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but to be a good memo writer in government was a very real form of power.
still true
“That, gentlemen, represents the size of the island of Tarawa,” said Shoup, who had won a Medal of Honor there, “and it took us three days and eighteen thousand Marines to take it.” He eventually became Kennedy’s favorite general.
American foreign policy of that era: the search for an Asian leader who told us what we wanted to hear, the creation of an army in our image,
reminded him of the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland teaching herself to believe six impossible things before breakfast.
This was reflected in the leadership. The North was led by a man who had expelled the foreigners, the South by a man who had been installed by foreigners.
It was ironic; the United States had created an army in its own image, an army which existed primarily on paper, and which was linked to U.S. aims and ambitions and in no way reflected its own society.
To the men in the field it was a real war, not just a brief interruption in their careers, something to prevent damaging your career.
In government it is always easier to go forward with a program that does not work than to stop it altogether and admit failure.
He knew nothing about Asia, about poverty, about people, about American domestic politics, but he knew a great deal about production technology and about exercising bureaucratic power.
McNamara asked Vann why he had been misinformed, and Vann bluntly told him it was his own fault. He should have insisted on his own itinerary. He should have traveled without accompanying brass, and he should have taken some time to find out who the better-informed people were and learned how to talk to them.)
Then he told Acheson that his greatest need was to train Vietnamese officers, since the Vietnamese would not fight under French officers. Acheson in turn grandly suggested that American officers do the training, explaining that the United States had demonstrated in Korea that it knew how to train Asian officers and the French didn’t. The wars, he thought, and the problems, were the same.
(the best people, who had correctly predicted the fall of China, would see their careers destroyed, but Dean Rusk, who had failed to predict the Chinese entry into the Korean War, would see his career accelerate.
the best decisions are often the loneliest ones.
leadership
(that hope still burned, the myth that the problem with the ARVN was a lack of training; Americans had been training the Vietnamese army for a decade, and still held to the hope that more training was the solution).
the most basic rule of politics is that human beings never react the way you expect them to.
A bad war means a bad system; the wrong officers are promoted for the wrong reasons, the best officers, often unable to go along with the expected norm, the fake body count, the excessive use of force, wither along the way.
bad wars enable bad people...
