INTRODUCTION

U.S. Military Refuses to Adapt to the situation if it means cleaning up their snobbery

"I'm not going to destroy the traditions and doctrine of the United States Army just to win this lousy war."

Sound familiar?

"any good Soldier can defeat a guerrilla."

Insert "marine" for Soldier if you like.

Now consider how the brass lacked a fraction of the balls (moral courage) of 1LT Watada during the Vietnam war to reform themselves and stand up to corrupt President Johnson to conduct the non-linear war correctly:

www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft0012/articles/garfinkle.html

But is it too much to expect that General Westmoreland, General Earl Wheeler, and their staffs might have better understood their professional obligations in the face of a novel challenge? No, that is not too much to expect. It is not too much to expect a professional Soldier to put his country's interests above those of his service or his personal reputation, and that was precisely the problem. Thanks to Nikita Khrushchev's famous speech about "wars of national liberation" as the new face of the anti-imperialist struggle, and to President Kennedy's conclusion that the United States needed to invest more resources into our capabilities to fight counterinsurgencies, a furious argument broke out in the early 1960s within the middle ranks of the U.S. Army. While some major figures, such as General James Gavin, supported Kennedy's view, most senior Army brass resisted it firmly. General George H. Decker, Army Chief of Staff from 1960 to 1962, summarized this view with the comment that "any good Soldier can defeat a guerrilla."

The conventionalists won the bureaucratic wars, and, as is the way of the world in such matters, their views hardened from having been subject to criticism. The conventionalists got promoted and, with those hardened views firmly implanted in their heads, rose to their places just in time to mismanage the war in Vietnam. Lind quotes an anonymous Army officer in Vietnam as saying, "I'm not going to destroy the traditions and doctrine of the United States Army just to win this lousy war." Such sentiment not only reflects Westmoreland's misguided devotion to conventional tactics in the face of an unconventional situation, but also the primacy the Army accorded doctrinal orthodoxy (and the professional egos attached to the doctrines) above all else. The American people had a right to expect better, and certainly deserved better. Which brings us back to Robert McNamara.

Is it too much to have expected McNamara to have bucked the tide within the Johnson Administration as a whole and opposed the 1965 escalation? Yes, it is too much, and we would all be better off if McNamara ceased his self-flagellation over the point. But is it too much to have expected McNamara to put a stop to Westmoreland's disastrous direction of the war before the end of 1966? No, it is not too much, because that was his job. McNamara himself was one of those who dressed down General Gavin for wanting to develop anti-guerrilla tactics, and he gave Westmoreland the leeway to wreak maximum havoc. It was also McNamara the systems analyst, along with the senior Army brass, who became fixated with body counts and other conventional indicators of military success that mislead in unconventional contexts. If McNamara insists on contrition, fine; he has much for which to repent. Just let him get the reasons right.

"Surge" Face-Saving Measure is not new, Abrams was wonder-boy with his "Surge" in second half of our Vietnam War Debacle

Look familiar?

Change "Abrams" to "Petreaus".

Change "Maximum pressure" to "Surge".

Change "Vietnam" to "Iraq".

Its the same narcissistic, egomaniacs who think an American Soldier-with-a-gun in his hand and a radio eager to inflict air strikes on civilians is the solution to everything when its their very presence coupled with heavy-handed abuse of civilians through forced relocation and too much firepower has made them cooperative with the internal rebels (Viet Cong) and when they were wiped out at Tet, not loyal enough to the central government to fight off the external North Vietnamese Army (NVA).

General Gavin's "enclave" strategy is exactly what we need to do today in Iraq--separate the warring factions by a wall checkpointed by the Shias/Sunnis/Kurds inside to keep car bombs and land mines out; while U.S. forces redeploy to rural areas of Iraq and off-shore mobile bases to stop being a catalyst for rebellion by their obnoxious presence patrolling and home invasions. Subtle strategies like "Enclaves" are not understood or appreciated by the big nation-state war brass who want to kill "ragheads" and get body count statistics. This is more proof why we need a dedicated sub-national conflict force. The racketeers are wrong, our forces cannot do the full spectrum of warfare well; what is required of small wars is fundamentally different from what large wars need. None of these truths are being told to the Secretary of Defense who lacks a professional military staff as pointed out by Gavin in War and Peace in the Space Age.

www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,901109,00.html

THE WAR: DECISION TO LOWER THE PRESSURE

THE Nixon Administration has secretly decided to respond to the Communist lull in the fighting in Viet Nam. The Pentagon is drafting orders instructing the military command in Saigon to reduce and limit the current strategy of "maximum pressure." The decision came after months of subdued debate. Some top State Department officials seemed as reluctant to modify the allies' aggressive strategy as their counterparts in the Pentagon. The hard-liners at State agreed with their military colleagues that the lull has little if any political significance. If it had, they said, the Communists would have found ways and means to let the U.S. know.

Other State Department officials were more willing to take a chance. Their argument was that the strategy of maximum pressure puts the burden of cutting back the level of fighting entirely on the enemy. Sooner or later, U.S. pressure results in Communist counterpressure. The question is essentially whether or not the possibility of reducing the level of combat and taking another step toward total disengagement from the war is worth the military risk involved. Last week the Administration decided that it was.

Ignored Advice. General Earle Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was dispatched to Saigon to discuss the new tactics with General Creighton Abrams, commander of U.S. forces in Viet Nam. Wheeler will also discuss the feasibility of withdrawing as many as 100,000 more U.S. troops from Viet Nam by the end of this year, if the lull continues. The President was expected to meet with Abrams next week, either in Saigon or Bangkok, as part of his nine-day, 24,070-mile tour of seven countries.

The new orders do not deny the necessity of an active defense, but they would scale down the massive search-and-destroy missions that have dominated U.S. strategy. Said one Government official: "Where we used to have division-sized sweeps, we now want to see whether the job can't be done by 25-man patrols. Where we now send out 25-man patrols, we want to see whether a five-man patrol won't do. And we must keep in mind that we are no longer out for military victory." The new approach also calls for increased Vietnamization of the war. U.S. troops would spend less time in combat and far more time training ARVN. Obviously, both proposals are designed to cut U.S. casualties.

The new Nixon concept of conducting the war-withdrawing troops gradually, dropping the level of combat and sending fewer G.I.s out on missions-seems a limited step in the direction of the "enclave theory" that was advanced in 1965 by retired Lieut. General James Gavin. Under Gavin's plan, American troops would withdraw to garrisons in Saigon, Cam Ranh Bay and Danang, and concentrate on upgrading the South Vietnamese army. However, the new orders do not entail an actual movement of U.S. forces to fixed enclaves, as Gavin proposed.

The military did not accept the Gavin concept then, and they are not enthusiastic now about the prospects of deescalation. They argue that maximum pressure is nothing more than an "active defense." Unfortunately, the line between attack and defense is not always clear. The military, for example, regarded the bloody assault on Hamburger Hill last May as essentially a defensive action, though it cost the U.S. 84 killed and 480 wounded.

Understandable Reluctance.

Overall, few experts would question that Abe Abrams' aggressive tactics in Viet Nam have been markedly more successful than those of his predecessor, General William Westmoreland. Last fall Abrams replaced Westmoreland's ponderous battalion and brigade assaults with squad-sized thrusts. His Operation Sting Ray called for hundreds-sometimes thousands-of small patrols daily. The enemy's infiltration trails through the jungles, mountains and paddies were denied him. American troops began operating after dark, and for the first time in the war the night no longer belonged to the Viet Cong. Last year more than 8,000 tons of Viet Cong ammunition and food were captured. In the first five months of this year, 5,000 more tons have been discovered. The Communists have been unable to launch major, concentrated attacks in the past ten months. With that record, the allied command in Saigon is understandably reluctant to shift tactics.

Military officials also insist that the lull is one of those recurrent pauses in which the enemy disengages his troops in order to regroup and resupply. Intelligence reports estimate that the North is still infiltrating 10,000 men per month into South Viet Nam. The Reds continue to cache food and arms in preparation for future offensives.

Plainly, the Administration's decision to reduce the level of combat is a gamble. Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky last week proposed a South Vietnamese pullout from the Paris peace talks and accused the U.S. of lagging in its efforts to train and equip ARVN troops. A great deal will, of course, depend on the ARVN's willingness and ability to assume a greater share of the fighting. Despite the dangers, the risk seems worthwhile. Last fall, when the Communists pulled three divisions back across the DMZ, Averell Harriman for one was convinced that it was an earnest sign of Hanoi's eagerness to limit the fighting and that the U.S. should make a reciprocal move. The Johnson Administration, committed to a military victory, failed to probe the possibilities. This time, the Communists deny that there is a lull, but the stillness on the battlefield may yet prove more eloquent than their words.

THE LECTURE

Hear LTG Gavin predict in 1972 the condition of the world today!

VIDEO

AUDIO

www.library.ucsb.edu/speccoll

The Center for the Study of Democratic
Institutions Audio Archive

Program 569: Military Security Blankets

Army General James M. Gavin discusses his belief that the security of the United States no longer depends on weapons, armed forces, and holding areas of strategic value around the globe, but rather on less tangible factors such as the people's standard of living and the overall economic health of the nation. With Harry S. Ashmore, John Cogley, Sidney Holt, George McTurnan Kahin, Donald McDonald, and Robert Rosen. Mar. 10, 1972. [CSDI program number 569; UCSB tape number A8185/R7]
Listen: (28:30)
Download: Military Security Blankets (11.5 MB)

http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/audio/8000/a8185/cusb-a8185b.mp3

THE BOOK

CONTENTS

Preface Page...........1

Chapter I The Continuing Revolution..........7

Chapter II The Changed Nature of War and Strategy.......21

Chapter III Vietnam: History and Resolution.......39

Chapter IV World Affairs..........68

Chapter V The Human Environment-The City..........99

Chapter VI The Human Environment-The People..........143

Chapter VII A Commitment to Change..........173

PREFACE

Several years ago it seemed to me the quality of American life had begun to alter. We no longer faced and tried to understand our problems. Instead we hid from them in a variety of ways; and when they finally forced th,emselves on us, we had no answer but past solutions. In short, we were not living in the present.

I felt that the country had never faced a more dangerous and at the same moment a more challenging time.

That either we had to begin to try and solve the grievous ills that affected our society, understand the modern meaning of strategy and make this understanding manifest in our policies, or we would suffer critically. As our crisis continued, I began to consider ways in which I might do somethmg. Twice in the past I had written a book as one method of bringing solutions then relatively unknown before as wide a number of people as possible. Though occupied with a variety of other tasks, I kept the idea of a book in the back of my mind for about two years. By last summer it seemed to me that the need to speak out, to try to turn the country around, had become intense. I resolved to make the time to write a book. This decision made, I looked around for someone to help me.

About twenty years before, I had encountered an eager, young newspaper reporter in the E wing of the Pentagon. He was then writing on military affairs and for the "Periscope" page of Newsweek. I talked to him briefly and found it a fascinating experience. "Periscope" at that time was being troublesome to many in Washington. It had shown a facility for coming up week after week with a great deal of information that was closely held in Washington circles. The newspaperman was Arthur Hadley; and after I got to know him better I understood why "Periscope" was doing so well. He not only had a rare capacity to get the facts, but an unusual ability to analyze and on the basis of his analysis to anticipate what might be next.

I had just finished a course at our Nuclear Weapons School and had attended some tests in the Pacific; and had begun to have my first doubts about the growing reliance upon the "big bombs"; to solve all of our problems. It seemed to me that in a democracy the application of military force should be as flexible as democracy itself, and that in international affairs any punishment America meted out to an aggressor must be tailored to fit the crime. A Hitler would have found big bombs a fine exclusive weapon with which to solve all his problems; but the President of the United States needed a variety of solutions. I was a lonesome voice at that time, but I soon found intellectual company in Arthur Hadley, for he too shared my feelings about the sterility and inadequacy of "massive retaliation at a time and a place of our choosing." Later I served two years in NATO; and upon returning to

Washington I resumed my friendship with Hadley and spent many absorbing hours discussing the broad terms of national policy.

Our recent discussions have been on national strategy and the significance of Vietnam. Again we have found ourselves in almost complete agreement as to what should be done, both in America and abroad. We see Vietnam as poisoning our society at home and causing us to make serious mistakes in the conduct of our international affairs abroad. The Soviet penetration of the Middle East, the ill will in NATO over our Vietnam policy, our marginal ability to deal with situations that arise in other parts of the world, and our near paralysis before our domestic crisis, all relate to our Vietnam involvement. Since we had so often discussed these matters, I asked Hadley to work with me on the book.

This is that book.

In the preparation a great many others have generously contributed their time and thoughts. Many of these are presently in the government and asked that they be not mentioned. But while respecttng their wishes I would like nevertheless to thank them warmly. In Cambridge a number of people at Arthur D. Little, Incorporated, and at the Organization for Social and Technical Innovation have contributed to my knowledge of urban problems not only in the course of writing this book but over an extended period of time. Their learning and insight have been of great help. Peter Labovitz of ADL and Donald A. Schon of OSTI in particular aided in both the preparation and criticism of the manuscript. The Honorable Teodoro Moscoso, special adviser to the assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, has

generously taken time to guide me through the often neglected subject of Latin America.

In locating and researching the necessary facts both in libraries and on the ground, I have had the help of Maude Dorr, Nancy Hoepli and Kay Manion. Dorothy Littlefield typed the many drafts of the manuscript with speed and accuracy. I am most grateful to them all.

JAMES M. GAVIN
BOSTON, 1967

When a prominent figure produces a book in an election year, the suspicion often arises that the book is not his own. That he merely took some past speeches (perhaps ghost written themselves) and some clippings; and told someone to produce a book. This did not happen here; This is James Gavin's book. Those who have read his previous books and articles in magazines ranging from the Atlantic Monthly to the Saturday Review know he stands alone as both a thinker and a writer. I have merely tried to lift from him some of the pressures of time. The credit he so publicly gives me measures his generosity rather than my contribution. His kindness equals his legendary courage.

A. T. HADLEY
WEST TISBURY, 1967

Chapter I

THE CONTINUING REVOLUTION

America is in crisis. Two years ago when I first used ~ these words I found few who agreed with me.

Now talk of the American crisis rises everywhere. Some minimize it; some maximize it. Some claim we will get through easily, while others wring their hands and prophesy doom. A few even try to understand how we got here and why. But practically no one any longer denies that we have reached-- a critical period in our nationallife.

I believe we face choices unparalleled. in our history and that how we deal with our problems will have profound consequences for ourselves and the world. I hope that even those who disagree with one or more of my strategies and solutions will find their knowledge of America's present deepened by reading this book.

To find the issues behind our crisis is not difficult.

America's problems explode at us daily, not just secondhand but touch close in our lives. And their violence is unpleasant for all, fatal for some.

In the multitude of problems that concern us, two are most immediate: the war in Vietnam and the disintegration of our cities. Both these crises are desperate. In both, men die. The war in Vietnam would seem to be the more urgent because a military disaster there-either general defeat or escalation to total war-would so convulse the United States that the chance to solve the problems of our cities would vanish. But complex as the Vietnam problem is, it seems to me, for reasons this book will outline, to be the simpler of the two. At least the entrances to that labyrinth, the paths that need to be taken, are visible.

Customarily the disintegration of our cities and the war in Vietnam are viewed as two separate issues, and they are felt to stem from different causes. The only thread between them is believed to be the tragic one: they are happening to ourselves and at the same time. To me, however, they are both part of the same disturbing pattern of change which disarranges other portions of our lives. This change is the often cited but seldom understood "scientific revolution." By the scientific revolution I mean not only the new concepts and inventions themselves but their direct and indirect effect on our lives. Even as the Industrial Revolution dominated and shaped the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so the Scientific Revolution molds this present era. And our failure to master the far-reaching consequences of this revolution has created a world threatened by many ills, great and small-from the polluted air we breathe and the contaminated water we drink, the untested pills we swallow, the automobiles that choke our cities, the un-

employment caused by computers and automation, and the population explosions in a world already overcrowded, to the effect of atomic weapons and other new military concepts on our foreign and military policy. All around us the Scientific Revolution has created a wide gap between the world as it is and the world as we believe it to be. This distortion of our vision, this gap in our knowledge, makes it close to impossible for us to solve our problems. For they cannot be solved until they are seen and understood.

Because of this knowledge gap our crises take us by surprise, and we flail at their tentacles without understanding their basic causes. For example, we allow ourselves to believe that riots in our cities will be solved by shooting rioters or that the Vietnamese war can be ended by bombing North Vietnamese. Neither is true. Unless we understand the causes of our problems and their size we cannot take the necessary first steps toward their solution. As indeed too often we have not.

THE KNOWLEDGE GAP

Sometimes complex concepts are best approached by using simple illustrations. Here follow several small emergencies created by the scientific revolution. These happened because we were unprepared for the complexity of that revolution and could not see the obvious in front of us. These events are not as horrendous as the issues just mentioned; but they brought needless suffering and even death to an unfortunately large number

of people. And if we fail in the small things, how shall we handle the large? On March 18, 1967 the oil tanker Torrey Canyon ran on the rocks of Seven Stones Reef off Cornwall, England.

Into the ocean from the ship's broken hull poured 60,000 tons of fuel oil. The result was economic disaster for a wide area, not just in Great Britain but across the channel in France. Beaches were polluted, fishing industries all but destroyed, and the ecological balance of the ocean over a large area was profoundly altered.

Neither the scientific nor the industrial community, nor the governments of Britain and France had any solutions to offer other than hoping the wind would shift. (And praying for the wind to shift has ever been a precarious basis for human planning.) The Torrey Canyon disaster caused enormous damage. Yet the oil-carrying capacity of the Torrey Canyon, 120,000 tons, is small compared to other giants plying today's oceans with capacities of over 200,000 tons. And on the drawing board are vessels capable of carrying 500,000 plus tons. The opportunity for a major disaster was right there, sailing around, completely visible. The ship had been created by science and technology which invented and perfected the special metals, pumps, and navigational aides; and also created the economic organization and world markets that made the tanker desirable. Yet no one had foreseen the disaster. Or taken the necessary steps to mitigate the results of such a tanker breaking up.

In another area there is the disturbing story of deformities and deaths of infants resulting from the use of the tranquilizer thalidomide by pregnant women. Inves-

tigation made clear that the drug had been placed on the European market without proper testing. In the testimony that followed the uncovering of the causes of the tragedy the methods for the licensing of new drugs were shown to be inadequate, and though they have been improved subsequently, inadequacies remain. Yet the Scientific Revolution continues to flood the market with new drugs and other like products without thorough testing.

Yet another tragedy is in the making. Some dark, smoky day a great many people in one of our major cities, say New York or Los Angeles, are going to die of air pollution. Then everyone will scream for the villain, who, it will have to be admitted, will be ourselves.

And ahead lie even more difficult problems. For, as a recent editorial in the magazine Science pointed out, before long "...man may be able to program his own cells with synthetic information long before he will be able to assess adequately the long-term consequences of such alterations, long before he will be able to formulate goals, and long before he-can resolve the ethical and moral problems which will be raised."

FIRST CAUSES

To find the Scientific Revolution a major cause of both the Vietnamese war and our crumbling cities may seem far-fetched. But it is my firm belief that this basic theme, among others, links them both.

The Vietnamese war is a specific example of the general problem of limited war. And the whole nature,

possibilities, problems and dangers of limited war appeared with the scientific fact of the first nuclear explosion. With the advent of nuclear weapons the old Clausewitzian orthodoxy that war is a continuation of politics by other means has disappeared. Also, no longer true is the attractive idea that something shining and definite called "victory" can be achieved by destroying enough people and property. For since a nuclear holocaust must be avoided, it follows that a primary objective of both sides in a limited war should be to keep such a war limited. And this means limited in duration as well as in weapons used and area fought over.

The problem of our disintegrating cities is more complex. But a majority of the factors underlying urban unrest spring from our inability to understand and cope with the technological application of science to our society. The depressed urban Negro rightly feels closed out from our culture, for automation and mechanization have abolished even those unskilled jobs into which he had hitherto been segregated. And lacking education, and more importantly, the incentives of opportunity, he finds the technical skills that are the keys to the kingdom of affluence more and more difficult to acquire. At the same time such factors as food and data processing, rapid transport and communications, the need for all sections of our increasingly complex industrial society to live in close contact with each other, combine to accelerate the need and conditions for urban growth. Pile on top of this the population explosion resulting from the progress of medical and nutritional science and the

migration off the farm as the result of new chemical fertilizers and the mechanization of agriculture and you have some of the beginnings of the urban problem. Science and technology created this vast inhumanness. Now those same forces must be harnessed to humanize and make livable again the world around us. Marshall McLuhan has remarked: "Very few men look at the present with a present eye, they tend to miss the present by translating it into the past, seeing it through a rear-view mirror." This is all too true. We cannot, of course, determine where we are without some reference to the past. But we must view the past too with a present eye. And unfortunately, the more successful the past the greater the temptation to merely look in the mirror.

When business is prospering and military and foreign affairs are stable, as was the situation in the period between World War I and the depression or between Korea and Vietnam, the resistance to change is of course much greater than in a time of national emergency or grave social upheaval.

Look at the Social Revolution that took place in this country between 1932 and 1940-and at the social and economic chaos that preceded it. On March 4, 1933, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated, our nation was in dire straits. As historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. has described it: "The national income was less than half of what it had been four short years before. Nearly thirteen million Americans-about one-quarter of the labor force-were desperately seeking jobs. The machinery for sheltering and feeding the unemployed was breaking down everywhere under the

growing burden. And a few hours before, in the early morning before the inauguration every bank in America had locked its doors." The nation had taken the soundness of its institutions for granted for too long. Social change was urgently needed. And in that time of economic collapse people were willing to accept the fresh ideas, approaches and actions of the New Deal.

To say that we are in an equal crisis today is to understate our present problem by several orders of magnitude. In the words of the late President Kennedy: "It is the fate of this generation...to live with a struggle we did not start in a world we did not make. But the pressures of life are not always distributed by choice. And while no nation has ever faced such a challenge, no nation has ever been so ready to seize the burden and the glory of freedom." But even with ability to understand the processes and effects of the Scientific Revolution; to see where we are; we still are not guaranteed success. For not only are new social and political ideas scarce, but in equally desperate short supply is the ability to nourish them, to bring them about, translate them from words, graphs and figures into the hard framework of human reality. New ideas unfortunately do not flourish like radishes but have to be nurtured like orchids. With men and institutions by nature conservative and resistant to change, only the expert can make the new idea effective; see that it is not merely thought, but is used for the benefit of society. Machiavelli, no mean student of the process of change, expressed the problem in these words: "There is nothing more difficult to carry out, or more doubtful of success,

nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things." Politicians and people tend to leave well enough alone. Unfortunately neither in Vietnam nor our cities do we have a well enough that can be left alone. Either we find new ideas and use them or the Scientific Revolution will continue to push us into less understandable wars and an endless succession of long, hot summers, each more torrid than the last.

THE MANAGEMENT OF COMPLEXITY

But the outlook need not be one of total gloom. For Americans have developed the skills, techniques, and mental attitude necessary to solve their major problems once they see them clearly. In our giant industries, and in government too, we have'in part mastered the process of taking new developments or ideas and successfully controlling them. Economists have shown us that we have created a new form of organization, the gigantic corporation, one of whose functions is the handling of new ideas without the wild fluctuations of risk.

An epic in length and breadth, this documentary aims at nothing less than a full-scale portrait of the most dominant institution on the planet Earth in our lifetime--a phenomenon all the more remarkable, if not downright frightening, when you consider that the corporation as we know it has been around for only about 150 years. It used to be that corporations were, by definition, short-lived and finite in agenda. If a town needed a bridge built, a corporation was set up to finance and complete the project; when the bridge was an accomplished fact, the corporation ceased to be. Then came the 19th-century robber barons, and the courts were prevailed upon to define corporations not as get-the-job-done mechanisms but as persons under the 14th Amendment with full civil rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (i.e., power and profit)--ad infinitum.

The Corporation defines this endlessly mutating life-form in exhaustive detail, measuring the many ways it has not only come to dominate but to deform our reality. The movie performs a running psychoanalysis of this entity with the characteristics of a prototypical psychopath: a callous unconcern for the feelings and safety of others, an incapacity to experience guilt, an ingrained habit of lying for profit, etc. We are swept away on a demented odyssey through an altered cosmos, in which artificial chemicals are created for profit and incidentally contribute to a cancer epidemic; in which the folks who brought us Agent Orange devise a milk-increasing drug for a world in which there is already a glut of milk; in which an American computer company leased its systems to the Nazis--and serviced them on a monthly basis--so that the Holocaust could go forward as an orderly process.

The movie goes on too long, circles too many points obsessively and redundantly, and risks preaching-to-the-choir reductiveness by calling on the usual talking-head suspects--Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Moore. And except for an endlessly receding tracking shot in an infinite patents archive, there's scarcely an image worth recalling. Still, it maps the new reality. This is our world--welcome to it.

Part 1: 150 years ago there were no huge corporations which are an industrial-age creation mass-producing widgets and collecting massive pools of money to bribe politicians and corrupt government, the "nbad apple" excuse hides the fact that the totality is rotten, we rely on corporations to provide our social fabric then wonder why we are in a rotten mess

Part 2: post-Civil War explosion of corporations lead to their corrupt lawyers to pervert the law to make the corporation to be considered a "person", a total lie to exploit the 14th Amendment written for freed human slaves--not inanimate objects, Supreme Court and judges obviously bribed by the corporations

Part 3: Corporations only seek to make money for share holders, no social responsibility, has psychology of a sociopath, workers in sweat ships in third world working for slave wages

Part 4: corporate fucks poison people with chemicals, no one goes to prison, 1 out of every 2 men and 1 out of every 3 women get cancer in their lifetimes

Part 5: societies under delusion they are flying but really are hurtling towards destruction; Corporations have the psychology of psychopaths

Part 6: we are killing the planet with our factories

Part 7: Medieval society at least respected the land as stewards of God, privatization of land leads to rape of the land, corporate take-over of all functions of life means tyranny of corrupt profit-motive psychopaths who will kill us all as they profit racketeer, corporations target kids to nag parents to buy products

Part 8: corporations brain-wash consumers that they are benevolent patrons to glorious lifestyles

Part 9: undercover marketing

Part 10: asshole corporations are trying to claim patents on DNA

Part 11: Fox (fascist) news covers up Monsanto milk drugging story, news is what we say it is, tried to silence journalists with hush money

Part 12: IBM murders concentration camp victims with punch card machines they LEASED, Butler refuses to over-throw FDR

Part 13: corporations not loyal to anyone but stock holders, superficial gestures to appease the public not real social responsibility and actions, Kathy Lee Gifford boohoo about her stuff made in sweat shops

Part 14: corporations can be destroyed by state governments

Part 15: current industrial age is going to kill the planet, need renewalable way of life using renewable energy

America excels in its ability to manage and organize complexity, and more than any other nation it has developed the new skills necessary to handle the problems of the second half of this century. This is what gives me hope. If we can understand our problems and face them, I am certain we can help ourselves. Generals who find in their military experience analogies to civilian problems are often suspect. Be that as it may,

I believe the creation of American Airborne forces, with which I was intimately associated during World War II, indicates ways in which we can handle many of our problems today.

The United States began the experiment of dropping men and weapons by parachute in 1923. But during the lean peacetime years progress was slow. In the summer of 1940 the first experimental parachute platoon (less than fifty men) was organized. I was teaching tactics at West Point at the time and it seemed to me that the tactics of the blitzkrieg and the use of an ever-larger scale of armored formations would not be enough, and that we would have to find a new dimension of warfare. I therefore obtained an assignment with the parachute troops, and after qualifying as a jumper was put in charge of plans, training, and the development of doctrine for this new type of force.

It was a good place to be. For under the stress of war the military establishment was desperately looking for new ideas and doctrines, but there were many who did not give the airborne much of a future. I was told at one time that the United States would never use more than a few platoons of Paratroopers because there would never be enough airfields to launch anything so large as a division. Yet three years later, as senior airborne adviser to General Eisenhower prior to D-Day, I was planning the landing of three airborne divisions for the night before and in the early hours of D-Day. And by the war's end we had five airborne divisions, an airborne corps and the First Allied Airborne Army.

After the war in the course of a conversation with a high-ranking Russian parachute officer in Berlin I asked why the Russians had not used their airborne troops on a more major scale and in a more decisive way. He replied that they just had never found it possible to organize fully all the men, airplanes, and vehicles necessary for massive operations. I then realized that our greatest achievement had not been the development of a new concept but the technique of management. We knew from the beginning that we wanted our units to be decisive, to operate as large, well-managed forces. We had to solve problems of communications, new tactical procedures, develop new aircraft, devise new troop formations and weapons. But above all we had to coordinate all this, and to develop an organization to adapt and direct the new science and technology.

It struck me then that the type of planning and management that we were doing in the Army was new-new both in its scope and diversity and in its pioneering use of the latest scientific advice and equipment, such as systems analysis, operational research, data control. Since there was no word to describe what we were doing, I privately gave it the name technoplanning. In later years, dealing with private industry, I found that the major corporations were also engaging in technoplanning. And recently Professor John Kenneth Galbraith has brilliantly identified a whole vast stratum of America as the "Technostructure," the chief business of which is the preparation and execution of complex plans.

The ability to handle large problems is abundantly present here in America. But first, I repeat, we must recognize and understand the problems. This book was written in response to the interest generated by some of the solutions to certain current American problems that I have proposed in books, articles and in testimony before Congress. I make no claim in a book this size to total wizardry. Nor does it take twenty-twenty vision to see that America has some major problems and note what they are. But it seems to me that very few people have been looking at our cities, our military establishment, the war in Vietnam, our pockets of poverty and our race relations in a true way. Few hafe seen them as part of a new rapidly changing system created by the scientific revolution. I have tried to see our present crises not through a glass darkly, but face to face. In offering a few strategies to get us turned around and to deal with our crisis in a modern, scientific way, I hope I can influence people to make the commitment to change now. We should not fear change. It is pointless to. For in this period, change will occur at an increasing rate. If we look around us we can see clear evidence of this already. What we must fear is that our situation will change for the worse-in Vietnam or our cities-and we, apathetic or not understanding why, will be unable to reverse the processes of deterioration.

There are many things we should be doing to make certain that we control this future, that it does not merely burst on us like an unforecast hurricane. To take a specific instance, I am greatly concerned that we have no cabinet

secretary for science. There is no one with prestige and statutory authority, not merely to distribute the evergrowing federal funds going into research, but to exercise some direction and control over that research-and equally important, to anticipate our needs and initiate new research. For all our problems presently occur in the context of the scientific frontier-just as in the nineteenth century they occurred in the context of the physical frontier. If we handle our natural resources wisely-especially the abilities and brains of our people-then the scientific revolution in its most beneficial sense will serve both our domestic and foreign interests. If we waste our resources-waste the abilities of any portion of our people-then all our other problems will multiply.

Our future in this period of expanding knowledge and technology is at least as challenging as when our physical fronrier moved west. Only this time there is no peaceful eastern seaboard to which we can retreat.

We are all pioneers. As a nation now, we are as homesteaders then. Either we master the environment around us or we succumb. Fortunately, men are responsIve to challenge. Indeed, as Toynbee has pointed out and anthropologists have documented, man does best when confronted by a degree of challenge.

These lines by Walt Whitman have always seemed to me to describe the times in which I have found myself.

Long, too long America Traveling roads all even and peaceful you learned from joys and prosperity only.

But now, ah now, to learn from the crisis of anguish, advancing, grappling with direct fate and recoiling not.

Chapter II

THE CHANGED NATURE OF WAR AND STRATEGY

I would rather that the organization of this book placed the chapters on America's urban crisis and the human environment before those on strategy, war and Vietnam. In complexity, difficulty and danger to ourselves I believe our domestic crisis is our most important problem.

Yet Vietnam is a roadblock in both our thoughts and national energies. We seem unable to give solutions to our domestic problems more than lip service until we have begun a resolution of that war. Therefore it seemed wise to deal first with the specific problem of Vietnam.

And since Vietnam is a special example of war in general and limited war in particular, it cannot be understood without some idea of how warfare has been profoundly altered by nuclear energy-another aspect of the scientific revolution.

Before analyzing war and strategy in the nuclear age, I want to make one point totally clear. I am not advocating war of any size as a means of settling national disputes. Indeed, as my public testimony and writing show, I have been struggling all my life to see that wars did not happen-and if they did happen, that they were isolated rapidly, kept limited, and held to where they could be settled by diplomacy.

A psychiatrist helps a human being to lead a whole life by examining with him the dark side of his nature. In such a spirit it is sometimes necessary to examine war. For if we do not understand the nature of strategy and war in the post-nuclear age, peace and national greatness will escape us no matter how earnestly we wish for them. There is no use searching for peace with the wrong tools in the wrong place.

War, science and organization have always gone hand in hand. Indeed food gathering, religion and war would appear to be man's three oldest collective undertakings.

Religious History In 2 minutes

No matter whether the war was just or unjust, important or trivial, to those involved in that moment of history the battle seemed vital. They strained their social organization to the uttermost to achieve victory.

WARFARE IN HISTORY

From the rough charge of clan and tribe, through phalanx, cavalry sweeps, and blockading naval squadrons, to price controls, materials allocation, surtaxes, and total mobilization, man has structured and ordered his society and military forces for battle in units of ever-increasing size and complexity. At the same time he has turned to science to give him weapons of ever-greater strength. Iron swords to break the bronze, animal sinews to hud weapons further than thrown stones. Archimedes harnessing the sun's energy through lenses to fire the Roman ships at Syracuse. Iron gave way to steel, oil replaced coal, Greek fire was dwarfed by gunpowder, gunpowder yielded to TNT, still the scientists searched on for new sources of energy that would increase the killing power of their particular side.

Finally, using the knowledge and tools provided by the scientific revolution, scientists generated here on earth the explosive power comparable to that taking place on the sun itself. The' search had finally ended. The theoretical limits of destructive power had been reached. New ways might be found to place the nuclear explosive on target more efficiently; engineering and chemical refinements might slightly increase the power of a bomb of a given weight. But such improvements are relative compared to the quantum jump in destructive power from TNT to nuclear fusion. Before, we thought in pounds. Now mankind has learned a new word: "megatons."

When "Thin Boy," the first nuclear weapon, was detonated over Hiroshima at 8:15 A.M., August 6, 1945, the world changed. Many have said this. Only a few have thought and acted on the implications of the change. The scientists who developed the bomb had forecast accurately the nature of the explosion that would occur.

But even they had but dimly envisioned the changes in warfare and diplomacy that were to follow. And the reactions of generals, admirals, diplomats and politicians to nuclear weapons were confused, slow and unfortunately often uninformed and wrong. And I question how much we understand the psychological changes that must have occurred in mankind as a result of living under the threat of nuclear extinction.

by politics and diplomacy. If the nation had miscalculated or its adversaries refused to back down, then the nation went to war. This is of course an oversimplification, but in outline it is correct.

From this scheme of things rose two basic postulates of strategy and warfare. Both of these still dominate much of our thinking, though both have been proved invalid since Hiroshima. Before the nature of modern strategy can be outlined and the needs and dangers of modern warfare understood, it is necessary to examine and refute these two myths.

The first of these is the oft-repeated dictum of the German military strategist Karl von Clausewitz that war is a continuation of politics by other means. In the Clausewitzian orthodoxy war is seen as a definite state of affairs apart from the life of a nation. There is peace. And there is war. The two are distinct. In war, power is applied until one or the other nation yields. Then the world reverts to a period of peace. Diplomacy and statecraft once again become the paramount strategy for adjusting disputes.

I believe that by now most thoughtful people recognize as obsolete for our time this simplistic view of peace and war as two distinct times in a nation's life. There is economic war, cold war, espionage, guerrilla war, limited war, the war of ideas, etc. The "war" we came close to at the time of the Cuban missile crisis is vastly different from the war we now fight in Vietnam; A nation faces challenges to its power and exerts its influence on others in a variety of shifting ways. War and peace blend.

THE NUCLEAR AGE

Before Hiroshima, war and strategy were comparatively stereotyped and simple in character. The building blocks of national power were understandable entities: so many battleships, so many metric tons of steel production, so many divisions in the field, so many in the reserve, this nation and that nation bound by ties of blood and alliance. Nations who coveted what others had, or wanted to regain what they believed was rightfully theirs, made treaties, fabricated the latest weapons, mobilized and maneuvered their fleets and divisions. All this was national strategy. If a nation was successful in its strategy its adversaries gave in and it obtained its way

Strategy is complex. We do not suddenly shift gears and go from being at "peace" to driving all out for "victory." We no longer have then a distinct state of war or any definite boundary between war and peace. Rather we have a long and continuous spectrum of national life in which peace merges imperceptibly into war and war itself slowly escalates to total nuclear holocaust.

Having understood this, we can now examine the second, even more pervasive myth. The second myth holds that the proper way for a nation to prosecute the distinct state of war, i.e., to wage war, is to throw all the power it has at the enemy, including nuclear weapons, until the enemy gives in. "There is no substitute for victory" is a popular slogan used by those who think in these pre-nuclear-age terms.

This view springs from the incorrect assumption that war is a part of national life distinct from peace. But far more seriously, it imperils us all because it stems from the failure to understand the change in warfare brought about by nuclear weapons.

The truth of the nuclear age is-and we may all sleep easier because more and more people are coming to understand this truth-that both we and the Soviet Union possess the power to totally destroy each other.

Experts may quibble about whether the degree of destruction will be 83 per cent or 92 per cent depending on the weather pattern at H-hour, the height of burst and who struck first. I am reasoniably expert in this field myself, and I am willing to stand behind the adjective "total" in describing the destruction both we and the Soviets could visit upon the other. The colossal might of thermonuclear weapons, plus the very effectiveness of both the strategic air force and strategic missile systems, prevents their use in other than total war. War is violent and volatile. At any moment, even if both sides are trying to keep the war limited, it may escalate sharply toward nuclear holocaust. With the threat of such total destruction ever present it follows that the primary task of the military should be to keep any wars that may occur as limited as possible-and this means limited in time also, something the Vietnamese war has not been. And a primary responsibility of American political leaders should be: first, to provide the guidelines under which the military can limit the war, and second, through rigorous diplomatic negotiation to provide the means by which the war can be ended.

In summary then, we live in a world where "peace," "war," and "total war" merge imperceptibly into each other. Nations now apply their power throughout the world in a variety of ways, from feeding the starving to shooting bullets. With the threat of nuclear destruction ever present both politician and Soldier should strive to sharply limit any such wars as may occur. Within the limits the war may be violent. Both Korea and Vietnam have seen plenty of dying. But to prevent escalation to total nuclear war the limits must be understood and maintained.

With these two myths cleared away we can now examine the changed nature of strategy.

STRATEGY TODAY

industry and thus pursue their strategy of independence.

In the realm of economic strategy I find the fall of Premier Khrushchev highly significant. Khrushchev's failure was not in the Cuban missile crisis. That was a small tactical error from which, after his defeat by President Kennedy, he recovered quickly. His basic failure was his inability to make good on his challenge to the United States: "Let us compete in the realm of trade and we will see who wins." He set his country lofty goals in economic growth, crop production, consumer goods. He promised lavish economic aid around the world. In all of these aims he fell short. And the world knew it. Similarly the economic failure of China's "great leap forward" and the excess of Mao Tse-tung's Cultural Revolution have as much if not more to do with her declining influence among her neighbors than the presence of a U.S. fleet in Asiatic waters.

I believe it follows from this that the efficiency of our economy at home will have as much effect on our position in the world as anything else that we do. I do not wish to sound materialistic or isolationist and imply that a lavish supply of domestic goods is everything.

Side Bar: THE TRAP

Episode 1: Fuck you, buddy

What Happened To Our Dream Of Freedom?

Individual freedom is the dream of our age. It's what our leaders promise to give us, it defines how we think of ourselves and, repeatedly, we have gone to war to impose freedom around the world. But if you step back and look at what freedom actually means for us today, it's a strange and limited kind of freedom.

Politicians promised to liberate us from the old dead hand of bureaucracy, but they have created an evermore controlling system of social management, driven by targets and numbers. Governments committed to freedom of choice have presided over a rise in inequality and a dramatic collapse in social mobility. And abroad, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the attempt to enforce freedom has led to bloody mayhem and the rise of an authoritarian anti-democratic Islamism. This, in turn, has helped inspire terrorist attacks in Britain. In response, the Government has dismantled long-standing laws designed to protect our freedom.

The Trap is a series of three films by Bafta-winning producer Adam Curtis that explains the origins of our contemporary, narrow idea of freedom.

It shows how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today's idea of freedom. This model was derived from ideas and techniques developed by nuclear strategists during the Cold War to control the behaviour of the Soviet enemy.

Mathematicians such as John Nash developed paranoid game theories whose equations required people to be seen as selfish and isolated creatures, constantly monitoring each other suspiciously -- always intent on their own advantage.

This model was then developed by genetic biologists, anthropologists, radical psychiatrists and free market economists, and has come to dominate both political thinking since the Seventies and the way people think about themselves as human beings.

However, within this simplistic idea lay the seeds of new forms of control. And what people have forgotten is that there are other ideas of freedom. We are, says Curtis, in a trap of our own making that controls us, deprives us of meaning and causes death and chaos abroad.

Part 1: Global consumerism "freedom", expanding the power of corporate elites. Economist Hayek says individual consumer self-interests should drive economies, Cold War game theory by RAND

Part 2: people only driven by self-interest, this can then be exploited, Hollywood-glorified RANDster John Nash's "Fuck You, Buddy" game, says balance point can be achieved where everyone gets what they want, The Prisoner's Dilemma, everyone wins if everyone is selfish so they can adjust their behaviors, if someone cooperates unpredictability reigns, the sucker pay-off you lose everything, "Nash Equilibrium" subsidizes Hayek's free-for-all

Part 3: Laing's theories of freedom, Family is first social institution where power and tyranny are exerted, he analyzed a group of families to see how they used game theory to manipulate eachother, authoritarian parents, public duty damned as hypocrisy and unworkable

Part 4: no agreed view of what the public good is everyone game theoried against each other,

Part 5: healthy people went to mental hospitals feigning illness and all were declared mentally ill and not allowed to leave to feed the racket in the THUD experiment, only released when they said they were ill but getting better. Mad, they said send some more fakes! Experiment director agreed, then hospitals said they caught 41 phonies. Experimentor said he sent no one! Psychiatry gives up trying to understand and cure mental illness! decides to just label symptoms!

Part 6: politicians who are zealots cannot be bought off by monetary greed, dark pessimistic view of human nature is greed alone

But the ability of our economy to continue to cope successfully with the complexities of the scientific revolution and provide an increasingly better standard of living for all our people will have a major effect on our standing as a world power.

Science-technology

This combined field is vital in the struggle among nations for strategic dominance. Again, I do not refer to the effect alone, great though it is, of science and technology on weapons production,

What is strategy? Strategy is the way a nation applies its power to maintain its existence in the world. A wise nation keeps its strategy as peaceful as possible, not only because war is wasteful and often self-defeating, but also because, in the words of the Eddic bard, "When the outcome goes to the sword's edge, fate's slippery." And he sang long before the possibility of thermonuclear immolation.

In this post-nuclear age I see four main elements of strategy: economics, science-technology, ideas and finally military power. I would like to examine each of these briefly. To those who are experts in the field I apologize for the brevity of this outline, which however may be generally useful because the subject is still little understood. And knowledge is essential If we are to debate our national problems intelligently.

Economics

The industrial base of a nation, the ability of a people to organize production efficiently and make weapons, has been recognized as an important element of national power long before the Romans fought for Cornwall's tin. But in recent decades economics has had a more direct effect on strategy. Through foreign aid, disaster relief and international trade, America makes other nations conscious of her power. The economic slogan of the eighteenth century was "trade followed the flag"; in our age, the flag follows trade. The emerging nations realize this full well; so they desperately search for loans and credits with which to build heavy

Sidebar: THE TRAP

EPISODE #3 - We Will Force You To Be Free

The final programme focussed on the concepts of positive and negative liberty introduced in the 1950s by Isaiah Berlin. Curtis briefly explained how negative liberty could be defined as freedom from coercion, and positive liberty as the opportunity to strive to fulfill one's potential. Tony Blair had read Berlin's essays on the topic, and wrote to him [4] in the late 1990s, arguing that positive and negative liberty could be mutually compatible. He never received a reply, as Berlin was on his deathbed.

The program began with a description of the Two Concepts of Liberty, reviewing Berlin's opinion that, since it lacked coercion, negative liberty was the 'safer' of the two. Curtis then explained how many political groups who sought their vision of freedom ended up using violence to achieve it.

In essence, the programme suggested that following the path of negative liberty to its logical conclusions, as governments have done in the West for the past 50 years, resulted in a society without meaning populated only by selfish automatons, and that there was some value in positive liberty in that it allowed people to strive to better themselves.

The closing minutes directly state that if western humans were ever to find their way out of the "trap" described in the series, they would have to realise that Isaiah Berlin was wrong and that not all attempts at creating positive liberty necessarily ended in coercion and tyranny.

Part 1: Berlin warns against the schoolmaster approach, two types of freedom, negative seems lesser of two evils

Part 2: wars of liberation to get negative liberty, Sartre's existentialistic "freedom", terrorism against the ruling class justified?, Pol Pot massacred all middle class people to try to get clean slate,

Part 3: Kissinger backing of brutal dictators in order to contain communism, neocons think we should instead expand negative freedom at gunpoint to roll-back communism, armed struggle + bureaucratic Shia islam = freedom? wtfo?, Reagen neocons export sham democracy (like in Iraq today), a falsade placebo for the people

Part 4: Reagen admin lying about Sandanistas having chemo weapons from Sovs etc., liberal democracy hubris, Soviet collapse results in economic collapse

Part 5: Yeltsin restores order by force, corporations owned by racketeers have Yeltsin in hock, Putin takes charge, imprisons the robber barons, negative consumerism liberty failed in Russia, neocons back in power lying to America to get them to war

Part 6: Bremer fires all capable people like Pol Pot did except without murdering them to get clean slate, country given over to foreign corporations to be governed, massive corruption, typical falsade democracy like during Reagen era, no social contract, rebellion began, we become the French and start torturing/coercion, pre-emptive war manifests as pre-emptive crime arrests, our so-called freedom aka consumersim is not going to hack it in the future

but to the other ways in which science-technology influences our national power. Perhaps the most dramatic of these is the space race. There are some who protest that the space race is an area of competition we should stay out of. However, the boost to Russian prestige when the Soviets orbited the first satellite, and our own elation when John Glenn circled the earth or when the first close-up views of Mars were radioed back, should convince all but the most confirmed opponents of the program that we should be in the race to stay. In the space race the various elements of national strategy merge, as they so often do. If we manage our economy wisely we should be able to continue our foreign aid, increase our affluence at home, attack the problems in our cities, and still provide the economic base for our scientific-technical competition in space. Of course, in part our economic growth rests upon the proper application of science and technology to industry.

We must realize that for both the developed nations of Europe and the emerging nations around the globe our scientific-technological skill is at the same time a source of strength and a threat. Europeans grow emotional on the subject of the "brain drain" (as more and more of their scientists leave for America) and the technological dominance of the United States. I believe their fears are exaggerated, but we should be aware that they exist. We must wisely export our skills in sciencetechnology so that other nations can build up pools of talent of their own. At the same time we should at home do far more than at present to make certain science-

technology is used not merely to produce new goods at random but to achieve a better society through improved education, nutrition and medical care-in short, an ever-expanding human environment.

Recently, I read in the Paris newspaper Le Monde a rather plaintive query that translates roughly as: "Why is it that man has been able to produce explosives on the scale of 25 pounds of TNT for every human being, but still has been unable to provide for everyone 25 pounds of rice or grain?" I am convinced that the nation first able to aid the world in producing 2 5 pounds of rice or grain for every man will find itself a far greater world power than the nation that adds another 25 pounds of TNT per person to the already overly large world stockpile of destruction.

Ideas

The third ingredient of a nation's strategy is the effective power of a nation's ideas. By the power of its ideas I mean not only the thinking and production of a nation's philosophers, poets, artists and statesmen, but also the success with whicn the society realizes for everyone the values in whiSh it claims to believe. We say we stand for freedom, law, orderly change, equality under God; and I believe we do. But the denial of equal rights and opportunities to one section of our people, the riots in our cities, the ever-spreading urban blight, our high level of unemployment and poverty and our strategic bombing of North Vietnam are at least as much a part of our national image as our ideas.

Perhaps we can see our situation in better perspective if we consider how the prestige and power of Communist China have been affected by the recent purges

and actions of the Red Guards. The Red Chinese claim to be the wave of the future; they continually proclaim to the new nations of the world that they are the society best organized for orderly progress from underdevelopment to national greatness. Their mastery of the process of nuclear fission greatly added to their power. Chinese, as distinct from Russian, Communism was becoming a growing force in Latin America and also in certain sections of Africa. But the purges and excesses of Mao, the antics of the Red Guards and the dislocation of the economic and intellectual life of the nation have decreased Chinese influence. Nations formerly aligned with China, such as Indonesia, have broken away. The obvious gap between claim and reality has greatly diminished Red China as, an international power.

Only the self-deluding can deny that when we engage in a war or use tactics in a war about which most of our allies have grave doubts, or when large sections of our society are on public view as not benefiting from our prosperity, our prestige and power throughout the world are lessened in exactly the same way as the excesses of Maoism reduce the prestige of China. It is undeniably true we have the power to turn North Vietnam into "a parking lot," as certain extremists have recently advocated. But far from solving any problem such an action would leave us alone in the world feared, distrusted, without friends. In short, such an extreme solution is not only morally repugnant; it would gravely diminish rather than increase our national power. To understand modem strategy is to recognize this conclusion as established beyond doubt. I believe further that

each escalation by the President of the strategic bombing of North Vietnam actually decreases U.S. power in the world.

The power of ideas, a third facet of national strategy, has gained importance only recently. Before telecommunications, jet travel, radio and television, ideas spread slowly. In the past, little was often known about what was actually happening inside a foreign country. But the generation of scientists that developed "The Bomb" also made communication by satellite possible. Demosthenes remarked, "I can control a crowd as far as I can throw a stone and cast my voice." As a result of the scientific revolution we can, as it were, cast stones into global orbit and a man's voice and actions can be projected instantaneously into every corner of the world. With this instant communication from and to all parts of the world the strategic importance of the power of ideas tool a quantum jump.

"He who desires to reform the government of a state, and wishes to have it accepted and capable of maintaining itself to the satisfaction of everybody, must at least retain the semblance of old forms; so that it may seem to the people that there has been no change in the institutions, even though they are entirely different from the old ones. For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often even more influenced by the things that seem than those that are"

--Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Chapter XXV

To the extent that we repair our social fabric so that all participate equally, to die extent that we abolish poverty, to the extent tbat we provide a climate in which artistic and intellectual commitment flourishes, we will have added to the power of ideas in our national strategy. And like scientific knowledge this power is no less immense for being intangible.

Military Power

So we come to the final ingredient of American strategy: the military might of our nation.

Many still consider armed force to be the sole element of that strategy. I hope I have been persuasive enough in showing this is not so. I do not mean in the confines of this chapter to go into the tactical complexities of mili-

tary power any more than I. have dealt fully with economics, science, or ideas as they relate to strategy. Again my purpose here is to delineate only the broad outlines of the nature of post-Hiroshima military power, which perhaps is more misunderstood than any other aspect of our national strategy.

In my attempt to dispose of the myth that the correct way for a nation to "wage war" is to use against its adversary all the power it possesses, including nuclear weapons, I stressed that both the United States and Russia now have ample nuclear arms to. destroy each other-no matter who strikes first. From such a "thermonuclear exchange," to lapse into technical language, the damage would be, to say the least, vast and awesome.

There is one chance out of three that the fallout from our attack on Russia would cause well over 70 per cent casualties in countries as far west as Great Britain. Nations downwind to the south, such as India, would suffer even more heavily, while the Russian attack on the United States would contaminate huge areas of Latin America.

Someday, through greed or miscalculation, nuclear weapons may be used. This is why certain forms of arms control are so all-important. To deter an adversary from using nuclear weapons against us it is vitally necessary that we keep in our strategic arsenal the latest and most sophisticated weapons and counter weapons. As much as possible these weapons should be designed so that whatever enemies we may have realize we do not intend to use our weapons to strike first. But we intend to and will respond massively and lethally

against any nuclear "Pearl Harbor" upon ourselves. But, and I reiterate this important point, the very might, accuracy and destructive power of these nuclear weapons make them unsuitable for anything less than total war. Neither we nor our enemies dare to risk an all-oUt nuclear counter attack by being the first to employ nuclear weapons in areas where a vital national selfinterest is not threatened. The Berlin blockade, the Korean War, the Lebanese crisis and the Cuban missile crisis-all of these challenges to America have been met and solved without a nuclear exchange. None but the fanatic can be dissatisfied with an outcome so obviously beneficial to all mankind.

Our strategic nuclear weapons exist to deter nuclear war. As such they are kept ready but sheathed except in the most extreme crises. They are as unsuited to limited war as a tank is to killing a mosquito. We have devoted a great deal of money, scientific skill and military talent to our strategic nuclear force since the explosion over Hiroshima, both in the Air Force and in the Navy, and to some extent (air defense) in the Army.

While there are certain areas in which I would shift the emphasis I can state unhesitatingly that our strategic nuclear force is reliable, effective and ready.

LIMITED WAR

Now we turn to an entirely different area: limited war.

Beneath the broad umbrella of nuclear power America faces the possibility of many limited challenges. These

will range all the way from striqent propaganda or economic boycott, through guerrilla war and subversion, to such bruising confrontations as the Cuban missile crisis or Korea. To meet such less-than-total challenges we need a flexible military establishment to wage lessthan-total wars. For such a force we have been niggardly in our expenditures, haphazard in our science, and we have frustrated those of military talent who have tried to wrestle with the problem. We still do not have the forces necessary to fight such wars quickly, in precisely defined areas, and at minimum cost in life and treasure. What is wanted is a force capable of making the punishment fit the crime. Or, in the language of the tactician, applying power adequate to contain the threat. The absence of a truly modern, limited-war capability both makes more likely the possibility of general nuclear war. When we cannot fight a war successfully within limits we are pressed to escalate dangerously; and this in turn makes more difficult intelligent debate on such issues as Vietnam.

Another problem is that the concepts and terms involved in the problem of limited war are not generally understood. For example there is much discussion in America about "a bombing pause." This discussion is confused because the general term "bombing" covers a variety of special military situations. There is the strategic bombing of North Vietnam to which, for reasons detailed in the next chapter, I am totally opposed. There is the strategic bombing of South Vietnam about which I have grave moral and military doubts. There is the interdiction bombing of South Vietnam, much of which I believe

necessary. Finally, there is tactical bombing and close air support, both of which I consider essential so long as ground combat continues. Enough. I have merely cited one incomplete example to show the complexity of the issue. Finally, in this discussion of military tactics it is important to refer back to our overall view of strategy and reiterate that there is no dividing line between war and peace. Just because we fight a limited war, other aspects of strategy do not stop. During the Korean war, for example, skilled diplomacy utilizing the power of the ideas for which we then fought rallied to our cause the support of the United Nations. Even neutralist India sent a hospital unit to Korea. This U.N. presence added to our strength far above and beyond mere units of firepower. And now, in contrast, the almost total lack of such support in Vietnam makes it more difficult for us to bring the war to a successful conclusion.

If we have a society that men believe in and if we are doing our utmost to produce the 25 pounds of rice or wheat for each person in the world, then governments under threat of attack, if forced to call on us for military assistance, will do so with confidence. Their people will welcome us, even as we were welcomed during World War II by the occupied countries of Europe and later in Korea. Before we have fired a single shot we will be close to the sucessful outcome of the battle.

The goal of strategy is peace. Not peace at any price but the peace that comes through mature and thoughtful utilization of our vast power. We must understand

modern strategy, the many facets of our power and the myth-shattering complexities of war in the post-Hiroshima age. Then we can continue our domestic growth, conduct our foreign affairs with a reasonable amount of wisdom and help those who voluntarily ask us for economic or technical aid in the solution of their problems. If we continue in ignorance, we shall expend our nation's wealth and men in never-ending conflicts about the globe. Further we will neglect what must be done at home to achieve within our own society its full potential. And we will reap the wrath and anger of both those we have neglected at home and those we incorrectly believe we aid abroad. Having considered in this all too brief detail the changed nature of modern strategy and war, let us now turn to Vietnam.

Chapter III

VIETNAM: HISTORY AND RESOLUTION

Vietnam is the least understood conflict in our nation's history. America has committed over 460,000 troops and the might of our air and sea power. We have fought skillfully and bravely. Yet "victory" is nowhere in sight. Will more troops bring a quicker victory? Do we need more air strikes? These are questions that all Americans ask. Our course of action [COA] would be simple if the answer were an easy Yes. But unfortunately there will be no "victory" in Vietnam. Only more victims. This is the difficult and unfortunate truth we have yet to understand. To see the Vietnam problem we must first trace briefly the history of our involvement there and then set Vietnam in the context of our present military and diplomatic capabilities. When we have done that, while we may not gain "victory" through a clearer view of the situation we

can at least plan toward a successful conclusion of the war.

Before beginning this study of the Vietnamese situation, I want to make one point absolutely clear. On the level of combat on the battlefield Vietnam is the best-fought war in our history. Thanks to a substantial base of experienced training personnel in the United States, our young men enter the combat zone more battle-ready than in previous wars. Morale is helped by the fact that ground combat troops are returned to the United States after a specific number of days in Vietnam. Unlike their predecessors in World War II, they know they will not have to stay in combat until they are killed or wounded-or until the war is brought to an end. I have watched officers and non-coms leading the troops in the field and they are highly professional.

Americans, whatever they think of the conflict, can be proud of these Soldiers and their dedication to the task at hand. Under the most difficult and dangerous circumstances these Soldiers have proved that they are every bit as brave, patriotic, and hard working as their forefathers in uniform. Being of the beatnik or hippie generation has not diminished their qualities as Americans; rather, I am inclined to think, it has added to them. Let no debate on Vietnam divide us from the knowledge of our Soldiers' courage: The errors of this tragic war are made, not on the battlefield, but in Washington.

My own involvement with Vietnam began in 1954. I was then Chief of Plans of the Army, serving under Matthew B. Ridgway, the Chief of Staff. I knew Ridgway and had served with him in the past. He is a man

of incisive intelligence and great moral courage-in brief, a good man to work for.

At that time in 1954 the French were involved in the defense of Dien Bien Phu. They had chosen to defend this isolated fortified area in an effort to provoke the Vietminh into a major battle in which the Communist troops could be destroyed. But it was clear by then that the battle was not going as the French planned; and they were making tremendous demands on the United States for war material. Vietnam was already becoming a swamp-ridden jungle Moloch with an insatiable appetite for aircraft, arms, ammunition and other military supplies.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff had been doubtful about the Dien Bien Phu strategy from the beginning. Our military adviser in Saigon, Major General Thomas Trapnell, had never thought well of the scheme. I myself had felt that genuine French concessions to make Vietnam independent was far more important in the situation than mere firepower. As the situation at Dien Bien Phu worsened, the French in desperation asked us for carrier strikes against the Communists attacking the fortified area. Admiral Arthur W. Radford, a strong advocate of carrier air power, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was in favor of such a U.S. military action. So were Chief of Staff of the Air Force Nathan F. Twining and Chief of Naval Operations Robert B. Carney. There was even talk of using one or two nuclear weapons. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles sounded out our allies on their reaction to such a U.S. air attack. Forntunately

General Ridgway refused to bend in his opposition to this "quickie" solution. He believed that the air attacks would be indecisive and further that they would lead to American ground troops being involved in Indochina. We in the Army felt that to fight on the ground in Indochina alongside the French was a war America did not want.

Though under tremendous pressure to conform, Ridgway refused to endorse the majority view. Instead he carried his disagreement over the air strike, or "split" as it is known in Pentagonese, up to the President. I am convinced that Ridgway's determined opposition plus that of our allies was crucial in aborting this early effort to involve us in Vietnam. I well remember my feeling of relief when President Eisenhower's decision went against the strike. A feeling that was regrettably brief.

VIDEO: Dien Bien Phu, Legendary French combat commander LTC Marcel Biegard leads counter-attacks with M24 Chaffee light tanks to clear VietMinh anti-aircraft guns for resupply aircraft to drop safely, good technique but not enough to overcome bad concept of operation (CONOPS) of trying to defend low ground with only an air line of resupply

French Foreign Legion 2nd REP Paratroopers

The situation at Dien Bien Phu worsened and on May 7th it fell. The next day the French sat down in Geneva at the conference table with delegates from Vietnam, the Vietminh regime and six other countries and submitted armistice proposals. Surprisingly quickly, or so it seemed to us in the Pentagon, an agreement was reached to end the then Vietnamese war. The Geneva agreements and Final Declaration of July 1954 provided for Vietnam to be partitioned along the seventeenth parallel into North and South Vietnam, with nationwide elections to determine the nature of reunification to be held in July, 1956. An international control commission was also established to supervise the implementation of the agreements.

To understand what happened next, it is important

to understand the attitude of the Pentagon back in 1954 because this atmosphere led to the initial decisions that brought us to our present position in Vietnam today.

And this attitude is still all too prevalent in our military thinking. Indeed it has deep roots elsewhere.

In 1954 the recent Korean War decisively influenced Pentagon thinking. For the Air Force, Korea had been a disillusioning and frustrating experience. Air Force leaders had assumed that air superiority, air surveillance and air attacks would smash the North Korean drive and demolish the North Korean military establishment.

They had trumpeted this point of view both to the public and to the President. When the bombing failed to halt the North Korean war effort they developed the myth of the Yalu sanctuary. If only they could bomb Red Chinese Manchuria, which lay beyond the Yalu River, they said, everything would turn out all right. Thus the Air Force was able to avoid, at least in public, confronting the evidence that in Korea, both strategically and tactically air power had failed. Unfortunately from their frustration sprang a readiness to answer any challenge to American power with threats of total nuclear war. To the Army, Korea had been embittering and costly. Of the 147,000 casualties most had been in the ground forces. Despite the Army's wealth of combat experience from WorId War II, its abundance of logistical support, and its modern fighting equipment, major units had been surprised and routed by Chinese forces. The Army felt that ground forces had done the major share of the fighting, that more wars like the Korean War were a pos-

sibility, that the Army's accomplishments should be recognized, and that it should receive the funds to train and equip itself for such contests in the future. Instead, the Army was beginning to feel the pressure of the "New Look" cutbacks that followed the promulgation of the doctrine of massive retaliation; its funds and troop strengths were slashed while the forces for strategic nuclear bombing were built up.

But above and beyond this, everyone in the Pentagon-including, let me add, myself-tended to see the world in terms of good guys and bad guys. Moreover I met no one who doubted who the good guys were. (It was a simple vision of the world, which held much truth in the period when we faced the byzantine greed of Stalinism.) And we had many supporters outside the Pentagon. Speaking of the Geneva accords in August of 1954, Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York stated:

"If Geneva and what was agreed upon there means anything at all, it means...taps for the buried hopes of freedom in Southeast Asia....Now the devilish techniques of brainwashing, forced confessions and rigged trials have a new locale for their exercise....Communism has a world plan and it has been following a carefully set-up timetable for the achievement of that plan...."

We had excuses for our belief. Still, we should have been wiser. Instead we assumed that Peking was a mere pawn of Moscow, that thwarted by NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and the Marshall Plan from taking over Europe, Stalin was now on the march in Asia. The

Communist world was assumed to be an integrated, monolithic bloc. Only a few of us were beginning to distinguish between the nationalistic Communism of Tito and the Stalinism of Russia; I can recall the hours of thought I devoted to the question before recommending the Army's support of military aid to Tito. And for even fewer of us, did that clearer vision extend as far as the Vietnamese brand of Communism under Ho Chi Minh. The belief that Communism itself was changing and that there were types of nationalistic Communism with which the United States could quite safely co-exist would have been regarded as close to heresy.

It was in this atmosphere that we closely followed the negotiations at Geneva. We had the feeling that the French had not only failed in combat, but that now they were about to let down the team. Despite our lavish support of their efforts to reestablish themselves in Indochina, they were now acting in their own self-interest, rather than in the interest of the free world as a whole. Through intelligence sources we learned about what later became known as the Sainteny Commission, named for its chairman, whose purpose was to negotiate directly with the Ho Chi Minh government to assure the safety of French investments in Communist-held territory.

Parenthetically, I had occasion some years later, in December 1965, to discuss at lunch the Sainteny Commission with General de Gaulle. General Paul Ely, who had been the French commander in Vietnam in late 1954, was also present. I asked General de Gaulle how the commission got along with Ho Chi Minh; he assured me that they had worked well together. When I asked

him whether he thought a similar modus vivendi could be made with whatever type of government appeared in Saigon in the event North and South Vietnam setded their differences, he said without hesitation that he was confident this could be done. It is important to remember these remarks when evaluating French pronouncements on Vietnam and to be aware that France was concerned about protecting a rather large economic investment. But to return to 1954. the attitude of the Pentagon staff when the Geneva accords were finally reached was that the French had unwisely folded. Now it was obviously up to us to assume the full burden of combat against Communism in that area. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agreed with the Pentagon. At that time Secretary Dulles was building, as a good lawyer might, a paper wall of treaties to contain Communism. Germany joined NATO, then came SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization), and then CENTO (Central Treaty Organization).

In this atmosphere the Joint Chiefs began with the highest priority to study a proposal to send combat troops into the Red River delta of North Vietnam. As Chief of Plans of the Army Staff, I was responsible for recommending what attitude the Army should take toward this proposal to put American ground troops into North Vietnam. I began by bringing together the best Asian experts. We decided that to be honest with ourselves we had to face the fact that if we entered North Vietnam we were going to war, not with Ho Chi Minh, but with Red China. Red China would be providing most of the arms, vehicles, ammunition, and other sinews

of war because of what she would feel was a threat to her national self-interest. Once again, let me reiterate that this did not mean that either I or the Army staff wanted or urged war with Red China. In the weeks and months to come, we were to argue forcefully and frequently against such a war. Rational consideration of the alternatives should not be mistaken for advocacy. Having assumed Red China as the enemy, we had to further assume that the entry of an expeditionary force into the Hanoi area would bring a reaction from the Chinese, exactly as they had reacted when we crossed the 38^th Parallel in Korea. If this happened we would find ourselves confronting Chinese field armies that vastly outnumbered our own forces. And we would not have the narrow peninsula in which they could be contained as in Korea. We were also in agreement that we had to prepare for the reopening of the Korean front by the Chinese if we committed ourselves heavily to Vietnam. Then followed the agonizing decision as to whether we should wait to be attacked in Korea, or whether we should take the initiative, in reopening that front.

Remembering our experience in World War II and Korea, the Army staff anticipated a bloody and costly war that would engage a tremendous portion of our manpower and national wealth. This cost could be met only at the expense of our other global commitments and by the diversion of resources from the well-being of our domestic society. In all probability we would have to resort to tax increases, wage controls and rationing. As to Vietnam itself, we put the size of the necessary expeditionary force at eight combat divisions, supported

by thirty-five engineer battalions, and all the artillery and logistical support such mammoth undertakings require. (At the time of my trip to Vietnam in November 1967 there were eight and two-thirds U.S. divisions in Vietnam.) Because of the size of the undertaking and the danger of involvement with Red China, we believed it would be necessary to call up the Army Reserves and National Guard. In short, we felt the operation should not be attempted unless the country was put on virtually a war footing.

Again, as at the time of Dien Bien Phu the Joint Chiefs divided. Admiral Radford was emphatically in favor of landing a force in the Haiphong-Hanoi area, even if it meant risking war with Red China. In this he was fully supported by the Chief of Staff of the Air Force and the Chief of Naval Operations. In my opinion such an operation meant a great risk of war. Just southeast of Haiphong harbor is the island of Hainan, which is part of Red China.

The Navy was unwilling to risk their ships in the Haiphong area without first invading and capturing the island. Admiral Radford and the Chiefs of the Navy and Air Force felt that, faced with our overwhelming power, the Red Chinese would not react to this violation of their sovereignty. General Ridgway and I had grave doubts about the validity of this reasoning.

Once more the embattled Ridgway "split." Using the staff study we had prepared in the Army he wrote directly to President Eisenhower, pointing out the hazards to the nation if we undertook such a war in Vietnam and the dubious gains. Again fortunately, the President decided not to commit U.S. forces to Southeast Asia.

However, there was a compromise. We would not attack North Vietnam, but we would support a South Vietnamese government that we hoped would provide a stable, independent government that was representative of the people. As I said before, we saw ourselves as the good guys. The French had let us down, but we would continue the battle. Also, we in the Army were so relieved that we had blocked the decision to commit ground troops to Vietnam that we were in no mood to quibble over the compromise.

Early in 1955, I visited Saigon to discuss political and economic problems plus military aid and assistance with General Paul Ely, chief of the French mission, and Lieutenant General John "Iron Mike" O'Daniel, head of the American mission. At that time I met Ngo Dinh Diem, the prime minister. Diem seemed to me to be a non-political man, self-centered and quite unresponsive to the needs of his people.

However, in October of that year Diem polled 98 per cent of the vote against Emperor Bao Dai. Three days after this referendum, Diem proclaimed South Vietnam a republic and himself president. The Department of Defense, the Department of State and the CIA undertook to support him. This involvement in Vietnam sprang from our honest conviction once again that the world was either black or white with no gray in-between. We had stopped Communism in Europe. We had stopped it in Korea. Now we were going to stop it on the seventeenth parallel of Indochina. Unfortunately, even today there seems to be some in government who continue to hold this simplistic view, refusing to adjust it to the real world.

Once again the knowledge gap weakens us.

Earlier, on July 16, 1955, while Diem was still premier only, his government had announced with American backing that it would not comply with the Final Declaration of the Geneva Conference that called for free elections to determine the future of all Vietnam. The reason given was that free choice was impossible in the North. In acquiescing in the Diem announcement, the United States violated its own unilateral declaration giving its position on the Geneva Conference, which stated that the United States "shall continue to seek to achieve unity through free elections supervised by the U.N., to insure that they are conducted fairly....The United States reiterates its traditional position that peoples are entitled to determine their own future...."

At the time of Diem's declaration the number of French troops in South Vietnam was still significant. But by October, when Premier Diem deposed the absentee Emperor Bao Dai and became the first president of the Republic of South Vietnam, the French presence had begun to disappear rapidly. President Eisenhower sent President Diem a letter in which he offered U.S. assistance "in maintaining a strong, viable state, capable of resisting attempted subversion or aggression through military means...." Later President Eisenhower explained that this language was meant to cover aid only. And during the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group, averaging six hundred and fifty men, did not increase significantly. President Kennedy began to occupy himself with the

Southeast Asian situation immediately after his inauguration. By then the resistance movement in South Vietnam, the VietCong and its political arm, the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF), had gained strength. The NLF was receiving some aid and direction from the VietMinh in the North. The degree and extent of this aid and control have been from the beginning the subject of bitter debate within the U.S. government; the scarcity of facts has not dampened the heat of the argument.

With President Kennedy's election, I returned to government service as ambassador to France. I called on the President on May 18, 1961 to discuss his planned visit to Paris. The talk soon shifted to Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam and Laos: at that time Laos appeared the more volatile situation of the two. I argued strongly against committing any U.S. troops to Laos. I pointed out that Laos was a landlocked area in which it would be very difficult to bring U.S. power to bear in any meaningful way, even if it should be in the U.S. interest to do so. I felt Laos would turn into a bottomless pit into which we would pour Soldier after Soldier. I recounted for the President the history of the debate inside the Pentagon after Dien Bien Phu and said I felt this new situation was similar. There was little to be gained and a great deal to be risked by U.S. military action.

In the discussion President Kennedy indicated strongly that he believed sending U.S. troops to Laos was the wrong course of action. He also implied that if he asked the Pentagon for advice they would recommend dispatch-

ing troops. I agreed with him-I thought a significant number of generals and admirals still lived in the "good and bad guys" world.

The President suggested that I call on Prince Souvanna Phouma of Laos in Paris and try to persuade him that the American objective was truly "to establish a free, neutral, independent Laos." Up to this point the United States had been backing the CIA-picked General Phoumi Nosavan; and the President wanted to make it clear our policy had shifted to the support of Souvanna Phouma.

There was a good deal of suspicion of Souvanna Phouma in the U.S. government. It was felt he was, if not a Communist himself, pretty much controlled by the Communists. But the President argued, and hindsight convinces me more than ever he was completely correct, that Souvanna Phouma was the man the Laotians wanted and that he should receive U.S. support. My job was to convince Souvanna Phouma of our intention to respect the freedom, neutrality and independence of Laos.

Shortly after President Kennedy's visit to Paris I called on Souvanna Phouma at his Paris apartment. His attitude was not entirely friendly toward me, but he seemed willing to listen. Among other things I tried to persuade him to visit the United States, meet President Kennedy and learn firsthand of the United States change in attitude. Souvanna Phouma seemed loath to do this, though he had a trip planned for the immediate future that would take him through several Communist countries. I was not sure I had accomplished much at the meeting.

I called on him again about a month later and this time felt that genuine progress was made. Souvanna Phouma

was quite friendly and we got along well. I continued to visit with him frequently after that and reassure him of the genuineness of American intentions. In the end, I am satisfied he became convinced of our sincerity. Finally, through the ability and craft of W. Averell Harriman in Geneva, a treaty was drafted which was acceptable to all parties. Once again the commitment of U.S. troops to Southeast Asia had been avoided.

While Laos then is not Vietnam now, there are distinct parallels. The Laotian experience convinced me of the need to work in Asia with national leaders of differing political persuasion, as we had with Tito in Yugoslavia. That we cannot remake the world in our own image is a truism often repeated but not always followed. And have we looked at our own image recently? Laos also...convinced me of the fallacy of the falling-domino theory. Laos went neutral; neither Cambodia nor Thailand fell. With a little diplomatic skill dominoes can be buttressed; it sometimes seems to me that we deliberately try to link them to each other.

In the meantime in Vietnam things were not going well with the Diem government, though we were doing our verbal best to help him. Vice-President Johnson had visited the country in 1961 and referred to Diem as the "Churchill of Asia." Shortly thereafter, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, on one of his frequent brief tours of inspection, called Diem "one of the greatest leaders of our time." Yet the Diem government became more isolated and oppressive. By 1963, the war in Vietnam was going very badly and President Kennedy was having grave doubts about our course of action. Recent

books have indicated the depth and bitterness of the division in the Kennedy administration over Vietnam.

The President himself stated publicly at that time, "In the final analysis it is their war. They are the ones that have to win it or lose it. We can help them; give them equipment. We can send our men out there as advisers. But they have to win it." However, the President's military advisers continued to tell him the war was going well. On October 2, 1963, after another whirlwind visit to Vietnam, Secretary McNamara insisted that the President issue the following statement:

"The military program in South Vietnam has made progress and is sound in principle, though improvements are being energetically sought....Secretary McNamara and General Taylor reported their judgment that the major part of the U.S. military task can be completed by the end of 1965.... They reported that by the end of this year [1963] the U.S. program for training Vietnamese should have progressed to the point that one thousand U.S. military personnel assigned to South Vietnam can be withdrawn."

A President deserves better counsel than this from his military advisers! There has been much speculation about what President Kennedy would or would not have done in Vietnam had he lived. Having discussed military affairs with him often and in detail for fifteen years, I know he was totally opposed to the introduction of combat troops in Southeast Asia. His public statements just before his murder support this view. That the evil that men do should so often live

after them while the good is interred with their bones is tragedy enough. Let us not also lay blame on the dead for our own failures.

By 1964 Vietnam had become a major political issue in the presidential campaign. President Johnson reassured those whom he was later to refer to as "nervous Nellies" with the words "I have not chosen to enlarge the war." He later reiterated, "We aren't going to send American boys nine thousand or ten thousand miles away to do what the Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." In August 1964, under circumstances still not totally clear, two U.S. destroyers were attacked by North Vietnamese PT boats. President Johnson ordered "air action" against "gunboats and certain supporting facilities" in North Vietnam. In the excitement following the attack on the destroyers, Congress, at the behest of the administration, adopted the Southeast Asia Resolution upon which the administration bases its action today.

President Johnson, like Kennedy before him, came under pressure from his military advisers to take more "forceful" action against North Vietnam and the NLF. The Joint Chiefs of Staff advised Johnson to send United States combat troops to South Vietnam. The overthrow of President Ngo Dinh Diem had not resulted in preventing the growth of the NLF. The new leader of South Vietnam, General Khanh, was doubtful that his own army was strong enough to prevent a communist victory.

Johnson told his Joint Chiefs of Staff that he would do all that was necessary to prevent the NLF winning in South Vietnam but was unwilling to take unpopular measures like sending troops to tight in a foreign war, until after the 1964 Presidential Elections. "Just let me get elected," he told his military advisers, "and then you can have your war."

Johnson was aware he would have difficulty convincing the American public and the rest of the world that such action was justified. He therefore gave permission for a plan to be put into operation that he surmised would eventually enable him to carry out the bombing raids on North Vietnam.

Operation Plan 34A involved the sending of Asian mercenaries into North Vietnam to carry out acts of sabotage and the kidnapping or killing of communist officials. As part of this plan, it was decided to send U.S. destroyers into North Vietnamese waters to obtain information on their naval defences. On August 2, 1964, the U.S. destroyer, the USS Maddox was allegedly fired upon by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin. In retaliation, Maddox fired back and hit all three, one of which sank. The Maddox then retreated into international waters but the next day it was ordered to return to the Gulf of Tonkin.

Soon after entering North Vietnamese waters, Captain Herrick reported that he was under attack. However, later he sent a message that raised doubts about this: "Review of action makes reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. Freak weather reports and over-eager sonar men may have accounted for many reports. No actual sightings by Maddox. Suggest complete evaluation before further action."

Johnson now had the excuse he had been waiting for and ignored Captain Herrick's second message. He ordered the bombing of four North Vietnamese torpedo-boat bases and an oil-storage depot that had been planned three months previously.

President Johnson then went on television and told the American people that: "Repeated acts of violence against the armed forces of the United States must be met not only with alert defence, but with a positive reply. That reply is being given as I speak tonight."

The Congress approved Johnson's decision to bomb North Vietnam and passed what has become known as the Gulf of Tonkin resolution by the Senate by 88 votes to 2 and in the House of Representatives by 416 to 0. This resolution authorised the President to take all necessary measures against Vietnam and the NLF.

Johnson's belief that the bombing raid on North Vietnam in August, 1964, would persuade Ho Chi Minh to cut off all aid to the NLF was unfounded. In the run-up to the November election, the NLF carried out a series of attacks and only two days before the election, the U.S. air base near Saigon was mortared and four Americans were killed.

On February 7, 1965, the first air strikes were ordered against North Vietnam. On March 6, two U.S. marine battalions were landed in South Vietnam. The direct U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, against which some of us had fought for so long, had begun in earnest. By October 1965, draft calls were the largest since the Korean War and American forces in South Vietnam totaled 148,300.

At this time, though now out of government, I once again felt a grave personal concern for the future. My concern was on two distinct levels. First, I was distressed that so much of our physical wealth and human