The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  Whatever desire to discern distinctions in the Communist world existed in June 1950 (and they had been fast diminishing) ended on June 25, when the North Koreans crossed the border to the South. Two days later Truman announced the American response, and the Korean War was on. Eventually China (because of American miscalculation) entered the war, and all of this made Vietnam totally and definitively part of the great global struggle. Immediately after the start of the Korean War, Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk made a brief list of steps to be taken in Asia; one of the priorities was a sharp increase in military aid to the French. In Washington, American statements reflected French statements; Acheson, who had once seen Ho as something of a nationalist, now was a hard-liner on the war. After Senators Homer Ferguson and Theodore Green made a trip through Asia they returned deeply concerned about what was happening there. They found that wherever they went, most people thought the Americans were supporting a colonial war, which was very damaging to the American reputation for being on the right side and against colonialism. Acheson moved to reassure the senators: they had it all wrong, they had completely misunderstood. It was not nationalism which was being fought there, he told them, it was Communism. The two were incompatible; you cannot be both a Communist and a nationalist. It was all very simple, he said.

  It was a marvelous and definitive answer, reflecting the American capacity, and particularly the Achesonian capacity, to see things through our eyes rather than through anyone else’s. Since the situation was clear to Acheson, it should also be clear to the Vietnamese. That self-assurance which blinded him here always served him well against his critics; he did not lack for confidence. But there was a touch of genuine naÏveté about the world. In 1951 Acheson met with Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, the famed French commander of the Indochina forces, a French MacArthur. De Lattre explained some of the problems of fighting an elusive enemy in a war without fronts. Then he told Acheson that his greatest need was to train Vietnamese officers, since the Vietnamese would not fight under French officers. Acheson in turn grandly suggested that American officers do the training, explaining that the United States had demonstrated in Korea that it knew how to train Asian officers and the French didn’t. The wars, he thought, and the problems, were the same.

  One important minority voice was raised in the State Department at the time—George Kennan’s. There was an element of irony in his dissent, because it was his cables from Moscow toward the end of the war which had fascinated James Forrestal and which had led to a marked escalation in his career and reputation. But Kennan had resented the way his ideas had been used; as American foreign policy hardened after the war, he had a feeling that his ideas were being exploited by his superiors, one element of a broad outline of thinking plucked out by them for their purposes, which were not necessarily his; he was outlining a very complicated thing, and they were not interested in the complications. Kennan had little illusion about Soviet postwar intentions. He knew they would make certain moves which they considered in their national interest, and that we should be prepared for these moves. But he had not foreseen and did not want the spiraling tensions and arms race as the Cold War mounted, and by 1948 he had become the highest-ranking dissenter on what he termed the increasing militarization of American foreign policy. He had dissented on NATO, since, as far as he was concerned, the Marshall Plan was sufficient; Soviet penetration of Western countries, he felt, if it came at all, would come from within, it would not come in the form of Soviet tanks rolling across France. When the Korean War broke out he argued with Acheson that this was not a Soviet attack, but that almost surely the Soviets regarded this as a Korean civil conflict.

  By 1950 Kennan had become very unhappy with the growth of the military influence in American foreign policy, and the instinct to have a simplistic approach toward the Communists as one great monolith; and he was uneasy with the embryonic attempts to do in Asia what we had done in Europe. As American involvement in Indochina deepened, he had written a long memo to Acheson saying that the French could not win in Indochina nor could the Americans replace them and win, and that we were now, whether we realized it or not, on our way toward taking their place. He wrote that if the Vietminh won, it would look like a Communist takeover at first, but eventually the local forces would find their own level, and the indigenous people would run things in their own way. Nationalism would inevitably express itself in hundreds of ways, and the people would not be dominated by Moscow or Peking. What he was really saying was that this was nature taking its course, a step in the national evolution of the people.

  It was not a position which Kennan had come to easily, but he had been talked into it by a member of his staff at the Policy Planning Council, none other than John Paton Davies, already being hounded for his China prophecies. Kennan, basically a Europeanist like the others, had been against the idea of coming to terms with the Vietminh, but Davies had turned him around. Davies insisted that American policy makers had to get out of the habit of looking at Communism as a moral issue. Rather, he said, when a local indigenous force for a variety of reasons has a chance to form an insurgency, the metropolitan government would not be able to defeat it. Davies was extremely skeptical of the American capacity to put trained people into the field to deal with the complexity of these problems, having seen Americans failing at the same thing in China. Davies convinced Kennan that there was no real future for the West in areas like this, and yet the dangers were not so real as they seemed. The local forces, for example, would have to sell the same raw material to the West that they had in the past. It was, of course, similar to Davies’ thinking on China, which was that the Chiang government was never much of a friend, it was too Chinese; as such it inevitably had built-in conflicts with us, and thus, similarly, the Mao government could never be much of a friend to Moscow. The best thing we could do in situations like this was to deal with the realities and hope for the best; many of these forces were simply outside our control, and by trying to control them we could not affect them but might, in fact, turn them against us.

  Kennan’s brilliantly presented arguments, based on the ideas and evidence of Davies, did not change American thinking on Vietnam. The new Assistant Secretary at FE, Dean Rusk, was too much of a traditionalist, a believer that we had to rally a government and not show faint-heartedness. The Kennan-Davies view remained a minority one, all but ignored in the rising domestic tensions and anti-Communism; Kennan’s ideas would surface again, some sixteen years later, when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee belatedly held hearings trying to trace the course which had brought us that far.

  Since the course was already set, the memo had no effect at the time. We picked up the French war and the French assumptions. We financed the war for the next four years, and considered it part of our great global strategy. The architects of the major change had been the Democrats and Acheson, albeit under pressure from the right. In 1952 the Democratic Administration was defeated and the new Republican Secretary of State would lend his own loftiness and grandeur to that particular French cause. Indeed, as the war progressed and the realities of the paddies came home to Paris, the two countries, America and France, seemed to switch sides. The French, who had been eager for the war and for American support, became increasingly dubious, and the Americans seemed more eager for the war than France. And developments showed what strange paths our own smaller compromises would lead us to. Dean Acheson, who had always thought the French cause a false one and who had once seen Ho as a nationalist, and who had made the decision to give arms more as an afterthought, found himself sucked along by the pull of that which had been let loose. In 1953 and 1954, out of office, he met regularly in Princeton with his former State Department associates, and at the time of Dienbienphu he and his aides (with the exception of Kennan) agreed that the United States was making a great and perhaps fatal mistake if it did not go to the rescue of the French and join in on the war. Soft old Dean Acheson. Soft old Democrats.

  Although Rusk had not cha
nged these policies himself, since it was Acheson who was in command, he certainly acquiesced and had no qualms about it. He became a formidable articulator of the policy. The people who wanted a hard-line China policy, on the Hill and at Time magazine, found in him a more than acceptable advocate, and he was a very able man to have around during a change in policy (though when he first took over the job at FE, he held to the existing line that the fall of Nationalist China was the Kuomintang’s own fault, and in June 1950, just before the Korean War, he had called the rebellion there comparable to “the American revolt against the British”). In fact, it was a speech of Rusk’s on China to the China Institute in May 1951 which seemed to mark the new, harder policy. Chiang, not the Communists, were the legitimate rulers of China; the Mao government represented foreign masters. “Forthright speech,” said Time approvingly; it was a speech which made headlines throughout the country and was reprinted in major news magazines, occasioned a protest from the British, a denial from the State Department that it represented a new policy, and finally a cat-and-mouse press conference by Acheson himself in which he said that it represented nothing new—but it was stronger than the old, wasn’t it?

  . . . We and the Chinese, for example, have had a vital interest in the peace of the Pacific. Each of us wants security on our Pacific flank and wants to be able to look across those vast waters to find strength, independence and good will in its great neighbor on the other side. It was inevitable that the driving force of Japanese militarism would sooner or later bring China and America together to oppose it, just as we had moved 40 years earlier to support China’s independence and integrity against threats from Europe. The same issues are now posed again—and are made more difficult to deal with because foreign encroachment is now being arranged by Chinese who seem to love China less than they do their foreign masters.

  •••

  The independence of China is gravely threatened. In the Communist world there is room for only one master—a jealous and implacable master, whose price of friendship is complete submission. How many Chinese, in one community after another, are now being destroyed because they love China more than the Soviet Union? How many Chinese will remember in time the fates of Rajk, Kostov, Petkov, Clementis and all those in other satellites who discovered that being Communist is not enough for the conspirators of the Kremlin?

  The freedoms of the Chinese people are disappearing. Trial by mob, mass slaughter, banishment as forced labor to Manchuria, Siberia or Sinkiang, the arbitrary seizure of property, the destruction of loyalties within the family, the suppression of free speech—these are the facts behind the parades and celebrations and the empty promises.

  The territorial integrity of China is now an ironic phrase. The movement of Soviet forces into Sinkiang, the realities of “joint exploitation” of that great province by Moscow and Peiping, the separation of Inner Mongolia from the body politic of China, and the continued inroads of Soviet power into Manchuria under the cloak of the Korean aggression mean in fact that China is losing its great Northern areas to the European empire which has stretched out its greedy hands for them for at least a century.

  •••

  Hundreds of thousands of Chinese youth are being sacrificed in a fiery furnace, pitting their waves of human flesh against the fire power of modern weapons—and without heavy equipment, adequate supply or the most elementary medical attention. Apart from Korea, the Chinese are being pressed to aggressive action in other areas—all calculated to divert the attention and energies of China away from the encroachments of Soviet imperialism upon China itself.

  •••

  Events in China must surely challenge the concern of Chinese everywhere—in Formosa, on the mainland and in overseas communities. There is a job to be done for China which only the Chinese can do—a job which will require sustained energy, continued sacrifice and an abundance of the high courage with which so many Chinese have fought for so long during the struggles of the past decades. The rest of us cannot tell them exactly what is to be done or how. We cannot provide a formula to engage the unity of effort among all Chinese who love their country. But one thing we can say—as the Chinese people move to assert their freedom and to work out their destiny in accordance with their own historical purposes, they can count upon tremendous support from free peoples in other parts of the world. . . .

  It was strong stuff. There was another speech that night, by John Foster Dulles, and it was mild by comparison; but it would not hurt the career of Dean Rusk to have been a little more anti-Mao than Dulles that night. Rusk would not remain Assistant Secretary very long, however; the Republicans were on their way back, and they would use the charge of State Department softness on Communism as the major weapon in their return to power. Many of the people in State would be badly hurt during this period, but not Rusk, in part because his own views were indeed hard-line, but more than that, because of an almost unique capacity to stay out of trouble. (After MacArthur was fired and returned to give his “Old soldiers never die” speech, State knew there was going to be a congressional inquiry on MacArthur. Yet Rusk did not go with Acheson to the Hill at that time, though he seemed the logical candidate, being the man for Asia; instead it was Adrian Fisher, the Department’s legal counsel, a man who normally would not receive that assignment.) The Republicans, with Dulles leading the way, attacked the policies of the past, the immoral compromises, the weakness of the Democratic no-win containment, policies in which Rusk had been one of the lesser architects. But no matter, Rusk and Dulles got on fine; they had worked well together on the Japanese peace treaty and had kept in touch, and Rusk’s views on China were obviously acceptable.

  After the Republicans were elected in 1952, which meant that Dulles, chairman of the board of the Rockefeller Foundation, had a new job, Secretary of State, he started to look for a staff for State, but he also needed someone he liked and trusted for the important job of President of the Rockefeller Foundation, and he recommended his young friend Dean Rusk. So Dean Rusk was once again promoted (the best people, who had correctly predicted the fall of China, would see their careers destroyed, but Dean Rusk, who had failed to predict the Chinese entry into the Korean War, would see his career accelerate. There had to be a moral for him here: if you are wrong on the hawkish side of an event you are all right; if you are accurate on the dovish side you are in trouble). He would maintain, this man whose surface identity was as a Democrat, a very close friendship with Dulles. Years later, when Dulles’ secretary met Rusk, she said she felt she knew him well. Mr. Dulles had liked him so much, had spoken about him and had told her that any time Mr. Rusk called from New York, she was to put the call through directly because Mr. Rusk was very special, and Mr. Dulles certainly did not do that with many people. Robert Bowie, the head of Policy Planning under Dulles, would confirm this, whenever Rusk was in town Dulles would call him and say—Rusk’s here, I want you to spend the day with Rusk, tell him everything we’re doing.

  So color Rusk neutral, or color him amenable, or hard-line. Who was he, which side was he on? He left State for the next best thing, the head of a great foundation at an unusually early age, only forty-three, and there were to be great things ahead. He had survived the most delicate and politically dangerous period in recent State history, and he had come out stronger than when he went in (with both sides). He was deft enough to retain his friendships with Lovett, Acheson and their friends, to secure new friendships with Dulles and Henry Luce, and yet to send occasional smoke signals to the Democratic liberals that he was on their side. At the same time he was handing out the tax-exempt money of the very wealthy, holding on to a safe and secure base, where risks were minimized. He had a little more interest than in the past in the underdeveloped world, earmarked a little more money for Africa and Asia. So he spent those years of the fifties meeting the wealthy and powerful in New York, making no enemies, waiting for the next phone call from the next President. Making no enemies.

  But the Kennedy years were not par
ticularly easy ones; Rusk found himself surrounded by men he considered amateurs, people playing with the processes, interfering with serious men. Rusk was a man who believed in the processes; in fact, in that 1960 Foreign Affairs essay he had written advertising himself to the next President, he had said that processes were more important than people, but this was an Administration which believed in the importance of people and their attitudes. (In that sense he and Harriman could not have been more opposite. Harriman believed that you changed policies by changing people, that you fought the bureaucracy; Rusk thought the bureaucracy was something you came to terms with, that its attitudes existed for very real reasons.) The Kennedy style upset Rusk, the young men from the White House trying to get their hands into foreign policy, playing at it, looking over at State and finding bright young friends of theirs, bringing them to NSC meetings so that the Secretary, yes, the Secretary of State would be giving advice and have it challenged by some hot young desk officer. This was a recurrent situation, which he found virtually a violation of his office, and it made his natural tendency to speak only to the President even more marked. Faced with a situation like this he became even more tight-lipped, and he would doodle. Those who knew him well could detect from his scribbling the amount of tension and distaste he felt, and they would decide that the younger and more outspoken the desk officer, the greater the doodle index.

  Rusk himself must have sensed the disdain for him around the White House. (He had once scheduled a briefing on nuclear weapons for the high-level officials, believing that they needed to know more about what the weapons would or would not do—and it was a chilling experience. Glenn Seaborg did the briefing on American missile capacity, and afterward, as they were all going back to the White House, Rusk turned to the two high-level White House people with him and said, “It’s all very complicated, isn’t it? You never know when those things will really work when it comes right down to it, do you?” And one of the very senior White House men answered, “Well, if they don’t, you’ll never know, Dean.”)