dean never wrote a memo on anything!"

Back, then, to the question of whether intellectuals should be trusted with power.

For my part, I remain one of those hopelessly outdated and discredited liberals. As the SDS, Students for a Democratic Society--along with the Black Panthers and other activist groups--made clear to us in the Sixties, we liberals are unreliable allies--too indecisive, too wishy-washy.

So ask me whether intellectuals should be entrusted with power, and I answer: Maybe.

Sometimes.

It depends.

But I can say that President Kennedy may have missed a great opportunity to spare the world the Vietnam War when he did not name Chester Bowles as his Secretary of States. When he passed over that former advertising man, that occasional politician, that unabashed idealist and, yes, that windy intellectual.

#

"Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution."

Jesus Christs

Wedlock

Marksman

Macumba: White and Black Magic in Brazil

"Saki: A Life of Hector Hugh Munro, with six short stories never before collected." (Hamish Hamilton, London, 1981)

"Hidden Terrors: The Truth About U. S. Police Operations in Latin America."

"Norman Corwin's Letters," edited by A. J. Langguth (Barricade Books, 1994)

"A Noise of War: Caesar, Pompey, Octavian and the Struggle for Rome."