Pentagon Papers

by Neil Sheehan

  • That the Eisenhower Administration’s decision to rescue a fledgling South Vietnam from a Communist takeover and the Administration’s attempt to undermine the new Communist regime of North Vietnam gave the Administration a “direct role in the ultimate breakdown of the Geneva settlement” for Indochina in 1954.

  • That the Kennedy Administration, though ultimately spared from major escalation decisions by the death of its leader, transformed a policy of “limited-risk gamble,” which it inherited, into a “broad commitment” that left President Johnson with a choice between more war and withdrawal.

  • That the Johnson Administration, though the President was reluctant and hesitant to take the final decisions, intensified the covert warfare against North Vietnam and began planning in the spring of 1964 to wage overt war, a full year before it publicly revealed the depth of its involvement and its fear of defeat.

  • That this campaign of growing clandestine military pressure through 1964 and the expanding program of bombing North Vietnam in 1965 were begun despite the judgment of the Government’s intelligence community that the measures would not cause Hanoi to cease its support of the Vietcong insurgency in the South, and that the bombing was deemed militarily ineffective within a few months.

  • That the infiltration of men and arms from North Vietnam into the South was more important to the various Administrations as a means of publicly justifying American involvement than it was for its effects on the Vietcong insurgency.

  • That these four succeeding Administrations built up the American political, military and psychological stakes in Indochina, often more deeply than they realized at the time, with large-scale shipments of military equipment to the French in 1950; with acts of sabotage and terror warfare against North Vietnam beginning in 1954; with moves that encouraged and abetted the overthrow of President Diem in 1963; with plans, pledges and threats of further action that sprang to life in the Tonkin Gulf clashes in August, 1964; with the careful preparation of public opinion for the years of open warfare that were to follow, and with the calculation in 1965, as the planes and troops were openly committed to sustained combat, that neither accommodation inside South Vietnam nor early negotiations with North Vietnam would achieve the desired result.

  In these disclosures and analyses of the origins and course of the war lies the immediate significance of the Pentagon papers.

  But the documents and the narrative histories have a greater significance beyond the war in Indochina and its traumatic effects upon the United States and the countries of Southeast Asia. For this archive represents the first good look since the end of World War II at the inner workings of the machinery of the Executive Branch that has grown up under the American Presidency. The most recent body of policy documents to come into the public domain is dated 1946, the last year for which the State Department has released any of its archives. The Pentagon papers also contain documents, such as the reports on clandestine warfare, of a kind that generally are excluded from the State Department’s policy of releasing documents after 25 years.

  Clandestine warfare, as this collection of New York Times articles on the Pentagon papers will illustrate, naturally has an important effect on public events. Covert operations also occasionally violate treaties and contradict open policy pronouncements. No matter what vintage, therefore, documents related to clandestine war are, in the bureaucratic phrase, “excluded from downgrading” under the classification regulations, in order to avoid embarrassing the Executive Branch and the men responsible.

  The instances are also rare in which a collection of documents akin to the Pentagon papers has come to light in modern history. The last examples were the release of the secret Czarist archives after the Russian Revolution in 1917, the publication of imperial Germany’s records by the Weimar Republic following World War I, and the capture of the Nazi archives by the Allies at the climax of World War II.

  The internal functioning of the machinery of the post-World War II Executive Branch has been much theorized about, but only intermittently perceived in authentic detail. Usually these perceptions have come in the personal memoirs of the policymakers, whose version of history has been understandably selective.

  To read the Pentagon papers in their vast detail is to step through the looking glass into a new and different world. This world has a set of values, a dynamic, a language and a perspective quite distinct from the public world of the ordinary citizen and of the two other branches of the Republic—Congress and the judiciary.

  Clandestine warfare against North Vietnam, for example, is not seen, either in the written words of the senior decisionmakers in the Executive Branch or by the anonymous authors of the study, as violating the Geneva accords of 1954, which ended the French Indochina War, or as conflicting with the public policy pronouncements of the various Administrations. Clandestine warfare, because it is covert, does not exist as far as treaties and public posture are concerned. Further, secret commitments to other nations are not sensed as infringing on the treaty-making powers of the Senate, because they are not publicly acknowledged.

  The guarded world of the government insider and the public world are like two intersecting circles. Only a small portion of the government circle is perceived from the public domain, however. Vigorous internal policy debates are only dimly heard and high-level intelligence analyses that contradict policy are not read outside. But, as the Pentagon papers demonstrate, knowledge of these policy debates and the dissents from the intelligence agencies might have given Congress and the public a different attitude toward the publicly announced decisions of the successive Administrations.

  The segments of the public world—Congress, the news media, the citizenry, even international opinion as a whole—are regarded from within the world of the government insider as elements to be influenced. The policy memorandums repeatedly discuss ways to move these outside “audiences” in the desired direction, through such techniques as the controlled release of information and appeals to patriotic stereotypes. The Pentagon papers are replete with examples of the power the Executive Branch has acquired to make its influence felt in the public domain.

  The papers also make clear the deep-felt need of the government insider for secrecy in order to keep the machinery of state functioning smoothly and to maintain a maximum ability to affect the public world. And even within the inner world, only a small number of men at the top know what is really happening. During the five-day bombing pause in May, 1965, for instance, Secretary McNamara, in order to guard against leaks, sent a top-secret but misleading order through the entire military command structure stating that the purpose was to permit reconnaissance aircraft to conduct “a thorough study of [North Vietnamese] lines of communication.”

  The real purpose of the pause, the history says, was to provide an opportunity to secretly deliver what amounted to “a ‘cease and desist’ order” to Hanoi to call off the insurgency in the South. When this “demand for their surrender” was rejected, the history continues, the seemingly peaceful gesture of the pause would provide political credit for an escalation of the air war against North Vietnam afterwards. As President Johnson explained in a personal cable directly to General Maxwell D. Taylor, then the American Ambassador in Saigon, he wanted a pause “which I could use to good effect with world opinion.”

  “You should understand that my purpose in this plan is to begin to clear a path either toward restoration of peace or toward increased military action, depending upon the reaction of the Communists,” the President said. “We have amply demonstrated our determination and our commitment in the last two months, and I now wish to gain some flexibility.”

  Such sharp and fresh detail in the Pentagon papers on the hitherto gray workings of the Executive Branch poses broad questions, for all spectrums of American political opinion, about the process of governing.

  The principal actors in this history, the leading decisionmakers, emerge as confident men—confident of place, of education and of accomplis
hment. They are problem-solvers, who seem rarely to doubt their ability to prevail. In a memorandum to President Johnson on Feb. 7, 1965, recommending a full-scale bombing campaign against North Vietnam, McGeorge Bundy, the former Harvard dean who was now the special presidential assistant for national security affairs, remarked in self-assured tones that “measured against the costs of defeat in Vietnam, this program seems cheap. And even if it fails to turn the tide—as it may—the value of the effort seems to us to exceed its cost.” In the same memorandum, Mr. Bundy assured the President that General Taylor and the other senior members of the United States Mission in Saigon were “outstanding men, and United States policy within Vietnam is mainly right and well directed.”

  “None of the special solutions or criticisms put forward with zeal by individual reformers in Government or in the press is of major importance, and many of them are flatly wrong,” Mr. Bundy told the President. “No man is perfect, and not every tactical step of recent months has been perfectly chosen, but when you described the Americans in Vietnam as your first team, you were right.”

  Of the generals, like William C. Westmoreland, the military commander in Vietnam, and Earle G. Wheeler, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the history remarks that they were “men accustomed to winning.”

  The written language of these men, and that of a number of the Pentagon authors, is the dry, sparse language of problem-solving. There are the options, “Option A, Option B and Option C,” and the “scenarios” for war planning, and the phrases like “wider action” and “overt military pressures” to describe open warfare. The conflict in Indochina is approached as a practical matter that will yield to the unfettered application of well-trained minds, and of the bountiful resources in men, weapons and money that a great power can command.

  The restraints—the limits of action perceived—are what the body politic at home will tolerate and the fear of clashing with another major power—the Soviet Union or China. There is an absence of emotional anguish or moral questioning of action in the memorandums and cablegrams and records of the high-level policy discussions. Only once in the history do two of the leading participants, Secretary McNamara and the late John T. McNaughton, the head of the Pentagon’s politico-military operations as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, express emotional and moral qualms. The occasion, recounted in Chapter 9, was a personal letter from Mr. McNaughton to Mr. McNamara, his friend as well as superior, in May, 1967, and a subsequent memorandum both men drafted for President Johnson later that month, unsuccessfully recommending a cutback in the bombing of the North to the 20th Parallel as a gesture toward peace. The letter and the related memorandum stand out as lonely cries against the magnitude of the human cost of the war.

  Because the historians were forbidden to interview the decision-makers, a number of whom had left government by the time the history was being written, the narrative lacks the motives and the considerations that were never committed to paper. The historians could not fill in the breaks in the documentary trail or always be certain of the precise context of a document.

  This limitation, however, conversely gives the Pentagon papers a validity of their own. For it is a commonplace among journalists and historians that the memories of men, particularly men who have participated in an ill-fated venture, change with time.

  For example, in an “eyes only” cable to President Kennedy after a crucial fact-finding mission to South Vietnam in the fall of 1961, General Taylor recommended sending an 8,000-man American combat task force under the cover of a flood relief mission. The majority of the troops should consist of “logistical-type units,” General Taylor said, but “after acquiring experience in operating in SVN [South Vietnam], this initial force will require reorganization and adjustment to the local scene.” Among the missions of the task force would be to act as “an emergency reserve” for the Saigon government army and as “an advance party of such additional [American] forces as may be introduced if . . . contingency plans are invoked.”

  “As a general reserve,” General Taylor continued, the task force “might be thrown into action (with U.S. agreement) against large, formed guerrilla bands which have abandoned the forests for attacks on major targets.”

  “I am presently inclined to favor a dual mission, initially help to the flood area and subsequently use in any other area of SVN where its [the task force’s] resources can be used effectively to give tangible support in the struggle against the VC [Vietcong]. However, the possibility of emphasizing the humanitarian mission will wane if we wait long in moving in our forces or in linking our stated purpose with the emergency conditions created by the flood.” Without the combat task force, General Taylor warned, “I do not believe that our program to save SVN will succeed . . .”

  Nearly 10 years later, in a television program recorded in the early spring of 1971 and broadcast on Sunday, June 27, 1971, General Taylor was asked about this recommendation, the gist of which was now publicly known.

  “I did not recommend combat forces,” he said. “I stressed we would bring in engineer forces, logistics forces, that could work on logistics and help in the very serious flood problem in 1961. So this was not a combat force.”

  “But you also described it as a military task force which might become the base for a further military expansion into combat forces,” the television interviewer persisted.

  “That is right, that’s correct,” the general said. “But I did not recommend anything other than three battalions of infantry. Pardon me, three battalions of engineers.”

  The Pentagon papers are beyond the reach of memory. The documents are the written words of the men who set the armies in motion and launched the warplanes. These written words undoubtedly contain factual errors and omissions by the decision-makers themselves, and the documents will have to be explained and elaborated upon for a complete historical account. But the written words are immutable, engraved now in the history of the nation for all to examine. This is the strength of the Pentagon papers.

  The Times perceived several choices in deciding how to report the Pentagon history.

  One choice was to disregard the narrative-analyses of the Pentagon historians, for whatever individual or institutional biases these might contain, and to report solely on the documents. This approach, however, would have forced The Times reporter to interpret the documents and made him the historian, and so it was rejected.

  A second choice was to go beyond the narrative-analyses and the documents by interviewing the leading decision-makers and by seeking alternative interpretations of major events from published histories of the war. This approach would also have meant that The Times was, in effect, writing its own history of the war, and so it, too, was rejected.

  A third approach, and the one adopted, was to keep the articles within the general limits set by the narrative-analyses and the documents as a whole. Material was brought in from the public record only where it seemed necessary to put the papers into context for the general reader. When the need to interpret events arose, The Times sought to confine itself to the interpretations in the Pentagon history. Where the Pentagon historians noted gaps in the documentary record, The Times so indicated.

  The purpose was to report as accurately as possible on the corporate body of history that the narrative-analyses and the documents form, but the very selection and arrangement of facts, whether in a history or in a newspaper article, inevitably mirrors a point of view or state of mind. The articles that follow thus undoubtedly reflect some of the conceptions of The Times reporters who wrote them. But the hope has been to provide a fair reflection of the Pentagon papers and the desire has been to move them into the public domain as quickly as possible, so that the average citizen and the professional historian can judge the papers on their own merits.

  NEIL SHEEHAN

  July 16, 1971

  New York City

  Chapter 1

  The Truman and Eisenhower Years:

&n
bsp; 1945-1960

  Highlights of the Period: 1945-1960

  South Vietnam, the secret Pentagon account contends, is essentially the creation of the U.S., and the formative years were those of the Truman and—in particular—the Eisenhower Administrations.

  Here, in chronological order, are key events—actions, decisions, policy formulations—of this period:

  1945–46

  Ho Chi Minh wrote a series of appeals for U.S. support to President Truman and the Secretary of State. There is no indication, the account says, of any reply.

  1950

  A National Security Council study urged the U.S. to “scrutinize closely the development of threats from Communist aggression” in Asia and to aid “directly concerned” governments.

  The U.S. recognized the Bao Dai regime, not Ho; the French requested military aid; Secretary of State Dean Acheson said that the alternative would be the “extension of Communism” throughout Southeast Asia “and possibly westward.” The aid decision, the account says, meant the U.S. was “thereafter” directly involved “in the developing tragedy in Vietnam.”

  1953

  The National Security Council reported that the loss of Indochina to Communism “would be critical to the security of the U.S.”

  1954

  The National Security Council urged President Eisenhower to warn that “French acquiescence” in a negotiated settlement would end U.S. aid to France, and suggested that the U.S. might continue the war on to “military victory.”

  The French asked for a U.S. air strike with disguised planes. The President’s nonintervention decision was still tentative. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said he would give a “broad hint” to the French that U.S. intervention was a possibility, with preconditions. Eisenhower ordered a draft Congressional resolution, and the Defense Department prepared a memo on the U.S. forces that would be required.