August 2006 Newsletter

A Review of Gareth Porter’s Perils of Dominance
By Edwin E. Moise
Professor of History, Clemson University

Gareth Porter has long been a controversial figure in his field, and Perils of Dominance will not make him less so. It provides new and valuable information and interpretations, but it also has enough defects to provide plentiful ammunition for his detractors.

Large portions of the book center on an important insight: that the picture many of us have of a rough balance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, each restrained in its behavior by the knowledge that an all-out conflict would destroy them both, is not really valid for the early part of the Cold War. Porter argues that in the 1950s and early 1960s the United States was clearly much stronger than the Soviet Union and China and that awareness of this fact helped shape the policies of all three powers and of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The Communist states restrained their actions in an effort to avoid direct conflicts with the United States, while the United States was confident enough to push its advantage and indeed, sometimes pretended to be more willing to fight than it actually was and in that way got the other side to back down. Porter says the Communist states’ “appeasement” policies were “aimed at avoiding the risk of a clash with the United States at any cost,” especially during the Eisenhower years (xi).

The broad outlines of this interpretation are clearly correct. The United States was the dominant power, and even those scholars who are aware of that fact (this reviewer included) have not given it the attention it deserves. This view of U. S. dominance has led Porter to reinterpret Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ policies toward Indochina in the first half of 1954, at the time of the Geneva Conference. Dulles was not nearly so ready as other authors have believed to use U.S. military power to block a Communist victory in Vietnam. Porter offers convincing evidence that Dulles did not think he would need to use force. Instead, he bluffed, exploiting the superior strength of the United States and using the threat of U.S. military intervention to intimidate China and the Soviet Union.

This interpretive lens works well when applied to some crucial decisions on Indochina in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but when Porter writes about the mid-1960s it becomes apparent that he is exaggerating the evidence on Communist restraint. A CIA intelligence memorandum dated March 18, 1963 [1], does not, as Porter claims, state “that the USSR had no interest in helping local Communists gain power anywhere in the world” (19). Farther on Porter makes the startling assertion that “Soviet archival sources and recently published Chinese accounts of the period both indicate that the USSR gave no military assistance to the North Vietnamese during the entire period from 1960 to early 1965, except for a few thousand World War II-era German weapons provided in 1962” (48). Neither of the two sources Porter cites for this statement supports it, and one obvious counterexample comes to mind. The PT boats involved in the Tonkin Gulf incident of August 2, 1964, were built in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and sent to North Vietnam in the early 1960s.

If Porter had used his view of American dominance to analyze the escalation decisions of 1965 he might have produced some really interesting results, but he does not apply it as much as he did for earlier periods. He discusses the realization of American officials, in June 1965, that despite the presence of American ground and air combat forces in Vietnam, the Communists might be about to win the war there (222). Yet he does not mention that the People’s Republic of China began sending significant numbers of military personnel into North Vietnam at about that time. The Communist leaders’ increased willingness to take strong action in Vietnam, despite the risks of confrontation with the United States, cries out for a much more detailed analysis, as does the process by which American leaders recognized that they were losing their ability to intimidate their opponents.

The other major thread running through Perils of Dominance is the belief that Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson were all less inclined to adopt extreme Cold War policies than their principal advisers were. On this issue Porter makes some valid points, but he sometimes goes well beyond his evidence. His story of how and why Secretary Dulles decided to encourage Premier Ngo Dinh Diem not to meet with representatives of the Communist government in Hanoi to discuss holding elections for the reunification of Vietnam, as called for by the Geneva Accords, is new and extremely interesting. American officials had been planning to encourage Diem to meet Hanoi’s representatives because they were confident that Hanoi would refuse to agree to conditions for a truly free election. It would then be clear to the world that Hanoi was blocking the elections. Toward the middle of 1955, however, Dulles became seriously concerned that Hanoi would make reasonable proposals in the meeting. He then decided to discourage Diem from going, and in July 1955 Diem announced that he would not attend. The documentation for most of this story seems very solid, although there does not appear to be much evidence for the assertion that Dulles did not consult President Eisenhower about his decision.

Porter paints an accurate picture of the hawks in the Kennedy administration who were pressing for U.S. military action in Vietnam, but his picture of Kennedy’s resistance to that pressure is problematic. He says the president was determined to avoid an American war in Vietnam but for political reasons wanted to hide the fact, not only from the public, but to the extent he could, from his own national security bureaucracy. There are two problems with Porter’s approach to this issue. One is the way he picks and chooses statements from the documentary record that support his argument or can be re-interpreted to support his argument. He says that in March 1962, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara proposed that plans be drawn up for the introduction of U.S. combat forces into Vietnam if a crisis should occur there. He quotes Kennedy’s response to McNamara: “An important item in this planning . . . is the timing of a decision for US action and the factors that go into such a decision [emphasis added].” He interprets these words to mean that if there was a crisis in Vietnam, the United States should be planning not to send additional forces but to pull out the ones already there (167). This interpretation goes rather far beyond the apparent meaning of the words. Later on Porter writes that “on July 17, [Kennedy] began to define ‘withdrawal’ as immediate withdrawal, and expressed his opposition to it. ‘For us to withdraw from that effort,’ he said, ‘would mean a collapse not only of South Viet-Nam, but Southeast Asia. So we are going to stay there’” (174). Kennedy said nothing about the immediateness of the withdrawal; Porter reads that into his statement.

In the last months of the Kennedy presidency, there was a series of meetings at which plans for withdrawing U.S. forces from Vietnam were discussed. Porter argues that Kennedy wanted the National Security Council to approve and publicly announce a withdrawal plan but did not want to support such a plan openly even within the NSC, fearing that this would make him vulnerable to accusations of being soft on communism. Apparently, Kennedy is supposed to have hoped that the United States could withdraw from Vietnam during his presidency without either the public or high officials ever thinking of the withdrawal as having been his policy. Porter quotes Secretary of Defense McNamara as saying that once such a plan was announced, “it would be in concrete,” impossible to change (176). This logic is very strange. Changing such a plan would not have been difficult. Indeed, it is hard to think of any major decision the United States ever made in Vietnam that did not represent a reversal of some previously announced policy.

The other problem with Porter’s approach to the Kennedy administration is that he ignores crucial parts of what the administration actually did while tracing Kennedy’s policies though what various people said. He claims that from the mid-summer of 1962 onward, “a plan for phasing out the U.S. military presence in South Vietnam” had become Kennedy’s “main policy line” for Vietnam (164). He does not appear to notice that the policy Kennedy actually implemented, from mid-summer of 1962 to the time of his death, increased the number of U.S. military personnel in South Vietnam by slightly more than 50 percent.

Porter’s chapter on the Kennedy administration reads as if Kennedy sent only military advisers to South Vietnam. He refers to Kennedy’s “consistent opposition to deployment of combat forces” (167). In an endnote he concedes that the Air Force pilots sent to Vietnam late in 1961 were flying combat missions, but he says “it is not clear whether Kennedy understood” this was occurring (331, n. 115). The documents in the Vietnam 1962 volume of Foreign Relations of the United States contain enough references to the air strikes conducted by the “Jungle Jim” unit in South Vietnam to render most unlikely the notion that the president might have been unaware of what was going on. I do not see even in Porter’s endnotes any reference to the Army and Marine helicopter pilots who were flying combat missions or the Special Forces troops who were leading, not just advising, locally recruited troops in combat operations. President Kennedy had put considerable numbers of military personnel into combat in Vietnam, and he knew it.

Porter’s picture of the Johnson administration is much like his picture of the Kennedy administration: he sees a coterie of hawks pushing a reluctant president toward war. But since that was indeed the situation in 1964, his evidence is considerably better. The argument for Porter’s most extreme assertion, that Secretary of Defense McNamara concealed from President Johnson the weakness of the evidence for the second Tonkin Gulf incident when he was getting Johnson’s approval for retaliatory air strikes, does not seem strong enough to justify the confidence with which the assertion is made. But Porter makes a better argument here than he does for similar assertions about the Kennedy administration.

Porter does not take the domino theory very seriously. In his view the senior policymakers believed too strongly in the superior strength of the United States and in their ability to intimidate the Communist powers to worry as much as they sometimes pretended they did about all of Southeast Asia falling to communism. Dwight Eisenhower and William Bundy sometimes talked as if they believed in the domino theory and sometimes talked as if they did not, but Porter makes a solid case that neither of them did. He is much less convincing about Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara, at times reading meanings into their statements that are not really there. For example, the record of a meeting at which McNamara was present in Honolulu on October 8-9, 1962, states that Thailand was “not an easy target” for Communist subversion and that “the real danger is Thailand’s wavering confidence in US determination to beat the communists in SEA.” The record does not go into the question of how the fall of South Vietnam to communism would or would not change the situation.[2] Porter’s summary omits the second of these statements and treats the first as if it meant that Thailand would not be an easy target if South Vietnam fell:

At least one important piece of documentary evidence supports the view that McNamara, along with Taylor and McCone, understood that Thailand was not likely to be “gravely threatened” in the event of a Communist victory in South Vietnam, as Bundy’s draft had suggested. In October 1962, McNamara and other participants in a conference on Vietnam in Honolulu discussed the situation in Thailand and registered a consensus that it would not be “an easy target” for Communist subversion, given the stability of the government of Sarit Thanarat (246-47).

At the end of his discussion of the domino theory, Porter makes an extremely interesting point: that when American officials worried about Southeast Asian governments falling to or reaching an accommodation with communism if South Vietnam were to fall, they were worrying about what might seem to us quite modest accommodations. The United States was determined to keep the People’s Republic of China a pariah state isolated from the international community. The notion that the fall of South Vietnam was sure to cause Thailand to fall under Communist domination was silly. The notion that the fall of South Vietnam would prompt the Thais to adjust their international stance to the extent of establishing normal diplomatic relations with Beijing and exchanging ambassadors was not silly at all, and American officials felt this would represent a serious defeat for the United States.

Perils of Dominance is an important book, despite its serious flaws. I not only learned interesting new facts by reading it, I gained a significantly better understanding of some very important issues relating to a subject I thought I already understood pretty well. Although I felt obliged to exercise caution in places where he has been careless in his argument and his documentation, Porter has compensated for that by compelling me really to notice the fact that the United States was the world’s dominant power throughout the years of the Vietnam War, and he has persuaded me to reevaluate my understanding of a number of issues, including the domino theory.

[1]Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, vol. V, Soviet Union (Washington, DC, 1998), 645.

[2]Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, vol. XXIII, Southeast Asia (Washington, DC, 1995), 974.