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Introduction
For most of the
past 20 years, directly or by proxy, the
United States has been waging war in Indochina. Forty-five
thousand Americans have died in the fighting, 95,000 men of
various nationalities in the former French colonial army, and
no one knows how many Indochinese-the guesses run from one
to two million. Only a very small number of men have known
the inner story of how and why four succeeding Administrations,
those of Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and
Johnson, helped to maintain this semipermanent war in Indochina-
a conflict that the Administration of President Nixon has
continued.
On June 17, 1967, at a time of great personal disenchantment
with the war, Robert S. McNamara, who was then Secretary
of Defense, made what may turn out to be one of the most
important decisions in his seven years at the Pentagon. He commissioned
what has since become known as the Pentagon papers
-a massive top-secret history of the United States role in Indochina.
The work took a year and a half. The result was approximately
3,000 pages of narrative history and more than 4,000
pages of appended documents-an estimated total of 2.5 million
words. The 47 volumes cover American involvement in Indochina
from World War II to May, 1968, the month the peace
talks began in Paris after President Johnson had set a limit on
further military commitments and revealed his intention to
retire.
The New York Times obtained most of the narrative history
and documents and began publishing a series of articles based
on them on Sunday, June 13, 1971. After the first three daily
installments appeared, the Justice Department obtained a temporary
restraining order against further publication from the
Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The Government contended that if public dissemination of the
history continued, "the national defense interests of the United
ix
States and the nation's security will suffer immediate and irreparable
harm," and sought a permanent injunction. The issue
was fought through the courts for 15 days, as The Times and
The Washington Post, which had subsequently begun publishing
articles on the history, along with other newspapers, argued
that the Pentagon papers belonged in the public domain and
that no danger to the nation's security was involved.
On June 30, 1971, the Supreme Court of the United States
freed the newspapers to continue publication of their articles.
By a vote of 6 to 3, the justices held that the right to a free
press under the First Amendment to the Constitution overrode
any subsidiary legal considerations that would block publication
by the news media.
The Pentagon papers, despite shortcomings and gaps, form a
great archive of government decision-making on Indochina over
three decades. The papers tell what decisions were made, how
and why they were made and who made them. The story is
told in the written words of the principal actors themselves-in
their memorandums, their cablegrams and their orders-and in
narrative-analyses of these documents written by the 36 authors
of the history.
The authors, who functioned as anonymous government historians,
aimed at the broadest possible interpretation of events.
They examined not only the policies and motives of the successive
Administrations concerned, but also the effect or lack
of effect of intelligence analyses on policy; the mechanics and
consequences of bureaucratic compromises; the dilemmas of
seeking to impose American concepts on the Vietnamese; the
techniques of the Executive Branch of government in influencing
Congress, the news media and domestic and international
opinion in general, and many other tributaries of the main historical
narrative.
The narrative-analyses bear the character of a middle-echelon
and institutional view of the war, for the majority of the authors
were careerists, experienced State and Defense Department
civilian officials and military officers, as well as defense-oriented
intellectuals from government-financed research institutes. The
director of the project for Mr. McNamara was Leslie H. Gelb,
30 years old at the time the history was commissioned, a Harvard
Ph.D. in political science and a former head of policy
planning in the Pentagon's office of politico-military operations
-International Security Affairs. The authors were promised
anonymity when they were recruited for the project so that they
would be free to make judgments in the course of their writing.
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The anonymity was designed to protect their careers if the judgments
later displeased higher authority.
The anonymous character of the study, officially entitled
"History of U.S. Decision-Making Process on Vietnam Policy,"
was also preserved by having several authors collaborate on
each of the various chronological and thematic sections. The
process gave the history a fragmented character and it does not
reflect consistent themes throughout, as would a history written
by one author or a group of authors who shared a similar overview
of events. For example, the history lacks a single, all-embracing
summary and it displays a number of other inconsistencies.
The result was an extended internal critique of the appended
documentary record-what Mr. Gelb, in a letter on Jan. 15,
1969, to Mr. McNamara's successor, Clark M. Clifford, called
"not so much a documentary history as a history based solely
on documents-checked and rechecked with ant-like diligence."
To preserve the secrecy of the project, the historians were
forbidden to supplement the documentary record by interviewing
the decision-makers themselves. And even where the documentary
record was concerned, the authors could not bridge
important gaps. They did not have access to the White House
archives of President Johnson and to those of past Presidents,
nor to the full files of the State Department and the Central
Intelligence Agency, although the authors did have many documents
from all of these sources.
The historians relied for the documentary record on files of
Mr. McNamara and Mr. Clifford, the official archives of past
Defense Secretaries and those of other senior officials in the
Pentagon. Into these Pentagon files had in turn flowed papers
from the White House, the State Department, the C.I.A. and
the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. William Bundy, the Assistant
Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs in the Johnson
Administration, also made available documents from his official
files.
The copy of the Pentagon papers obtained by The New York
Times lacks, however, the four volumes the historians wrote on
the secret diplomatic negotiations of the Johnson period. What
discussion of Vietnam diplomacy since 1963 is contained in the
relevant chapters of this book, therefore, has been based on
the sporadic, but significant insights the other volumes of the
Pentagon papers provide.
The historians themselves also found no conclusive answers
to some of the most widely asked questions about the war, including
these:
• Precisely how was Ngo Dinh Diem returned to South
Vietnam in 1954 from exile and helped to power?
• Who took the lead in preventing the 1956 Vietnam-wide
elections provided for in the Geneva accords of 1954-Mr.
Diem or the Americans?
• If President Kennedy had lived, would he have led the
United States into a full-scale ground war in South Vietnam
and an air war against North Vietnam as President Johnson did?
• Was Secretary of Defense McNamara dismissed for opposing
the Johnson strategy in mid-1967 or did he ask to be relieved
because of disenchantment with Administration policy?
• Did President Johnson's cutback of the bombing to the
20th Parallel on March 31, 1968, signal a lowering of United
States objectives for the war or was it merely an effort to buy
more time and patience from a war-weary American public?
But whatever their drawbacks, the Pentagon papers are the
most complete secret archive of government decision-making
on Indochina that has yet become available. Taken as a whole,
the papers demonstrate that the four Administrations of Presidents
Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson progressively
developed a sense of commitment to a non-Communist Vietnam,
a readiness to fight the North to protect the South, and
an ultimate frustration with this effort-to a much greater extent
than their public statements acknowledged at the time. The
historians were led to many broad conclusions and specific
findings, including the following:
• That the Truman Administration's decision to give military
aid to France in her colonial war against the Communist-led
Vietminh "directly involved" the United States in Vietnam and
"set" the course of American policy.
• That the Eisenhower Administration's decision to rescue
a fledgling South Vietnam from a Communist takeover and the
Administration's attempt to undermine the new Communist
regime of North Vietnam gave the Administration a "direct
role in the ultimate breakdown of the Geneva settlement" for
Indochina in 1954.
• That the Kennedy Administration, though ultimately
spared from major escalation decisions by the death of its
leader, transformed a policy of "limited-risk gamble," which it
inherited, into a "broad commitment" that left President Johnson
with a choice between more war and withdrawal.
• That the Johnson Administration, though the President
was reluctant and hesitant to take the final decisions, intensified the
covert warfare against North Vietnam and began planning
in the spring of 1964 to wage overt war, a full year before
it publicly revealed the depth of its involvement and its fear
of defeat.
• That this campaign of growing clandestine military pressure
through 1964 and the expanding program of bombing
North Vietnam in 1965 were begun despite the judgment of the
Government's intelligence community that the measures would
not cause Hanoi to cease its support of the Vietcong insurgency
in the South, and that the bombing was deemed militarily ineffective
within a few months.
• That the infiltration of men and arms from North Vietnam
into the South was more important to the various Administrations
as a means of publicly justifying American involvement
than it was for its effects on the Vietcong insurgency.
• That these four succeeding Administrations built up the
American political, military and psychological stakes in Indochina,
often more deeply than they realized at the time, with
large-scale shipments of military equipment to the French in
1950; with acts of sabotage and terror warfare against North
Vietnam beginning in 1954; with moves that encouraged and
abetted the overthrow of President Diem in 1963; with plans,
pledges and threats of further action that sprang to life in the
Tonkin Gulf clashes in August, 1964; with the careful preparation
of public opinion for the years of open warfare that were
to follow, and with the calculation in 1965, as the planes and
troops were openly committed to sustained combat, that neither
accommodation inside South Vietnam nor early negotiations
with North Vietnam would achieve the desired result.
In these disclosures and analyses of the origins and course
of the war lies the immediate significance of the Pentagon
papers.
But the documents and the narrative histories have a greater
significance beyond the war in Indochina and its traumatic
effects upon the United States and the countries of Southeast
Asia. For this archive represents the first good look since the
end of World War II at the inner workings of the machinery
of the Executive Branch that has grown up under the American
Presidency. The most recent body of policy documents to come
into the public domain is dated 1946, the last year for which
the State Department has released any of its archives. The
Pentagon papers also contain documents, such as the reports
on clandestine warfare, of a kind that generally are excluded
from the State Department's policy of releasing documents
xiii
after 25 years.
Clandestine warfare. as this collection of New York Times
articles on the Pentagon papers will illustrate. naturally has an
important effect on public events. Covert operations also occasionally
violate treaties and contradict open policy pronouncements.
No matter what vintage. therefore, documents related
to clandestine war are, in the bureaucratic phrase, "excluded
from downgrading" under the classification regulations, in
order to avoid embarrassing the Executive Branch and the men
responsible.
The instances are also rare in which a collection of documents
akin to the Pentagon papers has come to light in modern
history. The last examples were the release of the secret Czarist
archives after the Russian Revolution in 1917, the publication
of imperial Germany's records by the Weimar Republic following
World War I, and the capture of the Nazi archives by
the Allies at the climax of World War II.
The internal functioning of the machinery of the post-World
War II Executive Branch has been much theorized about, but
only intermittently perceived in authentic detail. Usually these
perceptions have come in the personal memoirs of the policymakers,
whose version of history has been understandably
selective.
To read the Pentagon papers in their vast detail is to step
through the looking glass into a new and different world. This
world has a set of values, a dynamic, a language and a perspective
quite distinct from the public world of the ordinary
citizen and of the two other branches of the Republic-Congress
and the judiciary.
Clandestine warfare against North Vietnam, for example,
is not seen, either in the written words of the senior decision-makers
in the Executive Branch or by the anonymous authors
of the study, as violating the Geneva accords of 1954, which
ended the French Indochina War, or as conflicting with the
public policy pronouncements of the various Administrations.
Clandestine warfare, because it is covert, does not exist as far
as treaties and public posture are concerned. Further, secret
commitments to other nations are not sensed as infringing on
the treaty-making powers of the Senate, because they are not
publicly acknowledged.
The guarded world of the government insider and the public
world are like two intersecting circles. Only a small portion of
the government circle is perceived from the public domain,
however. Vigorous internal policy debates are only dimly heard
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and high-level intelligence analyses that contradict policy are
not read outside. But, as the Pentagon papers demonstrate,
knowledge of these policy debates and the dissents from the
intelligence agencies might have given Congress and the public
a different attitude toward the publicly announced decisions of
the successive Administrations.
The segments of the public world-Congress, the news media,
the citizenry, even international opinion as a whole-are regarded
from within the world of the government insider as elements
to be influenced. The policy memorandums repeatedly
discuss ways to move these outside "audiences" in the desired
direction, through such techniques as the controlled release of
information and appeals to patriotic stereotypes. The Pentagon
papers are replete with examples of the power the Executive
Branch has acquired to make its influence felt in the public
domain.
The papers also make clear the deep-felt need of the government
insider for secrecy in order to keep the machinery of
state functioning smoothly and to maintain a maximum ability
to affect the public world. And even within the inner world,
only a small number of men at the top know what is really happening.
During the five-day bombing pause in May, 1965, for
instance, Secretary McNamara, in order to guard against leaks,
sent a top-secret but misleading order through the entire military
command structure stating that the purpose was to permit
reconnaissance aircraft to conduct "a thorough study of [North
Vietnamese] lines of communication."
The real purpose of the pause, the history says, was to provide
an opportunity to secretly deliver what amounted to "a
'cease and desist' order" to Hanoi to call off the insurgency in
the South. When this "demand for their surrender" was rejected,
the history continues, the seemingly peaceful gesture
of the pause would provide political credit for an escalation of
the air war against North Vietnam afterwards. As President
Johnson explained in a personal cable directly to General Maxwell
D. Taylor, then the American Ambassador in Saigon, he
wanted a pause "which I could use to good effect with world
opinion."
"You should understand that my purpose in this plan is to
begin to clear a path either toward restoration of peace or
toward increased military action, depending upon the reaction
of the Communists," the President said. "We have amply demonstrated
our determination and our commitment in the last
two months, and I now wish to gain some flexibility."
xv
Such sharp and fresh detail in the Pentagon papers on the
hitherto gray workings of the Executive Branch poses broad
questions, for all spectrums of American political opinion,
about the process of governing.
The principal actors in this history, the leading decision-makers,
emerge as confident men-confident of place, of education
and of accomplishment. They are problem-solvers, who
seem rarely to doubt their ability to prevail. In a memorandum
to President Johnson on Feb. 7, 1965, recommending a full-scale
bombing campaign against North Vietnam, McGeorge
Bundy, the former Harvard dean who was now the special
presidential assistant for national security affairs, remarked in
self-assured tones that "measured against the costs of defeat in
Vietnam, this program seems cheap. And even if it fails to
turn the tide-as it may-the value of the effort seems to us to
exceed its cost." In the same memorandum, Mr. Bundy assured
the President that General Taylor and the other senior members
of the United States Mission in Saigon were "outstanding men,
and United States policy within Vietnam is mainly right and
well directed."
"None of the special solutions or criticisms put forward with
zeal by individual reformers in Government or in the press is
of major importance, and many of them are flatly wrong," Mr.
Bundy told the President. "No man is perfect, and not every
tactical step of recent months has been perfectly chosen, but
when you described the Americans in Vietnam as your first
team, you were right."
Of the generals, like William C. Westmoreland, the military
commander in Vietnam, and Earle G. Wheeler, the Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the history remarks that they were
"men accustomed to winning."
The written language of these men, and that of a number of
the Pentagon authors, is the dry, sparse language of problem-solving.
There are the options, "Option A, Option B and Option
C," and the "scenarios" for war planning, and the phrases like
"wider action" and "overt military pressures" to describe open
warfare. The conflict in Indochina is approached as a practical
matter that will yield to the unfettered application of well-trained
minds, and of the bountiful resources in men, weapons
and money that a great power can command.
The restraints-the limits of action perceived-are what the
body politic at home will tolerate and the fear of clashing with
another major power-the Soviet Union or China. There is an
absence of emotional anguish or moral questioning of action
xvi
in the memorandums and cablegrams and records of the high-level
policy discussions. Only once in the history do two of
the leading participants, Secretary McNamara and the late
John T. McNaughton, the head of the Pentagon's politico-military
operations as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for
International Security Affairs, express emotional and moral
qualms. The occasion, recounted in Chapter 9, was a personal
letter from Mr. McNaughton to Mr. McNamara, his friend
as well as superior, in May, 1967, and a subsequent memorandum
both men drafted for President Johnson later that
month, unsuccessfully recommending a cutback in the bombing
of the North to the 20th Parallel as a gesture toward peace.
The letter and the related memorandum stand out as lonely
cries against the magnitude of the human cost of the war.
Because the historians were forbidden to interview the
decision-makers, a number of whom had left government by
the time the history was being written, the narrative lacks the
motives and the considerations that were never committed to
paper. The historians could not fill in the breaks in the documentary
trail or always be certain of the precise context of a
document.
This limitation, however, conversely gives the Pentagon
papers a validity of their own. For it is a commonplace among
journalists and historians that the memories of men, particularly
men who have participated in an ill-fated venture, change
with time.
For example, in an "eyes only" cable to President Kennedy
after a crucial fact-finding mission to South Vietnam in the
fall of 1961, General Taylor recommended sending an 8,000-
man American combat task force under the cover of a flood
relief mission. The majority of the troops should consist of
"logistical-type units," General Taylor said, but "after acquiring
experience in operating in SVN [South Vietnam], this
initial force will require reorganization and adjustment to the
local scene." Among the missions of the task force would be
to act as "an emergency reserve" for the Saigon government
army and as "an advance party of such additional [American]
forces as may be introduced if ... contingency plans are
invoked."
"As a general reserve," General Taylor continued, the task
force "might be thrown into action (with U.S. agreement)
against large, formed guerrilla bands which have abandoned
the forests for attacks on major targets."
"I am presently inclined to favor a dual mission, initially
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help to the flood area and subsequently use in any other area
of SVN where its [the task force's] resources can be used
effectively to give tangible support in the struggle against the
VC [Vietcong]. However, the possibility of emphasizing the
humanitarian mission will wane if we wait long in moving in
our forces or in linking our stated purpose with the emergency
conditions created by the flood." Without the combat
task force, General Taylor warned, "I do not believe that our
program to save SVN will succeed ... "
Nearly 10 years later, in a television program recorded in
the early spring of 1971 and broadcast on Sunday, June 27,
1971, General Taylor was asked about this recommendation,
the gist of which was now publicly known.
"I did not recommend combat forces," he said. "I stressed
we would bring in engineer forces, logistics forces, that could
work on logistics and help in the very serious flood problem
in 1961. So this was not a combat force."
"But you also described it as a military task force which
might become the base for a further military expansion into
combat forces," the television interviewer persisted.
"That is right, that's correct," the general said. "But I did
not recommend anything other than three battalions of infantry.
Pardon me, three battalions of engineers."
The Pentagon papers are beyond the reach of memory.
The documents are the written words of the men who set the
armies in motion and launched the warplanes. These written
words undoubtedly contain factual errors and omissions by
the decision-makers themselves, and the documents will have
to be explained and elaborated upon for a complete historical
account. But the written words are immutable, engraved now
in the history of the nation for all to examine. This is the
strength of the Pentagon papers.
The Times perceived several choices in deciding how -to report
the Pentagon history.
One choice was to disregard the narrative-analyses of the
Pentagon historians, for whatever individual or institutional
biases these might contain, and to report solely on the documents.
This approach, however, would have forced The Times
reporter to interpret the documents and made him the historian,
and so it was rejected.
A second choice was to go beyond the narrative-analyses
and the documents by interviewing the leading decision-makers
and by seeking alternative interpretations of major events from
published histories of the war. This approach would also have
xviii
meant that The Times was, in effect, writing its own history of
the war, and so it, too, was rejected.
A third approach, and the one adopted, was to keep the
articles within the general limits set by the narrative-analyses
and the documents as a whole. Material was brought in from
the public record only where it seemed necessary to put the
papers into context for the general reader. When the need to
interpret events arose, The Times sought to confine itself to
the interpretations in the Pentagon history. Where the Pentagon
historians noted gaps in the documentary record, The
Times so indicated.
The purpose was to report as accurately as possible on the
corporate body of history that the narrative-analyses and the
documents form, but the very selection and arrangement of
facts, whether in a history or in a newspaper article, inevitably
mirrors a point of view or state of mind. The articles
that follow thus undoubtedly reflect some of the conceptions
of The Times reporters who wrote them. But the hope has
been to provide a fair reflection of the Pentagon papers and
the desire has been to move them into the public domain as
quickly as possible, so that the average citizen and the professional
historian can judge the papers on their own merits.
NEIL SHEEHAN
July 16,1971
New York City
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