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May 8 - May 30, 2025
It was extraordinary that in this period Rusk avoided the one dangerous issue of the time, on which he seemed to be an expert. The issue was China,
though the very fact that Rusk had not been involved in the China problem, that he was not burned, should have been some kind of warning.
second, a sense of responsibility because he had not forecast the Chinese entry into the war.
Clubb, between mid-July and early October, submitted three separate official memoranda warning of the danger of Chinese intervention. But though it was his special area of expertise, he was not included among those who attended the critical meetings between Truman and MacArthur at Wake Island,
(In 1965 Rusk would meet with a group of high school seniors and discuss the reasons why we were escalating in Vietnam; a member of his staff who was there thought it was a forceful but simplistic presentation of a hands-out-of-the-cookie-jar view. The next day, however, he was stunned when he saw an “Eyes Only” memo on the same subject from Rusk to the President, the highest level of security possible for documents, and it was word for word the exact same presentation.)
Rusk would say, again and again, that when a great nation like the United States of America puts its shoulder to the wheel, something has to give:
MacArthur panicked and was sending back what Lovett would call “posterity papers” which covered him against all eventualities, saying that he was meeting the entire Chinese nation in battle.
despite the Democratic desire to blame Dulles for the commitment to Southeast Asia, the creation of South Vietnam, and the invention of Diem, the roots of the change in American policy actually predated Eisenhower’s coming to power. The really crucial decisions were made at the tail end of the Truman years, with Acheson as Secretary of State and Rusk as his principal deputy for Asia.
The real architect of the American commitment to Vietnam, of bringing containment to that area and using Western European perceptions in the underdeveloped world, was not John Foster Dulles, it was Dean Acheson.
he would not turn his back on Alger Hiss (who was of course a member of the Establishment in very good standing; a remarkable amount of what Acheson was committed to was at its heart class).
He was the son of a British Army officer who went to Canada, fought against a half-breed insurrection in Manitoba,
he once wanted to be Solicitor General of the United States, a job for which he had been recommended by the Roosevelt Administration, only to find that he was blocked by Attorney General Homer Cummings, who was from Connecticut, the reason being that the senior Acheson had found Cummings too frequently divorced and had withheld a marital blessing).
Acheson was more conservative than the Administration on fiscal policies, and ill at ease with Roosevelt’s loose, disorganized personal style,
Truman had more reverence for the wisdom of the Establishment (one of the differences was that Roosevelt, having come from that particular class, was a good deal less in awe of it, be it in foreign affairs or anything else.
So it was that Acheson, even more than Marshall, was the architect of containment, the architect of an attitude of universality toward Communism
Up until that point Walton Butterworth, still Assistant Secretary of State for the Far East, was fighting valiantly against all the French attempts to involve us in the war with aid and arms, but things were fast moving out of his control.
as it always did in conflicts between its anticolonialism and its anti-Communism, the United States backed down completely.
On May 7, 1950, the day when Acheson learned of the Schuman Plan, he also agreed to give military aid for the war. It was a quid pro quo decision, though it was not announced as such
New York Times commented editorially: “We cannot ask France to sacrifice for Indochina, merely then to give it up. Neither can we dictate terms to France, because we are not prepared to step in. Indochina is critical—if it falls, all of Southeast Asia will be in mortal peril.” All of this, of course, was before Korea.
It was not nationalism which was being fought there, he told them, it was Communism. The two were incompatible; you cannot be both a Communist and a nationalist. It was all very simple, he said.
He had dissented on NATO, since, as far as he was concerned, the Marshall Plan was sufficient; Soviet penetration of Western countries, he felt, if it came at all, would come from within,
As American involvement in Indochina deepened, he had written a long memo to Acheson saying that the French could not win in Indochina nor could the Americans replace them and win, and that we were now, whether we realized it or not, on our way toward taking their place.
The French, who had been eager for the war and for American support, became increasingly dubious, and the Americans seemed more eager for the war than France.
In 1953 and 1954, out of office, he met regularly in Princeton with his former State Department associates, and at the time of Dienbienphu he and his aides (with the exception of Kennan) agreed that the United States was making a great and perhaps fatal mistake if it did not go to the rescue of the French and join in on the war.
How many Chinese will remember in time the fates of Rajk, Kostov, Petkov, Clementis and all those in other satellites who discovered that being Communist is not enough for the conspirators of the Kremlin?
After the Republicans were elected in 1952, which meant that Dulles, chairman of the board of the Rockefeller Foundation, had a new job, Secretary of State, he started to look for a staff for State, but he also needed someone he liked and trusted for the important job of President of the Rockefeller Foundation, and he recommended his young friend Dean Rusk.
Katzenbach finally interrupted and said he knew about the Constitution, but a man could be a damn fool and be constitutional).
“This President,” he said, “will never take the steps on China policy that you and I might want him to take unless he is urged to do so by his Secretary of State. And this Secretary of State will never urge him to do so.”
Nineteen sixty-four was a lost year, and much of the loss was attributable to the attitudes and disposition of Dean Rusk.
Bundy took a vacation in the Caribbean, and when he did, the White House machinery seemed to fall apart. No one else knew how to push the buttons
Desmond FitzGerald, the number-three man in the CIA, was briefing him every week on Vietnam, and FitzGerald, an old Asia hand, was made uneasy by McNamara’s insistence on quantifying everything, of seeing it in terms of statistics, infinite statistics. One day after McNamara had asked him at great length for more and more numbers, more information for the data bank, FitzGerald told him bluntly that he thought most of the statistics were meaningless, that it just didn’t smell right, that they were all in for a much more difficult time than they thought. McNamara just nodded curtly, and it was
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The United States must be prepared to put aside many of the self-imposed restrictions which now limit our efforts, and to undertake bolder actions which may embody greater risks”).
These restrictions include keeping the war within the boundaries of South Vietnam, avoiding the direct use of U. S. combat forces, and limiting U. S. direction of the campaign
the immediacy of the American acceptance of Khanh, plus the fact that in contrast to how difficult the coup against Diem had been, how easily Khanh pulled his, would underscore the frailty of political control in Saigon. It would encourage rather than discourage other plotters.
As the decay in Saigon became more evident, McNamara was also charged with looking into the possibilities of bombing as a means of bringing more pressure to bear on Hanoi. Would it have to be done, and if so, should it be done immediately?
the Vietcong had up to 90 percent control in key provinces in the Delta,
Unless we can achieve this objective in South Vietnam, almost all of Southeast Asia will probably fall under Communist dominance (all of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), accommodate to Communism so as to remove effective U.S. and anti-Communist influence (Burma), or fall under the domination of forces not now explicitly Communist, but likely then to become so (Indonesia taking over Malaysia). Thailand might hold for a period with our help, but would be under grave pressure. Even the Philippines would become shaky, and the threat to India to the west, Australia and New Zealand to the south, and
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the CIA and the other intelligence agencies were reporting, quite the opposite, that the dominoes were not all the same size, shape and color, that the loss of South Vietnam might have less impact outside the immediate Indochinese peninsula, that the other countries reacted to very different political pressures, and that Vietnamese nationalism, left over from the colonial war, which was the principal force aiding the Vietcong in Vietnam, might have no effect in a country which had not undergone a colonial experience.
(Johnson himself did not take the domino theory seriously; he was far more worried about the loss of a country to the Communists and what this would do to him in terms of domestic politics, though this could not be expressed so bluntly in an official paper.)
His own impression was that Vietnam was coming apart and would continue to do so, and he thought it would be difficult to do an honest paper with Rostow in charge.
When they finished they had a stack of papers about a foot high and the essential answer, which was no, bombing the North would not work.
the real problem in 1964 for the INR people was trying to get the attention of their superiors, trying to get someone to fight for them).
INR could never be sure of what it was saying, and somehow the military always seemed sure;
having lost that argument, when someone else—perhaps from State, perhaps from CIA—made the same points which McNaughton had just made to McNamara, no one tore those arguments apart more ferociously than John McNaughton.
(though he was perhaps McNamara’s most trusted deputy at the end of his life, he could never have succeeded him as Secretary of Defense; there was too much antagonism built up there, even among the younger brighter military officers who felt what they considered McNaughton’s contempt not just for the old-fashioned bombs-away generals, but for themselves as well, the men who felt they were working for the same thing as McNaughton and were hurt by his brusqueness and rudeness).
think if it was easy to get off of it, we would already have gotten off.
both in their attacks on Diem and in their disdain for Rusk and Vice-President Johnson, they had made enemies, not powerful then but powerful now.
As far as he was concerned, it was all over, the Vietcong had all the muscle and dynamism, the government side seemed weak and hopeless;
He was made the desk officer for all of Southeast Asia, a marvelous job if it had not been for the fact that it specifically excluded Vietnam.
“Now I think the President would like to see you,” which made Nes a little nervous and wondering what was up, a potential DCM being appraised by the President of the United States.
