August 2006 Newsletter

Review of Gareth Porter’s Perils of Dominance
By Fredrik Logevall, Cornell University

Gareth Porter advances two principal arguments in Perils of Dominance. The first is convincing, in my judgment, even if he stretches it too far; the second is not. Porter is not the first to see in the period 1953-1965 an imbalance of power between the United States and its main Communist adversaries that overwhelmingly favored the former, but he develops the argument more fully than any other scholar I know. He goes so far as to assert the existence in this period of a unipolar international system, in which both the Soviets and Chinese were acutely aware of Washington’s strategic superiority and therefore disinclined to allow military action that would challenge U.S. interests—including, in this case, in Southeast Asia. American officials, meanwhile, fully aware of their advantage, developed an “extremely high level of confidence” that Washington “could assert its power in Vietnam without the risk of either a major war or a military confrontation with another major power” (259). They could act with impunity, that is to say, in working to keep South Vietnam from falling to Communism, at least as far as Nikita Khrushchev (and the Kosygin/Brezhnev team that followed him) and Mao Zedong were concerned.

The argument for a fundamental imbalance of power in these years is persuasive, and powerfully rendered, and it raises profoundly important questions for our understanding of the Cold War international system as a whole. Blithe references to a superpower rivalry between two giants of more or less equal stature, dubious enough before this book, will be harder to make after it. Porter is at his best here, and really very good, as he describes this strategic disparity and analyzes its meaning for the larger Cold War. With respect to Vietnam in the mid-1950s, he makes a strong case that U.S. strategic superiority decisively influenced Eisenhower’s and Dulles’s decision to subvert the 1954 Geneva Accords, confident as they were that neither the Chinese nor the Soviets would do more than issue empty protests. Porter misses the degree to which South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem was the architect of his government’s policy vis-à-vis the Accords, but the basic point stands: for U.S. leaders there was, in Cold War terms, “no serious downside to scrapping the elections called for by the Geneva Accords,” and to working to build up the Diem regime.

The question, though, is how much explanatory power this imbalance of power has for the American decision a decade later to wage large-scale war in Vietnam. Here Porter offers considerably less. He does not demonstrate that the U.S. superiority drove the decision to launch Rolling Thunder and commit ground troops, and he presents no real challenge to the prevailing view that concerns about the possible responses from Moscow and especially Beijing helped shape the nature and extent of the Americanization of the conflict in 1964-65 and thereafter—precluding, notably, an invasion of the North and a wholesale expansion of the war into Laos and Cambodia. He underplays, moreover, the degree to which some senior officials feared for how America’s global “credibility” would be affected by the outcome in Vietnam, a concern based on perceived vulnerability, not overweening confidence.

The book’s second major argument, which is connected to and ultimately overshadows the first—and which I will focus on here—is that what Porter calls the “national security bureaucracy” consistently advocated deeper U.S. military engagement in Vietnam, even in the face of opposition from Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. The three presidents, Porter doggedly insists, were the exceptions to the general rule of American hubris and hawkishness; the three men sought at all times, ultimately unsuccessfully, to prevent the outbreak of major war. But was this “national security bureaucracy” really the cohesive, undifferentiated mass Porter makes it out to be? In his telling it consistently speaks with one voice (“The national security bureaucracy believed…” [187]; “The national security bureaucracy was firmly opposed…” [208]), and consistently advocates one basic course of action, i.e. escalation. In fact, though, there were always important differences among national security officials over Vietnam policy. This was true at the beginning under Eisenhower and at the end under Johnson; it was true among top and mid-level civilian officials at State, at the CIA, and in the Pentagon, and among their counterparts in the uniformed military. Even when principal advisers were united on the need for expanded military action, they often disagreed on why it was necessary, and on what form it ought to take.

Contrary to Porter’s claim, for example, top advisers did not react to the 1961 Taylor-Rostow report with unanimity, and were not, as a group, “shocked” when JFK rejected some of its recommendations. Contrary to his claim, “Johnson’s advisers” at the start of 1965 had not concluded that “he was holding off on the bombing in the hope that a neutralist regime would emerge in Saigon to negotiate a peace settlement with Hanoi” (208). (I doubt, indeed, that a single one of them had so concluded.) Far more than Porter allows, moreover, these advisers early in 1965 differed among themselves regarding the likely efficacy of air power, and the advisability of sending U.S. ground troops.

Like an attorney trying to present the clearest (though not necessarily the best) case possible before the jury, Porter time and again flattens out ambiguities. Thus one gets little sense that top and mid-level officials were themselves at times uncertain about the outlook for the conflict—even with the introduction of U.S. ground troops—and about the stakes involved. Dean Rusk, in my judgment, was a true believer on Vietnam, whereas Robert McNamara wasn’t; both men, however, though ultimately champions of Americanization, often expressed uncertainty about the best course to follow. Already in October 1963 McNamara told his colleagues that “we need a way to get out of Vietnam,” and at several points in 1964 he expressed deep concerns about the state of the war and the prospects for victory. Porter quotes the October 1963 line, but his McNamara becomes an über-hawk the minute Lyndon Johnson assumes office. Why? Because, Porter argues, McNamara did not feel constrained by loyalty to the new president. Really? It seems to me well-established that he had a profound sense of loyalty to Johnson, arguably as great as he had to Kennedy. This loyalty, which may have been to the office as much as to the two men, in my view goes a long way to explaining his advocacy in the lead-up to major war. Certainly, the defense secretary’s attitude on the war was much more complex, more internally contradictory, than we see in this book.

The same smoothing out of rough edges occurs with the presidents. In Perils of Dominance each one is a dove, continually striving with all his might to prevent large-scale escalation—until February 1965, when Johnson, determining he can resist the bureaucracy’s pressure no longer, gives up. Evidence for such an interpretation can be found in the vast published and archival material—for the Kennedy and especially the Johnson periods, in particular, the amount is now truly staggering—but the question is how it stacks up against the totality of that material. Too often in this book the author bases his claims on memoirs and oral histories, which, though certainly legitimate sources, are weak reeds upon which to build sweeping interpretive arguments.

Porter maintains, for example, that JFK made a serious effort to open a diplomatic channel with Hanoi in 1962. His main evidence: the memoir by Chester Bowles, a minor player in the administration who did not have the president’s confidence and who was prone to writing long-winded memos seldom read by anyone who mattered. Porter then uses this abortive 1962 plan to buttress his argument that Kennedy in 1963 initiated a full withdrawal from Vietnam. Here again memoirs and oral histories figure prominently in the notes. Porter acknowledges that the president in the fall voiced reservations about a withdrawal, but he insists it was a ruse: “Kennedy’s apparent skepticism about a withdrawal was political theater to complete the fiction that he was only responding to urging [sic] of his top national security advisers” (176). And later: “At the meeting, Kennedy was still pretending to be undecided” (176). How do we know he was pretending, in a political theater? Porter can’t really tell us. He is not unpersuasive in portraying Kennedy as a skeptic on the war, as a flexible and pragmatic leader, and he is right to emphasize that JFK rejected aides’ recommendations for a larger escalation on his watch. Too often, though, Porter reads inconclusive evidence only one way and imposes a clarity on the material that is not there.

The way I interpret a series of important White House meetings on October 2 and 5, for example, is that Kennedy at that late hour was still uncertain about which way to go, still postponing the tough decisions for the future, and moreover that he had not given the proposal for a 1000-man withdrawal from South Vietnam very much thought. He says at one point: “My only reservation about this [1000-man withdrawal] is that it commits to a kind of a…if the war doesn’t continue to go well, it’ll look like we were overly optimistic, and I don’t—I’m not sure we—I’d like to know what benefit we get out [of] at this time announcing a thousand.”[1] Could this be part of the ruse, as Porter maintains? Yes, but neither Porter nor others who have put forth this “incipient-withdrawal” thesis (as I have called it elsewhere) have been able to find persuasive evidence to that effect.[2] A president determined to withdraw from Vietnam regardless of the state of the war would have taken care in the autumn of 1963 to speak more elliptically in public pronouncements, and would have been far less dismissive of exploring possibilities for a negotiated settlement of the conflict. He would have been more reticent about endorsing a showdown between Diem and dissident generals.

One also wonders about Kennedy’s supposed need for total secrecy. Why the elaborate ruse? According to Porter, the president worried that public association with a withdrawal plan would risk serious political fallout for him if the war subsequently went sour. Maybe, but Porter uses an odd historical example to bolster the point: he writes that JFK endured a “fierce political attack” (166) in September-October 1962 for his failure to take forceful action against the Soviet military presence in Cuba. Some criticism he certainly suffered, but a fierce political attack seriously threatening his political position at home? Not remotely.

This issue of American domestic opinion is of critical importance to Porter’s analysis, not merely with respect to Kennedy but Johnson as well. In his preface he refers to “the strongly interventionist cast of domestic opinion” the two men had to confront (x). Later, in a key passage in the conclusion, he writes that LBJ hoped for “an evolution of congressional sentiment that would make possible a negotiated exit from the war” (263). Each of these assertions is almost wholly unsubstantiated, however, for Porter has done no research to speak of on Congressional and public attitudes in the 1961-65 period—or even made use of the secondary literature on the subject. Few lawmakers ever appear in the text, and there is no systematic analysis of editorial opinion in U.S. newspapers, of the views of syndicated columnists, of opinion polls. Had Porter undertaken such research, I believe he would have found incontrovertible evidence that domestic opinion was never strongly interventionist in this period, certainly not in 1964-65. He would have found that the Senate Democratic leadership (and numerous other Democrats and moderate Republicans) in early 1965 expressed deep misgivings about the prospect of an Americanized war, and expressed those misgivings to Johnson—albeit more timidly than they might have. He would have found similar concerns in a broad cross-section of newspapers, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, as well as among leading columnists. And he would have found that the general public, to the extent it paid attention at all, was ambivalent, not wanting to lose in Vietnam but also not wanting to send America’s young men to fight and die there.[3]

Johnson’s own vice president thought in terms of this domestic opinion in arguing forcefully against an expanded war. In two remarkable memos written precisely at the time the administration prepared to launch Rolling Thunder and commit the first ground troops, Hubert H. Humphrey, a savvy and seasoned politician with a deep understanding of Democratic precinct politics across the country, did not doubt that there were political risks in disengagement. But he argued that 1965 was the optimal time to incur those risks and—of central importance—that the risks of escalation were greater. “If we find ourselves leading from frustration to escalation and end up short of a war with China but embroiled deeper in fighting in Vietnam over the next few months,” he warned Johnson, “political opposition will steadily mount.”

It is always hard to cut losses. But the Johnson administration is in a stronger position to do so now than any administration in this century. Nineteen sixty-five is the year of minimum political risk for the Johnson administration. Indeed, it is the first year when we can face the Vietnam problem without being preoccupied with the political repercussions from the Republican right. As indicated earlier, our political problems are likely to come from new and different sources (Democratic liberals, independents, labor) if we pursue an enlarged war.[4]

Porter mentions neither of the two memos, nor does he tell us that Humphrey opposed an expanded war. Johnson’s response perforce also goes unmentioned, but it’s worth noting. “We don’t need all these memos,” he told Humphrey, before excluding the vice president from Vietnam meetings for the better part of a year.

The point is not that Porter had an obligation to refer to these Humphrey missives—or to any specific documents, for that matter. The point is that he needed to do much more to substantiate his claims regarding popular and Congressional attitudes in those fateful weeks in late 1964-early 1965. His thesis depends on it. His endnotes show that he’s conversant with the recent scholarship on the war, and though he’s largely uninterested in engaging that literature (beyond bland reference to “mainstream” scholarship), he knows that some of it addresses public attitudes in the United States in the key months of decision. One would have expected him to offer more than hoary claims regarding a “strongly interventionist” domestic opinion.

If one considers that senior Democrats and powerful voices in the press had deep reservations regarding escalation, and that the bureaucracy itself was internally divided about the best way to proceed in Vietnam, it becomes hard to accept Porter’s depiction of a Lyndon Johnson heroically doing all he can to head off war. The author avers that LBJ hoped for the emergence of a neutralist regime in Saigon that would ask the U.S. to leave, and further that the president actively sought a negotiated settlement with Hanoi. The weight of the archival evidence points precisely in the opposite direction: to the conclusion that Johnson, from the time he took office through the summer of 1965, and beyond, wanted nothing to do with early negotiations, except those involving the particulars of Hanoi’s surrender. He was a hawk on Vietnam, not because he was eager for war or because he was optimistic about the prospects (he was neither), but because he “associated negotiations with compromise and compromise with defeat” (218). That last phrase is from Porter, who uses it to describe the top advisers; it’s at least as apt in reference to their boss.

Porter asserts that the bureaucracy worked incessantly to compel Johnson to expand the war. He lists a dozen such attempts, and declares: “There is surely no parallel in modern history to the twelve separate attempts by the national security bureaucracy over a fourteen-month period [November 1963 to January 1965] to get Johnson to authorize the use of military force against the same state” (267-68). Strong words, indeed. Even a cursory glance at the list of twelve, however, reveals that most of them cannot be construed as attempts to get LBJ to approve military action; they belong in the category of contingency planning for possible future use of force. Several, moreover, had Johnson’s tacit support, while others were backed by some advisers but not others. Not one involved what Porter clearly implies all twelve involved: an all-out effort by the bureaucracy to force the president’s hand.[5]

Were Vietnam War presidents subject to bureaucratic pressures that reduced their maneuverability in policy terms? Unquestionably. But it won’t do to argue, as Gareth Porter does, that John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were forced by such pressures to effectively give up the reins of authority on Vietnam. That argument misrepresents the attitudes both in the Oval Office and in the bureaucracy—and in the country as a whole. As an examination of America’s strategic dominance vis-à-vis the Chinese and the Soviets in the years after Korea Perils of Dominance has much to teach us. As a study of American decision-making on Vietnam in the lead-up to major war, it falls well short of the mark.

[1]Recordings and transcripts of these October 1963 meetings can be found under “Transcript and Audio Highlight Clips” at www.whitehousetapes.org; last accessed on January 27, 2006.

[2]Fredrik Logevall, “Vietnam and the Question of What Might Have Been,” in Mark J. White, ed., Kennedy: The New Frontier Revisited (London: Macmillan, 1998). Porter’s argument here echoes James K. Galbraith, “Exit Strategy,” Boston Review, October/November 2003, 29-34; and John M. Newman, JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle of Power (New York: Warner Books, 1992).

[3]See Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999).

[4]The memorandum is reprinted in full in Hubert H. Humphrey, The Education of a Public Man: My Life and Politics (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1976), 320-24. For Johnson’s response, see Carl Solberg, Hubert Humphrey: A Biography (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1984), 287-88; and Humphrey, 327.

[5]For detailed examinations of this fourteen-month period, relying heavily on primary sources, see David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 284-411; and Logevall, Choosing War, pp. 75-374.

[6]See here Andrew Preston, The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).