The Best of I.F. Stone

by I. F. Stone

  Fulbright did not deny that both destroyers were in the area at the time of the July 31 shelling and inside the territorial limits claimed by North Vietnam. He did not deny Morse’s charge that the U.S. knew about the shelling of the islands before it took place. He merely denied that the warships were there to cover the operation in any way. Our warships, according to the official account, just happened to be hanging around. Morse’s point—which neither Fulbright nor Russell challenged—was that they had no business to be in an area where an attack was about to take place, that this was bound to appear provocative. Indeed the only rational explanation for their presence at the time was that the Navy was looking for trouble, daring the North Vietnamese to do something about it.

  Morse made another disclosure. “I think I violate no privilege or secrecy,” he declared, “if I say that subsequent to the bombing, and apparently because there was some concern about the intelligence that we were getting, our ships took out to sea.” Was this intelligence that the ships were about to be attacked within the territorial waters claimed by North Vietnam? Morse said our warships went out to sea and “finally, on Sunday, the PT boats were close enough for the first engagement to take place.” This dovetails with a curious answer given by Senator Russell at another point in the debate to Senator Scott of Pennsylvania when the latter asked whether Communist China had not published a series of warnings (as required by international law) against violations of the twelve-mile limit. Russell confirmed this but said, “I might add that our vessels had turned away from the North Vietnamese shore and were making for the middle of the gulf, where there could be no question, at the time they were attacked.”

  The italics are ours and call attention to an evident uneasiness about our legal position. The uneasiness is justified. A great many questions of international law are raised by the presence of our warships within an area claimed by another country as its territorial waters while its shores were being shelled by ships we supplied to a satellite power. There is, first of all, some doubt as to whether warships have a right of “innocent passage” through territorial waters even under peaceful circumstances. There is, secondly, the whole question of territorial limits. The three-mile limit was set some centuries ago by the range of a cannon shot. It has long been obsolete but is favored by nations with large navies. We make the three-mile limit the norm when it suits our purposes but widen it when we need to. We claim another 9 miles as “contiguous waters” in which we can enforce our laws on foreign ships. While our planes on reconnaissance operate three miles off other people’s shores, we enforce an Air Defense Identification Zone on our own coasts, requiring all planes to identify themselves when two hours out. In any case, defense actions may be taken beyond territorial limits. The law as cited in the U. S. Naval Academy’s handbook, International Law for Sea-Going Officers, is that “the right of a nation to protect itself from injury” is “not restrained to territorial limits. . . . It may watch its coast and seize ships that are approaching it with an intention to violate its laws. It is not obliged to wait until the offense is consummated before it can act.”

  More important in this case is the doctrine of “hot pursuit.” The North Vietnamese radio claims that in the first attack it chased the U.S. warships away from its shores. “The right of hot pursuit,” says Schwarzenberger’s Manual of International Law, “is the right to continue the pursuit of a ship from the territorial sea into the high sea.” The logic of this, our Naval Academy handbook explains, is that “the offender should not go free simply because of the proximity of the high seas.” It is easy to imagine how fully these questions would be aired if we spotted Russian ships hanging around in our waters while Cuban PT boats shelled Key West. Our actions hardly fit Johnson’s description of himself to the American Bar Association as a champion of world law.

  There are reasons to believe that the raids at the end of July marked a new step-up in the scale of South Vietnamese operations against the North. These have been going on for some time. In fact, a detailed account in Le Monde (August 7) says they began three years before the rebellion broke out in South Vietnam. Ever since January of this year the U.S. press has been full of reports that we were planning to move from infiltration and commando operations to overt attacks against the North. Newsweek (March 9) discussed a “Rostow Plan No. 6” for a naval blockade of Haiphong, North Vietnam’s main port, to be followed by PT boat raids on North Vietnamese coastal installations and then by strategic bombing raids. In the middle of July the North Vietnamese radio reported that the U.S. had given South Vietnam 500 “river landing ships” and four small warships from our mine sweeping fleet. A dispatch from Hong Kong in the New York Times (August 14) quoted an “informed source” as saying that the North Vietnamese had concealed the fact “that the shelling of the islands” on July 31 “had been directed at a sensitive radar installation.” The shelling of radar installations would look from the other side like a prelude to a landing attempt.

  These circumstances cast a very different light on the Maddox affair, but very few Americans are aware of them. The process of brain-washing the public starts with off-the-record briefings for newspapermen in which all sorts of far-fetched theories are suggested to explain why the tiny North Vietnamese navy would be mad enough to venture an attack on the Seventh Fleet, one of the world’s most powerful. Everything is discussed except the possibility that the attack might have been provoked. In this case the “information agencies,” i.e. the propaganda apparatus of the government, handed out two versions, one for domestic, the other for foreign consumption. The image created at home was that the U.S. had manfully hit back at an unprovoked attack—no paper tiger we. On the other hand, friendly foreign diplomats were told that the South Vietnamese had pulled a raid on the coast and we had been forced to back them up. As some of the truth began to trickle out, the information agencies fell back on the theory that maybe the North Vietnamese had “miscalculated.” That our warships may have been providing cover for an escalation in raiding activities never got through to public consciousness at all.

  The two attacks themselves are still shrouded in mystery. The Maddox claims to have fired three warning shots across the bow of her pursuers; three warning shots are used to make a merchantman heave-to for inspection. A warship would take this as the opening of fire, not as a warning signal. The North Vietnamese radio admitted the first encounter but claimed its patrol boats chased the Maddox out of territorial waters. The second alleged attack North Vietnam calls a fabrication. It is strange that though we claim three boats sunk, we picked up no flotsam and jetsam as proof from the wreckage. Nor have any pictures been provided. Whatever the true story, the second incident seems to have triggered off a long planned attack of our own. There are some reasons to doubt that it was merely that “measured response” against PT bases it was advertised to be. Bernard Fall, author of The Two Viet-Nams, who knows the area well, pointed out in the Washington Post August 9 that “none of the targets attacked” in the reprisal raids “was previously known as a regular port or base area. Hon-Gay, for example, was one of the largest open-pit coal mining operations in Asia, if not the world.” Was this one of the strategic industrial targets in Rostow’s “Plan No. 6”?

  Lyndon Johnson Lets

  the Office Boy Declare War

  As I. F. Stone evidently surmised, it is probably not a good sign when U.S. involvement in a new ground war in Asia is announced apparently off-handedly during a routine briefing by a State Department press officer. Stone was unfortunately prescient when he penned the last two sentences of this article about Vietnam: “One thing alone is certain. The further we get in, the harder it will be to get out.”

  . . .

  June 9, 1965

  THERE SEEMS TO BE A PECULIAR DIVISION of labor here in Washington. The President makes peace speeches and the Pentagon makes foreign policy but the unpleasant task of declaring war is left to the poor State Department. The news that U.S. troops in Vietnam have been authorized to enga
ge in full combat is the news that we are embarking on a new war. Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution, that half-forgotten document, put the power to declare war in the hands of Congress. Its members might insist at least that they have the right to hear declarations of war from some official higher up than the press officer of the State Department. It is hard to find any Constitutional or administrative reason to explain why Robert J. McCloskey, the press officer, should have been pushed suddenly into the pages of history by being assigned the task of announcing at his daily usually routine and almost always boring, noon press briefing that we were no longer advising or patrolling or defensively shooting back in Vietnam but going full-scale into war. As a major decision, it should have been announced at the White House. As a change in military orders, it might have been made public at the Pentagon. As a hot potato, both seem to have passed it on to the State Department. There in turn it was passed on down from the Secretary through the many Assistant Secretaries to the lowest echelon available. Maybe the higherups are hoping it will be called not Johnsons or McNamara’s but Bob McCloskey’s war.

  Nothing better attests the slim popular support for the war than the care thus exercised by Lyndon Johnson not to be photographed marching at the head of the troops straight into it. The White House acted as if it couldn’t be bothered by such trivial matters. “The White House,” The Washington Post reported June 9, “declined to comment on the State Department announcement. Informed officials sought to play down the significance of the announcement, arguing that American forces already are patrolling vigorously and that the commander should not be inhibited in making the best use of his troops.” This genius at obfuscation was evident in the very form of the announcement given McCloskey to read: the U.S. commander in Saigon had been authorized to commit U.S. troops to “combat support” of South Vietnam units if asked to do so by the South Vietnamese government. This would seem to put the power to declare America at war in the hands of whoever happened to be on top in Saigon’s Ferris wheel changes of government and military command. This is quite a departure from the tight centralization of powers characteristic of the Johnson Administration. Here in Washington minor officials can hardly announce a new post office for Chilicothe, Ohio, without clearing it with the White House. But whether or not our troops move into full combat will be decided by someone 9000 miles away whose name the papers can’t even spell properly. Delegation of powers has never been so distant. It looks as if while the rest of us may be plunged into war, Lyndon Johnson wants to keep as far away from it as possible. Maybe he can blame it on Dirksen, who was foolish enough to say plainly that he feared this new move would “transform this into a conventional war.” That’s the kind of candor that lost Republicans the last election.

  The truth is that the South Vietnamese army is out of reserves, though the expected Viet Cong monsoon offensive is only just getting underway. The urgent problem at the moment is to supply from U.S. combat forces the extra 160,000 men McNamara was so confident a few months ago he could mobilize from among Saigon’s idle but indifferent youth; the men who couldn’t be drafted there will soon have to be drafted here. The political situation is as precarious as the military. The Quat government, which has no real popular base, is tottering under attack by Catholic extremists who will be satisfied by nothing short of an Asian anti-communist Armaggedon. The shaky government and its shakier military needed the shot in the arm of a public announcement that they were being given a blank check to draw as they pleased on American manpower. But worse is in the offing. Military planners here must be prepared to deal with the possibility that the Viet Cong may soon inflict so heavy a blow as to demoralize the South Vietnamese forces and make impossible the maintenance of any governmental façade in beleaguered Saigon. Very shortly the problem may be more serious than providing mobile reserves to rescue South Vietnamese forces from unexpected attacks. The problem soon may be that if resistance is to go on, the U.S. will have to take over the government and the war altogether.

  So we will do what we swore after the Korean war we would never do again—commit American troops to an Asian land war. Militarily and politically, McCloskey’s war is folly. It will tie down a major portion of U.S. military power in a minor theatre of conflict, and create an image made to order for hostile propaganda. White men will be fighting colored men in an effort to put down a rebellion so deeply rooted that it has gone on for two decades, and extended its power steadily during the four years in which we trained, directed and supplied a satellite native army. We are worse off politically than the French were a decade ago: they at least had a puppet Emperor, Bao Dai, to cover the nakedness of imperial rule. Once again, as against the Japanese and the French, the communists can muster wide support as leaders of a resistance to alien domination. We have again made Ho Chi Minh a national leader.

  It would be hazardous to comfort ourselves by expecting no more than another Korea, a distant limited conflict, relatively minor in casualties and rich in business stimulation. Vietnam is not Korea. Korea was a civil war between North and South; there were few communist guerrillas behind South Korea’s lines. South Korea had a real government and it was headed by a national hero. Syngman Rhee, for all his failings, was a man who had devoted his life to his country’s liberation from Japanese rule. There is no such figure to head a South Vietnamese government; the guerrillas hold most of its territory and can at will shut off road and rail supply to the besieged cities. It is doubly a civil war, within the South as well as between South and North. It therefore does not lend itself to the kind of neat settlement arrived at in the Korean war. That war could be ended when Chinese “volunteers” pushed our forces back to the 38th parallel and reconstituted the status quo ante. It was also relatively easy to limit the Korean war on the understanding that our side would not bomb the privileged sanctuary in China from which the “volunteers” were supplied and their side would not bomb the privileged sanctuary in Japan from which our troops operated. It will be more difficult to keep this war contained.

  If our troops meet serious reverses in the South, it will be hard to resist the clamor for a tougher bombing policy in the North. If Hanoi and Haiphong are bombed, the North will have nothing to lose and will escalate the war by moving its army south. Those elements in our military itching for a preventive war against China will press for bombing the roads and railroads which connect it with Vietnam. Whether and how China will react, what Russia will do, are unknowns, perhaps as much in Peking and Moscow as in Washington. To go to war is to leave oneself at the mercy of the unexpected. How far it will spread and how many lives it will cost depends on the capricious roulette of war. One thing alone is certain. The further we get in, the harder it will be to get out.

  Time to Tell the Truth for a Change

  Johnson’s escalation of American involvement in the war in Vietnam was accompanied by repeated protestations of our strenuous behind-the-scenes diplomatic efforts to find a peaceful settlement. However, leaks undermined these claims, suggesting that U.S. intransigence had played a major role in expanding the conflict.

  . . .

  November 22, 1965

  We are ready now, as we always have been, to move from the battlefield to the conference table. I have stated publicly, and many times, again and again, America’s willingness to begin unconditional discussions with any government at any place at any time. Fifteen efforts have been made to start these discussions with the help of forty nations throughout the world, but there has been no answer.

  —LBJ announcing troop buildup in Vietnam July 28

  AS IN THE U-2 INCIDENT, our government has again been caught in falsehood. It owes the country an honest explanation before more of our sons die in Vietnam. The State Department’s admissions in the wake of Eric Sevareid’s revelations in Look explain a cryptic remark made by UN Secretary General U Thant last February and a mysterious leak at UN headquarters in New York last August. “I have been conducting private discussions on the question of Vietnam for a lo
ng time,” U Thant told a press conference February 24, “I am sure that the great American people, if only they knew the true facts and the background to the developments in South Vietnam, will agree with me that further bloodshed is unnecessary.” Then he added sadly, “As you know in times of war and of hostilities the first casualty is truth.” He was slapped down the same day in a curt White House statement.

  This brings us to the leak, which now falls into perspective. “In twenty months,” Mr. Johnson said in a White House speech August 3, “we have agreed to fifteen different approaches to try to bring peace, and each of them has been turned down by the other side.” This was too much for someone at UN headquarters. Someone called in two UN correspondents, Hella Pick of the Manchester Guardian and Darius S. Jhabvala of the New York Herald-Tribune, and leaked the story which the State Department has now confirmed, that only eleven months earlier, in September 1964, we turned down a chance for secret peace talks U Thant had arranged with the North Vietnamese.* It appeared in the Herald-Tribune August 8 and in the Manchester Guardian August 9. The account in the latter suggests that the source of the story was someone close to Adlai Stevenson and that he told it in such a way as to put the blame on the State Department and avoid direct criticism of Kennedy and Johnson.

  The Manchester Guardian story said Washington had “cold-shouldered at least two opportunities for contacts with North Vietnam in the last two years.” The first was after the fall of Diem in the autumn of 1963, when Hanoi “was willing to discuss the establishment of a coalition neutralist government in Saigon.” Note that the reference was to a coalition neutralist government and not to a National Liberation Front government. This throws light on another cryptic remark by U Thant at his press conference last February. “In my view,” he then said, “there was a very good possibility in 1963 of arriving at a satisfactory political solution.” The second lost opportunity mentioned in the Manchester Guardian account was the secret meeting to which Ho Chi Minh had agreed in September, 1964, but which we rejected. The Guardian went on to say: