by Greg Grandin
Later, after Nixon’s second inauguration, congressional aides asked William Sullivan, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, under what constitutional provision could the White House justify its bombing of Cambodia, which by that point had been going on for four years. Sullivan struggled for a response, finally answering: “For now, I’d just say the justification [was] the reelection of President Nixon.” “By that theory,” the Washington Post remarked, “he could level Boston.”33
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The Paris Peace Accords—signed in January 1973—could not hold. Saigon would not allow honest elections and Hanoi, which had been fighting for the independence of all Vietnam since the 1940s, would not accept a divided country. The question is, were Nixon and Kissinger hoping for a “decent interval” to pass before Saigon fell, by which time Vietnam might be forgotten as what Kissinger called a “backwater”? Or were they planning to use an inevitable violation of the agreement by Hanoi to legitimate a resumption of the bombing?
Larry Berman argues the latter: Nixon, he writes, “intended for South Vietnam to receive the backing of American airpower through 1976,” when his legacy would be secured and his successor elected. “The record shows,” Berman writes, “that the United States expected that the signed treaty would be immediately violated and that this would trigger a brutal military response. Permanent war (air war, not ground operations) at an acceptable cost was what Nixon and Kissinger anticipated from the so-called peace agreement.”34
A landslide election and a broken peace agreement would have, in other words, allowed Kissinger to move from the bombing of Cambodia (initially secret because the White House feared the domestic reaction) to a now vindicated and fully justified aerial assault on North Vietnam. Götterdämmerung (as Seymour Hersh described the decisive destruction that Nixon and Kissinger had wanted to visit on North Vietnam since they first entered the White House) would finally have its warrant.* And when North Vietnam began to move against the South, Kissinger did want to retaliate. Told by Nixon’s new secretary of defense, Elliot Richardson, that more bombing would have little strategic effect, Kissinger said: “That is not the point. It is a psychological reprisal point we must make.”
But domestic politics continued to confound. “Watergate blew up, and we were castrated,” Kissinger later said. “We were not permitted to enforce the agreement.… I think it’s reasonable to assume he [Nixon] would have bombed the hell out of them.”
5
Anti-Kissinger
One might well ask: Why bother to play the game at all?
—Daniel Ellsberg, 1956
The ferocity with which Nixon and Kissinger bombed Cambodia, along with the desire to inflict extreme pain on North Vietnam, had a number of motivations, both explicit (to wring concessions out of Hanoi; to disrupt the NLF’s supply and command-and-control lines) and implicit (to best bureaucratic rivals; to look tough and prove loyalty; to appease the Right). “Savage was a word that was used again and again” in discussing what needed to be done in Southeast Asia, recalled one of Kissinger’s aides, “a savage unremitting blow on North Vietnam to bring them around.”1 But there’s another way to think about the savagery, along with the wild, off-the-books way their air assault was carried out.
Everything about the secret operation seemed to be a reaction to the man Henry Kissinger identified as the ultimate technocrat: Kennedy’s and Johnson’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara.* In office from 1961 to 1968, McNamara is famous for imposing on the Pentagon the same integrated system of statistical analysis he had, in the previous decade, used to rescue the Ford Motor Company. “McNamara’s revolution” continued reforms that had been underway since World War II, but in a much more intensified and accelerated fashion.2 McNamara’s “whiz kids” sought to subordinate every aspect of defense policy—its lumbering bureaucracy, its cornucopia budget for equipment appropriation, its doctrine, tactics, chains of command, its supply logistics and battlefield maneuvers—to the abstract logic of economic modeling. When Ray Sitton, the Air Force colonel who helped Kissinger come up with the method to cover up the Cambodia bombings, informed the “systems analysts on the third floor [of the Pentagon]” that he didn’t “know how to quantify the effectiveness” of bombing by B-52s, they told him he was “dumb.”3 “You can quantify anything,” they said. Sitton, known as an expert on B-52s, was charged with graphing out the “cost-effectiveness” of monthly B-52 bombing runs. The idea was to budget only those sorties on the rising side of the curve. Once “effectiveness” began to decline, funds would be cut off. “I never was successful in explaining to them that if you are a military command in the field, the most important mission they fly may be the one just before they reach zero on the other side of the curve,” Sitton said. Intangibles that couldn’t be graphed or coded into an economic model—will, ideology, culture, tradition, history—were disregarded (McNamara even tried, without success, to impose a single, standard uniform on all the different branches of the armed services).
As might be expected, such efforts to achieve “cost effectiveness” greatly expanded paperwork. Every operational detail was recorded so that, back in DC, teams of economists and accountants could figure out new opportunities for further rationalization. Finance and budget came under special scrutiny; among McNamara’s early major reforms was to “develop some means of presenting” the Pentagon’s “costs of operation in mission terms.” What this meant for the Strategic Air Command is that every gallon of fuel was accounted for, every flight hour recorded, every spare part used, along with every bomb dropped.
Kissinger’s plans to bomb Cambodia—plans worked out with Sitton—weren’t quite the antithesis of McNamarian bureaucracy. It was more a shadow version, or perversion, of that bureaucracy. According to Sitton, Kissinger approved a highly elaborate deception to circumvent “the Strategic Air Command’s normal command and control system—highly classified in itself—which monitors for budgetary requirements such items as fuel usage and bomb tonnage deployed.” A “duel reporting system” was established; briefings of pilots focused exclusively on objectives inside South Vietnam, but once in the air, radar sites would redirect a certain number of planes to their real destination in Cambodia. The mission would be “routinely reported in the Pentagon’s secret command and control system as having been in South Vietnam.” Accurate documentation in terms of fuel spent, spare parts used, bombs dropped were put down in the “post-strike” forms. “Clerks and administrators” needed their paperwork, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Earle Wheeler, told the Senate, after the deception was finally revealed, in order to justify the expenditure. But all documentation—maps, computer printouts, messages, and so on—that might reveal the true targets was burned.
“Every piece of paper, including the scratch paper, the paper that one of our computers might have done some figuring on, every piece of scrap paper was gathered up,” Major Hal Knight, who carried out the falsification on the ground in South Vietnam, testified to Congress in 1973: “I would wait until daylight, and as soon as that time came, I would go out and burn that.” “I destroyed the papers that had the target coordinates on them. I destroyed the paper that came off the plotting boards that showed the track of the aircraft.… I destroyed the computer tape that took the target coordinates, UTM coordinates and translated them into information that the bombing computers could use. Then I also destroyed any scrap paper that went with that, and the brushgraph recording.” “A whole special furnace” was set up to dispose of the records of the bombing targets, General Creighton W. Abrams told Congress; “we burned probably 12 hours a day.”4
“Fire,” wrote Spengler, “is for the warrior a weapon, for the craftsmen part of his equipment, for the priest a sign from God, and for the scientist a problem.”5 For Kissinger and the other men who bombed Cambodia for four years, it was a way of subverting the soulless enervation of “systems analysis,” of taking war out of the hands of bureaucrats and giving
it back to the warriors.*
I keep coming back to Spengler’s influence on Kissinger’s critique of the foreign policy bureaucracy not because it reveals something unique to Kissinger, though it does do that. Kissinger, I think, was much more aware of the philosophical foundation of his positions than most other postwar defense intellectuals. Yet, what is more important, at least in terms of understanding the evolution of the national security state, is how his critique reflects a deeper current in American history. The idea that spirit and intuition need to be restored to a society that had become “overcivilized” and “overrationalized,” too dependent on logic, instruments, information, and mathematics, has a pedigree reaching back at least to the late 1800s.6 “Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes, in a 1911 Harvard address (quoted by Kissinger in his undergraduate thesis).
Throughout the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, every generation seemed to throw up a new cohort of “declinists,” militarists who warn about the establishment’s supposed overreliance on data and expertise, complain about the caution generated by too much bureaucracy, protest the enervation that results from too much information. The solution to such lassitude is, inevitably, more war, or at least more of a willingness to wage war, which often leads to war. Kissinger, in the 1950s and 1960s was part of one such cohort, contributing to the era’s right-wing lurch in defense thinking, the idea that we needed to fight little wars in gray areas with resolve. In the mid-1970s, ironically, he himself was a primary target of just such a critique, at the hands of Ronald Reagan and the first generation of neoconservatives.
But before we get to that irony, there’s another worth considering: the role that one of Robert McNamara’s left-behinds, the economist Daniel Ellsberg—a man who liked to do his sums, whose understanding of the way the world worked was so diametrically opposed to Henry Kissinger’s metaphysics that he might be thought of as an anti-Kissinger—had in bringing down the Nixon White House.
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Henry Kissinger and Daniel Ellsberg did their undergraduate and graduate studies at Harvard around the same time, both young veterans on scholarship and both brilliant and precocious. Ellsberg handed in his own summa undergraduate thesis two years after Kissinger. And it was Ellsberg, stationed in the US embassy in Saigon, who briefed Kissinger during his first visit to South Vietnam.
Like Kissinger, Ellsberg was interested in the question of contingency and choice in human affairs. But Ellsberg approached the subject as an economist, going on in his graduate studies and then at the RAND Corporation to do groundbreaking work in game theory and abstract modeling. Focused on atomized individuals engaged in a series of rational cost-benefit transactions aimed to maximize their advantage, these methods were far removed from Kissinger’s metaphysical approach to history, ideas, and culture.
Kissinger, in fact, had Ellsberg’s kind of methodology in mind when he criticized, in his undergraduate thesis, the smallness of American social science and the conceits of “positivism,” the idea that truth or wisdom could be derived from logical postulates or mathematical formulas. Ellsberg spoke the language of axioms, theorems, and proofs and believed that sentences like this could help defense strategists plan for nuclear war: “For any given probability distribution, the probability of outcome a with action III is p (A ∪ C) = PA + PC. The probability of outcome a with action IV is p (B ∪ C) = PB + PC.… This means there must be a probability distribution, PA PB PC (0 ≤pi ≤p ∑ pi = 1), such that PA > PB and PA + PC < PB + PC. But there is none.”7
In contrast, Kissinger the metaphysician, wrote things like: “It does not suffice to show logically deduced theorems, as an absolute test of validity. There must also exist a relation to the pervasiveness of an inward experience which transcends phenomenal reality. For though man is a thinking being, it does not follow that his being exhausts itself in thinking.… The microcosm contains tension and polarity, the loneliness of the individual in a world of strange significances, in which the total inner meaning of others remains an eternal riddle. Rhythm and tension, longing and fear, characterize the relationship of the microcosm to the macrocosm.”8
The clash between these two ways of thinking about human experience would play themselves out in the first few months of Kissinger’s tenure as Nixon’s national security adviser.*
Shortly before Nixon’s inauguration, Ellsberg, in a meeting with Kissinger at the president-elect’s headquarters at the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan, offered some advice. He related a story of how Robert McNamara, soon after being named secretary of defense, shook up the bureaucracy by immediately flooding Pentagon officers and staff with written questions. The answers he received weren’t important. What mattered was that McNamara, by demanding detailed responses on an impossibly short deadline, was establishing his dominance. And the questions were designed in such a way as to show that the defense secretary was already familiar with controversies and rivalries, that he had his own informants embedded in the department.
Ellsberg suggested Kissinger do something similar: draft questions on controversial issues and send them out to the whole bureaucracy, to every agency and office. The agency principally responsible for any given subject, Ellsberg predicted, would have one opinion on the matter, and secondary agencies would have another, and the difference between the two opinions would provide a useful map of the ambiguities, doubts, and uncertainties that existed in the bureaucracy. But, Ellsberg said, there was another, more Machiavellian reason to conduct the survey. The “very revelation of controversies and the extremely unconvincing positions of some of the primary agencies,” he said, “would be embarrassing to the bureaucracy as a whole. It would put the bureaucrats off-balance and on the defensive relative to the source of the questions—that is, Kissinger.”9
“Kissinger,” Ellsberg remembered, “liked the sound of that.” So the new director of national security asked Ellsberg, in early 1969, to compile the questions. According to Marvin and Bernard Kalb, the very first thing Kissinger did when he “arrived at his office in the White House basement on January 20, 1969, was to fire [Ellsberg’s] list of fifty questions at a bureaucracy struggling to make the transition from Johnson to Nixon.” Kissinger set “impossible deadlines,” demanding “detailed answers from the State and Defense departments, the CIA, Commerce and Treasury, and the Bureau of the Budget to such questions as: What is the state of American relations with China? With the Soviet Union? With India, both Vietnams, and Indonesia?” The list went “on and on.” The questions, as Ellsberg predicted, prompted a backlash. “Who the hell does he think he is anyhow?” And soon a counterproposal for reorganizing the NSC around the State Department began to float around, which allowed Kissinger to identify potential rivals. The proposal was quashed and its authors were sidelined.
That first stage of the exercise worked well for Kissinger. The next, not so much. Kissinger had asked Ellsberg to collate, analyze, and average the responses to the questions related to the Vietnam War, over five hundred pages in total. The gloom revealed by the survey was astounding. Even those hawks “optimistic” about the pacification of Vietnam thought that it would take, on average, 8.3 years to achieve success. All respondents agreed that the “enemy’s manpower pool and infiltration capabilities can outlast allied attrition efforts indefinitely” and that nothing short of perpetual troops and bombing could save South Vietnam.
When the findings were presented to Kissinger, he must have immediately recognized the trap he had fallen into. For all his warnings about how the “accumulation of facts” by technocrats like Ellsberg has the effect of sapping political will, Kissinger had foolishly given him free rein to, in effect, data mine the bureaucracy, providing him with hard evidence that the majority of the foreign service thought the war either was unwinnable or could be won only with actions that were politically impossible: permanent occupation or total obliteration.
The negativity of Ellsberg’s survey added to the state of siege that quickly fell
over the Nixon White House, compelling the use, over and over again, of the word savage to describe the violence he hoped to visit on North Vietnam. Maybe, in the face of ongoing confirmation that he wouldn’t be able to bend Hanoi to his will, Kissinger thought by repeating the word like an incantation he could keep Ellsberg’s gods of evidence and fact at bay.
Ellsberg proposed a follow-up survey. “We’ve had enough questions for now,” Kissinger said.*
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Kissinger was the statesman, Ellsberg the expert. And according to Kissinger’s worldview, Ellsberg shouldn’t have existed, or at least he shouldn’t have done what he did. Midlevel experts and analysts were supposed to be risk-avoiding functionaries, little better than insurance actuaries. Ellsberg was what Kissinger in his undergraduate thesis called a “fact-man.” His faith in data, his belief that he could capture the vagaries of human behavior in mathematical codes and then use those codes to make decisions, should have led him to a state of, if not paralysis, then predictability. As Kissinger would later write, “most great statesmen” are “locked in permanent struggle with the experts in their foreign offices, for the scope of the statesman’s conception challenges the inclination of the expert toward minimum risk.”10
But it was Ellsberg who was speaking out against the war and then leaking top-secret documents, taking a tremendous risk, including the possibility of imprisonment. And with this one audacious act, he changed the course of history.
The difference between Ellsberg and Kissinger is illustrated by the Pentagon Papers themselves. The “major lesson” offered by the massive study, Ellsberg thought, “was that each person repeated the same patterns in decision making and pretty much the same policy as his predecessor without even knowing it,” thinking that “history had started with his administration, and had nothing to learn from earlier ones.” Ellsberg, the economist, believed that breaking down history into discrete pieces and studying the decision making process, including the consequences of those decisions, provided a chance to break the destructive pattern.