Bruce Herschensohn’s New Book

9 Responses to “Bruce Herschensohn’s New Book”

1. MK on March 31st, 2010 5:37 pm

   There is a famous Nixon quote, jotted down by H. R. Haldeman in his notes on November 18, 1972, “”K having probs. w/ Thieu – P. told him to go ahead – get best deal let Thieu paddle his own canoe.” We at NARA tried to open it and a number of other Haldeman “H notes” of meetings with Nixon to the public in 1987. Nixon’s representatives filed 36 CFR 1276 claims against disclosure, noting in their submission, “”File: 11/17/72-12/21/72 Note: Practically all the documents are objectionable.” NARA considered the objections for a long, long time, then finally was able to open the material nearly 10 years later. Haldeman’s own diary (largely based on his notes but his personal property and not subject to 36 CFR 1276) noted for November 18:

   “”P mentioned at noon that K was having problems with Thieu. He’s gotten a new cable and apparently Thieu is causing trouble again. The P told him to just go ahead and get the best deal we can and then let Thieu paddle his own canoe. Then when the P called in the evening, he said K has now read the message and it wasn’t nearly as bad as he thought, so it was another crisis that Henry was stirring up.”

   On November 29, 1972, Haldeman recorded in his diary, “”Apparently the meeting with the South Vietnamese envoy didn’t go very well. The P spent a long time with him, about two and a half hours. The net result was the P softened a little bit, which was bad. They’re going to have to meet tomorrow to try to clean that up, but the South Vietnamese, after the meeting, came back and told Henry to tell the P they would probably have to go it alone. And that we should just go in, make a settlement to get our prisoners back, and stop fighting as far as we’re concerned, and let the Vietnamese go on fighting it out. They don’t seem to understand that our Congress won’t continue to supply them, if they take that route. And that they have to go along with us on a settlement, a point which Henry would like to get across to them (and the P) in the meeting tomorrow.”

   As to the Nixon era Congress, Mr. Herschensohn’s comment that Congress “saw a way to lose (the war)” very much sounds to me like modern framing. Us, good guys who want to win, them, bad guys who want to lose. An historian wouldn’t represent the situation that way. Or at least a good historian would not. He would look for nuance, multiple perspectives, shading, contextual sophistication.

   Having come to adulthood then – I entered college in 1969 — I view the period a bit differently. My parents’ family was behind the Iron Curtain in occupied Estonia while I was growing up. I never had a chance to meet or see my grandparents as a result. Our family was split, my Mom, Dad, sister and I living in freedom, the others living under forcibly applied Communist rule. My half brother and half sister applied for permission to visit their father (and my Dad as a result of his second marriage) but the Soviets refused to let them out. Dad died in 1987 without having seen his son and oldest daughter after fleeing Estonia when the invasions occurred in the 1940s. As an employee of the United States’ Voice of America, a radio scriptwriter for the Estonian Service, he obviously was not going to be able to visit them over there. Only after Estonia regained its freedom was I able to visit in 1992 and for the first time meet some of my relatives.

   As wrenching as it was to know that family members could not enjoy the freedoms we have here, I’ve always understood that the United States does not have the means to go around the world liberating oppressed people. Its reserves and assets are very limited. To the extent it spends them, it must focus on its own national interests. There’s a point where it has to calculate what its strategic interests are and the extent to which its own people are willing to see their young men lay down their lives for a cause.

   By the time Nixon took office in 1969, a large number of Americans simply did not believe it was worth fighting in Vietnam. That remained the case throughout his term in office. Elected officials in both branches of the federal government were keenly aware of that. I know how citizens felt, I read many of their anguished letters to Nixon while I was employed by NARA. It simply was not possible to keep selling the American people on the continued expenditure of lives and their tax dollars on the cause of maintaining a Republic of South Viet Nam. Even people such as I, who as a youngster heard about and accepted the notion of the “domino theory,” understood that. I had it easy. As a female, I was not subject to the draft. I supported Nixon, wearing “Tell it to Hanoi” buttons while walking the streets of Washington to my college campus. But I was not oblivious to the extent to which people of good faith across the political spectrum were tormented by the war and the thought of sending our young men to die there. So, too, later, with Iraq.

   Would it have been possible to sell the American people on continued expenditure of their tax dollars on massive military aid to the South after the signing of the Paris Peace Treaty in 1973? I don’t know. No one does. It would have required a framework which had become very frayed by 1973. One doesn’t get do overs. It’s not as if politics allows people to make amends to those they have harmed, as one does in AA. No president ever is going to go before the American people and say, as we might in dealing with wrenching problems in our personal lives or discussing them in an AA meeting, “we meant well but we miscalculated. The country suffered terrible upheaval and polarization because we tried to do something which LBJ realized as far back as 1965 had little or no chance of succeeding. We understand your pain. We wish we could have done better. We don’t get a do over and don’t deserve it. But please, despite our terrible screw ups, try to understand that we still feel some obligation to the South Vietnamese people.” But because the world of politics fears humility, it often traps our elected officials.

   When Saigon fell during the Ford administration, many Vietnamese fled to the part of the DC suburbs where I then lived. As someone whose family lay behind the Iron Curtain, I sympathized with them. We donated clothes to the refugees and patronized their stores when they set up businesses here. I understood the pain of being separated from one’s family and felt badly that they were in the same situation as I. But I also understood that in an imperfect world where all men and women merely are human, good intentions can go awry, conditions change, trust is lost, people say “no more,” and the best way to deal with it is to be understanding, rather than harshly judgmental. None of us is perfect, we all have erred and miscalculated during our lives. If I were writing about the period of the Vietnam war, I would be humble. I would try to keep in mind the different perspectives and the pressures that the human beings facing difficult decisions operated under, and rather than labeling them good or bad, simply try to understand them.

2. DAVID PHILLIPS on April 1st, 2010 4:33 am

   BRUCE – I GUARANTEE that I SHALL PURCHASE THIS BOOK, TOO!

   Rev. DAVID STOKES’ recent “Apparent Danger” has been well received, too!

3. DAVID PHILLIPS on April 1st, 2010 4:55 am

   THIS PITCH is right down home plate for BRUCE – should he care to respond!

   IS IT JUST ME, OR does “The NIXON CENTER” seem to focus on one-way communication, over much?

   JACOB HEILBRUNN of The Center posted (on March 31st) a “learned, expert commentary” on a belated renewal of a START Treaty — whose terms STILL are not public!

   For the present, it remains a “Bi-lateral TREATY – Secretly negotiated” – - but still awaiting its signing in Prague on April 8th – fully one week from now.

   U. S. Sen. JOHN KERRY’s upper house web site has even promised some preliminary public hearings “starting about Easter” before that signing in the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee.

   HOW CAN The Nixon Center “experts” opine — with any credence or authority — absent a text on the public record?

   BRUCE – WOuld you care to comment, sir?

4. MK on April 1st, 2010 5:22 am

   As I was thinking last night about Vietnam and the Iraq war, I considered the extent to which politics superficially feeds on (and traps people in) very public oppositional framing. (Mature people don’t get stuck like that in their personal lives, fortunately.) It’s a curious phenomenon which can have terrible consequences. Nixon and Republicans criticized some of LBJ’s Vietnam policies while he was president; Democrats criticized Nixon’s while he was in office. You can, as the saying goes, be for something before you’re against it. Or vice versa.

   Yet behind the scenes, as Robert Caro demonstrated for a segment of the reading public in his series on LBJ as a member of Congress, there is a lot of horsetrading on some issues. I was reminded of that again when I recently read Nick Kotz’s book about passage of civil rights legislation, Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws That Changed America. But horsetrading demands a certain environment to work, one which locked in positions can erode.

   The nation certainly was polarized during the Vietnam war, with some ridiculous demonization and name calling. One thing that was missing, mercifully, back in the days of Vietnam, was the existence of a certain genre of books written by people outside government who never had held positions of authority. What I like to think of nowadays as “feel good by hating ‘em” books by writers on the left and the right both, with titles containing the words traitors, destroying, idiots, etc. Instead of educating Americans about how Washington works, they largely seem to serve as security blankets.

   As an historian, I think people are weakened by reaching for things like that. We need more civic maturity, not less. Yet David Brooks, who never will write one of those books is one of the few contemporary pundits these days to discuss civic maturity and what corrodes it. Books by taunting outsiders, which in my view serve little purpose other than to hand like minded people crutches they really don’t need – make it hard to learn lessons (as one does in the business and managerial world) and grow and develop. As bad as Nixon had it, Bush had it even worse in that regard. By the time W was president, the market was full of books on both sides which handed ordinary citizens crutches. This was not necessarily sought out by the Bush administration but is a part of the world we live in now. That type of reductionism and demonization of anyone who disagrees with the author just made it harder, not easier, for W to sell the Iraq war to the American people. Just part of how the political marketplace has changed for the worse since Nixon’s day.

5. DAVID PHILLIPS on April 1st, 2010 2:51 pm

   “MK” _= YOU, OBVIOUSLY, have NEVER “WALKED THE WALK” of those of us who served HONORABLY over-seas in military uniform during the Vietnam, LAOS and Cambodia Wars under five (5!) U. S. Presidents — all of them “World War II Veterans – our ‘[self-promoted] Greatest Generation’???

   OUR delayed FLIGHTS HOME to the Country of our birth and origins – ensuring after dark arrivals under LBJ, especially – never prepared us for what we would find on those “late arrivals, after dark” — to avoid many war protesters at the main gate @ Travis AFB, in Northern CA!

   NEITHER DID WE UNDERSTAND = Why “it was highly recommended” WE NOT(!) WEAR OUR MILITARY UNIFORMS on our “home-comings” – else we’d be injured[!] by war protesters, WHO ARE now in power at the highest levels of Federal Government and far too many bureaucracies!

6. MK on April 1st, 2010 4:17 pm

   Mr. Phillips, if your answer to my description of my family situation is to try to turn this comment box into a zero sum game, than I have learned something in observing that.

   None of us has “walked the walk” some other has. So what? This is a nation which values individualism, not collectivisim.

   You have not walked the walk of a federal archivist. Or an historian.
   Nor, presumably, have you walked the walk of a person who never was able to meet some family members who were stuck behind the Iron Curtain. Nor worked in civil service for 37 years as I have. That doesn’t make you a lesser person any more than my different experiences make me a lesser person. We all contribute to this great nation in very different ways. We largely have freedom of choice in the careers we choose, unlike in the old USSR.

   I have not walked the walk of a U.S. citizen who served in the military. Or who had all of their family here with them in the U.S. There are areas where you had it luckier than I and areas where I had it luckier than you. But being an American is not a zero sum game, I don’t lose by choices others made in life and neither does anyone else.

   Since I see America’s strength in its diversity and in the ability of its citizens to look at things from differing perspectives (unlike in the old Soviet Union which forced group think on the people in its clutches) I do not see what your point is in directing such a comment to me. We can all be proud of the path we chose in life, we don’t need each other’s individual or collective approval, validation, or opprobrium. Or I would think most of us do not. We are a free people in that sense, I no less than you for my parents having come to this country as refugees from Communism.

   Finally, as I as a Christian am about to celebrate Easter, I know we all are frail and fallible and weak and that none of us can or could lord it over another. We’re all God’s creatures, nothing more, nothing less.

   Again, being an American is not, repeat not, a zero sum game.

7. MK on April 1st, 2010 4:44 pm

   Mr. Herschensohn, you are unlikely to comment here as that is the pattern with the people associated with TNN. I looked in at my local Barnes and Noble on my way home as I wanted to browse your book to look at your sources. I did not see it there so what you used is unclear to me at this point. Keep in mind I’m on the east coast, so it is 7:

   I am interested, however, in the extent to which you may have examined citizens’ letters held by the NARA administered Nixon Presidential Library. My work there primarily involved screening the White House tapes to identify portions which could be declassified or otherwise released to the public. I did do some processing of textual collections, as well. The letters from ordinary Americans in those collections form a largely untapped source for researchers to study. Americans are humanized in the often anguished and anxious letters they wrote to Nixon in ways that polls and newspaper clippings never could begin tp touch.

   I hope you used some of those letters, and also constituent letters in legislative collections. (Committee files come to NARA. Member files are not covered by the Federal Records Act and typically are donated in part to historical societies or university libraries’ special collections.) I’m curious as to whether you looked at such letters, since your book apparently looks at public opinion. Even the White House Central Files: TR (Trips) category, general and executive, which I processed in the late 1980s, provides glimpses into public opinion. You’d be surprised how many Americans wrote to Nixon either before and after he visited their cities and towns. I saw some very touching and moving letters in the collections I processed.

   Among secondary sources, did you drawn on books such as Waiting Wives: The Story of Schilling Manor, Home Front to the Vietnam War, by Donna Moreau. Well worth reading. I read it several years ago and recommend it. As Andrew Carroll noted, “Waiting Wives casts light on one of the most overlooked aspects of all wars — the anxiety, loneliness, and resilience of the military wives on the homefront. Donna Moreau, who knows this world from personal experience, illuminates this story with great candor, humanity, and humor. This is a timeless book, and, thanks to Moreau’s gifts as a writer, an unforgettable one as well.”

8. MK on April 1st, 2010 4:44 pm

   That should be 7:44 pm, forgot to add the time.

9. MK on April 2nd, 2010 5:43 am

   Mr. Herschensohn, I have an answer to my question to you above. This morning, I found the Letter from Yorba Linda you put up at the Nixon Foundation’s site in February. You wrote of the book, “Much of the information used is taken from notes, commentaries, speeches, articles, and other writings of mine during the 1960s and 1970s as those events were being lived.”

   But I have another question for you. Given your background with USIA, I would be interested in hearing your take on how the Bush administration handled the Iraq war in terms of trying to sell it. Support for the war plummeted among Americans as they came to realize there were no WMD. To argue that people should be free certainly is noble, but history shows that this is a murky area, even for the U.S. and its western allies. As President Bush noted of the Yalta agreement at the end of World War II in 2005, “the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history.” Roger Cohen offered a thoughtful examination of why history cannot always be wrapped up in neat, feel-good packages, in “1945’s Legacy: A Terror Defeated, Another Arrives.”
   http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/weekinreview/15cohen.html?_r=1

   Sometimes, as my friends have kidded me, a country such as that from which my parents came, is “a speed bump on the map of Europe.” A tiny Northern European country with geographic importance due to its seaports but with less than 2 million people easily can be invaded, occupied, and its citizens forced to submit to totalitarian rule, under conditions we Americans find unimaginable. I don’t remember resentment in the Estonian-American community during the Vietnam War that the U.S. sent men to fight there but that there was no assistance for the Baltic nations when the Soviets tightened their grip on them after World War II. There was, of course, some resistance in the 1940s (I recommend Mart Laar’s War in the Woods: Estonia’s Struggle for Survival 1944-1956. My dad already was working at VOA during the Hungarian uprising in 1956. The truth of the matter is, even with European countries, not just in Southeast Asia, or more recently with Iraq, we’ve had to pick and choose whose freedom we will defend and whom circumstances dictate we must abandon to their fate. President Bush did well to mention some of this in 2005, but was hampered in some quarters by the albatross of the Iraq war.

   It seems to me our political processes increasingly encourage not so much amnesia, but reductionism and feel good polemics. This weakens the fabric of our nation, because it implies we can’t look at complex issues or face hard truths. I don’t belong to AA but I have a friend who does so I’ve gone to some meetings as friend and supporter. AA encourages self examination and moral inventories. Politics encourages blame shifting and excuses. But real life is messy, history can be messy. Yet our political framework often reduces all this to cartoonish chest thumping or finger pointing. Some historians handle such issues better than others. I’ve called out some of my peers for reductionism and over reliance on broad brush depictions. But I’ve also read histories which largely succeed in producing thoughtful, nuanced narratives. I’d be interested in hearing which ones you’ve read, and your thoughts on the different challenges Nixon and Bush faced in trying to sell the Vietnam war and the Iraq war to the American public and to the world at large. As my dad worked at VOA, these issues interest me, aside from my being an historian. Perhaps because I am the child of refugees, I’ve always thought the U.S. projected its strength best not by insisting on being treated by infallibility and demanding praise for its goodness and exceptionalism – but through intangibles, including debate about it’s actions and acknowledgement of what it did well and what it didn’t. That is exactly what oppressed people, such as those who lived under Communism, did not have.

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