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“While all other sciences have advanced,” confessed our second President, John Adams, “government is at a stand; little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago.”
folly or perversity. This book is concerned with the last in a specific manifestation; that is, the pursuit of policy contrary to the self-interest of the constituency or state involved.
He chose officials on the principle of “la carrière ouverte aux talents”—the desired talents being intelligence, energy, industry and obedience. That worked for a while until he too, the classic victim of hubris, destroyed himself through overextension.
It is epitomized in a historian’s statement about Philip II of Spain, the surpassing wooden-head of all sovereigns: “No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence.”
His decision suggests that an absence of overriding personal ambition together with shrewd common sense are among the essential components of wisdom.
Germany was not fighting for the status quo but for German hegemony of Europe and a greater empire overseas. She wanted not a mediated but a dictated peace and had no wish, as the Foreign Minister, Arthur Zimmermann, wrote to Bernstorff, “to risk being cheated of what we hope to gain from the war” by a neutral mediator. Any settlement requiring renunciations and indemnities by Germany—the only settlement the Allies would accept—would mean the end of the Hohenzollerns and the governing class. They also had to make someone pay for the war or go bankrupt. A peace without victory would not only
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fear the Greeks, even when bringing gifts.”
When pardons instead of death penalties for manslaughter, murder and other major crimes were questioned, Cardinal Borgia defended the practice on the ground that “the Lord desireth not the death of a sinner but rather that he live and pay.”
Otherwise, the Italian wars are significant for their effect in further politicizing and debasing the Papacy. Taking the same part as any secular state, treating and dealing, raising armies and fighting, it became entirely absorbed in the things that are Caesar’s, with the result that it was perceived as no better than secular—a factor that was to make possible the Sack of Rome. In proportion to their absorption in the realm of Caesar, the popes had less time or concern for the things of God.
The Laocoon was art, style, virtue, struggle, antiquity, philosophy, but as a voice of warning against self-destruction it was not heard.
“The retention of America was worth far more to the mother country economically, politically and even morally than any sum which might be raised by taxation, or even than any principle so-called of the Constitution.” In short, although possession was of greater value than principle, nevertheless the greater was thrown away for the less, the unworkable pursued at the sacrifice of the possible. This phenomenon is one of the commonest of governmental follies.
My theme is narrower: a depiction of folly on the British side because it was on that side that policy contrary to self-interest was pursued. The Americans overreacted, blundered, quarreled, but were acting, if not always admirably, in their own interest and did not lose sight of it. If the folly we are concerned with is the contradiction of self-interest, we must in this case follow the British.
Benjamin Franklin noted in a memorandum to himself that while Americans at present loved British modes, customs and manufactures, “A disgust of these will ensue. Trade will suffer more than the tax profits.” He added a thought that should have been a creed for the British government: “Everything one has a right to do is not best to be done.” This in essence was to be the Burke thesis: that principle does not have to be demonstrated when the demonstration is inexpedient.
Wooden-headedness enjoyed no finer hour.
Insistence on a rooted notion regardless of contrary evidence is the source of the self-deception that characterizes folly. By hiding the reality, it underestimates the needed degree of effort.
Recognizing the contradiction of self-interest in the American war, a political cartoon of 1776 pictured the British lion asleep while ministers were busily engaged in slaughtering the goose that lays the golden egg.
The question raised is why did the policy-makers close their minds to the evidence and its implications? This is the classic symptom of folly: refusal to draw conclusions from the evidence, addiction to the counter-productive. The “why” of this refusal and this addiction may disclose itself in the course of retracing the tale of American policy-making in Vietnam.
These results left little impression; he was not prepared to infer from them any reason to reexamine policy. As in the case of Philip II, “no experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence.”
The American government reacted not to the Chinese upheaval or to Vietnamese nationalism per se, but to intimidation by the rabid right at home and to the public dread of Communism that this played on and reflected.
His position was realistic, if not a profile in courage. Re-election was more than a year and a half away. To continue for that time to invest American resources and inevitably lives in a cause in which he no longer had much faith, rather than risk his own second term, was a decision in his own interest, not the country’s. Only an exceedingly rare ruler reverses that order.
and that the United States “did not believe in negotiating until our position on the battlefield was so strong that our adversaries might make the requisite concessions.” De Gaulle rejected this position outright. The same illusions, he told Ball, had drawn France into such trouble; Vietnam was a “hopeless place to fight”; a “rotten country,” where the United States could not win for all its great resources. Not force but negotiation was the only way.
Failure to seize his chance at this moment to extricate his Administration from an unpromising foreign entanglement was the irreparable folly, though not his alone.
Despite the Working Group’s warning, the President, his Secretaries and the Joint Chiefs were sure that American power could force North Vietnam to quit while the United States carefully avoided a clash with China.
“The greatest contribution Vietnam is making … is developing an ability in the United States to fight a limited war, to go to war without arousing the public ire.” He believed this to be “almost a necessity in our history, because this is the kind of war we’ll likely be facing for the next fifty years.”
It was chained to the aim of ensuring a non-Communist South Vietnam in order to make its exit with credibility intact. The goal had subtly changed from blocking Communism to saving face. McNaughton, one official who did not allow himself self-deception, put it caustically when he placed first on his list of United States war aims, “70 percent to avoid a humiliating defeat to our reputation as guarantor.”
Disaffection
