Document created: 28 October 2003
Air University Review,
November-December 1973
Brigadier General
Noel F. Parrish, USAF (Ret)
One of the most understandable of great contemporary poets, W. H. Auden, writes in his new Epistle to a Godson: “You don’t need me to tell you what’s going on: the ochlocratic media, joint with under-the-dryer gossip, process and vent without intermission all to-day’s ugly secrets. . . . if what is to happen occurs according to what Thucydides defined as ‘human’, we’ve had it, are in for a disaster that no four-letter words will tardy.”
Auden was not referring to Richard J. Barnet’s recent book, Roots of War, nor to the published and broadcast work of Barnet’s sources and ideological colleagues who are the authors of similar products. Yet, since these include Neil Sheehan, The Pentagon Papers; Tristram Coffin, The Armed Society; Ralph Stavins, Richard J. Barnet, and Marcus Raskin, Washington Plans an Aggressive War; Robert Crichton, “Our Air War,” in the New York Review of Books (January 4, 1968, pp. 3-5); William Appleman Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire and The Tragedy of American Diplomacy; Seymour Melman, Our Depleted Society and Pentagon Capitalism; Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War; Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins; William Fulbright, The Pentagon Propaganda Machine; and finally the producers of the CBS TV extravaganza, “The Selling of the Pentagon,” it is clear that they all relate to Auden’s widely shared dismay.
Not all these men agree with each other on every issue, nor do they deal always with “ugly secrets”; but they all flaunt a haughty indignation that might be called “the new school tie.” Their comments on past and present American difficulties are not usually couched in four-letter words, but they are frequently so translated at campuses and conventions. To their credit it should be said that these writers and speakers do not themselves advocate mob rule (ochlocracy), although they and the media seem at times to encourage it. In most cases these disconsolate specialists in adversity do not fix blame on fate or on supernatural forces, as Thucydides did not. They ascribe responsibility to universal human nature as Thucydides did. They blame only the United States government—sometimes all government—and all its agents.
In Roots of War (Atheneum, 1972), Richard Barnet presents a splendid example of the common tendency among the writers and “communicators” in question to focus their censure on a small but influential group of administrators who work in large buildings on opposite banks of the Potomac River. These men are labeled by Barnet as “the national security managers.” He says there have been 339 men and a woman in this category since World War II. There is some confusion in Barnet’s and similar writings as to whether these managerial types are representative of “American society,” which also takes many licks. There is even more confusion as to whether these blameworthy State Departmentalists and E-ring Pentagonians are outright malicious or just clumsy; whether they are misguided or misguiding; knowing criminals or miserable carriers of some psychic American social disease; and, finally, whether they are all too human or just plain inhuman.
An example of this confusion is provided by E. B. Tompkins’s laudatory review in the once prestigious Saturday Review, which interprets Barnet’s description of these national security managers: “Drawn primarily from law and banking, they were well educated and power-hungry. Barnet views them as amoral, insensitive, ruthless, and hypocritical men with a predilection for violence and fascinated by lethal technology.” Tompkins admits the picture may be overdrawn.
On the other hand, prolific foreign policy critic Ronald Steel, lengthily reviewing and approving Barnet’s book in the recently famous New York Times, says that while the Pentagon managers “decide from their desks and push buttons which governments shall be overthrown and which nations destroyed . . . they are, Barnet holds, deeply moral men who are convinced that what they are doing is best for the nation and by extension, best for the world. They are always saying so and there is no reason to believe they do not mean it.” Steel, who might well be considered something of a competitor in the increasingly crowded occupation of damning both banks of the Potomac, goes on to praise Barnet as “one of our most perceptive young political analysts. Roots of War is an eloquent, important and timely study that breaks new ground. It clarifies the issues, stimulates the mind and enriches the debate it is certain to trigger.”
Although Steel’s final sentence seems heavy on the trigger, Barnet can scarcely top this accolade when he reviews Steel’s next book, a not unlikely circumstance since gentlemen of this critical school are customarily asked by friendly editors to comment upon each other. The claim that the book “clarifies the issues” is questionable. There is a crucial difference of opinion between admiring commentators on the central point of whether the villainous national security managers chose those black hats or just picked them up by mistake. Careful reading indicates that despite what the Library Journal calls Barnet’s tendency to be “rambling and repetitious,” his picture of the powerful Pentagonians is definitely that which the Saturday Review commentator saw as “overdrawn.” Barnet had his tongue buried in his cheek when, like Shakespeare’s Mark Antony at Caesar’s funeral, he praised these men as honorable and upright—only to add that their children call them “uptight.” Even as he credits them with normally happy marriages and sexuality, Barnet finds this most surprising, since Hitler was sexually abnormal.
The other principal point of variance among Barnet’s sympathetic interpreters is whether the “lawyers and bankers” who ever since World War II have been responsible for, as the once judicious Library Journal puts it, “America’s persisting plans to engage in permanent war in the name of permanent peace,” are freaks or just typically ailing members of our sick society. William Pfaff, a widely published associate of Herman Kahn, writes in Book World that Barnet’s is the “best book we possess on the subject . . . of the cold war.” He finds it “convincing” and says these national security managers “were no narrow elite. They were representative of their generation.” On the other hand a reviewer in the Nation sees Barnet as searching for the reason “why this nation with its conviction that it means only to do good, has brought such misery to the world in the last quarter century,” and along with most other commentators he sees Barnet’s “critique of the national security managers” as the most important clue.
Much of the confusion on this latter point arises from Barnet’s generosity with blame. Since blame is his profession, so eager is he to spread it that he and his fellow “new left” interpreters of past and present now make an entire nation the target of their blunderbuss charge. Somewhat at variance with Voltaire’s advice to cultivate one’s own garden, Barnet and his fellows dig their native land only to turn up the dirt. No probing is necessary for the “roots of war” since he feels them all around him. In a society as rotten as he finds ours, it becomes difficult to fix upon the source of infection. Nevertheless, despite the confusion he causes among even his most eager readers, Barnet indicates that in the country of mindless villains the single-minded homicidal villain is truly a prince. The most princely Lucifers in his inferno are the “best and brightest” sons of privilege and costly universities who descended upon Washington with the brothers Kennedy to “plot aggressive war.”
As most of the admiring commentators on Roots of War have observed, the chapters on the “crisis managers who created the crises they mismanaged during the Kennedy-Johnson era are the book’s principal contribution.” With all reluctance, it must be admitted that they are a contribution. Barnet and his friendly source (everybody’s source for the saddest items of this unhappy period, Daniel Ellsberg) were themselves among the “best and brightest.” They were among the first to leap into the Kennedy dragnet for new and unprecedented talent.
Despite Ellsberg’s penchant for solitary labor at night and his singular productivity with a photocopy machine, Barnet’s is much the superior talent. Unlike Ellsberg and other hawk-dove mutations who screamed with the eagles before turning pigeon, Barnet appears to have been reasonably consistent as a man of sincere pacifist inclinations from the start. Like other job-jumpers culled from the Eastern ivy, Barnet managed to spend enough time in the Pentagon or thereabouts to gain the usual escalator-rider’s clause in his record: “consultant to the Department of Defense.” Yet he seems to have spent most of his time on disarmament, in the State Department and the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Possessing acute powers of observation and a keen cynicism behind his barrage of utopian slogans, Barnet saw and came to describe clearly his fellow members of the Kennedy intellectual elite at their dismal worst. That high-level group’s management of the Vietnam effort in the early 1960s was so miserable in its results that few now rise in defense or explanation. Barnet’s observations offer a bitter but thoughtful foretaste of the coming flood of literature on how it could possibly have happened.
As Barnet reports it, the great issue repeated throughout Kennedy’s campaign was America’s falling prestige. The Eisenhower administration was said to be “made up of miserly old men . . . the torch must now be passed to the young and vigorous who would fight the Communists with the courage and subtlety so lacking in the quiet clubhouse atmosphere of the Eisenhower White House.”
The most damning phrase in the Kennedy lexicon, as Theodore White observed, was to call a man “ordinary” or to describe him as “common.” Those who have listened more than once to discourses by McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, or second-level personalities such as Alain Enthoven and Adam Yarmolinsky, will understand Barnet’s description of their attitude in Calvinist terms: “They are the elect; . . . The arrogance so characteristic of the Kennedy advisers, a quality that made it so easy for them to dismiss unwelcome advice by dismissing those who proffered it, was the pride of the men who believed that they were the chosen.”
One such speech, not mentioned by Barnet, was Adam Yarmolinsky’s appearance before a capacity audience at the University of Colorado, which even his sponsor characterized as arrogant. Yarmolinsky boasted that his personal role in selecting Kennedy appointees was to find “liberals” who were “tough” because toughness in all appointees was prescribed as the indispensable quality. Barnet now says some of these appointees, “looking back on their experience, talk about the ‘hairy chest syndrome.’” In such an atmosphere, “Bureaucratic machismo is cultivated in hundreds of little ways. There is the style of talking to a subordinate—the driving command masked by superficial informality—or to a superior—fact-loaded, quantitative, gutsy. The Kennedy operators, particularly, cultivated a machine-gun delivery. . . . Speed reading too became a kind of badge of prowess. To be an operator is to be active in ‘putting out fires,’ . . . The ambitious and successful bureaucrat . . . specializes in the crisp, uncomplicated, usually mechanistic analysis of a problem . . . .”
Seldom if ever in modern history has so powerful a group of men suddenly cultivated so self-conscious a “style.” Not surprisingly, the first to be taken in by the new-establishment style were the traditionally skeptical and “tough-minded” newsmen. Their favorite word for these smooth yet stern performers was “steely”: “McNamara had a steel-trap mind, McGeorge Bundy had steely nerves, etcetera.” McNamara, appropriately pedestaled on an automobile, shouted at Harvard students, “I am tougher than you are.” Barnet calls McNamara “the leading specimen of homo mathematicus . . . always looking for the facts, usually the wrong facts.” He first broke others and finally himself with overwork and “was by the time he was relieved from office given to weeping in public.”
Since the key to all value judgments was measurement and since a manager’s output could scarcely be measured, prestige was measured by effort. For the Kennedy crop of ivy-clad professors, suddenly “fatigue became a badge of importance. Officials could measure their significance by the demands their office made on their time. The favorite word of the self-important bureaucrat to describe his immediate plans on leaving office is ‘to decompress.’ ” This charade of pretentious dynamism led directly toward the supercharged push to “finish,” not to say win, an obviously endemic struggle in the ever resistant jungle of Vietnam.
Perhaps the most sacrificial figure, for whom even the Kennedys showed less respect than for anyone else except Vice President Lyndon Johnson, was Dean Rusk, who, after a seemingly interminable period in office, finally left “broke and unemployed.” Why did he and others, such as the wealthy McGeorge Bundy and Robert S. McNamara, who gained nothing but dubious fame, endure all these strains, these “dreary meetings and sleepless nights”? Barnet quotes one unnamed “manager’s” explanation: “Playing for high stakes.”
This seems a vastly oversimple answer, especially for a whole group. Barnet goes on to say that, having tasted “Promethean power,” they found it difficult to go back to “corporate bonds, . . . making raincoats, lecturing students, . . . In the Kennedy era they called themselves ‘crisis managers’ . . . their ‘finest hour,’ as many of them have written, was the Cuban missile crisis, . . . Like Henry V on the eve of the battle of Agincourt, the modern militarized civilian believes that he will be remembered and measured by the great contests in which he participates. . . . His tests are, of course, not tests of bravery but of toughness. . . .”
Anyone who witnessed at too close hand the openly cultivated and often ruthless machismo (Irish Mafia type) of these years may readily approve Barnet’s designation of Kennedy himself as supremely responsible for the early misjudgments and blameful blunders of the Vietnam involvement. Evidence is cited which came, apparently, from the Ellsberg xeroxes. Barnet accepts Ralph L. Stavins’s designation of “Kennedy’s Private War” (New York Review of Books, July 22, 1971), largely because of Kennedy’s instructions, to national security agencies shortly after taking office, to “make every possible effort to launch guerrilla operations in Viet-Minh territory at the earliest possible time.”
This and other evidence is said to show that actions against North Vietnam and in Laos, ostensibly to stop infiltration, were unjustified, since there was no infiltration, but the case as he presents it briefly here is inconclusive. More convincing are quotes from Arthur Schlesinger and Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy’s house “intellectuals,” who wrote their own more or less balanced accounts of various “secrets,” which are in some ways superior to stolen documents selectively presented.
Sorensen revealed that even Maxwell Taylor, the Billy Graham of the early Counterinsurgency Faith, had stipulated that 8000 regular U.S. troops also would be needed if the original guerrilla operations were to have a chance of success. Yet Kennedy turned Taylor down, possibly because the Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed with him, and continued his own Jungle Jim strategy.
General Taylor, as Chief of Staff of the Army under Eisenhower, had served as Kennedy’s man in the Eisenhower camp, and in fact the Kennedy brothers had sometimes visited Taylor in his quarters at Fort Myer, privately, under the purposely inconspicuous guidance of Senator Stuart Symington. A considerable portion of Kennedy’s campaign attacks against Eisenhower’s military policies reflected Taylor’s inside information and his official rebuttal against those policies. Eisenhower had repeatedly rejected Taylor’s continuing requests for more money to fight future “brushfire wars”; but Kennedy was converted to the rather vague theory of “flexible response,” which has turned out, as most military men vainly warned, to be considerably more flexible in all respects than was originally meant by the ambiguous “brushfire” slogan. Barnet condenses the story now becoming familiar: Kennedy came to office convinced of the importance of the “Third World” whose “fate would be decided by the ordeal of guerrilla warfare. Shortly after his inauguration he appointed Taylor a special White House Assistant and put him in charge of ‘Special Group Counterinsurgency.’” In this new enthusiasm, Kennedy was supported by Walt Rostow and also by “the energetic commitment of his brother Robert.” He “vigorously backed those bureaucracies committed to unconventional warfare and personally restored the Green Beret” as the symbol of a new elite force, a sort of “President’s own” force, against Army opposition. The President “was briefed on the euphoric literature on counterguerrilla warfare then beginning to emerge from the CIA-sponsored research in leading universities, and turned his personal attention to improving the technology of guerrilla warfare. At his carved oak desk he pored over the design of a new sneaker for America’s jungle warriors.”
All of this fits well into other pictures developed from previously revealed or “news leaked” sources and especially the lengthy works of Sorensen and Schlesinger, who wrote laudatory accounts of Kennedy’s deep personal involvement in the events of Vietnam before the military “newthink” that he decreed was finally seen leading to a dead end. Maxwell Taylor’s memoirs depict Kennedy, after being shown the promised land of “flexibility,” as taking his cues from supercharged activists, such as Roger Hilsman, who were more committed to the jungle than was Taylor himself. He liked their spirit as they sought to rescue failing doctrines through increasingly desperate operations.
Inexperienced in administration, Kennedy failed to recognize the chain-reaction effect created by his decree that enthusiasm for the new cause in all the services be used as a criterion for promotion and that skeptics be removed from areas of influence. McNamara, who had come into office even more ignorant of military matters than was Kennedy, had no ideas or principles of his own other than to establish himself as the toughest possible executor of the Presidential will. Armored in layers of charts, graphs, and linear projections, behind a barrage of self-convincing statistics gathered by all the overworked staffs of the Pentagon, he overawed both the press and the Congress so completely that the pleased President spoke of making him Secretary of State.
It now appears that the thoughtful and principled Rusk was more influential, for good or ill, than the man of numbers whose true function was that of a cipher, blankly extending and multiplying the thoughts and plans of others. But it is impossible for a man of such prominence as McNamara to function in a conceptual vacuum. Who was his principal idea man? In Barnet’s account, another figure emerges rather ominously from previous obscurity, John T. McNaughton, who died in the crash of an airliner years ago and is no more able to defend himself today than is the living McNamara. McNaughton’s xeroxed memoranda show him writing of “symbolic” deaths and of the importance of “spilling American blood” in Vietnam. He seems to have taken more seriously than most of the staff Kennedy’s reported instructions to read the works of Machiavelli. Some of his “hairy-chested” working papers speak of the war as being fought almost entirely for American interests rather than to help the Vietnamese, and he wondered how to provoke North Vietnamese reactions so we could retaliate. Barnet calls him “McNamara’s trusted lieutenant” and his “leading thinker on the war.” McNaughton is reported to have radiated toughness in all directions and to have been more disliked than his boss, yet there is a strange circumstance about his caustic writing that bears notice.
Working papers, in the Pentagon at least, are often written by assistants. McNaughton’s assistant was none other than Daniel Ellsberg himself, who, it will be remembered, was once so exhibitionist a hawk that he had himself photographed in the act of pretending to be a machine gunner at the front. So we have in McNaughton’s notes the “bloodiest” ideas, with McNaughton dead and his supersecret memoranda now broadcast by his former trusted assistant. The question of authorship arises. What was a bright, informed, and over-dedicated mind such as Ellsberg’s doing to assist McNaughton if not at least participating in the writing of working papers? It appears possible that Ellsberg the dove, in his nightly vigils over the secret xerox machine, was immortalizing some earlier work of Ellsberg the hawk, ghost-written for his maligned and now dead boss!
The unknown is not more fantastic than the known, if we are to believe one of Ellsberg’s own stories as told by Barnet:
“In September 1964 Assistant Secretary of Defense John T. McNaughton asked his assistant Daniel Ellsberg to look into what losing in Vietnam would mean. ‘You realize,’ Ellsberg recalls him saying, ‘to work on this subject is to sign your own death warrant.’ McNaughton did his own typing on this high-risk assignment.” It may be futile to wonder who did the typing on less fatal memoranda. In any case it seems sadly ironic that this story, if true, shows poor McNaughton mistrusting his no-doubt loyal secretaries and trusting Daniel Ellsberg.
In only one notable instance does Barnet raise the question of personal as well as official disloyalty. He says that the Vietnam war makes an excellent case study of the relationship between a President and his principal advisers “because it was a conspicuous failure. At least one hundred bureaucratic accomplices in the tragedy have rushed into print with their own exculpatory versions of the story. One of them, John Roche, grandly declassified a secret memorandum written by Assistant Secretary of State Roger Hilsman in the pages of the New York Times Magazine [Jan. 24, 1971] the better to impeach the historical testimony of his bureaucratic rival, along with his character. Anyone interested in understanding the phenomenon of bureaucratic homicide can only welcome such public display.”
This entire statement is an inexcusable performance by Barnet. While evincing nothing but praise for wholesale character assassination and other damage by Ellsberg and others (even the self-righteous Ellsberg expressed public concern), Barnet picks on John P. Roche, of all people. Roche was in no sense a planner of the war but was Johnson’s historian-in-residence or “intellectual.” He replaced Kennedy’s historian Arthur Schlesinger, who eulogized his boss rather clumsily, and Johnson’s earlier historian Eric Goldman, who later was to write The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson. Roche took no advantage of Johnson and still manages to explain the man better than anyone else.
Roche is a most readable and reasonable columnist for the Hearst newspapers, who might be called a reformed radical. This could explain Barnet’s castigation of him, since no one infuriates a radical so much as a reformed radical. Roche wrote not to attack Hilsman’s character but to set the record straight. He handled the subject in the manner of a historian and not that of an “ideological warrior masquerading as a historian,” such as were the “radical revisionist” historians who flourished for a while.
Barnet’s lack of credibility in this and other instances tends to vitiate confidence in his judgments of the Kennedy-Johnson operators, yet this was a cast of characters he knew well, and his observations are generally in harmony with those of a number of others. Except for examples of exceptionally articulate analysis such as we have examined here, Barnet parallels David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest and other works that hold up the Kennedy-Johnson briefcase warriors to gleeful ridicule. Once the record is set straight, these men should yet be examined with the understanding and compassion they themselves failed to demonstrate.
Nevertheless, remembering the pretentiously positive Bundy and the theatrically self-confident McNamara, who at his peak employed as speech writer a Ph.D. in philosophy to help him weep in words before he wept in person, one finds it difficult to resist Barnet’s all too simple summary:
“Proclaiming that there is no alternative to peace in a world of atomic weapons, the national security managers waged a generation of ‘brushfire’ wars under the cover of a horrendous nuclear arms race . . . . Wringing their hands in public about the human failure represented by every bullet and tank produced, they poured money into the military and strained the civilian economy.”
These brief sentences roughly represent a popular public view of the Kennedy-Johnson operators, and it is partly because of such statements that the public view is as it is. For this reason it is important to note that the statement, like Barnet’s book and others, is heavily booby-trapped. The Vietnam failures led to loss of confidence in certain high officials, and this disillusionment has been extended by Barnet and others to include all governmental operations, past and future, the United States government itself, and, incredibly, all government, as we shall see.
After each serious failure of a major governmental policy in foreign affairs, the participants divide into various groups. Some sell public confessions of error, while others defend themselves. Many remain tight-lipped, at least for a while, and of these some seek academic or organizational shelter until the storm subsides. Barnet comments on these shelters, two of which had already served during and after the unpopular Korean War: “A few former officials such as Paul Nitze in the 1950’s and a number of Kennedy intellectuals in the 1960’s took academic cover on leaving office and helped during Republican administrations to convert such Washington institutions as the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies and the Brookings Institution into occasionally influential governments in exile.” He does not mention certain crusading “foundations” nor the peculiar double role played by the Brookings Institution, which served as a crowded shelter for Kennedy partisans after Johnson took office. These dropouts and ejectees under Johnson were said by some to be the intended heirs of the voluminous secret study ordered by McNamara that became famous as “the Pentagon papers.” In one explanation the papers, which none of the principal remaining operators with McNamara ever had time to read, were originally intended to be used, very selectively of course, in the Robert Kennedy Presidential campaign. When this was not to be, the more cynical and unstable of the exiles began dealing with remaining malcontents under McNamara and Rusk for secrets and even for documents. This process reached its climax when an ideologically oriented high official of the nonpolitical RAND Corporation, who has since been dismissed, was careless in trusting highly classified papers to his more radical friends, thus allowing Ellsberg to escape with the entire bundle.
Whatever truth there is in this obviously inadequate explanation must await further unraveling as the divisive radical crusaders continue telling on each other. Roots of War helps lay some of the groundwork for this process. Barnet describes the Kennedy policy of monitoring news stories. Lyndon Johnson, he says, devoted as much energy to members of the press, two of whom, Drew Pearson and William S. White, “wrote glowingly of his daily triumphs, but the President’s continuing larger-than-life performance became less and less convincing against the background of an escalating war. Johnson began to be in serious political trouble when the ‘credibility gap’ itself became news.”
There is nothing new about the practice of cultivating friendly newsmen, and Kennedy could handle it reasonably well. The practice became unforgivable only when he started punishing uncooperative newsmen and applied the stick to publishers who spurned his carrots. Barnet says that he tried to get the New York Times to recall David Halberstam from Vietnam and that he called in a Fortune editor to rewrite with McGeorge’s help an unfavorable article about Bundy.
Barnet overlooks another occasion when the President sent General Maxwell Taylor to persuade Henry Luce to discharge Charles Murphy as Fortune’s Washington editor because of Murphy’s detailed account of the mishandling in Washington of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Kennedy had canceled appointments with all Luce magazine reporters because one had written a story he did not like. Luce finally compromised by protecting his employees but cautioning them to write favorable stories. For this, struggling Life got exclusives on Jackie, White House redecorations, and such. One Life reporter who had previously written critically of McNamara commented after his later favorable story: “I didn’t like it, but McNamara liked it so my boss liked it. We are welcome in the Pentagon again and that is important to me.” Abraham Lincoln observed a hundred years earlier that such methods do not always work, especially in times of trouble, and time ran out on Lyndon Johnson after Kennedy had gone.
Neophytes in high government establishments have more trouble than newsmen in drawing the line between the public interest and their own or their boss’s private interests. Yet most newsmen identify with the public interest well enough to become highly suspicious of officials who place it second. True, they tend to be prejudiced in favor of those who give them usable stories, but they like to be convinced that those stories are serving the public interest and not just that of the official who released them. Barnet comments that the Washington Post, during the controversy over its use of the Ellsberg papers, complained that certain officials had made a practice of showing newsmen secret papers. In truth, McNamara regarded secrets as his personal property and used them for his own purposes so consistently that he banished from Washington certain other officials who were personally known by members of the press, and more than once he hired previously critical members of the press in an effort to make them personally loyal. It was this gradual erosion of the self-discipline of news media through their declining respect for leadership that opened the way for Ellsberg. Barnet reveals that Ellsberg had tried to peddle his papers to a major TV network a year before the New York Times accepted them.
Not all the “media, joint with under-the-dryer gossip,” were willing to “process and vent without intermission all today’s ugly secrets.” A vast amount of restraint was shown, at some cost. Barnet, anxious as he is constantly to advance his rather mystical ideology, was unwilling to go along with certain sensational but meaningless techniques: “. . . the television networks have never had an analysis in depth of the negotiating positions of the various sides of the Vietnam war. When I tried to bring up the subject on an NBC ‘special’ right after the Tet offensive of 1968, the producer kept passing me notes to say something juicy about the CIA in Laos. She was against the war, but she knew she would receive no plaudits for a serious, probably dull, discussion of the issues. The program would be counted a success only if it made ‘hard news’ in the Monday morning edition of the New York Times.” Sometimes the pressures from all sides seem to converge, with the troubled as well as troubling media in the middle.
Again Barnet all but destroys the value of his perception by spreading his judgments back across history, which he little knows and less understands. In arguing that present difficulties arise from previous homicidal policies, ad infinitum, he charges Dean Acheson, whose stubborn honesty almost matched his brilliance, with practicing consistent deception.
To justify simplified statements of complex problems, Acheson wrote in his recently published memoirs that, since the average educated American spends probably less than ten minutes a day thinking about the world outside his country, “points to be understandable had to be clear. If we did make our points clearer than truth, we did not differ from most other educators and could hardly do otherwise.” Barnet claims that Acheson’s doing this in his descriptions of the Communist threat led to alarmism, to “right-wing backlash” and thence toward “preventive war,” which Barnet calls “the prescription of the right wing.” This, he says, is comparable to a famous remark of General Maxwell Taylor’s which can be interpreted to mean that all a citizen should be told about foreign policy is what he needs in order “to be a good citizen and to discharge his functions.”
Do national security managers “find it necessary alternately to frighten, flatter, excite, or calm the American people”? Barnet says they do, and that “several planners say privately of the Vietnam War that their greatest miscalculation was excessive confidence in their ability to manage public opinion.” He tries to relate Acheson’s honest facing of the problem to the performance of Phil Goulding, McNamara’s Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, who “gives several examples of outright lies ‘to protect the national interests’ and several more of making events clearer than truth.”
Since Goulding has turned anti state’s evidence, Barnet has no quarrel with him, but he cannot resist an ironic comment. One of many such passages in Goulding’s Confirm or Deny admits that he “told an untruth to the American people” and, he goes on, “Worse than that, I also misinformed some 235 million people of the second most powerful nation in the history of the world, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. . . . Misleading the puny-armed French . . . was one thing, but walking the Soviet Union down the garden path was another.” Says Barnet: “His apology is interesting.”
An ex post facto conscience, explained at book length, can become a thing of mystery. It might be that humor was Goulding’s intent, but there is no humor for Barnet in international relations since nations themselves are all evil bureaucracies. Barnet explains at length how our national leaders, though practitioners of violence, are able to reassure each other that they are all honorable men. As with other “criminals,” the fault is not their own but that of American society, which must be changed at once. Dean Rusk is exceptional in that he is seen by Barnet as once having displayed a conscience, which he quickly overcame. When Rusk approved a stepped-up defoliation program in 1965 he was told it would damage only Viet Cong areas, and thus he found a way “to resolve inner moral doubts and to legitimize the ordering of a crime.” The purpose of the “crime” was to make the leaves of trees fall.
A similarly Calvinist obsession with original American sin was displayed recently by one of Barnet’s select “thinkers,” William Appleman Williams, historian of the “American Empire” as well as its principal discoverer and explorer. Williams, who writes as though “American imperialism” were a single word, was asked to comment on a paper presented at the U.S. Air Force Academy by a Princeton University history professor. Williams’s comments ignored the paper and instead called upon the cadets to refuse to discharge their responsibilities, in other words to mutiny, since the American ship of state was unfit to navigate, thus unwittingly providing an appropriate bit of humor that almost passed unnoticed.
Sigmund Freud is also listed as one of the thinkers most influential on Roots of War, though his theories are less in evidence than Williams’s. Barnet is repeatedly scandalized by the fact that the national security managers somehow avoid guilt feelings (this despite Freud’s contention that everyone should avoid them). Barnet writes bitterly: “The war planners . . . never betrayed a trace of remorse. Perhaps one can understand the pride that would keep them from issuing public mea culpas. But it is hard to understand how some of them, upon hearing the revelations of the Pentagon papers, would address one another at cocktail parties with a breezy ‘Hi, war criminal.’ ” Did Ellsberg “sacrifice” his obscurity in vain? The answer, of course, is no. Despite the breezily concealed embarrassment of victims exposed in mental undress, and despite certain baleful consequences, historians will benefit, provided they can get enough other documents declassified to achieve a balanced view.
One reason why Barnet and the Revisionist historians fail to make the objects of their preaching squirm in agony is lack of focus. True, their huge supply of under-the-xerox-dryer secrets gives them ample reason to condemn their erstwhile Pentagon associates. But “homicidal bureaucrats” and “bureaucratic killers” have dominated America since George Washington as they read, or tell, their country’s history. Their treatment of various episodes, most of them shameful in their eyes, is surprisingly uniform, since a common lack of inspiration causes them to approach American history with a sophomoric sneer:
“For William McKinley, the Spanish-American war was nothing less than a stern duty to ‘uplift and civilize and Christianize’ the Filipinos.” This is one example of a technique closer to Goulding’s methods than to Acheson’s. Despite this and similar statements by Barnet, McKinley was forced into the Spanish-American War by public opinion in support of Cuban rebels, and any motivation to “uplift” the Filipinos arose after the Spanish-American struggle was over.
In another strained attack on a now historical figure, Barnet twice brands Lyndon Johnson as “racist” because once in telling a story he used the term “Mexican” in uncomplimentary context and he once used the term “yellow” in a manner that might be interpreted as applying to Orientals. He says that Johnson employed “homicidal technology” in Vietnam so that he would not have to “admit that he, the President of the United States, was as powerless to influence the dangerous outside world as he was to change America.” These are false judgments of a U.S. President who changed the United States by achieving more important social and civil rights legislation than any other President.
San Antonio, Texas
General Parrish’s article will be continued in the next issue of the Review.
Brigadier General Noel F. Parrish, USAF (Ret), (Ph.D., Rice University), is assistant professor of history at Trinity University, San Antonio. Commissioned from flight training in 1932, he served as flying instructor and supervisor and as Commander, Tuskegee Army Flying School. Other assignments were as Special Assistant to the Vice Chief of Staff, Hq USAF; Air Deputy, NATO Defense College, and Deputy Director, Military Assistance Division, Europe; Assistant for Coordination, DCS/Plans and Programs, Hq USAF; and Director, Aerospace Studies Institute, Air University, 1961-64.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this
document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression,
academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official
position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air
Force or the Air University.
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