Jennings’ Heroes

16 Responses to “Jennings’ Heroes”

1. MK on April 2nd, 2010 10:24 am

   Ah, yes, Watergate. Which somehow just happened. Except it didn’t.

   John Taylor and I once debated whether Nixon would have gone all out in Vietnam had he been elected in 1960. I tend to think not and John did not rule out that he might not have. We might have avoided becoming mired in Southeast Asia that way, altogether, had Nixon won in 1960.

   The fact is, Nixon came in to the White House instead in 1969, following a President of the opposing party, and had to deal with decisions others had made. He could have survived Vietnam, which was not of his own making – although he did, of course, play a role as the sometimes critical, sometimes supportive, influential voice of the opposition party during LBJ’s tenure. Nixon did take actions which led to the signing of the peace accords, even if, as his once secret tapes show, he had his own doubts about the Vietnam endeavor. Large numbers of voters certainly were ready to move on and to put the war behind them. It would have taken a lot of skill to keep the public on board with future efforts, such as re-supply, and it was up to Nixon to display (or not) such skill. Simply put, keeping the faith in Vietnam after January 1973 required earlier self discipline in the areas that led to Watergate, including the avoidance of the tragic-comically disproportionate view of political opponents as enemies.

   Nixon was responsible for in the broad sense and could not survive Watergate, which was of his own making. He set the tone at the top, as an executive does. Anyone who has dealt with a workplace culture at higher levels understands what that means. Unless one faces Nixon’s tragic flaws, it is hard to make the argument that one believes in accountability, that over used and largely hollow word, hollow because it so rarely is demonstrated. It’s when I look at how people discuss Watergate and what Nixon himself called his self-inflicted wounds in the context of Vietnam that I decide how I can I size them up. Few measure up, a sign of the age we live in, I guess.

   There were other problems, ones he did not seem to foresee. Nixon was a strategic thinker in some areas but had huge blind spots in others. You can’t go scorched earth on opponents and then expect them to work with you. People can’t be bullied into cooperation, at least not in a democratic nation. (How many TNN readers react to being yelled at and insulted by turning meek and saying, “I’ll do whatever you want.” Most of us don’t react that way.) Nixon needed to lay the groundwork much earlier, while he still was trying to negotiate a settlement. Very, very hard to do, and much of the outreach needed to be done in private. Sending Agnew out to give feel good red meat speeches (some penned by Pat Buchanan) was short sighted. He needed a surrogate who better understood voters and generally respected human psychology, not a beat ‘em up, cheerlead type of guy. And more thoughtful attention to the areas in Bryce Harlow’s portfolio and generally his Hill team, with a balance between the simple venting (the complaints Haldeman’s diary captured) and discipline in reaching long term goals. (Yeah, I know, Harlow took a leave of absence and wasn’t there in 1972.)

   That’s all I have time for, this Smartphone’s keyboard is too small to keep trying to tap something out and this has taken up too much of my lunchbreak, already.

2. MK on April 2nd, 2010 10:44 am

   Left out a few words, screen too small on handheld. That should have read “go scorched earth on domestic opponents in the U.S. and then expect them to work with you.”

   A wise leader leaves room for future outreach. Tough to do in the VN scenario but something RN actually owed those of us who had votef him into office and supported him. Holding office is about stewardship, something too often overlooked. You have to work hard at that and keep it in mind as a longterm objective.

3. MK on April 2nd, 2010 2:02 pm

   Off work now, with time to offer some more observations. The question of stewardship and political capital largely has been ignored in assessing the Nixon era. That academics and political types overlook it is not surprising to me, however. Although their methodologies differ greatly, the former being largely fact based with varying degrees of interpretation, the latter focusing on how to sell ideologically driven solutions, neither the academic nor the political environment encourages a focus on stewardship. In the former, scholars look at what others did. They mostly are armchair analysts. In the latter, the idea often seems to be, find a way to avoid accountability and to blame the other guy for what happened. So the idea that a president temporarily occupies an office which he hands on eventually to a successor of the same or the opposition party tends to fall by the wayside. So, too, to a lesser extent, does the idea of political capital.

   The corporate and managerial world is very different. It often depends on assessing business processes and products honestly, figuring out why they aren’t selling better, making fixes. Often this involves internal matrixing, collaboration, brainstorming. Depending on the type of environment one works in, there can be a learning culture which can be hard to establish in a workplace where getting the keys to the office often depends on oppositional framing, blaming the other side, and reductionism. Ironically, the area where there is the most at stake – the presidency – is least conducive to matrixing, outreach, honest assessment. When it does occur, it is internal, unseen, unknowable by voters. (We certainly didn’t know in 1965 the extent to which LBJ agonized over Vietnam.) What is said externally often is geared towards not giving away ground, preserving an image, and, sometimes, stifling dissent. It is the external rhetoric that often most erodes political capital.

   Some presidents enter office with a better chance of building on or holding on to political capital than others. An existing war, an existing severe economic crisis or down turn, an existing deficit, things of that nature obviously affect the expenditure of political capital in ways that their absence does not. At the same time, new shocks to the political system (such as 9/11) can change the course of a presidency, also. Without 9/11, Bush still would have faced the problems with the housing bubble and some of the fiscal and financial issues that hit at the end of his term, but he might have been a peacetime president who didn’t engage in “credit card” wars, as I once saw a conservative blogger describe them. If Nixon had won the presidency in 1960, as he almost did, the 1960s might have played out quite differently than they did. It was his misfortune to come in to office at a time of enormous challenges. As I pointed out in my comment above, he dealt with the Vietnam one, but mishandled how to deal with opponents.

   Just days before Kent State, Vice President Agnew said in a speech, “The real pity is that many of the students of our universities really feel that the theatrical radicals are the architects of a brave, new compassionate world, spiced with ‘rock’ music, ‘acid’ and ‘pot.’ There is a . . . group of students committed to radical change through violent means. Some of these may be irretrievable; all will require very firm handling. this is the criminal left that belongs not in a dormitory, but in a penitentiary. The criminal left is not a problem to be solved by the department of philosophy or the department of English–it is a problem for the Department of Justice.”

   While it certainly was true that there were serious problems with some of the radicals, the core concept of a “compassionate world” need not have been ceded away to the Left. As Joan Hoff and others have pointed out, Nixon actually did some rather progressive things in domestic policy. But Vietnam loomed so very, very large. Trapped between the need to reserve capital for future domestic outreach, and the political need to win elections, Nixon wasn’t able to strike the balance that would have enabled him to do both. Yes, he won re-election in 1972, as it started to seem as if he could win the “peace with honor” many Americans wanted. And he abolished the draft. But deep wounds existed among some of those who had opposed him. (Keep in mind, I supported his Vietnam policies.)

   Had Nixon been able to say, immediately and forcefully, “this was a third-rate burglary, it makes no sense to bug the DNC, let’s get to the bottom of this and move on to deal with the real problems the country faces,” he might have been able to put Watergate behind him. Some of the other abuses, including the misuse of the IRS and the Secret Service, the actions that John Mitchell called “the White House horrors,” might never have been exposed. That is part of the tragedy of his administration. But to do that, he would have had to detach himself in a nearly superhuman way from the baggage of his opponents’ opposition to the war.

   Yet even that opposition was not really so hard to understand. It was the rhetoric that met the expression of a core human instinct – the desire not to have to die for a cause that made no sense to many young people – that trapped the Nixon administration in the end. Yes, I know, it is very, very hard to refrain from name calling and demonizing others when others do it to you (and to your daughters, who certainly don’t deserve the abuse that Julie Nixon Eisenhower and Tricia Nixon Cox faced at times.) Nixon was trapped in a very difficult situation. And, I have to say, he does not appear to have read many of the citizens’ letters that were accumulating in the White House Central Files, which I mentioned on the other thread. And the challenge was great. You cannot easily convey sympathy and understanding of a young person’s unwillingness to risk his life for a nation other than his own while already embroiled in a war in a country with as complicated a history as Vietnam.

   The U.S. had no models then for how a president should act, while presiding over a war for which so many of his countrymen did not see a need. Nixon had to find his own way on that one and could not achieve the right balance to keep the door open to work with opponents. Long term policies (the need to find a way to sustain South Viet Nam) conflicted with politics (the perceived need to paint domestic opponents as bad and evil – something surrogates did more often than the President, at least in public statements) in a way which made future outreach incredibly difficult. Could a president with a different temperament have achieved it? Perhaps. We’ll never know. But I am not optimistic that we can discuss such issues here. Too early, perhaps, to move beyond the formulaic. And too hard, it seems, to tap into reserves of goodwill and reach across differing career and workplace experiences and even try.

4. MK on April 2nd, 2010 6:26 pm

   Jonathan, if you’re interested in why the issue of outreach to dissidents or war critics or even anxious doubters was so difficult, I’d like the bloggers who write here to think about what TNN itself demonstrates. When John Taylor established the site in February 2008, he wrote that the aim was to establish a New Nixon:

   “. . .who will be the creature of the scholars who will come to Yorba Linda, study these records without fear, or favor, or bias, and begin to tell the truly nuanced story of the 37th President’s life and times, his statesmanship and his legacy.

   So there is about to be another new Nixon, thanks to the good work of scholars who will come to Yorba Linda and do that work. But Richard Norton Smith, a great Presidential scholar in his own right, put it well when he said: “History is too important to be left to the historians.”

   So those who participate in the dialogue on this New Nixon blog will themselves be part of creating the next new Nixon, the nuanced new Nixon — the Nixon who will live for generations to come as an architect of peace, who strove in times of controversy and war and peace to find for his country a better place in the world and for the United States to be a better example to the world.

   So welcome to The New Nixon and help us create the latest new Nixon.”

   The problem is, after John left the site a year later, dialogue with readers – which he largely had kept going — just ended. It’s hard for me to believe that of all the people who wrote articles here over a two year period, only two – John Taylor and David Emig – were interested in feedback, dialogue, conversation. That leaves the impression that even now, it is tremendously difficult to move from the well worn grooves and patterns on some issues, such as Vietnam. (There’s been more nuance in discussion of other issues by bloggers. Well, not discussion. The dropping of take it or leave it articles here.)

   The site so far has passed up the opportunity to fulfill John’s vision and to leave behind a world drawn in black and white with just two points on a long spectrum: heroes (people who supported RN, especially those brave people who supported him and also fought in Vietnam) and villains (those who opposed the war). I see little interest here in moving to a new canvas where you can paint in people such as I, who understood and forgave the U.S. and western powers for not being able to save my own parents’ homeland from Soviet represssion in 1945, who supported the Vietnam war, but was able to keep in mind the humanity of my fellow citizens, regardless of their politics, and the need to differentiate among the people who did not support the Vietnam war. And who believes it is a mistake to castigate those who didn’t loyally follow RN, without deviation, as people who hated America or wanted it to lose. No one who has managed a large organization would look at people that way, it just is not realistic or tactically wise.

   If there’s no room still in the world of Nixon’s former associates and loyalists to engage with or discuss issues with people such as I, or some of the others who post here, much less people who actually opposed the war for various reasons while it was ongoing, how do you think that RN while in office could have sustained the support to achieve the appropriations needed to re-supply Vietnam, when psychic wounds were fresh on all sides? That demands a level of forbearance and a willingness to give to those who have attacked you that only extraordinary people can achieve. What’s happened here at the site on issues such as Vietnam suggests little movement since the 1970s. No wonder, with few exceptions, scholars haven’t gathered here at TNN. As I’ve said before, this could have been a vibrant, lively site. But that takes effort, and engagement, and a willingness to listen and to consider what different people say, and even to reassess issues, just as laying the framework for working with the opposition while in office takes effort and foresight. A site can’t succeed if its vibrancy depends on a single person (a John Taylor) just as a President can’t succeed if some of his goals depend on he being in office and having the clout to get what he wants. That’s way, way too risky a condition and fragile a framework on which to hang such weighty objectives as sustaining the Vietnam effort.

   .Bottom line: Any endeavor worth committing to requires careful thought about sustainability. To see why that was doomed after January 19y3, one need only look at what happened here after John Taylor left.

5. MK on April 3rd, 2010 6:12 am

   To give credit where credit is due, TNN actually has changed for the better in some areas over the last few months. The focus largely is tighter, mostly on RN rather than scattered across a range of issues, some unnecessarily provactative or only tangentially related to his presidency. There are many interesting, thoughtful essays here. The problem lies in what comes across as the lack of interest in seeing how people react to them. One might as well be reading a closed, no comments site such as NRO’s The Corner.

   That is not to say it’s easy for me as a reader to know when to comment and when not to. Take the item about Bruce Herschensohn’s book. He’s about to give a book lecture on it. He has a thesis, just as others who have written about Vietnam have their own theses. What is the likelihood that I or anyone could engage him in dialogue here? Pretty low, I would think. (But there are other essays here where authors could chit chat with posters or even thank them for their input but largely avoid doing so.)

   I actually understand that there is no right way for a reader to react, in thinking this over. Perhaps it would have been best for me to let the blog post about Herschensohn’s book serve what may have been intended its purpose, to raise interest in his forthcoming lecture. And not ask any questions here. Discussion of Vietnam probably is best saved for other forums. (I wish John Taylor would have been able to have the Vietnam conference at the Nixon Library that once was planned for it.) On the other hand, there is the precedent of Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland, actually posting comments here while John Taylor, John Pitney, and others were posting reactions to his book.

   Vietnam admittedly is a tricky issue to discuss. People on the left argue that American lives were wasted needlessly in Vietnam well past the point when our Presidents knew the endeavor was likely to end badly. We know now as we could not have known while he was in office what LBJ went through in his tormented internal deliberations in 1965. More recently, Ken Hughes wrote an article for the History News Service in 2007 which focused on a comment captured on one of the released Nixon tapes in which the President said, “South Vietnam probably is never gonna survive anyway.” Yet people on the right sometimes argue about a stab in the back theory. Perhaps because I’ve been a civil servant for so long, and participant as well as observer in government, I’m actually most interested in environmental and cultural issues: what makes it hard to sell initiatives that predecessors committed to? What makes outreach easier? What hinders it? What happens when the policy and political sides of the presidency collide?

6. David Emig on April 3rd, 2010 8:30 am

   Thank you, MK for your comments here. They never fail to enlighten.

7. MK on April 3rd, 2010 1:47 pm

   Thank you, David! I’m one of those previously-wounded by the Nixonites people — attacked for standing up for my federal colleagues back in the early 1990s — who decided to refuse to let that define either side or to stay stuck in time licking my wounds. Lent and Easter play a part in my spurt of verbosity about forgiveness, tolerance and trying to understand people, too, I think, LOL.

8. Phillip Jennings on April 3rd, 2010 7:06 pm

   From the Author of the PIG to Vietnam:

   Gentlemen: I am far above my head here, but let an old jarhead comment. I ’studied’ the wars in Indochina from 1954 when the French fell at Dien Bien Phu. Not as a historian or academic, but as a romantic youth, a Marine officer, and later as a novelist and story teller. Three things were evident (to me) out of the hundreds of books, lectures, interviews, and articles I’ve read: 1. America was morally and politically obligated to help the South Vietnamese; 2. The war was winnable and in fact the U.S. Military drove the Communists to a peace treaty; 3. Richard Nixon was the only president who delivered on his promises to the troops in the field. The “yes, buts” the “over-heard defeatist comments” the “real reasons Nixon did something” and all the other side issues known and debated until the sun burns out seem to be of vital interest to the academics. I assure you they are less important to most Americans and very few Viet Nam Vets. I am not denigrating anyone. I have neither the background or intellectual firepower to debate the politics of the war. But I was there three years, studied the area for decades, befriended and kept close to scores of Vietnamese, and that’s why I wrote the Politically Incorrect Guide. Primarily because of the Viet Nam War study guide and reading list from my daughter’s college sociology course–shameful lies and myths.
   Why was the war so long and painful? The overwhelming answer I came to after boiling it all down–it was just a lot more difficult than we thought. Bearing any burden was just too painful evidently. Many of the arguments against the war were spurious–completely America centric, and without a modicum of common sense. If you examine the anti-war movement and remove the silly, the left-wing anti-America drivel, the social civil rights upheaval, the proliferation of drugs, the shocking death of a popular president, you find precious few firmly held convictions against the war.
   Does it matter? Forget the history and political views–it matters very much to vets who have spent time explaining to kids and grandkids that they were not Nazi Storm-Troopers nor did they get defeated in the field by a rag-tag army from a small agrarian nation. It mattered to my dear friend Bill Colby, who saw a lifetime of dedication to this country smeared with stories of his Phoenix Program being a brutal assassination effort. And of course it matters to the families of those who did not come home.
   Nixon brought home the troops. He brought home the POWs. He forced Hanoi to sign a peace treaty. He did those things while suffering vile, vicious attacks and peace marchers actively supporting our enemy. God Bless Him.
   PEJ

9. MK on April 3rd, 2010 7:37 pm

   To Phillip Jennings, thanks for sharing your perspective. As in so many things, how things look depends on where you sit. To me the moral breakdown came in LBJ’s feeling obligated to go big in Vietnam in 1965, not in what occurred later. Had LBJ pulled out, we would in the U.S. would have been ok. Seemingly the prospect of doing that was not available to him, his secret tapes reveal he thought it would have been unmanly. Yet it would have been the manly thing to do–something he was capable of doing in other areas, such as ceding away the once solidly Democratic South in order to push for civil rights legislation. Although I supported Goldwater as a 13 year old, in retrospect I admired LBJ’s courage in doing the latter. I wish he could have brought the same courage to the table in assessing the situation in Vietnam.

   My parent’s’ countrymen in Estonia never had the chance to fight alongside U.S. troops, as the South Vietnamese did and as the Iraqis did. They would have loved to have regained the freedom they had as a democratic nation — much more westernized and European centric than Vietnam was — before World War II. Fate sometimes is cruel.

   As someone who has spent 37 years in civil service, my focus naturally is stewardship. It doesn’t matter if a President believes he is “right” if the voters turn against him or his own mishandling of something hands his enemies a sword. I respect your perspective and the fact that you blame others. As someone who has faced ethical quandaries and difficult choices involving professional integrity during my service in the public sector, I focus on other areas, such as the foundation for decision making. But even when we don’t see eye to eye (I was in Washington marching for Nixon and for you during the 190s but I knew from observation and discussion with my peers that those on the other side were not supporting the enemy) I’ll always respect the fact that because of men like you, we here in the U.S. are free to debate, dissent, and disagree.

   A happy and blessed Easter to all associated with TNN.

10. MK on April 3rd, 2010 7:46 pm

    If I may add a PS, my assessment of the diversity of motivation and thought among those against the war is based not just on my own personal experiences in debating with peers while wearing my pro-Nixon button during the 1970s, but also in my later examination of Nixon’s files while employed by the National Archives from 1976 to 1990. It was my job to screen the Oval Office tapes for declassification and to read the files generated in the Nixon White House. There are many people who were and still are dehumanized in discussions of the Vietnam war — Nixon and his aids, those who fought the war, some of those who opposed it, and plain, ordinary citizens whose real voices are captured in letters to Nixon that few scholars have bothered to read.

11. MK on April 4th, 2010 1:41 pm

    The National Archives’ Kennedy Presidential Library sponsored a conference on the Vietnam war in 2006. That being the case, I don’t think the Nixon Presidential Library is going to undertake anything similar, although I certainly would encourage panels and Q&A sessions on Vietnam.

    The reason I pinpoint 1964-1966 as the key period is that during the Johnson administration, U.S. troops levels rose from some 20,000 to 500,000. Yet released tapes and documents suggest that Johnson doubted the war was unwinnable and or that the U.S. should have a significant presence there. If that was the case, then he should have pulled out. Either you believe in something and go all out or you don’t believe in it and you don’t try incrementalism. The political reality was that Johnson felt trapped (ironically, given the recent discussion here, there’s a reference to his fear that the GOP would oppose appropriations). Had his risk assessment side rather than his political side prevailed, the outcome might have been different, either the U.S. never engaging in a build up or going all in and forcing a conclusion.

    It was the gradual escalation and the inability to level with the American people about the risks and projected outcomes during the Johnson adminisstration that frayed public trust as much as it did. It was Nixon’s misfortune to become president and to have to deal with the aftermath. As I said above, he could have survived Vietnam, and guided foreign policy through 1976, but he couldn’t survive Watergate.

    Here’s the excerpt from the LBJ tape in question, a segment of a conversation between President Johnson and Eugene McCarthy:

    JOHNSON: What they [supporters of the Walter Lippmann/J. William Fulbright arguments] really think is we oughtn’t to be there and we ought to get out. Well, I know we oughtn’t to be there, but I can’t get out. I just can’t be the architect of surrender. And don’t [you] see . . . I’m trying every way in the world I can to find a way to . . . ah .. . thing.

    But they [the North Vietnamese] don’t have the pressure that will bring them to the table as of yet. We don’t know whether they ever will. I’m willing to do damn near anything. If I told you what I was willing to do, I wouldn’t have any program. [Everett] Dirksen wouldn’t give me a dollar to operate the war. I just can’t operate in a glass bowl with all these things. But I’m willing to do nearly anything a human can do, if I can do it with any honor at all. But they started with me on Diem, you remember.

    MCCARTHY: Yeah.

    JOHNSON: [That] he was corrupt and he ought to be killed. So we killed him. We all got together and got a goddam bunch of thugs and we went in and assassinated him. Now, we’ve really had no political stability since then.”

    There are other records in which LBJ refers to feeling trapped, can’t get out, can’t finish it with what I’ve got, etc.

    As to what Nixon might have done regarding Vietnam had he been elected in 1960, we’ll never know. Our political system is so dependent on framing things in opposition, his statements while the other party from January 1961 to January 1969 was in power don’t give me enough clues as to what he might have done had he been in office.

12. MK on April 4th, 2010 1:51 pm

    Sorry, that should be Johnson doubted the war was winnable, my fault for not proofreading.

13. Phillip Jennings on April 4th, 2010 10:30 pm

    MK
    I’m not sure that I actually ‘blame’ people. I try not to judge outside of the context of the time. (A few years ago I wrote an entire book based on how stupid some of the U.S. actions in Viet Nam were). I just believe that we still confuse methodology and agenda with action and intent when we ‘argue’ about the war. Again, my perspective is from a basic belief that America is best served in the long run by assisting those in need of our assistance. South Viet Nam was. As a Christian (is everybody on edge now?) it is consistent with my beliefs that we defend a people from a godless tyranny. We tried. We almost succeeded yet lost heart (due to off- battlefield issues) and forfeited our victory. Whether or not LBJ thought the war could be won is irrelevant in hindsight. (Unless you are invoking St Augustine’s moral war criteria). It would, perhaps, matter what his views were if we knew for certain what his mental criteria were i.e. he thought the war was wrong because it was draining his Great Society agenda, because he didn’t fear communism, because he might lose the next election, etc. The long war was confused primarily due to a lack of leadership in the White House, beginning with JFK and continuing until Nixon. Whatever the war origins and past messes, Nixon inherited 500,000 troops in harms way and he brought them out, yes, with honor. And it was not the easiest path for him to follow.
    Southeast Asia (outside VN, Laos, Cambodia) was the better off for it.

    “JOHNSON: [That] he was corrupt and he ought to be killed. So we killed him. We all got together and got a goddam bunch of thugs and we went in and assassinated him. Now, we’ve really had no political stability since then.”

    Well, the facts are that we didn’t assassinate Diem. Were we complicit in the coup? Absolutely. Again, a matter of poor leadership and waffling, not a conscious decision to rid SVN of Diem.

    I have always said that if “you” don’t believe that South Viet Nam had a right to an independent existence, there really is no argument worth having about America’s involvement. From all that I know, and saw, it did.

    Not sure this adds much to the discussion. But I do enjoy the posts on this site.

14. MK on April 5th, 2010 4:58 am

    I am sympathetic to the desire of people not to live under Communism. (see
    http://thenewnixon.org/2010/03/31/bruce-herschensohns-new-book/#comments )
    Sometimes circumstances dictate otherwise. As the child of Estonians, I believe it was immoral and tragic that the U.S. and western powers allowed the Soviets to swallow up the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) after World War II. They had been sovereign nations with democratic governments prior to the war and members of the League of Nations. They would have preferred the light of freedom at war’s end.

    I do understand, however, that the U.S. and other allied countries, which had been allied with the Soviets in fighting Hitler and were exhausted after fighting Germany simply were not going to expend any effort to protect such tiny previously democratic nations from falling behind the Iron Curtain. I also believe the forced repatriations that delivered unwilling and often desperate men into the hands of the Soviets at the end of the war were tragic in nature. The U.S. and the west made calculations then as to who would live in freedom and who would not. So it certainly is a part of our history that we implicitly condemn some people to live in oppression, that we do not always act as liberators.

    LBJ’s doubts about whether the U.S. should be in Vietnam do matter. They led to the approach which eroded public trust and weakened Nixon’s political capital in 1973. Since voters go to the ballot box and affect officials in two branches of government, whether they buy in to initiatives can have some effect. Of course, officials can do what they believe is the right thing, in domestic as well as foreign policy, regardless of public opinion, but they have to be prepared to deal with the consequences.

    If LBJ didn’t believe the U.S. should have been in Vietnam, then he should have continued to maintain a minimal presence or pulled out altogether. Or, as suggested in a memo from Bill Bundy late in 1964, but shot down by Dean Rusk and not seen by LBJ, accepted what was possible in terms of a deal in1965 after taking some military action, including a little bombing. Rusk’s reasoning in rejecting the latter option in Bundy’s memo was “No, it won’t wash. We won’t get any points for trying and failing.”

    In interviews given shortly before his death, Robert McNamara said that Johnson “was more afraid of the right than the left. And he was afraid that if he did anything to in any way appear to appease the North Vietnamese, he would be severely criticized by the right wing of American politics. Therefore he didn’t do it.” I don’t have time or room here to get into everything that I believe lies behind political posturing, then and now. But this is an area where Nixon had influence, obviously. However, one doesn’t gain favor with voters by saying, “let’s be patient, support the president of the opposing party, let’s pull together as Americans, take the longterm view and see how things play out.” For better or worse (I think worse), in politics you get points by nickpicking and armchair quarterbacking and sometimes sheer demagoguery. Nixon actually often took a pretty prudent approach in his comments on Vietnam while the Democrats held the White House, but he hardly was, or could be, a Johnson booster.

    McGeorge Bundy, too, later pointed to the question of self-image, certainly pertinent in an era when values that now are assessed somewhat differently still prevailed: “”LBJ isn’t deeply concerned about . . . who governs South Vietnam — he’s deeply concerned with what the average American voter is going to think about how he did in the ballgame of the Cold War. The great Cold War Championship gets played in the largest stadium in the United States, and he, Lyndon Johnson, is the quarterback, and if he loses, how does he do in the next election? So don’t lose. . . . He’s living with his own political survival every time he looks at these questions.”

    McNamara criticized himself: “I felt that I owed the president my best judgment, whether it agreed with his or not. The question in my mind was not so much whether I owed that to him; the question was how to present it effectively to a man who didn’t want to listen.” Bundy, too, pointed to problems with how decisionmaking played out. “The principal players do not engage in anything you can really call an exchange of views. . . . That was prevented by him, and the process he used was really for show and not for choice.”

    This interests me a great deal, because I’ve been in situations during my federal career where the ability or inability to debate issues was critical. In some settings these matters were resolved well, in others not. In one case, the inability to resolve internal differences led to implosions with far reaching effect which might not have occurred with different players. I saw real trouble ahead. Yet it can be incredibly difficult to keep pushing back against someone, especially when, as is the case with the people with whom LBJ was dealing, they serve at the pleasure of the president. In one situation in which I was involved, although I had civil service protection, and couldn’t be fired, I did see some of my colleagues transferred out of their positions involuntarily. I looked for a new job and left the federal agency to take a job with another, because I was so uncomfortable about the new path on which decision makers were turning. I gave it my best shot, arguing against it, but my side lost. The problems later burst into public view dramatically, which might have been avoided in a different decision making environment.

    Our efforts at the National Archives to open the Watergate tapes (the law required revelation of “the full truth”) resulted in Nixon’s representatives referring to us as “junior prosecutors.” They also raised questions about archivists’ anti-Nixon bias and competence, despite our having received “outstanding” yearly performance reviews and in my case and that of the tapes supervisory archivist, having voted for Nixon. The real issue was who should control release of material from White House records and how long should the public wait to see it. I reacted to name calling not by demagoguing, but by developing an interest in why it occurs (what people fear) rather than yelling back.

    Robert J. Samuelson observes in today’s Washington Post that many thrive on yelling, instead: “Purging moral questions from politics is both impossible and undesirable. But today’s tendency to turn every contentious issue into a moral confrontation is divisive. One way of fortifying people’s self-esteem is praising them as smart, public-spirited and virtuous. But an easier way is to portray the ‘other side’ as scum: The more scummy ‘they’ are, the more superior ‘we’ are. This logic governs the political conversation of left and right, especially talk radio, cable channels and the blogosphere. . . .A culture of self-righteousness reigns across the political spectrum. Stridency from one feeds the other. Political polarization deepens.” One way or another, voters always are in the mix.

15. MK on April 5th, 2010 9:28 am

    Mr. Jennings, I do want to make it clear that I very much appreciate your debating such issues here. I wish more people who blog here or whose books are discussed would do that. The other thing I want to point out is that I am in no way saying my perspective is correct, simply saying that this is how I view the issues. I do think we all are shaped by our professions, experiences, and family situations to a large extent. I grew up accepting separation from members of my family due to their being behind the Iron Curtain. That this was so was because circumstances in 1945 led the U.S. to conclude it would or could not help them. I very much regretted that but understood that it is the fate of some people to be on the wrong side of history, even if on the right side morally and legally, so to speak.

    For the Baltics, the U.S. could do little more than withhold de jure recognition of the forcible annexation – which I appreciated — and to issue Captive Nations proclamations. I had a very interesting conversation with Stephen Ambrose on the latter. Steve came into the research room at NARA after he had published the first volume of his Nixon biography. On duty to assist scholars, I decided to cross a line I usually didn’t and to ask him gently and tactifully why he had presented an issue related to Eisenhower era Captive Nations proclamations as he did. I pointed out that there was a differing interpretation available and offered mine. He said he would keep that in mind in writing about the issue in the future. Indeed, he did. In a letter he wrote me in the early 1990s, Dr. Ambrose said he was so glad the Baltic nations had regained their independence and that he often thought of how I had gently chided him about the U.S.’ intent in issuing Cold War era proclamations. The approach I used was effective. Had I sneered at him as a typical, liberal academic, I doubt it would have had the same impact.

    As to Vietnam, what we’ll never know is what might have happened, if the U.S. had been able to sign peace accords at the end of the Johnson administration or at the beginning of Nixon’s. Some scholars have criticized Nixon for continuing the war for several years – leading to the deaths of many more members of the U.S. military — and settling in 1973 for terms very similar to what he might have gotten in 1969. Some of that is Monday morning quarterbacking, of course. One doesn’t know as a decision maker what the outcome will be or what lies ahead. You make choices and learn to live with them, at least I have. Of course, it is much easier to do when only some of your choices (how I screened the Nixon tapes for public disclosure) become subject to scrutiny by stakeholders. We at NARA largely accepted that we were in a no-win situation as long as Nixon was alive – some of his representatives always would call for more conservative review standards while some researchers would call for more liberal. We knew our work was high-risk and contentious in that regard but we couldn’t control the extent to which we would be flamed or not. I actually didn’t worry about it much, I just did my work the best I could. Still, I cannot say the verbal attacks did not hurt or shock me when they finally came. One either (1) yells back in kind or (2) defends and/or resists but also tries to understand what caused the situation to develop on the fist place. I’ve largely chosen the latter.

    One of the problems I see with a achieving a sustainable settlement in Vietnam was that it was not a case of one nation invading another, but rather a case of one nation, with a difficult colonial past and no experience with western style sovereignty, split in two after World War II. Whatever settlement we were able to forge would keep intact two Vietnams with two differing forms of government. The North was the aggressor but was not going to be subjugated and forced into non-aggression. The would be no unconditional surrender, only an uneasy peace of some kind. It’s not as if the South was going to march into the North and conquer it.

    The best we could hope for was that the South would be able to repel future attacks. Nixon might have been able to do that for the remainder of his second term, had he not become ensnared in Watergate (by his own hand). The real problem was that the war had gone on so long, and the terms in 1973 were not that different from what might have been worked out in 1969, that the domestic reservoirs of will (and goodwill) largely had run dry. I guess I look at the issue of national will that way because I’ve often been in positions where I’ve had to persuade people rather than being in a position of conquering them or forcing them to submit. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. Hey, we all use the tools we’re accustomed to using, I’m no different than anyone else in that regard. It doesn’t make me right or wrong, it’s just how this particular Nixon supporter looks at things through the perspective of her profession as federal historian, a participant in as well as an observer of government. The two things we can agree on, I think, are that it is tragic that the South could not avoid being overrun and the respect owed those who fought with bravery and honor to keep that from happening.

    My lunch break is almost up, that’s all for which I have time. Again, thanks for chatting here, Mr. Jennings, it reflects very well on you and you made your points well.

    Posted at 12:27 pm eastern time

16. Phillip Jennings on April 5th, 2010 11:28 pm

    MK
    I am very appreciative of your comments. If the truth be known, I am a bit more understanding of different points of view than the PIG Vietnam might suggest. My book Nam-A-Rama might be even closer to my views on the war. As you probably know, when promoting a book one needs to stay ‘on point’ in the brief time allowed to promote. That said, I do feel that the war is horribly misunderstood by most (?) Americans and based on what I see in school lessons, it will be more so when this generation is gone.
    With regard to the south attacking the north, you are probably aware that Ky and his cohorts pleaded with LBJ to let them go North, using only American firepower, not troops. Moving the war out of South Vietnam might have even worked. Certainly the belief held by my pals in Little Saigon who flew with Ky. They are not universally enamored with Nixon and Kissinger, but some of them have eagerly agreed to attend the Herschensohn reading and signing with me on April 19th. Certainly all good folks and wonderful Americans.
    Thanks again for your comments.
    PEJ

Got something to say?