________________________________________________________

H-DIPLO ROUNDTABLE REVIEW: David Kaiser's _American Tragedy: Kennedy,
Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War_. Harvard University Press,
2000. 558 pp. maps, illustrations, bibliographical references. ISBN
0-674-00225-3

Reviewers: Lloyd C. Gardner (roundtable editor), George C. Herring, and
Edwin Moise

________________________________________________________________


Review by Lloyd C. Gardner <lgardner2@home.com>
Rutgers University

        It used to be said that Samuel Johnson held back the Romantic
Movement by the force of his personality.  David Kaiser believes that JFK
held back Vietnam by the force of his skepticism.  Surrounded by an outer
circle of bureaucrats who had churned out war plans for defeating the
Communists in Southeast Asia since Eisenhower's day, and an inner guard
composed of "GI" generation top level advisers with an unyielding faith in
themselves, Kennedy remained the sole barrier between these powerful
forces and the plunge into the canopied jungles of Vietnam with their
myriad hidden dangers.  Secretary of State Dean Rusk said as much during
the fateful July, 1965 discussions about sending General Westmoreland
enough men to do the job right.  "If we had met the challenge posed in
1961 by sending 50,000 men to South Vietnam, Hanoi may have hesitated to
proceed with its actions. . . .  We should probably have committed
ourselves heavier in 1961." (p. 475) Not privy to the key debates in 1961,
President Johnson was especially sensitive to the arguments of his
(inherited) advisers.  Not sure in his own mind exactly how he would
maneuver the situation, on the other hand, JFK apparently never confided
his doubts to Johnson, never tugged at his sleeve to say, "Lyndon, watch
out for Rusk and McNamara, they're hot to go."

        It probably wouldn't have made a difference anyway, according to
Kaiser.  With Johnson in the White House, "Firmness in Southeast Asia had
become what Kennedy had never allowed it to be: the centerpiece of
administration foreign policy." (p. 329) Gone, taken from the nation by
Oswald's bullet, was Kennedy's promising beginning of a new era
highlighted by the test ban treaty; also gone was a greater understanding
of Third World countries beyond the strangulating confines of Cold War
preconceptions.  "The first visible shift occurred in December 1963, when
Johnson appointed Ambassador to Mexico Tom Mann -- a conservative,
pro-business Texan -- Undersecretary of State for Latin American Affairs,
a job Mann held under Eisenhower." (p. 312).  LBJ liked to keep things
simple.  He disliked even meeting foreign leaders.  Where Kennedy enjoyed
the nuances of international diplomacy, LBJ asked only that the generals
keep things quiet -- until after the 1964 election.  Speaking with the
Joint Chiefs as early as March, 1964, the new president laid down his
rules of engagement for Vietnam:

        Congress and the country did not want war -- that war at this time
would have a tremendous effect on the approaching Presidential political
campaign and might perhaps keep the Democrats from winning in November.
He said that he thought it would be much better to keep out of any war
until December. . . .  The political situation in December would be
stabilized.  (p. 304)

        These notes of the JCS meeting were taken by General Wallace
Greene of the Marine Corps.  More about that later.  Kaiser thus lays out
a powerful case that the war was not Kennedy's legacy, but Johnson's own
doing.  Unlike Oliver Stone (one of those to whom the book is dedicated),
however, Kennedy's most trusted advisers play a crucial role.  LBJ is not
alone.  Halberstam's "Best and Brightest" are not let off the hook.
(Indeed, Robert McNamara in particular is painted in much darker colors
than other accounts of the origins of involvement.) Great emphasis
throughout the book is placed upon the theories of William Strauss and
Neil Howe, who posit an interpretation of recent American history based
upon generations.  For Kaiser's interpretation, their notion of a "GI"
generation imbued with unfailing confidence in their own purposes and
programs suits very well.  As does the idea of a succeeding "Silent
Generation," whose criticisms were ignored by their elders as uninformed
opinions.  All the more suitable for an interpretation that posits Kennedy
as an exception to the rule.  JFK was a member of the "GI" generation, but
he stood aside always -- as if (during the ExCom deliberations in the
Cuban missile crisis) he were watching himself and the others -- detached
and contemplative.  True, his somewhat diffident manner, and cautious
responses to the civil rights movement, for example, along with a
"relatively poor record with Congress," have troubled historians.  "Yet
these qualities combined with his personal grace also enabled him to
maintain his emotional equilibrium during three very turbulent years of
American history -- and far more important, helped the vast majority of
his fellow citizens to maintain theirs as well." (p.266)

        It is along in here that historians less committed to Kennedy
"exceptionalism" might begin to have difficulties with Kaiser's account of
how the tragedy occurred.  There is very little about how Kennedy came to
power, as strident critic of Eisenhower's supposed lassitude.  The theme
of the 1960 campaign, it will be remembered was, "Who Lost Cuba?"
Adopting Lincolnian rhetoric, Kennedy pictured the world as half-slave and
half-free, with the balance teetering ever more towards the "Communists."
Kennedy's fascination with counter-insurgency and the Green Berets, his
famous speech at the Berlin Wall, his promise that he would pay any price
to win the struggle for freedom -- were these designed to help his fellow
citizens maintain their equilibrium?  One need not be an Eisenhower
revisionist to ponder the rhetorical objectives of the two presidents.
As for Southeast Asia itself, Kaiser succeeds in demonstrating that JFK
successfully held back the warhawks from going to war in Laos.  In Averell
Harriman he apparently found a man who instinctively understood what
Kennedy wanted -- and what he wanted to avoid.  Vietnam was different.
Ho Chi Minh was far bigger on the world scene than Sihanouk or Souvanna
Phouma.  While the dominoists could try to build a case for Laos or
Cambodia, world attention had been focused on Ho's revolution since
September, 1945, when he raised a "red flag" (figuratively at least) over
Hanoi.  He could not take a defeat in Vietnam, JFK confided to counselors,
like Ike slipped out of Korea.  Did he ever really change his mind on that
crucial point?

        In the dramatic months of 1963, Vietnam suddenly filled American
television screens.  The first war to be fought in living color.
Buddhist monks burned themselves to death.  Rumors flew about secret
negotiations with the North.  Would President Diem ever wake up to the
destructive path he was on?  In 1954, John Foster Dulles had made it clear
that the United States would not stand by and see Vietnam "go Communist"
by any means -- including the elections scheduled by the Geneva Accords.
Later, Henry Kissinger would say much the same thing about Chile.  A
nation foolhardy enough to choose that path -- well, what would happen,
would happen.  In 1963 it was a coup.  The idea made Kennedy queasy, to be
sure.  At times he felt his government was coming apart over Vietnam.
"And in this case the President's equivocal position reflected a
fundamental truth: that Diem's fate was really in Diem's own hands."
(p.265) Yes and no, another might conclude.  Diem's years in power had
never really demonstrated his suitability for the task of nation-building.
But could anyone have done better - given what the internal and external
constraints were on the idea of a South Vietnamese nation?  When the
French left, the Americans moved in.  Diem always chafed at his assigned
role.  He might be celebrated, as he was, as the George Washington of
South Vietnam.  But what would Washington have had to offer the people if
the Marquis de Lafayette headed a MACA for Paris after the war?  The
comparison is obviously far-fetched, intentionally so, because any
comparison of what Diem was, and what he faced, with Washington and the
first new nation is far-fetched.

        Kennedy's "equivocal position" was a dire threat to the Vietnamese
military, many of whom had by this time received training in the United
States.  Were they to suffer a defeat because the Americans had lost faith
in Diem?  We need to know much more about the internal debates among that
group, what they imagined Washington would do, how they hoped to avoid
forfeiting their new status in the international legions being trained in
the USA.  In the end, of course, it became a case of "Let Henry do it."
Ambassador Lodge, as Kaiser tells us, was a headstrong man, not given to
listening to the parsimonious caviling of the timid back in Washington.
We are launched on a course, Lodge would declaim, from which there is no
turning back.  So he was, and so they were.

        Kennedy's shock at Diem's ultimate fate was genuine.  A fellow
Catholic, the Vietnamese ally of the United States had paid a terrible
price for his errors.  I remain convinced that JFK's horror at the death
of Diem was at least in part a recognition that now the United States, and
he, personally, bore a profound moral responsibility for the fate of the
successor regime in Saigon.  To think otherwise, I would also argue, is to
see Kennedy as a cynical manipulator on a grand scale.  Garry Wills has
written of the "Kennedy Imprisonment"  -- and perhaps that was the real
legacy that fell to Lyndon Johnson.  LBJ often spoke, even in the heady
days of the Great Society, of driving into the White House through those
iron gates that locked behind him -- a prisoner of sorts.  Kaiser and
previous historians such as Fred Logevall have demonstrated, to my
satisfaction, that there was no great pressure on Johnson to expand the
war, in Congress or in Allied capitals.  The "GI" generation, with its
somewhat Freudian implications, provides an important insight into the
mindset of the New Frontiersmen who manned the watchtowers of freedom
scanning the earth and sky for the dreaded enemy's minions around the
world.  If not, perhaps, as he frequently asserts, the first book to put
Vietnam into its full international and domestic context, "American
Tragedy" is indeed full of new research in both printed and archival
materials.  As he acknowledges in his introduction, however, the Foreign
Relations series constitutes the bedrock of any study of Vietnam.
However much we complain about all the other lapses of the government in
meeting its obligations to make the record public, the series is unique in
the world, and the Historical Office of the State Department deserves
praise for its high standards of professionalism.  Among other sources,
Kaiser used the Wallace Greene Papers at the Marine Corps Historical
Center in Washington to great advantage.  Greene's notes of JCS meetings
with Johnson are often revealing, and do show LBJ as determined not to
lose.  I am not going to be the president who lost Vietnam, LBJ vowed in
the aftermath of the coup and Kennedy's death.  The line could have been
taken from the speech Kennedy planned to deliver in Dallas, on November
22, 1963.

-------------------------------

Review by George C. Herring <gherrin@pop.uky.edu>
University of Kentucky

        David Kaiser begins _American Tragedy_ with some very bold claims.
His work is based on an "enormous amount" of new documentation, he insists
and it provides "the most thorough and best-documented account" of
America's decision to go to war in Vietnam, "the greatest policy
miscalculation in the history of American foreign relations." He vows to
lay to rest a number of old myths and to offer new interpretations. He
implies little short of the final word on a topic that has provoked
enormous controversy.

        In fact, Kaiser's book is but one of three recent important
studies (the others are Fredrik Logevall's _Choosing War_ and H.R.
McMaster's _Dereliction of Duty_) that address the fundamental question of
why the United States committed vast sums of blood and treasure to a war
it most probably could not have won in an area of at best dubious
significance. It is well researched and well written, and it offers a
number of provocative interpretations. But it is by no means the last word
on the subject, as the author seems to suggest, and some of its major
arguments fail to convince.

        Kaiser provides a full analysis of U.S. policymaking on Vietnam
during the Kennedy and early Johnson years, with a glance back at the
Eisenhower administration (to whose policies he attaches great
significance). In contrast to Logevall, who places these critical
decisions in a broad domestic political and international context, and
McMaster, who focusses on the badly flawed relationship between civilian
and military policymakers, Kaiser centers his account somewhat narrowly on
the White House and to a lesser extent the Pentagon. The ground he covers
has been well trodden, first by journalist David Halberstam and political
scientists Leslie Gelb and Richard Betts and subsequently by scholars such
as Larry Berman and Brian VanDeMark. Kaiser does add new detail and he
fills out an already familiar story. His study, along with those of
McMaster and Logevall, gives us full and up to date, if not yet
definitive, coverage of the fateful _American_ decisions that led to
tragedy for the United States and especially for Vietnam.

        Where does he line up on the major issues that have divided
historians? He accepts as givens the "dove" conventional wisdoms that the
war should not have been fought and could not have been won. He rejects
the arguments of Berman and others that the United States intervened
mainly for reasons of domestic politics, the fear of falling dominoes at
home or Lyndon Johnson's determination to protect his cherished Great
Society programs, insisting rather that it was for reasons of high policy,
the national security imperatives that had shaped U.S. decision-making
during much of the Cold War era. Also taking issue with Gelb and Betts and
Daniel Ellsberg, he argues that, although the Johnson administration
intervened reluctantly, it did so with some measure of confidence in
ultimate success. On the issue of whether LBJ chose war, as Logevall
claims, or was responding to irresistible pressures, as his biographer
Robert Dallek argues, Kaiser does not take a firm position.

        Kaiser blames the war mainly on the Eisenhower and Johnson
administrations and on the persistent and egregious miscalculations of the
national security bureaucracy regarding the importance of Vietnam and the
ability of the United States to work its will there. In a brief
introductory chapter, he contends that the Eisenhower administration drew
up war plans for the defense of Southeast Asia and especially South
Vietnam that included the use of nuclear weapons. These plans, he
continues, guided U.S. military thinking on Vietnam through Johnson's
decisions for war, and in fact the Johnson administration followed them to
the letter, at least up to the point where nuclear weapons would be used.
Upon taking office, Johnson quickly elevated Vietnam to a top priority
issue, never questioning basic assumptions and making it the centerpiece
of his foreign policy. Facing North Vietnamese escalation and a
deteriorating situation in South Vietnam, he significantly expanded the
U.S. commitment. Once reelected in November 1964, he made his decisions
for war, not to fend off a possible right-wing backlash or to protect the
Great Society but to uphold the national security imperatives established
in the Eisenhower years.

        John F. Kennedy and to a much lesser extent George W. Ball are the
lone heroes in a book generally devoid of them. Ball is hailed for "one of
the most remarkable strategic appreciations ever written by an American,"
even though his arguments did not persuade, and, as the author fails to
note, Ball's inveterate loyalty and reputation as a domesticated dissenter
rendered him a harmless skeptic. Kennedy was a "brilliant natural
diplomat," more sensitive than most of his advisers to the "dangers of
rash action," more disposed to negotiation than military means, and more
accepting of "genuine" neutralism. A politician rather than bureaucrat, he
understood how little importance most Americans attached to Southeast
Asia. Kaiser rejects John Newman's argument that Kennedy knew the United
States was failing in Vietnam and therefore developed a secret plan for
extrication after he had been safely reelected. He attaches little
importance to the 1000 man withdrawal plan that has provided so much grist
for the mills of those who believe Kennedy was determined to get the
United States out of Vietnam. Rather, he emphasizes Kennedy's consistent
reluctance to commit U.S. prestige and military power in Indochina,
manifested first in his rejection of intervention in Laos in the spring of
1961 and later in the year in his refusal to commit combat forces in
Vietnam. Kennedy, he argues, also demonstrated a firm commitment to what
he came to consider more important foreign policy objectives, most notably
easing Cold War tensions and improving relations with the Soviet Union.
Kaiser admits that we can never know what Kennedy would have done had he
lived, but the implication is crystal clear: he would have found a way to
avoid the "American tragedy."

        Kaiser's book has much to commend it. He is very good at placing
Vietnam decisions in a broader foreign policy context, and he does better
than those who have preceded him in linking Vietnam decisions to the
ongoing crises in Laos. He is also very good on the 1964 coup that brought
Nguyen Khanh to power, confirming George Kahin's arguments about the
centrality of U.S. involvement in that important but little known episode.
He offers some shrewd insights and observations. He sees the Pentagon's
acceptance of gradual escalation in 1964 as necessitated by the hard facts
of logistic life--the military could not have escalated the war more
rapidly even if given civilian approval because of the primitive
infrastructure in Vietnam. He plays down the importance of the
much-studied July 1965 discussions that scholars have generally seen as
producing Johnson's decisions for war. Rather, he insists-- and on this
Logevall agrees--LBJ made his decisions for war in Vietnam "in principle"
in December 1964 and implemented them early the following year. He so
effectively concealed from the public what he was doing, Kaiser goes on,
that he has also misled a whole generation of historians. Similarly, the
importance of Gen. William C. Westmoreland's May 1965 ground troop request
is minimized. Its principal significance was to force the administration
to go public with its decisions for war. When he finally revealed his hand
in July 1965, Kaiser concludes, LBJ still brilliantly obscured the extent
and the magnitude of the commitment he was making.

        Kaiser also advances a generational explanation for the war. He
pins primary responsibility on what he calls the G.I. generation. Lodged
between the more cautious "Lost Generation," which came before, and the
more skeptical "Silent Generation," which came after, the G.I.s, born in
the first quarter of the century, successfully fought World War II. Tom
Brokaw's "great generation" brought to the task of government "an
exemplary willingness to tackle difficult and costly tasks, a faith in the
institution of the government of the United States, a great capacity for
teamwork and consensus, a relentless optimism," not all of them all of the
time virtues. Their baggage also included an unwillingness to admit the
possibility of failure, a trait that served them especially poorly when
dealing with Vietnam.

        Although a valuable contribution to the literature, _American
Tragedy_ falls considerably short of its author's extravagant claims.
Kaiser's research is thorough but hardly exhaustive and original. He
relies mainly on the State Department's _Foreign Relations of the United
States_ volumes and on recently declassifed documents from the
presidential libraries. The _FRUS_ volumes in Vietnam are especially well
done and certainly represent an authoritative source. But they hardly
constitute original research on the author's part, and their own editors
would be the first to admit that they do not comprise the entire record.
Pentagon records for the most part are unavailable and many important JCS
documents appear not to have survived. State Department files are
available but are not extensively used by Kaiser. McMaster and Logevall
have shown the value of research outside the _FRUS_ series and the
presidential libraries, and thus, despite claims to the contrary,
represent more comprehensive research than that done by Kaiser.

        The generational interpretation is interesting and offers some
insight into the mindset of Vietnam decisionmakers such as Robert
McNamara, the Bundy brothers, Dean Rusk, and even Lyndon Johnson,
especially their stubborn determination to persist despite ample warning
signs of possible failure. But Kaiser does not really develop it
systematically, and his exception of Kennedy, who he admits is in many
ways the archetype of his generation, raises doubts about the theory
itself or his use of it.

        His main arguments fail to convince. Eisenhower deserves a share
of the blame for Vietnam, to be sure, but Kaiser's handling of this issue
is curious and his emphasis seems misplaced. One might question first why
he begins his study with Eisenhower. The outlines of Vietnam policy, as
numerous scholars have pointed out, go back at least to the Truman
administration, and decisions made under FDR had a great impact on
subsequent policies. Kaiser appears to see himself as a lonely voice in
the wilderness standing forth boldly against the powerful forces of
Eisenhower revisionism. He seems grandly unaware that, at least on
Vietnam, Eisenhower revisionism has long been discredited. Kaiser notes
the "paradox" between Eisenhower's decisions not to go to war during the
Dien Bien Phu crisis in 1954 and his subsequent plans for war in
Indochina. In fact, there is no paradox at all. War in support of a
decadent and recalcitrant France was one thing; war in defense of U.S.
strategic objectives quite another. He overemphasizes the importance of
Ike's "secret" war plans. What is really crucial in terms of U.S.
involvement in Vietnam is Eisenhower's political decision in late 1954 to
buck the admittedly bad odds and assist South Vietnam. It is hard to
believe, moreover, that even in a hidebound military establishment war
plans drawn up in the heyday of the New Look would continue to exercise
such sway through Sputnik, Flexible Response, and the Cuban missile
crisis.

        Kaiser's treatment of Kennedy borders on infatuation and is even
less convincing. He produces no new evidence to demonstrate Kennedy's
skepticism about the importance of Vietnam and his advisers' claims of
success. He admits that Kennedy went to some lengths to obscure his
thinking, but professes in places to know what it was. He bases his
argument on his own estimate of Kennedy's diplomatic skills and on
surmise--on what he claims Kennedy did and what, therefore, he might have
done.

        Indeed, he goes out of his way to exonerate Kennedy from
responsibility for the Vietnam debacle, thus underminimg his credibility.
He ignores JFK's dissembling about what American "advisers" were up to in
Vietnam and his heavy-handed efforts to muzzle the press. He excuses
Kennedy from responsibility for the overthrow and death of Ngo Dinh Diem
and Ngo Dinh Nhu. They brought on themselves, he callously claims, a
_Vietnamese_ tragedy for which Kennedy himself accepted full
responsibility. In any event, Kaiser concludes disingenuously, the coup
was not all that important in the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

        There are numerous problems with such interpretations. Kaiser
praises Kennedy's ability to relax and separate himself from his work
(perhaps even his dalliances?) and finds no fault in his not doing
anything until he has to. What he sees as detachment and caution, however,
might also be viewed as indecision and even lack of courage. JFK's
inclination to hang in there and hope for the best places him squarely in
the "G.I. Generation." It can be argued, moreover, that Kennedy, like
Johnson, repeatedly chose the middle ground between the extremes offered
by his advisers. The problem is that, in part as a result of decisions
made by Kennedy, the middle ground left to Johnson involved a much higher
level of military force. Kennedy may have been sympathetic toward
neutralism, but he rejected it for Vietnam, in so doing rejecting an
option that, if we can believe recent Vietnamese testimony, might have
provided a way to avert war. Kaiser admits that Kennedy did not
institutionalize his policies and that he did not do enough to challenge
the more hawkish views of his advisers.

        Most important, in the final analysis, Kennedy must be judged on
the basis of what he did not what he may have been thinking and might have
done. Kaiser is quick to accuse Eisenhower of leaving his successor a hard
choice between war and peace. The same must be said of JFK. Looked at over
the long haul, the Kennedy administration seems less the anomaly Kaiser
makes it appear than just another phase in the seamless evolution of the
U.S. commitment toward full-scale war.

        The larger problem with Kaiser's analysis of the road to war is
characteristic of most of the literature on the Vietnam War. In this
instance, it is not the winners who have written the history. On the
contrary, as Robert McMahon has pointed out, the literature is dominated
by "American scholars asking American-oriented questions and seeking
answers in documents produced by Americans." Kaiser insists that however
"fascinating and important" the story of Hanoi's decisions might be they
"may well add relatively little to our understanding of American policy,
since American leaders knew so little about what their enemy was doing and
thinking." In fact, what would be most useful now is a study based on
sources from and an understanding of policymaking in both nations. Only
then can we truly understand how decisions made on each side interacted to
provoke a war that neither nation really wanted and that produced a
Vietnamese as well as an American tragedy.

----------------------

Review by Edwin Moise <eemoise@CLEMSON.EDU>
Clemson University

My comments on Kaiser's book are as follows:

David Kaiser presents here a great deal of useful information about the
way policies were formed at the upper levels of the U.S. government from
1961 to 1965.  Much of it new, based on very thorough archival research.
Repeatedly, looking at a summary of a document I found surprising and
unfamiliar, I checked the endnote, and discovered he had found it in an
archive I had never consulted.

The most valuable part of the book is chapters 13-15, where Kaiser traces
the final stages of Lyndon Johnson's decision to escalate the war on a
massive scale.  I have doubts (see below) that the decision to commit
ground troops was really as firm, in December 1964, as Kaiser considers it
to have been.  But he is very convincing in describing how during 1965,
the president habitually concealed decisions about escalation of the war
even from fairly high-level officials such as George Ball and William
Bundy, giving an impression that he was debating issues that in fact had
long since been decided.  This adds credibility to his claim that the key
decision had actually been made in late 1964.  Even if the December 1964
decision was a bit more tentative than Kaiser suggests, it was very
important, and Kaiser's discussion of it an important addition to the
literature.

Other issues on which I found Kaiser particularly illuminating are:

--The fact that U.S. military leaders wanted and expected to have the
option of using nuclear weapons in Indochina, if the situation there
seemed to be getting out of hand, pops up repeatedly at various points in
the book.  Often the language in which this was expressed in the documents
was veiled, but I think Kaiser is correct in his assertions that this
veiled language actually referred to nuclear weapons.

--The extent to which disturbing facts about the military situation in
Vietnam, which showed clearly in the weekly reports from the U.S. command
in Saigon, were ignored in high-level discussion in Washington during the
last months of the Kennedy administration.  Kaiser's discussion of this is
detailed enough to be convincing and useful.  He concludes, and I see no
reason to doubt him, that President Kennedy never realized how badly the
situation was deteriorating (p. 277).

--Discussion of the way General Nguyen Khanh obtained American permission
before going ahead with his coup in January 1964, which overthrew the
generals who had replaced Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963 (pp. 297-98).

Problems with the book:

1) Kaiser has a tendency to treat the drawing up of a plan as it it were a
commitment to carry out that plan.  This appears for the first time on p.
122, when he refers to Robert McNamara, in 1962, "setting a firm time
limit" on the U.S. involvement in South Vietnam.  On p. 186 this is
referred to as a "deadline."  I can see no support in Kaiser's evidence
for this phrasing.  McNamara was directing that plans be drawn up for an
American withdrawal, but there was nothing even faintly firm about these.

        Kaiser discusses (pp. 376-77) a plan drawn up in late November and
early December 1964, approved on December 2, according to which, when the
United States began systematic bombing of North Vietnam, the United States
would also deploy significant ground troop units to South Vietnam.  The 3d
Marine Division would be on its way to Vietnam two days after the bombing
began, and would take 33 days to arrive.  The 173d Airborne Brigade would
arrive even faster, within 29 days of the beginning of the bombing.  He
says (p. 377) that when Johnson actually did order the bombing (Operation
Rolling Thunder) in 1965, "the initial troops movements into South Vietnam
went off like clockwork."  This is not true.  The bombing began March 2.
The 3d Marine Division and the 173d Airborne Brigade each took a bit more
than two months to arrive in Vietnam, not the 33 days and 29 days
projected by the plan.

        This leads into a broader issue, on which Kaiser seems seriously
inconsistent.  Much of the time, Kaiser treats the plan drawn up in 1964
as having become U.S. policy on December 2, 1964, a done deal.  He often
suggests that later policy discussions of what should be done in Vietnam
were simply window-dressing, the Johnson Administration going through the
motions of decision-making in order to conceal the fact that the decisions
had already been made.  Sometimes this is convincing.  But the sections of
the December 1964 plan describing the schedule for arrival of American
ground troops were not followed in 1965, and it didn't even take a
decision to deviate from them.  The government did not seem to remember,
in March 1965, that there had been any decision in December 1964 about
what U.S. units were to arrive on what schedule.  Kaiser, having given the
misleading impression (quote above) that the troop movement sections of
the 1964 plan had been carried out as written, later describes in detail
how the U.S. government decided in 1965, utterly without regard to the
relevant paragraphs of the 1964 plan, what units to send to Vietnam on
what dates.  I think this implies that the meetings in 1965 that decided
to implement other sections of the 1964 plan may not have been pure
window-dressing; perhaps the U.S. government had not been so firmly
committed to any part of the plan, in December 1964, that implementation
could simply be assumed in 1965.

2) Kaiser defined his interests pretty clearly in the title he chose for
his new book, AMERICAN TRAGEDY: KENNEDY, JOHNSON, AND THE ORIGINS OF THE
VIETNAM WAR.  This is a study of American policy, not Vietnam.  There is
sometimes a remarkable neglect of what the Vietnamese were doing, even
when it was clearly relevant to American actions.

        This first becomes conspicuous in the chapter devoted to the coup
that overthrew Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963.  There is a lot of discussion of
conflicting American views of the attitudes of key Vietnamese military
officers, whether most of them were ready to overthrow Ngo Dinh Diem, to
what extent they supported the government's attack on the Buddhist
pagodas, and so forth.  Kaiser does not say much about who was right and
who was wrong in these disputes, what was actually happening among the
Vietnamese.  Astonishingly, the notes to this chapter do not contain a
single source citation to the memoirs of any of the Vietnamese involved in
these events.  The memoirs of General Tran Van Don, the coup plotters'
main liaison with the Americans, would have been particularly useful.

        In the section devoted to the American debates of late 1964 and
early 1965, over escalation of the war, one sees numerous comments on the
question of whether proposed American actions would be likely to provoke
Hanoi to send North Vietnamese units into South Vietnam.  There is not a
hint that while these discussions were going on, the first North
Vietnamese regiments were already on their way south.  By December 1964
the 95th Regiment had arrived in South Vietnam, and the 32d and 101st were
on the way.  The first date at which Kaiser mentions North Vietnamese
troops in the South is June 1965 (p. 441).

Miscellaneous minor comments:

p. 12 states incorrectly that in 1954, the United States pledged to
respect the Geneva Accords of July 1954.

I think a bit more detail was really needed about the implications of the
1962 Geneva Accords on Laos: both what the United States expected to
result from them, and what actually did result from them. In particular, I
don't think Kaiser makes it as clear as he should that the United States
complied with the accords, in the months immediately after they were
signed, much better than Hanoi did.  On the other hand, I am grateful to
Kaiser for actually footnoting a source for the promise by Pushkin, the
Soviet representative in Geneva, that the Soviet Union would ensure Hanoi
complied with the accords.  I had heard of this commitment, but never seen
it supported by a specific documentary source.

p. 166 states that Sam Adams inherited an intelligence estimate showing
100,000 Viet Cong guerrillas, and revised it upward to 500,000.  The
figure Adams inherited hadn't been nearly as low as 100,000.

p. 207 refers to Quang Tri province as being in II Corps.  It was in I
Corps.

p. 232 states that when State Department officials W. Averell Harriman and
Roger Hilsman decided in August 1963 to encourage a coup, they were under
the influence of reporting by New York Times reporter David Halberstam,
who had been portraying the ARVN generals as being on the verge of a coup.
p. 243 makes this clearer, saying Halberstam had reported "that the
generals all . . . wanted to go ahead [with a coup]." In both cases, the
impression is conveyed that Kaiser is reminding readers of what they had
seen on earlier pages, when he had discussed actual reports Halberstam had
published on specific dates.  But I could not recall seeing any such thing
on the pages in which Halberstam's actual reports had been detailed, and
when I went back and looked, I could not find such a thing on those pages.
Had there been an actual Halberstam report saying the generals all wanted
to go ahead with a coup?  I am not sure.

Why is it that almost every discussion I read of the Tonkin Gulf incidents
has to have at least one wrong date in it?  p. 331 says that the USS
Maddox was scheduled to reach the North Vietnamese coast on August 1,
1964; the correct date is July 30 (around noon of that day). p. 339 says
that Zhou Enlai sent a cable to Ho Chi Minh on August 5, one day after the
U.S. air strikes on North Vietnam.  This was not one day after, it was the
day of the strikes, which were on the afternoon of August 5.  These two
wrong dates are not extraordinary carelessness; they are close to par for
the course, in discussions of Tonkin Gulf.

p. 440 states that the size of the Chinese forces in North Vietnam
eventually reached more than 300,000 men.  This is a misunderstanding. The
number of Chinese who at one time or another were in North Vietnam was
over 300,000.  The highest level at any single time was about 170,000.

p. 491 states that General Westmoreland "stopped" the combined action
platoon program.  This is an exaggeration; Westmoreland restrained the
growth of the program, but did not come close to stopping it.

Finally, while I appreciate Dr. Kaiser's very kind comments about my book
on the Tonkin Gulf incidents (pp. 334, 542n56), I would be grateful if he
would try to get the publisher to correct my name on pp. 334 and 563 in
future printings.  I am Edwin Moise, not Edmund Moise.  :-(


-----------------------------------------------

Author's Response by
David Kaiser <KaiserD2@home.com>
Naval War College

        It is extremely gratifying to reply to three highly accomplished
and distinguished historians who have take the time and trouble to read my
book so carefully.  It is an even greater pleasure because their reviews
raise not only some interesting questions of fact, but also some very
fundamental questions about how governments work and, in a sense, how
history happens.  I was very pleased that all three took my generational
arguments-based, as they note, on the work of William Strauss and Neil
Howe-very seriously, and I hope this will encourage more historians to
take a close look at them, as well.

        Lloyd Gardner certainly identified many of the key points --
indeed, quite a few of the key passages -- of the book, such as the Rusk
quote, delivered in 1965, about 1961.  (I didn't discover this in the
archives -- George McT. Kahin printed it before me -- but I think I was
the first directly to link it with the discussions that took place in
1961.)  I shall delay discussing his remarks about Kennedy until later (to
handle this most interesting subject all at once).  The Greene papers --
which H. R. McMaster was the first to use -- are an extremely important
source.  Unfortunately many of his notes from 1966-7 haven't been
declassified. He was determined to record all his contacts with the
President, and thus, when they are released, I think they will clear up at
least two long-standing mysteries: the supposed episode of "The Day it
Became the Longest War," which is not supported by current archival data,
and the question of whether the Chiefs in August 1967 actually decided at
one point to resign in protest over McNamara's testimony about the
ineffectiveness of the bombing.

        Oliver Stone, by the way, is in the dedication -- along with many
other Americans -- because of his own war service and the movies _Platoon_
and _Born on the Fourth of July_.  He is there in spite of JFK, which was
a historical disgrace. Yet strange are the ways of Clio -- because of JFK,
it is only fair to note, Congress passed and the President signed the
Assassination Records and Review Act, leading to declassification of
records broadly related to the assassination on an unprecedented scale.
And thus, even that movie contributes, indirectly, to our knowledge of the
past.

        George Herring, it seems to me, is determined to view the book
within a relatively narrow professional context, and for some reason he
seems to want to discount how much of my book actually is new.  None of
the other authors he mentions -- Gelb and Betts, Halberstam, Van der Mark,
or Larry Berman -- had extensive documentation on the inner workings of
the Kennedy Administration or nearly as much on the Johnson
Administration, or discussed the evolution of the war itself based on
primary sources.  Van der Mark and Berman discussed only a few months of
the more than five years that I covered, and the events of those few
months, I think, look very different when one studies the context of the
preceding ten years.  Nor, despite Herring's frequent accusations to the
contrary, did I ever say that I was attempting to pre-empt the field, I
gave plenty of attention to the conclusions reached by many others, I am
sure many other books on this subject will be written, and I am sure there
is much to learn. Since finishing the book I learned some very interesting
things from Fred Logevall's book, which appeared after American Tragedy
had gone to press, and I was gratified that although he used some
different sources, his conclusions about the period upon which he focused
(a more narrow one) were very similar to mine.  I certainly gave full
attention to H.R. McMaster, and specifically pointed out both in the text
and in notes what I see as the weaknesses in his argument.  I pointed out
my differences with Larry Berman and Brian Van der Mark regarding the
White House meetings of July 1965.  Speaking more broadly, for better or
for worse, since the beginning of my career I have never felt that I had
to restrict my books to topics that had never been discussed before, and
it is fair to say that all three of my books on diplomacy have had an
unusually broad scope.  I think I have made clear on this list many times
that I think broader chronological approaches would illuminate many
historical topics.  This book was written both for a professional and a
general audience, and I continue to hope that it will be read by many,
many Americans who wouldn't recognize the name of a single poster on the
H-Diplo list, including my own.  And where are our fellow citizens going
to get the full story about our past, if not from us?

        In response to the statement that I confined myself to FRUS and to
presidential libraries, I would simply refer the reader to Ed Moise's
review, which I think described the source material more accurately, and
to the notes of the book.  I might add, by the way, that for the Kennedy
period a great deal of credit is due to John Newman, who put together a
very interesting file on the war itself in the Kennedy years and kindly
deposited it in the JFK Library -- including, in particular, a full set of
the MACV headway reports, which I analyzed in detail all the way through
1964 to get a new and more thorough picture of the course of the war on
the ground. (The 1964 reports are available on microfilm.)  The notes show
that I pried a great many documents out of the JCS files and made
extensive use of them, and that a great many new documents were
declassified at my request. I also managed to put the story in a much
broader, worldwide perspective by using FRUS volumes on other areas of the
world.

        I shall now discuss the broader issues of the roles of Eisenhower
and Kennedy, which Ed Moise did not much go into.  Regarding Eisenhower,
some of Herring's critique raises the key question I alluded to initially
of how governments work.  Presidents, I would venture to say, rarely if
ever really know exactly WHAT their government is doing, if only because
no single human being could secure and process all relevant information.
I saw (and developed at length) two critical aspects of Eisenhower
Administration policy, in which the President was involved to varying
degrees.  First, his Administration reached a decision in principle --
beginning in 1955 and 1956 -- that if South Vietnam, Laos, or various
other states of Southeast Asia were attacked by Communists, the United
States would defend them with whatever means necessary, regardless of
whether other SEATO powers did or not.  That was a step, as Robert
Buzzanco has shown, which the Truman Administration had definitely
rejected-largely, at that time, under the influence of the JCS-and one
which Eisenhower himself had rejected in 1954.  Now, however, it was laid
down in official documents approved by the President and the NSC, and the
bureaucracy, as the whole book makes very clear, took that to heart.  A
tendency has arisen to trace the origins of the war to the first time the
United States decided to resist Communism in Vietnam, that is, to the
Truman Administration's assistance to the French.  I think that is
insufficiently rigorous.  A government can take an interest in an area
without deciding that it is worth a war.  It was under Eisenhower, as I
show, that the government decided South Vietnam and Laos WERE worth a war,
and began planning for one.  The rest of the book, I would suggest, shows
how influential those decisions were.

        The second critical decision taken by the Eisenhower
Administration was its rejection of neutralism as an option for the Third
World -- and, specifically, its decision to try to bring non-neutral,
pro-western elements two power in Cambodia and Laos, as well as in South
Vietnam.  In Cambodia these unsuccessful efforts alienated Sihanouk; in
Laos they actually brought a pro-western government into power, but it was
so weak that it found itself opposed by both Communists (who were not
numerous) and neutralists in a civil war in 1960, and the Eisenhower
Administration was preparing to intervene when it left office -- showing,
it seems to me, that Eisenhower took his Administration's plans very
seriously in this case.  My concluding remarks about Eisenhower did not
purport to introduce a new view of Eisenhower the man, they suggested that
future historians would have to reconcile the contradictions between
Eisenhower the man, as he appears in many conversations and letters, and
some of the policies his Administration adopted.

        And now for Kennedy, who remains, clearly, a lightning rod for a
great many very powerful emotions, and an enduring historical puzzle.

        Lloyd Gardner is correct, of course, that Kennedy in the 1960
campaign, upon which I spent very little time, raised the issue (among
many others) of who lost Cuba, who was losing the space race, and who was
losing the missile race.  One could equally well note, however, that his
earlier foreign policy speeches, collected in _The Strategy of Peace_,
foreshadow many of the contrasting aspects of his foreign policy,
particularly his sympathy for Third World nationlism.  His 1957 speech on
Algeria created an enormous stir throughout the Third World.  But in any
event, it is now possible, thanks to the FRUS series, May and Zelikow's
Kennedy Tapes, and other Vietnam-related tapes which I listed to, to judge
him not based upon this or that speech, but upon what he said privately
and what he did.  It will be even more possible to make such judgments
when the Miller Center at UVA publishes a complete set of administration
tape transcripts quite soon.  Anyway, what George Herring in particular
seems to refuse to acknowledge is that everything I said about Kennedy is
based upon very thorough documentation, and that I did NOT, actually,
ignore the things he claims I am ignoring at all.  To those of us who
lived through his era Kennedy bequeathed a series of very powerful images.
I do not claim to have said the last word about him any more than about
anything else, but the time has now come when anything we say about him
can, and therefore should, be justified by documentation, and not by
whether or not it confirms to what we already believed.  I think my own
book passes that test and I will be most happy to defend any individual
points on that basis.

        Contrary to what George Herring says, I showed Kennedy's
skepticism about war in Southeast Asia with the help of a host of new
sources.  In an intermittent series of meeting in 1961, 1962, and even
1963 in he rejected repeated proposals to intervene in Laos, in South
Vietnam, or in both.  I did not ignore the deception he practiced about
the exact role of Americans (mainly pilots) in South Vietnam; I showed
very clearly how, in response to the intial flurry of press coverage of
the new American effort in 1962, the Administration developed its "line."
And I showed that Kennedy on several occasions refused publicly to draw a
line across the 17th parallel and declare that the US would defend it.
Twice, in November 1961 and in September 1963, he was given draft policy
statements declaring the security of South Vietnam an American "vital
interest" and twice, as Herbert Parmet originally pointed out, he changed
the language to leave an escape hatch.  Kennedy and McGeorge Bundy were
disturbed in the spring of 1962 when George Ball, of all people, made a
speech using stronger language.  (It's interesting that Robert Kennedy,
who rarely took part in discussions of Vietnam, also used stronger
language during a brief stop in Saigon.)  He said again and again that the
United States would need allied support -- including the British and
French -- in such a conflict-and such support was not going to be
forthcoming.  Most important of all, and here is the point Herring fails
to address, he refused, again and again, to begin the war forthwith in
1961 or (through Laos) in 1962 or 1963. In short, and contrary to Lloyd
Gardner's conclusion, Kennedy carefully avoided any statement comparable
to "I am not going to the President who lost Vietnam."  I have the
undelivered Dallas Trade Mart speech of November 22 before me, and I can't
find anything quite like that in it.  The only discussion of Southeast
Asia is embedded within a plea to the Congress, in effect, to restore a
very recent, substantial cut in the appropriation for foreign aid.  I
didn't expect to find all this when I began my research.  None of this, as
I said in the book, proves that we would not have gone to war if Kennedy
had lived -- much less that the whole subsequent history of the US would
have been different.  But I think I have shown that Kennedy's approach
both to Southeast Asia and to foreign policy as a whole differed from his
advisers' and from his successors, and that Johnson quickly adopted his
inherited advisers' assumptions.  Most important of all, perhaps, he had a
broad foreign policy agenda into which such a war simply would not fit.
Johnson had no such agenda.

        Both Herring and Moise have some questions about my discussion of
Diem's overthrow.  I did place the blame mainly on Diem and Nhu.  They
clearly enjoyed broad non-Communist support in 1955 and they clearly
alienated virtually all of it during the next eight years.  They were set
upon a number of courses of action which were bound to be disastrous. As a
result, they were faced with numerous coup plots from the beginning,
including one in 1960 that would have succeeded had the coup leaders been
more determined, and one in 1962 that nearly killed them with bombs on the
presidential palace.  I think I showed clearly how they failed to take
very simple steps that might have saved themselves during 1963, and how
even their closest palace collaborators agreed that they could not go on
as they were. Among Americans, Lodge definitely favored a coup, and on
October 30, in a taped meeting from which I am the first to quote, the
Administration decided that Diem was not changing, that he was not likely
to win the war, and that, therefore, the United States should not stand in
the way of a coup.  Even then, however, the tape shows very clearly that
they doubted anything was going to happen, and they did not realize how
strong the coup forces were.  (I certainly am familiar, by the way, with
Tran Van Don's memoirs, but I thought it better to rely upon contemporary
accounts of what he said.)  The decision that Diem could not be defended
at all costs was very similar, it seems to me, to decisions about Chiang
Kai-Shek in 1947-9, Syngman Rhee in 1960, Antonio Somoza in 1979, and
Ferdinand Marcos in 1984, and in none of those cases would I be prepared
to argue that the American government made a mistake.  Both Lyndon Johnson
and Richard Nixon found it very comforting and/or expedient to claim that
this was Kennedy's mistake, one that led to the war (Nixon even
commissioned forgeries to try to prove it.)  That strikes me both as
inaccurate and as another version of Denis Brogan's "illusion of American
omnipotence."

        Now I certainly owe Ed Moise an apology for giving him a new first
name -- I assure him the press is already preparing to correct the mistake
-- may I offer him a free corrected copy?  On the other hand, his
statement that on p. 232, I said Hilsman and Harriman were influenced by
Halberstam without quoting the relevant story by Halberstam is similarly
puzzling.  The story to which I was referring appeared on August 24, the
day Hilsman drafted the famous cable.  I quoted portions arguing that the
crackdown on the pagodas in Saigon was entirely the work of Nhu and his
own security forces and that Tran Van Don, the new Chief of the General
staff, hadn't even known the raid was coming.  Although this was contrary
to what Lodge was reporting, Hilsman's famous telegram began, "It is now
clear that whether military proposed martial law or whether Nhu tricked
them into it, Nhu took dvantage of its imposition to smash pagodas. . . .,
thus placing onus on military in eyes of world and Vietnamese people."
He added that Nhu was now in a "commanding position."  No one but
Halberstam had made these arguments; thus, I thought, his influence was
clear.  And on this point, Halberstam was wrong; the generals' position
was quite equivocal.  I did overstate things slightly, I see, summarizing
the following week on p. 243, when I said, "But the biggest flaw in the
August 24 cable was precisely its assumption that the generals all felt
double-crossed by the pagoda raids and wanted to go ahead-something
reported by David Halberstam, but not by the Embassy."  That sentence
would, it is true, be somewhat more exact if I had left out "and wanted to
go ahead," although that statement was the inference that Hilsman seemed
to draw from what Halberstam did report, namely, that the generals had
nothing to do with the crackdown.

        I now come to the most interesting question of "plans" and their
significance.

        I do think that McNamara's declaration in the summer of 1962 that
the American effort in South Vietnam had to be largely wound up within
three years was highly significant in a number of ways.  Although direct
evidence is lacking on this point, it seems to be a response to Kennedy's
political concern, which immediately became apparent when the press began
covering the new American effort in early 1962, that the United States
seemed to be getting bogged down in a new war.  (Kennedy remarked on April
6 of that year that "he wished us to be prepared to seize upon any
favorable moment to reduce our involvement [in South Vietnam], recognizing
that the moment might yet be some time away.")  From July 1962 through
October 1963, McNamara repeatedly insisted on the completion of a
withdrawal plan.  This had paradoxical consequences.  MACV and the Saigon
Embassy argued successfully that the American air effort within South
Vietnam had to be increased in order to meet that deadline.  By May 1963
McNamara was arguing that "the corner has definitely been turned towards
victory" in an effort to prove that he was meeting his deadline.  It was
largely because of this deadline, I think, that McNamara refused to
consider evidence (mostly provided by Halberstam, and actually verified by
MACV reports) that the war was going badly in the summer of 1963, and that
he insisted in September on a token 1000-man withdrawal.  Essentially, he
had defined what reality was, and his subordinates had to deliver the
goods.  (Not for the first time, by the way.) And that was probably the
biggest reason that throughout the whole crisis of August-November 1963,
nearly the whole government, including Kennedy, labored under the
misapprehension that while the political crisis in South Vietnam was very
serious, the war itself was probably going well.  Kennedy had made it
clear that he certainly didn't want a war or a long drawn-out involvement
in South Vietnam, and McNamara was going to secure our objectives within
these guidelines.  It was Johnson who made it clear we were going to hold
South Vietnam at all costs and McNamara immediately shifted his course as
well.

        Now, as for the December 1964 plan and the March 1965 deployments,
here we have a different question.  Some background is in order.  During
1964 General LeMay, Air Force Chief of Staff, argued repeatedly (as he had
over Laos and Cuba in 1961) that air power alone, properly applied -- and
here I strongly suspect, but can't quite prove, that that meant nuclear
weapons -- could deal with the situation in Vietnam.  The Army in
particular disagreed, and although the JCS documents from this period are
quite cryptic, LeMay evidently lost that fight.  Well before the
November-December planning exercise, Marines were on ships off of Da Nang,
prepared to land as soon as sustained bombing began.  The preparation of
plans during November-December was extremely complicated and the final
draft of November 29 that the President approved on December 7 focused on
bombing as the major aspect of Phase II of military action against North
Vietnam -- but added that the program of bombing would be accompanied by
"appropriate US deployments to handle any contingency."  The appendices,
which were also given to the President, made clear what this meant,
beginning with the deployment of the 3rd Marines and the 173rd Airborne
Brigade.

        In February 1965 it took weeks to persuade Johnson officially to
authorize Phase II bombing -- largely because he was determined to pretend
that no fundamental change of policy had taken place -- and when he did,
it was further delayed by another Saigon political crisis.  As I pointed
out (p. 408), Rolling Thunder (Phase II) finally began on March 2.  "The
December annexes called for one Marine battalion landing team to land on D
+ 3 and the remainder of the 3d Marine Division to arrive within thirty
days.  Instead, two battalions of Marines landed on March 8 -- D + 6 --
and the third battalion, making an entire Marine Expeditionary Brigade or
MEB, just four days later."  Ed Moise is right that the deployment of the
rest of the division and of the 173rd were delayed somewhat, a process I
describe in detail. In addition, as I discussed at length, many troops
originally earmarked for Thailand (in expectation of general war with
China) wound up in Vietnam instead.  But given this sequence, it seems
very clear to me that the Pentagon was implementing, with some
modifications, what Johnson had provisionally approved back in December.
The President had approved bombing plus major ground deployments.
Bombing and ground deployments began in the first 8 days of March.  That,
to me, is following the plan.  It seems (I have this from a freelance
journalist who called me and sent me copies of recently released LBJ March
tapes) that Johnson, true to form, talked as though the Marines were a
sudden decision-that, of course, was how he wanted to spin it. But it's
clear from the record that they were not.  Ed Moise speculates that "the
meetings in 1965 that decided to implement other sections of the 1964 plan
may not have been pure window-dressing; perhaps the U.S. government had
not been so firmly committed to any part of the plan, in December 1964,
that implementation could simply be assumed in 1965."  I would say that
those meetings reflected Johnson's determination to delay making steps
officially as long as possible, and that changes reflected all sorts of
factors-mainly logistical and military, partly political-that emerged in
the meantime.  There was no meeting that argued about deploying the
Marines, and subsequent discussions about the deployments generally
involved how and when to announce them-and how to meet Ambassador Taylor's
objections to such deployments.  The key point to me is that the United
States government committed itself to bombing and major ground deployments
in 1964, and began executing both during the same week in 1965.  General
David Shoup, who also appears in the dedication, argued several years
later that this was the result of interservice rivalries.

        Thanks to my graduate training, which my own work has only tended
to confirm, I have come to believe that in modern governments, policies
essentially are made and executed by bureaucracies, following very broad
guidelines from the top (and often, as in 1961, following guidelines
inherited from previous Administrations), and frequently having to modify
this or that detail for political and other reasons.  Presidents rarely
know exactly what they are approving and can almost never supervise the
implementation of the details.  Thus, they tend to focus on supervising
the spin.  I this case, LBJ detached himself somewhat from the process,
but it seems very clear that he knew what he was doing all along.  I think
that on these points I have something of a philosophical difference with
George Herring and with Ed Moise.  This also comes up in Herring's remarks
about the New Look and nuclear weapons, which I think are naive, as Marc
Trachtenberg's recent book shows as well.  Thanks to Eisenhower
Administration decisions, the United States military by 1961 did not plan
to, and was not equipped to, carry on any sustained major operation
without atomic and nuclear weapons.  The Rolling Thunder bombing campaign
ran out of conventional bombs almost at once.

        Regarding Ed Moise's individual comments:

        It's true that Bedell Smith's statement about the completed Geneva
Accords did not use the word "respect"; the United States did pledge not
to "disturb" them by the "threat or the use of force."  It's a small
difference of emphasis at most and certainly the Eisenhower Administration
took care not to do anything that explicitly violated them.  It did give
itself an escape hatch by calling for UN-supervised elections, as the
Accords did not.

        The misplacing of Quang Tri was, as you might expect, a typo; I
think there are plenty of other references in the book (and a map) showing
it in I Corps.

        Regarding August 5 and the Tonkin Gulf, it looks as if for once I
forgot that Vietnam was twelve hours ahead of Washington, a fact that
plays a major role in many episodes in the book.

        I can't put my hands on Sam Adams' book just now to find what
estimate he inherited -- let me repeat that I am referring to the estimate
for local auxiliaries, political supporters, etc. -- who he concluded
served as a reserve manpower pool -- not to the estimate for active
guerrillas.

        I was wrong about the end of the CAP program.

        Given Ed Moise's encyclopedic knowledge, I am relieved that this
was all he could find.

        In closing, let me once again the moderators for arranging this
roundtable, and to the commentators for their careful attention


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