Ray McGovern: Heeding George Kennan's Wise Advice
... As a young Army infantry/intelligence officer turned junior CIA analyst in 1963, I was given responsibility for reporting on Soviet policy toward China and Southeast Asia and was just beginning to get a feel for the complexities. My degrees were in Russian studies; I knew something about Communist expansion, but very little about Vietnam....
If my studies of Russia and of US foreign policy had given me an idol, it was George Kennan, former ambassador to the USSR and to Yugoslavia, and author of the successful post-war containment policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. He returned to the Princeton campus in 1963.
Early in the Vietnam War, I was delighted to discover one Sunday morning that Kennan had written a feature article on Vietnam for the Washington Post. Good, I said to myself, Kennan has finally ended his silence. Surely, he will have something instructive to say.
What Kennan wrote on Vietnam was not at all what I expected. Ouch; an idol turns out to have clay feet, I thought. Had Kennan not heard of the dominoes? I am embarrassed to admit that it took me another year or so to see clearly that Kennan was, as usual, spot on.
It was December 12, 1965, and there it was on the front page of the Outlook section - George Kennan calling for a major reality check on our involvement in Vietnam, and arguing for what he called a "simmering down" of our military adventure there as "the most promising of all the possibilities we face." He wrote:
"I would not know what 'victory' means.... In this sort of war, one controls what one can take and hold and police with ground forces; one does not control what one bombs. And it seems to me the most unlikely of all contingencies that anyone should come to us on his knees and inquire our terms, whatever the escalation of our effort....
"If we can find nothing better to do than embark upon a further open-ended increase in the level of our commitment simply because the alternatives seem humiliating and frustrating, one will have to ask whether we have not become enslaved to the dynamics of a single unmanageable situation - to the point where we have lost much of the power of initiative and control over our own policy, not just locally but on a world scale."
Kennan was harshly critical of those asserting that the US had no choice other than to "live up to its commitments." "Commitments to whom?" he asked. More pointed still, he asked if the "commitment" was conceived as "something unrelated to [South Vietnam's] own performance, to its ability to command the confidence of its people?"
Kennan's prescription of "simmering down" involved letting negotiations begin "quite privately and without elbow-jogging on our part, by our friends and others who have an interest in the termination of the conflict ... We must be prepared, depending on such advice as we receive from them, to place limited restraints at some point on our military efforts, and to do so quietly and without published time limits or ultimatums."
"Disbalance"
Kennan's bottom line:
"The most disturbing aspect of our involvement in Vietnam is its relationship to our interests and responsibilities in other areas of world affairs. Whatever justification this involvement might have had if Vietnam had been the only important problem, or even the outstanding problem, we faced in the world today, this not being the case, its present dimensions can only be said to represent a grievous disbalance of American policy...
... Does anyone see any parallels to Washington's parlor games - and its more serious discussions - today regarding upcoming decisions on Afghanistan?
Johnson was not about to be the first US president to lose a war - but, succumbing to the Greek tragic flaw of hubris, he became exactly that. The result: Not only were two to three million Vietnamese and 58,000 American troops killed, but also his Great Society bit the dust.
Fortunately for seniors like me, Johnson was able to sign Medicare into law (on July 30, 1965) before the bottom fell out. Most of the other promising reforms his administration had in mind became unsung casualties of that ill-conceived war.
And, as costly as Vietnam turned out to be, the Treasury was not nearly as broke then as it is now...