American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The harrowing collapse of South Vietnam in the spring of 1975 transcended all these events. Hanoi’s drive to victory unrolled slowly but implacably against a foe that was gradually disintegrating under an appalling burden of political corruption, economic chaos, and military incompetence and demoralization. For two years the North Vietnamese built up their troop strength and logistical support in the south, including even an oil pipeline from the north. Then they struck with overwhelming speed and power. American radio and television brought the denouement home: the triumphant march of Hanoi’s forces toward Saigon—the spreading panic in the capital—scores of American helicopters like great vultures rising and descending over the city—thousands of Vietnamese surging to the takeoff points, crying out to be saved—a marine clubbing them as they sought frantically to board the helicopters—the men and women and children left behind, now frantically seeking escape routes to the ocean and soon to risk their lives in small boats on the high seas.

  One American would long be haunted by his own special memory—of an aged farmer who somehow made his way onto an evacuation plane still pulling his bullock on a rope. Soon after takeoff the terrified animal, rampaging on the aircraft, forced his way through a half-open exit, dragging his master with him. Moments later the American saw the farmer still holding the rope tied to his bullock as they both floated in space, then plunged to the red earth below.

  Foreign Policy: The Faltering Experiments

  While the Vietnam War was heading toward its Götterdämmerung, Americans were readying to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of the era when their revolutionary ancestors conducted the long struggle for freedom from Britain. The fireworks, the patriotic speeches, the costumed parades, were a buoyant reminder of the Declaration that had freed the colonies to shape their own destiny as an independent nation. The lofty brigantines, frigates, and other men-of-war, stretching along the Hudson River with their ballooning sails and bright pennants, commemorated the beginning of an era when the small country with limited arms but consummate diplomacy held off the British and French and Spanish and secured a new republic.

  In the two centuries since those days Americans had in effect conducted a series of experiments in foreign and military policy. In the endless bouleversement of international affairs the young nation almost went to war against its old French ally, fought a second war against Britain that ended ingloriously, ousted or exterminated Indians, conducted a risky invasion into Mexico’s heartland, and then settled down to a long peace interrupted only by its own civil holocaust in the early 1860s. A period of internal expansion and warfare against Native Americans was punctuated by chauvinistic outbursts against Cubans and Canadians and Mexicans following some real or contrived incident. During the last third of the nineteenth century Americans established their Pacific dominion—Alaska, Hawaii, the Philippines, numerous islets—and intervened in Latin America during the 1890s to protect their commercial and political interests. It was said that the British built their empire in a fit of absentmindedness; this was almost as true of the Yankees.

  During these years Washington alternated between spasms of expansionist activity and longer periods of absorption in domestic problems; then the first years of the twentieth century inexorably drew the nation into global demands and crises. Theodore Roosevelt, sword in one hand and dove in the other, could no more resist international challenges and enticements than he could domestic. Woodrow Wilson moved from “too proud to fight” to making the world “safe for Democracy” almost in a twinkling of the eye. Three Republican Presidents in the 1920s experimented with repudiation of the League of Nations, deep reductions in arms, intervention in Central America, and tariff boosting.

  If American foreign policy making had appeared kaleidoscopic during the first third of the twentieth century, after 1932 it flashed across the public scene like images from a stepped-up movie projector. In a period of eight years FDR moved from policies of economic nationalism to semi-isolationism, to neutrality, to aid to the democracies, to all aid short of war, to military intervention in the North Atlantic. Eager at first to reduce American commitments abroad, Harry Truman was drawn into the intensifying cold war, into crises in Berlin, Greece, the Middle East, and Korea, ultimately almost into a war with China. Hoping to bring some order and stability to foreign relations, Eisenhower ran into a dangerous conflict over the Suez Canal, a desperate revolt in Hungary, crises in the Formosa Strait and Berlin, and a loss of credibility in the U-2 incident. Caught between clashing personal instincts toward détente and deterrence, and pulled politically between hawks and doves among Democrats and among the voters, Kennedy first stood by containment in Berlin and Cuba and then moved toward détente. Pledged to pursue peace in his 1964 contest with the bellicose Goldwater, LBJ sank steadily into the Vietnam quicksand even as he strove desperately for an “honorable” way out. Famous and infamous as a communist-fighter, Nixon opened relations with the communist power that a generation earlier had sent American troops reeling back toward the 38th parallel.

  That Washington’s foreign policy making was unstable, unpredictable, and volatile had long been a source of perplexity to allies and of suspicion to adversaries. British envoys would report back to London that they had enjoyed their stay in the American capital but could not find the government. Sophisticated Britons in Washington learned to maintain close contacts with Congress, the opposition party, and the media as they sought to divine the next actions of Presidents and Secretaries of State. Soviet Foreign Ministers and ambassadors were not so tolerant. Trying to make sense of the Washington kaleidoscope, they saw not merely inconstancy but duplicity and worse. If, as Andrei Gromyko complained, “a new leadership arrives and crosses out all that has been achieved before,” the reason must be, in the eyes of Pravda, the machinations of militaristic and capitalistic-forces within the “ruling circles of the United States.”

  Pravda was succumbing to paranoia. In fact, the direct source of the instability of American foreign policy lay far more in complexity and clutter than in conspiracy—in popular attitudes, party fragmentation, and governmental separation of powers. Students of public opinion had long noted that attitudes toward foreign policy among Americans lacked factual substance and intellectual depth, were not anchored to a “set of explicit value and means calculations,” and took the form of shifting moods. Instead of a two-party system arraying popular attitudes behind a governing party and an opposition, the country had had a four-party politics that reflected and perpetuated the diversity and volatility of opinion, leading to “nonpartisan” policies responsive to everybody and nobody. The constitutional provision requiring two-thirds of the Senate to approve treaties, the congressional distribution of foreign policy making among a host of Senate and House committees, the wide breaches between White House and Capitol Hill were neither confusion nor conspiracy but rather applications of the checks and balances planned with exquisite artistry by the framers of the Constitution.

  Even so, was a foreign policy of spasm and swerve inevitable? Did “underlying circumstances” doom the United States forever to short-run, ad hoc, volatile policy making in international affairs? Were tiny faltering steps, confusing and contradictory policies, vacillating half measures inevitable? A young Harvard scholar thought not. The past decade and a half, he wrote as Eisenhower’s presidency came to an end, had been a period of stagnation and decline. “Fifteen years more of a deterioration of our position in the world such as we have experienced since World War II would find us reduced to Fortress America in a world in which we had become largely irrelevant.” Americans must now choose between drift and decision.

  The solution, Henry Kissinger had contended, lay not in altering institutions but in summoning to leadership men who could replace routine with purpose, substitute individual creativity for group mediocrity, elevate purpose and principle over “pragmatism” and opportunism, risk new departures at the expense of rote and routine. Above all, the German-born political scientist inveighe
d against sensible, expedient policies. “In a revolutionary period, it is precisely the ‘practical’ man who is most apt to become a prisoner of events. For what seems most natural to him is most in need of being overcome.” The standing operating procedure would clash with the needs of creativity.

  As if by a flying carpet, this scholar had been transported to a global decision center that could make innovative leadership possible, and eventually to a success and celebrity of which he could hardly have dreamed. “Only in America,” as Americans liked to say—but it was by competence and conniving, not a feat of legerdemain, that the critic rose from political science to political power. All had begun well as Kissinger and Nixon rejected the old policies of alternating between acquiescence and confrontation, between compromise and containment, and proclaimed a new era of coherent, purposeful foreign policy making based on balancing interests with power.

  Disillusionment came slowly for both. The President found that he had appointed as security aide a brilliant conceptualizer and articulate advocate who, however, appeared to seek the Washington spotlight as though it were the aide and not the President who would have to stand responsible for foreign policy at the next election. Kissinger found that he was working under—and to a degree taking lessons from—an expert manipulator who disliked the process of face-to-face, give-and-take negotiating, who often appeared psychologically insecure to the point of literally kicking out in his anger and then withdrawing to privacy and solitude, who employed secrecy and deception almost as a matter of course, who rejected “teamwork” in favor of a decision-making process that again and again excluded the participation of the Secretary of State and even of White House aides.

  Both men were wily tacticians, resourceful crisis managers, brilliant opportunists. Both believed that leaders should lead—should press for decision and action despite foot-dragging bureaucrats and recalcitrant legislators, play enemies and even allies off against one another without apology, use almost any means to reach what they considered to be elevated goals. They were twentieth-century Machiavellians who maneuvered, manipulated, and mystified their adversaries and often their allies. In the end, however, whatever the various successes and failures of their foreign policy, Kissinger fell far short of the working principles he had set forth in his Harvard study.

  Perhaps the most important of these principles was to be expected of a scholarly rationalist who had immersed himself in the leisurely and well-considered diplomacy of the nineteenth-century aristocrats. This was the idea of basing foreign policy tactics on a philosophy of international politics that could serve as a guide to the flood of day-to-day decision making. But often missing in his strategy in practice was the crucial linkage between the overall goal and the everyday means—a framework consisting of explicit concepts, clear choices among priorities, interrelated guidelines—without which statecraft puffs up into rhetoric or crumbles into bits of eclectic, unrelated twitches, jerks, and spasms. This was most evident in White House Soviet policy, which proclaimed lofty principles of cooperation and dealt also with prosaic problems such as grain, but failed to fashion the linkage between these that would make for long-run, stable, reasonably predictable dealings with Moscow, her enemies, and her allies, notably North Vietnam.

  Another bête noire of Kissinger the scholar was the tendency of American foreign policy makers to seek out a “middle way,” bipartisan agreement, popular consensus. This tendency, he warned, made for weak policy by committees, the fragmentation of consensus into a series of ad hoc decisions, the conversion of substantive issues into administrative or even technical ones, and ultimate resolution of a problem by morselization and “coordination” rather than through clear decision and action. But such was the fate of the Kissinger operation.

  Such, in particular, was the fate of the policy toward Vietnam. Essentially, Nixon and Kissinger followed a middle way between an all-out military confrontation with Hanoi and a full-scale and early withdrawal from South Vietnam. Within the broad, bipartisan middle way there were violent fluctuations of policy as Nixon stepped up heavy bombing at the same time he was methodically pulling out ground forces.

  Were there alternative strategies in Vietnam? At least three. One was to plan and undertake, with the full knowledge of the Saigon regime, a carefully planned, orderly withdrawal of all American power in South Vietnam, with full rearguard protection from GIs and aircraft, in a manner that would enable escapees to find safety in other lands and at least avoid the terrible later ordeals of the “boat people.” Or Washington might have stepped up the bombing of North Vietnam so massively as to compel Hanoi to pull its troops north of the DMZ—an alternative that, however irrational, fitted Nixon’s willingness to pose as a “madman” who could scare his foes into compromise. There was also the “Korea” or “heartland” alternative—establishing and maintaining a shrunken South Vietnam in the Saigon and delta regions, backed up by ready American sea, air, and ground power over a long period.

  During Kissinger’s rule the NSC offices in the White House were a place less of calm consideration of alternative strategies than of continual tension, sudden crises, flaring anger, confrontations, shouting matches, group resignations. Doubtless this state of affairs was due in part to Kissinger himself, with his endless manipulations and bullying ways. But it was due also to erratic presidential direction, because, as Kissinger later reflected, “there was no true Nixon.” Several qualities fought for supremacy in the same man: he was “idealistic, thoughtful, generous,” along with “vindictive, petty, emotional,” “reflective, philosophical, stoical,” along with “impetuous, impulsive, and erratic.” Adlai Stevenson quipped during the 1960 campaign that no man since Lon Chancy had shown so many faces to the American public. Whether or not the President foiled his enemies, certainly he perplexed his associates. Anyone entering the Oval Office or Nixon’s hideaway study might find a master of calm analysis or a prisoner of deep insecurities and dark passions.

  The Nixon-Kissinger While House was an extreme version of the problems of other presidencies—the paper-thin bipartisanship, the absence of clear guidelines linking broad but explicit goals to everyday policy making, the atmosphere of recurrent tension and desperate crisis management. These problems stemmed from the fundamental and persistent failing in American foreign policy making—the lack of steadfast, coherent, “follow-through” decision and action—in short, of a strategy of international relations. A quarter century after Kissinger published his critique of ad hoc, volatile, zigzag foreign policy making, another young scholar could have made the same biting criticism of him, only with more urgency.

  This failure encompassed a number of tendencies: the revival of a presidency imperial in scope and power and heavily personal in image and operation; the refusal of Presidents, especially in crisis times, to include in the decision process America’s allies, congressional leaders, or even key cabinet officials; presidential exploitation of popular protest over an issue or incident, raising public expectations that whip back on the White House; and the traditional gulfs between Congress and the President, and between the houses of Congress, that produce the stalemates and slowdowns that in turn trigger spasms of action.

  Many of these tendencies were not new. For decades Presidents had bypassed the Senate treaty-ratification hurdle by making executive agreements on crucial matters with nations around the globe. At least since the Civil War, Presidents had been using their war powers to the hilt and extending their inherent or emergency powers to almost every conceivable domestic crisis as well. Indeed, the kind of congressional-presidential friction that tempted Presidents to go it alone had begun almost as soon as the two branches of government were established in lower Manhattan in the spring of 1789. As for secret presidential adventurism, the researches of Abraham Sofaer have supported his surmise that, in Arthur Schlesinger’s summary, “early presidents deliberately selected venturesome agents, deliberately kept their missions secret, deliberately gave them vague instructions, deliberate
ly failed either to approve or to disapprove their constitutionally questionable plans and deliberately denied Congress and the public the information to determine whether aggressive acts were authorized.” White House agents operating secretly in Iran in the 1980s were nothing new.

  What was novel and portentous was the convergence of these tendencies, immensely magnified by the media. Kennedy’s domination of press and electronic news during the missile crisis, Johnson’s obsessive monitoring of the media, Nixon’s access to television during both his foreign and his domestic struggles, demonstrated White House power to exploit television; but the media were willing accomplices. Presidents found it much easier to command the airwaves for direct appeal to the people than to consult congressional or even Administration leaders to shape a collective decision that might have future public support and staying power.

  The power of the media to present foreign policy in quick, intense, staccato images put enormous emphasis on the appearance of national power as well as its reality. Once upon a time Winston Churchill had built his reputation partly on his ability to proclaim defeat. After Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt told the American people that the Japanese attack had “caused severe damage to American naval and military forces” and that it would not only be a long war but a hard war. Later, General Stilwell, despite PR hopes to cover up defeat in Burma, refreshingly said, “I claim we got a hell of a beating.” After the missile crisis, on the other hand, Kennedy said that while Soviet missiles in Cuba would not have significantly changed the military balance of power, it would have appeared to change the political balance of power and “appearances contributed to reality.” Johnson had deep psychological fears of appearing “soft.” Nixon, commanding stupendous nuclear power, feared that the United States might appear “like a pitiful, helpless giant.” The perception of power, John Lewis Gaddis concluded, “had become as important as power itself.” The actuality of a nation’s military power had a certain continuity and measurability, while the appearance of power could change overnight, thus intensifying the uncertainty, unpredictability, and volatility of Washington’s role abroad.