VIETNAM SYNDROME CONTINUES

WASHINGTON--'Gray is the color of truth." So said McGeorge Bundy, 31 years
ago, in a speech about the Vietnam War. Historical truths are always
ambiguous, never more so than those that deal with a failed war.

Most Americans long ago concluded that President Lyndon B. Johnson and his
key aides--the Bundy brothers (McGeorge and William P.), Robert S. McNamara
and other bright lights of the establishment--stumbled into that quagmire
out of hubris and ignorance.

Now, new archival evidence suggests that the truth is far more painful.

These powerful men fully understood the dangers of intervention, resisted
Americanizing what they knew was a Vietnamese civil war, then proceeded to
lead the country where they did not want to go. When things went badly,
they loyally stood by their president.

Thirty years later, most Americans have become highly skeptical about the
integrity of their public servants. But at the same time, elite opinion,
particularly inside the foreign-policy establishment, still penalizes
dissent within government. It is the rare public servant who risks public
dissent from the official line.

There are exceptions.

Diplomat Richard C. Holbrooke's forthright criticism of the Clinton
administration's Bosnia policies and former Assistant Secretary of Health
and Human Services Peter Edelman's public resignation in 1996 to protest
welfare reform are two rare examples of public dissent. But Holbrooke
couched his dissent in language that allowed him to be nominated this year
as ambassador to the United Nations. As a rule, the establishment still
frowns on public displays of dissent.

When former defense analyst Daniel J. Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers
in 1971, William Bundy, a key architect of the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations' war policies, penned a note to his Groton schoolmate
Joseph Alsop: "What a wallowing in self-righteousness is this.

. . . Ellsberg is just the Whittaker Chambers of the New Left, but those
who exploit him deserve less charity." Even today, Ellsberg is regarded
inside the Beltway as a pariah, so much so that when the Washington Post
celebrated the 25th anniversary of its publication of the Pentagon Papers,
he was not invited to the celebrations. Such an explicit snubbing of the
man who made this journalistic coup possible is extraordinary. It can only
be explained by understanding the old establishment code of discretion by
which Washington policymakers thrive.

If you had a policy disagreement with the president, you dissented
privately, like George W. Ball did, in 1965, over Johnson's Vietnam policy.
Ellsberg's public dissent was offensive to the establishment on two
grounds: Not only was it public, but it also threatened to undermine the
notion that such men as the Bundy brothers and McNamara stumbled into
Vietnam out of sheer ignorance. Perversely, a claim of ignorance based on a
Eurocentric lack of curiosity about things Vietnamese was a better defense
than having to explain they knew the odds against military victory and
still persevered in a losing war.

The hard truth, however, is that the war's primary architects were deeply
reluctant to intervene with U.S. troops in what they recognized was an
anticolonial civil war.

During 1964 and '65, crucial decision-making years, National Security
Advisor McGeorge Bundy told Secretary of Defense McNamara that his proposal
to introduce large numbers of U.S. combat troops was "rash to the point of
folly." His brother, William, then assistant secretary of state for the Far
East, warned against making the conflict a "white man's war." Instead,
William proposed a withdrawal plan, in November 1964, that would have
allowed a communist-led unification of Vietnam under the guise of
neutralization.

Both brothers understood the futility of this war. In October 1964, William
Bundy wrote a long memo to senior Cabinet officials about why the U.S.
should walk away from Vietnam. It is "a bad colonial heritage of long
standing," he wrote, "a colonialist war fought in a half-baked fashion and
lost, a nationalist movement taken over by communism ruling in the other
half of an ethnically and historically united country, the communist side
inheriting much the better military force and far more than its share of
the talent--these are the facts that dog us today." But when Johnson
rejected any recommendations for withdrawal, the Bundy brothers remained
loyal to their president and endorsed a policy of gradual escalation. They
did so with a heavy sense of pessimism and even foreboding, but did so
nonetheless.

Why, when they seemed to know better, did they persevere in 1965 and then
defend the war for many years afterward? At the time, McGeorge said he
feared "the wild men in the wings." If liberals abandoned South Vietnam,
the McCarthyite right wing would be given a second wind. So, for domestic
political reasons, the Johnson administration opted for a policy of gradual
military escalation.

In fact, these Cold War liberals always wanted to avoid a land war in
Southeast Asia. In April 1962, according to a previously unpublished,
top-secret White House memo, President John F. Kennedy told McGeorge's
aide, Michael V. Forrestal, that he wanted "to seize upon any favorable
moment to reduce our involvement [in South Vietnam], recognizing that the
moment might yet be some time away."

We don't know what Kennedy might have done if he had lived. But whatever
dovish instincts he had were tempered by the fear that Republicans would
reignite the "who lost China?" demagoguery of the 1950s if Vietnam were
reunited under a communist regime. Vietnam was thus born out of a failure
of liberal courage.

By late 1965, when McGeorge Bundy quietly left the White House, 1,636
Americans had died in Vietnam. Over the next three years, as William Bundy
persevered at the State Department, more than 20,000 additional Americans
died, together with hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. The war dragged
on, while the liberal "experts" knew the futility of any military solution.

This is why men like the Bundy brothers and McNamara evoke such anger. They
knew better, and out of misplaced loyalty to the president, they betrayed
their own promise and intelligence. For them, resignation was not an
honorable course of action, nor was public disagreement.

Today, self-described centrist liberals like President Bill Clinton display
the same compromising political instincts in foreign policy as their "vital
center" liberal cousins in the 1960s. They haven't learned that pandering
to simplistic notions of toughness abroad allows their right-wing opponents
to define America's foreign-policy agenda. This is the real "Vietnam
syndrome" that still hobbles liberal policymakers as they grapple with a
post-Cold War world, in which such problems as terrorism, ethnic cleansing
and proliferation require the hard work of diplomacy to broker coordinated
international actions, not U.S. unilateralism.

But how often do we see liberals in government today dissenting from
cruise-missile diplomacy and "wag-the-dog" acts of interventionism?
Liberals seem to have learned nothing from the mistakes of their predecessors.

Kai Bird Is the Author of "The Color of Truth: Mcgeorge Bundy and William
Bundy, Brothers in Arms: a Biography"

Checked-by: Pat Dolan