Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [130]
The failure of creative policy was the failure to consider that confidence in America meanwhile was not being furthered by the spectacle of our military impotence in a guerrilla war in Asia. A great role in foreign affairs could have been played by an adviser who could have brought us to a withdrawal on the basis that we had done all we could or ought to do for Saigon and that its ultimate survival depended on itself, or otherwise would be valueless, as indeed it proved. Kissinger lacked the imagination and, doubtless, the influence for that solution. In the end, Christmas bombing and all, after four years’ talk at a cost of nineteen thousand more American lives and untold more lives and destruction in Vietnam, the terms obtained were no better than might have been obtained at the start. The four years of additional death and devastation were a waste.
Kissinger acknowledges none of this. Even less does he understand the domestic dissent of the time, although it is a constant theme in the book and clearly the factor that most deeply disturbed him. He treats it as a perverse opposition that, by encouraging Hanoi to stall, frustrated his negotiations. He quotes the Wall Street Journal statement that “Americans want an acceptable exit from Indochina, not a deeper entrapment” and the New York Times statement that bitter experience had “exhausted the credulity of the American people and Congress” and the Milwaukee Journal statement that “if [the South Vietnamese] can’t stand on their own feet now it is too late. The U.S. can no longer stand the internal frustrations and disruptions that the bloody, tragic and immoral war is costing,” but he does not absorb the message. His comment is that the national debate was “engulfed in mass passion,” not that it was telling him something he should have listened to. Apropos of the congressional vote to terminate action in Cambodia that finally blocked the Executive in 1973, he writes that Cambodia was the victim of “the breakdown of our democratic political process,” when in fact what was taking place was the functioning, not the breakdown, of that process. It is unsafe to have high office filled by someone who does not know the difference.
Kissinger complains that “we faced a constant credibility gap at home” and that he could have succeeded “if the public had trusted our goals,” but he never traces any connection between the public’s lack of trust and the acts and policies of the administration he represented. He has no inkling of the concomitant damage: that the cost of playing tough may come too high; that a foreign policy that alienates one’s countrymen and causes dislike and distrust of government is not worth what it might gain against the adversary; that a nation’s strength lies ultimately in its self-esteem and confidence in what is right; and that whatever damages these damages the nation.
New York Times Book Review, November 11, 1979.
Mankind’s Better Moments
For a change from prevailing pessimism, I should like to recall some JL of the positive and even admirable capacities of the human race. We hear very little of them lately. Ours is not a time of self-esteem or self-confidence—as was, for instance, the nineteenth century, when self-esteem may be seen oozing from its portraits. Victorians, especially the men, pictured themselves as erect, noble, and splendidly handsome. Our self-image looks more like Woody Allen or a character from Samuel Beckett. Amid a mass of worldwide troubles and a poor record for the twentieth century, we see our species—with cause—as functioning very