Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [55]
In short, the outcome of Lake’s project was predetermined by the roster of participants. As is so often the case in Washington—from Maxwell Taylor’s inquiry into the Bay of Pigs down to the various investigations conducted in the wake of the Abu Ghraib torture and abuse scandal—what purported to be a searching examination was in reality a carefully staged exercise intended to foreclose unwanted conclusions.
None of Lake’s contributors possessed the capacity to assess the war from a Vietnamese perspective, nor did any even think it worth bothering to try. None had served in Vietnam as combatants. The one soldier recruited for the project was, predictably enough, Maxwell Taylor. Although the war had fostered fundamental cleavages in American society, none of the contributors offered an antiestablishment or countercultural take on the war. There were no voices that might even remotely qualify as radical—no socialists, Marxists, pacifists, one-worlders, neo-agrarians, or libertarians. There was no room for Senator Fulbright or General Shoup. The 1960s had given rise to a “New Left,” which was then all the rage in the hipper quarters of academe. No New Left figure made the cut. Nor did any exponent of the anti-interventionist tradition, commonly if inaccurately referred to as isolationism. Lake included a single token contrarian: Richard J. Barnet, of the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies, who made the case for putting social justice and human rights at the forefront of U.S. policy objectives.
During the course of the Vietnam War, none of Lake’s contributors had gone to jail, gone underground, or gone into exile. They had, instead, gone to the White House, the Pentagon, and the Capitol. A single participant had actively engaged in antiwar protest at something approximating the grassroots level. Yet Sam Brown, a founder of the Vietnam Moratorium Committee in 1969, titled his essay “The Defeat of the Antiwar Movement.” Brown launched his assessment by bluntly declaring that opposition to the war had “had little lasting influence on the nature of either American society or its approach to the world,” thereby obviating any need for further discussion. By implication, popular grassroots opposition to U.S. policy had been an epiphenomenon, lacking in real significance.24
For the participants in Lake’s study, significance lay in identifying what precisely had gone wrong—mistakes made that, once identified, could put Vietnam definitively to rest. In his introduction, Lake approvingly quoted Henry Kissinger, no longer an obscure professor, who insisted that unearthing such lessons was essential “if we are not going to have another disaster that may have a quite different look but will have the same essential flaws.”25
When it came to specifying those flaws, the participants in Lake’s study did not reach a uniform set of conclusions. They did, however, adhere to a common analytical framework, one that treated Vietnam as an anomaly. The big problem was the loss of consensus, control, and legitimacy that failure in Vietnam had prompted. For Professor Shils of the University of Chicago, all the controversy over the war had stirred up “ideas of participatory democracy” along with populism, “bohemianism, animosity against businessmen and politicians, and muckraking.”26 Plain folk had gotten uppity, which undermined the authority of institutions long in the habit of exercising authority.
Irving Kristol, remembered today as a founding father of neoconservatism, assessed the foreign policy consensus as “under powerful attack” by both “the educated, idealistic ‘cosmopolitans’ ” who had created it back in the 1940s and by “the bulk of ‘provincial’ America,” which had never especially cared for that consensus in the first place.27 According to Kristol, the cosmopolitans needed to recover their nerve; the provincials needed to relearn their place.
This erosion of consensus, control, and legitimacy threatened to open the door to irresponsible behavior, usually described as some variant of “isolationism.