The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [205]
Advisers who worried about the inevitable escalation of combat were proposing alternatives. The Embassy in Saigon under Maxwell Taylor, who despite responsibility for the first combat initiative was not an advocate of expanded belligerency, proposed early in 1965 a plan for “terminating our involvement.” It advocated a return to Geneva, using as bargaining chips the progressive reduction of American forces plus “amnesty and civil rights” for the Viet-Cong and an American-sponsored program for the economic development of all Indochina. The plan was drafted by Taylor’s deputy, U. Alexis Johnson, a career foreign service officer, and a hint of it entered the Johns Hopkins speech and ended there. George Ball followed with repeated memoranda urging disengagement of our interests from those of Saigon before some major disaster cut off choices. Of communications to a President, Galbraith has written that “the overwhelming odds are that he will never read them.”
Two men deeply respected by the President, Senator Richard. Russell of Georgia and Clark Clifford, former White House counsel to Truman, tried to divert him from the course he was taking. Russell, as chairman until 1969 of both the all-powerful Approrpiations Committee and the Armed Services Committee and a colleague throughout Johnson’s senatorial years, was expected by many to become the first Southern President, if chance had not inserted Johnson ahead of him. Though publicly a hawk, in 1964 he had privately exhorted Johnson to keep out of war in Asia and now proposed, in a rare example of creative thinking, that a public opinion poll be taken in Vietnamese cities on whether American help was wanted and that if the results were negative, the United States should withdraw. The ascertaining of Vietnamese opinion on American appropriation of “their” war was an original idea that had not previously occurred to anyone and was, of course, despite its eminent source, not adopted.
A clue to the answer might have been seen in the eyes of Vietnamese villagers. A journalist who had covered the war in Europe recalled the smiles and hugs and joyous offers of wine when GIs came through liberated areas of Italy. In Vietnam, the rural people, when American units passed them on the streets or in the villages, kept their eyes down or looked the other way and offered no greetings. “They just wanted us to go home.” Here was a sign of the vanity of “nation-building.” What nation has ever been built from outside?
Clifford, an important Washington lawyer and intimate of the President, warned in a private letter that on the basis of CIA assessments, further build-up of ground forces could become an “open-end commitment … without realistic hope of ultimate victory.” Rather, he advised, the President should probe every avenue leading to possible settlement. “It won’t be what we want but we can learn to live with it.” The gist of his and the other counsels was confirmed by a foreign observer, the distinguished Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, who wrote in the New York Times in July 1965 that “The conviction that this policy will end in failure is commonly held in all countries outside the United States.”
None of the American advisers’ doubts was stated publicly, and none except Ball’s proposed outright withdrawal. Rather they advised holding on without escalating while seeking a negotiated settlement. Negotiation, however, faced a rigid impasse. Quite apart from preconditions, Hanoi would accept no settlement short of coalition or some other form of compromise leading to its absorption of the South; for the United States any such compromise would represent acknowledgment of American failure,