Johnson Administration

In taking the war upon himself, Robert S. McNamara forgets that containment abroad and anticommunism at home virtually ensured the Vietnam tragedy.

"A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought." The words are Ronald Reagan's. While McGeorge Bundy, like many others, finds Reagan's thinking about nuclear weapons muddy and his administration's public presentation of nuclear reality disgraceful, this particular sentence is crystal clear. It echoes the conclusion of the only person ever to authorize a nuclear strike, Harry Truman: "Starting an atomic war is totally unthinkable for rational men."

A Henry Kissinger has written, public support is "the acid test of a foreign policy." For a President to be successful in maintaining his nation's security he needs to believe, and others need to believe, that he has solid support at home. It was President Johnson's judgment that if the United States permitted the fall of Vietnam to communism, American politics would turn ugly and inward and the world would be a less safe place in which to live. Later, President Nixon would declare: "The right way out of Vietnam is crucial to our changing role in the world, and the peace in the world." In order to gain support for these judgments and the objectives in Vietnam which flowed from them, our Presidents have had to weave together the steel-of-war strategy with the strands of domestic politics.

A reviewer of Senator Fulbright's Indictment of President Johnson's policy in Viet Nam has pointed out that "it is possible to argue that the false starts of American policy in Asia and elsewhere have been at least as much due to the illusions of liberalism as to the 'arrogance of power'."[i] Obviously, particular policies and actions may be judged as making a bad situation worse, but they may not be the cause of its being bad in the first place. Much of the hawk-versus-dove dispute stems from shared misconceptions about communist insurgencies in Southeast Asia and therefore also about the resulting counterinsur-gency actions-misconceptions which form part of an ethos largely inapplicable to that troubled region today.