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Banned
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Yup....history indicates that pandering is the right word to describe the "wooing" of conservatives, veterans, and union workers, because, what did they get in exchange for their votes, besides bloated deficits, loss of union jobs, accelerated dependence on imported oil and a shift in wealth from them to "big oil", and the obscuring of the lessons that could have been learned from Vietnam....could have kept us out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Invading and occupying two distant countries, in each case, justified by the pursuit of a single individual, after you've reduced your national conventional forces to a 60 year low, doesn't confirm that many lessons have been learned...yet.
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SMITH, HEDRICK
WASHINGTON
New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Sep 7, 1980. pg. A.2
Last winter, most politicians reckoned that the Republican nomination was Ronald Reagan's to lose if he didn't trip up. He had a scare at the start of the primary season, but he didn't trip. By the summer the polls made it look as though the Presidency itself was his to lose if he didn't stumble. And suddenly, as his fall campaign opened, it looked as though he might boot away a golden opportunity.
His lieutenants had drafted a series of thematic speeches to demonstrate Mr. Reagan's Presidential depth. But before he could get the public's attention, Mr. Reagan was upstaging himself with thoughtless remarks and indulging in wistful throwbacks that left his advisers wincing. Last week, he linked President Carter with the Ku Klux Klan in an uncharacteristic bit of pique over what he regarded as the Carter campaign's attempts to connect him with the Klan.
Earlier, he launched George Bush, his running mate, on a mission to China with a gratuitous quip about re-establishing official relations with Taiwan. He mused aloud about teaching the biblical story of creation along with Darwinian evolution. In Chicago, his remark that the Vietnam War had been ''a noble cause'' stole headlines from a defense policy speech.
Mr. Reagan was like a prize fighter trying out in a new ring but still shadow-boxing with old sparring partners. As he threw verbal punches left and right, his eyes strayed off the main target. Some of his jabs bounced back against his own chin.
A bit overconfident and headstrong, he was eluding and baffling his own handlers. In a political campaign, handlers are as vital to a candidate's survival as the seconds who send a boxer into each new round with a reminder to keep his guard up and save his best punches for good openings.
As an actor, Ronald Reagan spent years in Hollywood listening to stage directions. As a Presidential candidate, he is accustomed to coaching. But few handlers have mastered the art of giving him tough advice to protect him from the unvarnished enthusiasms of his conservative rhetoric.
In 1976, his campaign manager was John Sears, a tough-minded strategist, blunt with his advice, hardnosed about the need for briefings, and determined to control the candidate and the campaign. He was hired again for the 1980 drive but last February, Mr. Reagan chafed under Mr. Sears's tight rein; he fired him and two associates. No one else has gotten clear control since then. ''I think Reagan felt he was programmed too much then and he's resisted it ever since,'' said a high-level adviser. ''Once we have a number of these flaps, he'll stop resisting.''
<b>The basic difficulty is the Californian's penchant for speaking his mind and giving conservative audiences what they like to hear,</b> without anticipating how his words may grate on more moderate ears. ''When he looks at China and Taiwan, he sees the issue so clearly that he doesn't see the troubles what he says will cause with others,'' said one aide. <b>''Or in calling Vietnam 'a noble cause,' he's so convinced of that he can't see the bad impact it will have.''</b>
''Not enough people go in and tell him how things are going to sound,'' said another Reagan operative. ''He'll take contrary advice if you give it to him well. It's a failure of his staff when people don't. But to be effective you have to be firm, and most people around big politicians don't like giving them bad news.'' Last weekend, for example, at a staff review of the campaign with Mr. Reagan, participants said no one had the nerve to tell Mr. Reagan that his goofs were his campaign's main problem.
By several accounts, too, his staff failed to warn him about the potential consequences of his remarks about Taiwan. In Ohio, another embarrassment developed when three staffer members - Lyn Nofziger, Michael Deaver and Ed Meese - inserted the charge into an economic speech that the current downturn was a Carter ''depression.'' But they failed to consult Alan Greenspan, a top Reagan economic adviser who was nearby and who admitted the next day that the remark was an overstatement.
The traveling staff did not spot political trouble in the ''noble cause'' phrase that Mr. Reagan himself inserted into his Chicago speech. And it prodded him into taking a swipe at President Carter for appearing in an Alabama town with a Ku Klux Klan office. Reagan headquarters, hurt by a Democratic countercharge that this was ''an insult to the South,'' ordered a hasty retreat.
A Shortage of Peers?
Insiders acknowledge that these events point up divisions within the Reagan campaign command as well as an organizational looseness under campaign manager William Casey. No one person is clearly in control, several aides lament.
The major difficulty is that the Reagan team is an amalgam of two groups with different backgrounds and viewpoints - the old conservative California group that has long served Mr. Reagan, primarily Mr. Meese, Mr. Deaver and Mr. Nofziger; and another group with links to President Ford's Administration and 1976 campaign - Mr. Casey, William Timmons, James A. Baker 3d, Stuart Spencer and Drew Lewis.
Some reckon the Californians are too close to Mr. Reagan to caution him about the political land mines hidden in his rhetoric. But except for Mr. Casey and Mr. Spencer, the Ford group has not yet won enough of Mr. Reagan's personal confidence to take on the ticklish task of telling him how to trim his sails. ''He really needs someone with him on a peer level, someone who will level with him about those misstatements,'' said a close associate.
One prospect is Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada, Mr. Reagan's national campaign chairman and longtime friend. The situation has become serious enough that others have coaxed Mr. Laxalt, despite his own re-election campaign, to start traveling with Mr. Reagan. Nonetheless, Mr. Reagan's advisers contend that the damage so far has been modest, can be remedied, and still has not cost Mr. Reagan his lead over Mr. Carter in the important swing states.
''Obviously, you can't continue that pattern for another month and not be hurt badly,'' said Robert Teeter, a Republican pollster working the Reagan campaign. ''But so far, I'm not sure you'd notice a lot of fluctuation in the polls.''
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[ Reagan and two missteps ... ]; [SECOND Edition]
Fred Barnes Baltimore Sun
Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext). Boston, Mass.: Aug 25, 1980. pg. 1
Reagan and two missteps
WASHINGTON - Ronald Reagan has stumbled at the outset of his campaign
against President Jimmy Carter by allowing himself - and not Carter - to
become the chief issue.
For all the assiduous planning by Reagan's strategists aimed at keeping the Republican presidential candidate off the defensive, he has been bedeviled in the 12 days since Carter officially became his Democratic opponent by two controversies of his own making.
The flaps - one involving his view of the Vietnamese war, the other involving Taiwan - had the effect of minimizing the effect of two speeches by Reagan last week on defense policy.
And that was a distinct loss for the Reagan campaign, since the speeches effectively pressed one of its overriding themes: that Reagan's hard-line approach is not reckless sabre-rattling but is the surest means of achieving peace with the Soviet Union.
Worse still, the self-generated troubles tended to raise doubts about the ability of Reagan and his political lieutenants to cope with the enormouspressure of a presidential race, particularly against an experienced and remorseless campaign operation such as Carter's.
Political advisers of the President were understandably pleased by Reagan's performance. "The poor guy may not get out of these flaps alive," chortled one Carter strategist.
That certainly overestimates Reagan's troubles. The damage was far from fatal, and Reagan has plenty of time to recover.
But to do so, he may need to curtail the controversy over his proposed policy toward the Taiwan government. At this point, more than a week after the flap erupted, there is no end in sight.
The controversy involving Vietnam was gratuitously created by three words that Reagan inserted in his speech a week ago to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The text contained Reagan's long-standing rhetoric in defense of the American effort in Vietnam, to which he added the phrase "a noble cause."
This was seized on by many of the reporters covering Reagan - to the surprise of the former California governor and his aides, who hadn't expected the phrase to attract attention.
Lost in press reports, especially those on television, was Reagan's well- reasoned argument that his tough military policies would have a far better chance of delivering peace with the Soviets than would Carter's.
In their effort to control the flow of news in the presidential race, the Reaganites have adopted a number of practices common to campaigns. One is limiting press conferences, where the candidate might make an off-the-cuff remark that upstages his primary message or gets him in trouble.
Another tactic is to emphsize general themes while steering away from specifics such as the price tag on proposals or the exact steps to be taken to achieve an important national goal.
To stay off the defensive in the campaign, Reagan operatives have further decided against responding to querries about old quotes from Reagan that the Democrats already have begun citing.
"You ignore it and go ahead talking about the important point in the campaign, which is Jimmy Carter's record," Nofziger explained.
That is the policy at least. But after Sen. Edward M. Kennedy derisively mentioned several comments from Reagan during Kennedy's speech to the Democratic National Convention, an aide to the Republican candidate sought to explain them. This kept the quotes alive in the press for another day.
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<b>Forgive me for adding the following article and the followup....14 years later. It seems like a microcosm that points to what workers were duped into doing with their former collective bargaining rights....voting them away.</b>
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http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...D8415B8084F1D3
IN MOVE TO THE CENTER,REAGAN PLANS TO ALTER 2 ANTIUNION POSITIONS
RAINES, HOWELL. New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Oct 9, 1980. pg. A.1
Ronald Reagan has revised his position on two issues of prime importance to labor unions as part of a broader strategy to move his Republican candidacy closer to the center of the political spectrum.
A campaign flier that will be distributed in a day or so to union members in hard-pressed mill towns in Ohio and Pennsylvania strongly modifies Mr. Reagan's harsh attack on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration as a hindrance to management. It also renounces the Republican nominee's suggestion in Indiana last spring that unions be made subject to antitrust laws.
Putting Out 250,000 Fliers
The Reagan campaign is preparing to distribute 250,000 of the fliers at a time when the candidate is making a series of increasingly moderate statements on such subjects as social welfare, the economy and military affairs.
The movement toward the center in the postconvention period has long been a part of Mr. Reagan's campaign plan. But that process worked only fitfully until the past few weeks when Mr. Reagan began stumping through the industrial states. Given the political balance in the West and East, these states hold the key to President Carter's hope of re-election.
The campaign flier that will be distributed to union members is intended, according to the man who wrote it, to neutralize the normally Democratic labor vote by convincing union members to stay away from the polls on Election Day.
On its surface, the flier looks like an appeal for traditionally Democratic voters in the Middle West's industrial section to switch to Mr. Reagan. But its real aim, its author says, is to minimize, rather than convert, the union vote in key states.
''I don't want those people to vote for Reagan,'' said Michael Balzano, a former Nixon Administration official who recently joined the Reagan traveling staff as a labor adviser. ''I want them to stay home. I don't want them to vote.''
Mr. Balzano drafted the campaign leaflet, with the candidate's approval, to reassure union members that a Reagan victory would not be a reversal of labor's legislative and regulatory gains.
Moves Toward the Center
''We want to make sure that Governor Reagan continues to appeal to ticket splitters and independents who are moderate,'' asserted James Baker 3d, a deputy campaign director. ''We've never made any secret of that.''
The Republican candidate's moderation has been evident on several fronts. Before his pledge to leave the union laws intact, for example, Mr. Reagan had defended his economic plan, which has been attacked as radical by Mr. Carter, by arguing that the Republican's tax-cutting proposals would not result in curtailment of essential Government services.
Last week, he reversed his opposition to Federal aid for New York City, and he has played down in stump speeches his statistic-studded proposals for an arms buildup in favor of renewed pledges to keep the peace. Recanting his past critcisms of Social Security, he pledges at every stop that no beneficiary will ever miss a monthly check. In the face Mr. Carter's accusation that he has pandered to racism, Mr. Reagan today said at Wheaton College near Chicago that he would ''vigorously support'' laws against discrimination.
The union leaflet is intended to dampen the impact of Mr. Reagan's past statements, too. In it he pledges not to seek repeal of the Occupational Safety and Health Act or the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires Federal construction wages to match prevailing union wages. He also promises not to seek a national ''right to work'' law, which would outlaw contracts that require workers to join a union to retain their jobs, and he promises not to try to extend the antitrust laws to unions. Stances Last Spring
But in South Bend, Ind., last spring, Mr. Reagan complained about labor union contributions to Democratic candidates. And in response to a voter's question, he agreed with the suggestion that consideration be given to extending antitrust laws to cover organized labor. Similarly, he promised at a Chamber of Commerce meeting in Washington to review OSHA regulations with an eye to removing many of them through executive order or legislation.
Mr. Balzona, a former director of Action, the Federal service agency, who often acted as President Nixon's liaison to labor and ethnic groups, said that before he agreed to run what he calls the Reagan ''offensive'' on union issues, he set out to determine the campaign's present stand on labor issues. ''I tried to find out what our position was,'' he said in an interview, ''and they didn't have a position.''
Then, armed with Mr. Reagan's quotations, he said, he ad discussed the matter with the candidate. ''He said, 'Some of these speeches I've made, some of the rhetoric you used, you get carried away. In a speech you exaggerate some things for effect.' '' Mr. Balzona added that he had concluded that the criticisms of Mr. Reagan from union officials had been based on ''a series of statements he made in campaign speeches for the last 19 years.''
''But when we ran the statements by him - 'Do you intend to abolish OSHA?' - he said, 'Of course not.' '' So on four key questions - including, ''would Governor Reagan seek the repeal of OHSA?'' - the pamphlet to be distributed to union members offers a blunt, boldfaced ''NO.'' The direct language, Mr. Balzona said, was approved by Mr. Reagan despite the objections of strategists who insisted that he had to be consistent with past statements. But Mr. Balzona said a group of 40 ''labor professionals'' consulted on the matter urged the unequivocal answers. Their advice to the candidate was characterized as, ''Don't say anything else about OSHA. Just say 'no.' ''
Reading the Small Print
The smaller type in the campaign pamphlet, however, reserves Mr. Reagan's right to ''eliminate unnecessary regulations,'' to ''insist on tightening the administration'' of the Davis-Bacon Act, and continuing Taft-Hartley provisions for the continuation of state ''right to work'' laws.
The campaign literature attempts to make Mr. Reagan more acceptable to union members by stressing his presidency of the Screen Actors Guild. ''He led the Screen Actors Guild in its first strike and he won it!'' it notes. ''Elect the former union president, President.''
Most of the pro-Carter pickets expected at the largely inactive Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation mill here failed to show up today. Spotting one worker with a Carter sign, Mr. Reagan said, ''He's had his chance, and his ideas didn't work. He's had his chance. He's had three and a half years. I think it's time to send in a new quarterback.''
Workers at the mill, which Mr. Reagan called a ''ghost town,'' received the Republican candidate cordially enough that even Mr. Balzona was moved to observe that his stay-at-home strategy may be too pessimistic. ''From what I've seen today,'' he said, ''these people are going to vote for us. We're going to get some votes here.''
Yet there are signs of persistent Democratic loyalty in this region, as well. Yesterday in Steubenville, Ohio, Mr. Reagan encountered vocal hecklers intent on keeping his past statements alive with placards carrying the old Reagan line: ''Unemployment compensation is a paid holiday.''
<b>''He's antilabor all the way,'' asserted Paul Tucker, one of about 150 union members who booed Mr. Reagan. ''We've got to keep Ronald Reagan out of the White House.'' <b>
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http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...AC0894DC494D81
MARKET WATCH; The Workers Are Starting To Win a Few
Norris, Floyd. New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: May 1, 1994. pg. A.1
IT was almost 13 years ago when it became clear that labor unions had lost much of their clout. President Ronald Reagan broke the air traffic controllers' strike, and left the strikers unemployed.
In retrospect, that action seems to have set the tone for an era in which the power of workers to get "more," as Samuel Gompers is said to have put it when asked what organized labor wanted, had ended.
It was a time when the fear of inflation had grown to the extent that the public wanted something done, not just in the United States but around the world. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher was breaking the power of unions and in France a supposedly Socialist Government was imposing austerity.
The fear of inflation then is now only dimly remembered by many. Prices had begun climbing in the late 1960's, and inflation kept rising through price controls and through recessions. By 1981, almost everyone expected oil prices to top $100 a barrel within a few years. Interest rates were high and rising, and a few months after the controllers' strike was broken the Government sold an issue of 30-year bonds with a yield to maturity of 15.78 percent. There was disagreement about what government could do to bring inflation under control, but there was consensus that there would not be the political will to do it.
Now, the situation is reversed. Higher interest rates are being blamed on almost everything except concern about inflation. It is widely believed that labor costs cannot rise rapidly because there are too many people willing to do any given job, if not here, then in some other country..........
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http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...D8415B8084F1D3
CANDIDATES VS.REPORTERS:OLD BATTLE,SHARPER EDGE
New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Oct 19, 1980. pg. A.2
Like every Presidential election, the race between Ronald Reagan and President Carter is not simply a contest between two candidates. It is also a contest between two agendas - which set of issues should voters view as the most pressing. But they are presented to the potential voter not by the candidates directly, but through the filter of the press, which has its own agenda - news. This year, as usual, the candidates' staffs are frustrated by what they perceive to be television and newspaper correspondents' priorities.
Mr. Carter's campaign advisers complain that the President's ''meanness'' in his attacks on the former California Governor was a contrived issue. For several days, following his warning of divisions between Christians and Jews if the Republican were elected, Mr. Carter found himself forced to discuss whether his attacks had been overly personal. His exasperated strategists struggled unsuccessfully to turn the coverage to other attacks, principally those that raise the war and peace questions.
Meanwhile, Mr. Reagan's people were sidetracked by the focus on air pollution. Particularly in California, where Los Angeles had been choking under a bad siege of smog, Mr. Reagan's comment that the pollution problem had become ''substantially controlled'' got headlines daily. The campaign was hard pressed to return to its principal subject, the economy.
And so, last week again, Representative John B. Anderson was besieged by questions about why he is remaining in the race. His own priorities have become submerged in the issue of whether he is a political spoiler.
This year's complaints about the press have a particularly sharp edge. They are that it has dwelt too much on the strictly political aspects of the race, on the horse-race, and that it has tended to highlight the candidate's personal characteristics. Mr. Reagan's gaffes make news while Mr. Carter's do not; Mr. Carter's slashing personal attacks on Mr. Reagan get attention while Mr. Reagan's tone is less remarked upon.
At the center of the discontent is the basic axiom of news coverage - focus on what's new. Generally, candidates find this more of an advantage than a disadvantage. But this year, both Mr. Reagan and Mr. Carter are trying to win support within the abnormally large undecided bloc. The Undecideds are less likely to be aware of the issues. Thus the need to sound familiar themes, over and over, is paramount. Reporters covering the candidates, however, are looking for what is fresh that day, even if it is only that the candidate has repeated himself in a new way.
Aides to both Mr. Carter and Mr. Reagan complain that reporters have, at different times in the campaign, looked for new ways in which the candidate reinforced a stereotype of himself -often, in their view, a stereotype held more by the press than the public.
<b>Early on in the campaign, Mr. Reagan's controversial ad libs about the Ku Klux Klan and about the Vietnam War being a ''noble cause'' created a firestorm of criticism. The Vietnam War comment was the very definition of old news. Mr. Reagan has said the same thing for years.<.b> But at the time he repeated it, the Carter campaign was charging that he was overly inclined to make rash statements. Mr. Reagan accused reporters of going off ''halfcocked,'' looking for ways to create credibility problems for him.
Mr. Carter expressed the same sort of exasperation, more recently, about the ''meanness'' charge. ''The press seems to be obsessed with this issue,'' he said as reporters at a news conference asked again and again about his suggestion that Mr. Reagan's use of ''code words'' had been racist.
A couple of days after Mr. Carter conceded that he had ''overstated'' things a bit and promised to get himself ''back on track,'' he was asked what kind of President he thought Mr. Reagan would make. His reply listed several disagreements, and closed with the statement that his rival would not be ''a good man to trust with the affairs of this nation in the future.'' Shortly afterward, White House press secretary Jody Powell charged that only in a climate of oversensitivity to the ''meanness'' issue could that statement be characterized as the ''strongest personal attack'' yet, as a United Press International story put it.
''News coverage of Presidential candidates often has a selfreinforcing, reflexive aspect to it,'' says political scientist James David Barber. ''A lot of times the stories are really about the observations of the journalists, reifying them as if they were real phenomena. Maybe that's happening because the race is so boring this year. It's like George Burns said when he had his first plate of eggs after going on a salt-free diet, that they tasted like the hens hadn't been paid that day.''
The candidates' planners can hardly claim that they are unfamiliar with how the system works, or that they don't know how to turn it to their advantage.
In the last couple of weeks, for instance, Mr. Carter got publicity for signing an agreement with Israel on oil supplies, and used the occasion of the war between Iraq and Iran to reiterate his positions on helping Israel. Mr. Reagan has traveled to automobile factories, steel mills and construction sites to pound away at his appeals for blue-collar support. Each time the coverage focused on the new setting and slightly different emphasis.
One way all the campaigns get around the priorieties of the socalled national press - the major networks, newspapers and news magazines - is simply to aim for local coverage in those areas where the candidate appears. Mr. Carter's hour-long town meeting in Yatesville, Pa., last week, was covered live on three local television stations. Lately, the Carter campaign has taken to calling in reporters from the Washington bureaus of middle- and small-sized newspapers for fullscale reviews of the issues it feels are not being adequately discussed.
Although several Carter officials have contended recently that the press is ''setting the agenda'' of the campaign outright, many in the press don't agree. ''By itself, the media can't see the agenda,'' said Julius Duscha, director of the Washington Journalism Center. ''The coverage in the end depends on what is picked up from the candidates. In campaigns I've covered, the reporters have heard the set speeches so long that they look for these other things, particularly when there doesn't seem to be much excitement to the campaign.''
''The Reagan gaffes,'' he continued, ''tell us something about what sort of a person he is, and Carter's 'mean streak' gives us insight into his personality. These things get to some of the main problems that people have with the candidates to begin with.'' end
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Letter
New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Jan 5, 1981. pg. A.14
To the Editor:
There is a bold, significant international move that the new Reagan Administration should take which will be practical and constructive: normalize relations with Hanoi. By persisting in its refusal to do this, the United States perpetuates world tensions and problems. Further, we are acting against our own national selfinterest. v. hat could normalization mean? Economically, American business would get a chance to trade profitably in Vietnam, just as our allies do. On the humanitarian level, a normalized American presence in Vietnam could help lead to improved conditions for people in Indochina. They need food and technology. We have both. They don't, in part because we destroyed much of what they had.
Morally, we have an unfulfilled obligation to the people of Indochina. The United States, the country most conspicuously present in Vietnam's destruction, is the nation most conspicuously absent during reconstruction. By refusing to normalize relations, we continue the legal banning of trade, aid, development and exchange programs. We thus make the rebuilding process even harder. Certainly we should help those who flee Indochina. But we should also try to restore the shattered society they are fleeing.
The arguments presented by Daniel C. Arnold and R. Sean Randolph (''Don't Recognize Hanoi,'' Op-Ed Dec.23) are similar to the negative rhetoric voiced by the old China lobby before Richard Nixon chose to alter our policy toward Peking. Messrs. Arnold and Randolph contend that our continuing not to recognize Hanoi contributes to ''geopolitical balance'' and serves our interest in a ''stable, secure Southeast Asia.'' The opposite seems more accurate: our policy contributes to instability and imbalance.
Politically, normalization could diminish Vietnam's great dependence on the Soviet Union, thus readjusting the balance of power more in our favor in Southeast Asia. It could also help prevent further conflict between China and Vietnam. The Chinese are less likely to reinvade Vietnam if their American friends are on good terms with Hanoi. The Chinese need what America now provides, in terms of trade and geopolitics, and are unlikely to give up these advantages if the U.S. chooses to recognize Hanoi.
Not all of Indochina's misery today is Hanoi's fault. In recent years our policy has been to ''squeeze'' Vietnam, to isolate it, perhaps even to help make conditions worse there than that tragic nation would otherwise have endured. It seems clear that Vietnam dominates Laos and Kampuchea now, as it has over the centuries. But to use that as an argument against normalization in 1981, or as a reason to back the genocidal Pol Pot, only fosters continued unrest. Normalization would help signal to China that we will no longer bolster its murderous ally.
The Indochina war was, is and will be a bitter experience for many Americans. Someday we will have to come to terms with what we did there. Candidate Reagan declared our role in that war ''a noble cause.'' President Reagan should consider an even more noble cause - peace. The war is over. Let the peace begin. And that means normalization of relations with Hanoi.
ROBERT RICHTER New York, Dec. 25, 1980 The writer, a former producer at CBS News and ABC News, produced the independent documentary ''Vietnam: An American Journey.''
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Ten Years After -- Vietnam's Legacy: A Decade After War, U.S. Leaders Still Feel Effects of the Defeat --- For Politicians and Military, Avoiding Next 'Vietnam' Guides Policy Decisions --- No Consensus About Lessons
By David Ignatius. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Jan 14, 1985. pg. 1
By David Ignatius
Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Jan 14, 1985. pg. 1
{First of a Series}
WASHINGTON -- In the decade since the Vietnam War ended, the world has changed in ways that no one could have predicted, certainly not the U.S officials of the 1960s who set out to save a shaky regime in a distant nation most Americans knew little about.
Who would have imagined then that Vietnam's arch-enemy today would be China, that Washington and Peking would be friends, that Ronald Reagan would be elected president, twice, and that West Point would be swamped with applicants for admission? Or that a new generation of college students, knowing little about the war, would be eager to learn what the U.S. did in Vietnam and why it lost?
Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong expresses the general sense that things haven't turned out quite as expected. "Yes, we defeated the United States," he says. "But now we are plagued by problems. We do not have enough to eat. We are a poor, underdeveloped nation. Waging a war is simple, but running a country is difficult."
What haven't changed are the painful memories of Vietnam. For people who were involved in the war, the images of America's defeat nearly 10 years ago remain fixed in the mind: Desperate Vietnamese refugees clinging to a helicopter. The frantic evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, where Americans climbed over the backs of Vietnamese in their rush to flee the country. The thousands of South Vietnamese allies left by the U.S. to the mercy of Hanoi.
"It was one of the blackest days for my country I had ever seen or could imagine," says retired U.S. Army Gen. Andrew Goodpaster, 69, who served as deputy commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam during the late 1960s. Like other Americans, he watched the final collapse in April 1975 on television.
A decade after Vietnam, the war still hurts. The wound hasn't healed. "No more Vietnams" has become a guiding principle -- some would say a crippling obsession -- of American foreign policy. Yet there is no consensus, even now, about what went so wrong in Vietnam or how the U.S. can use military power abroad without making similar mistakes.
The soul-searching over Vietnam extends even to the Reagan cabinet. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger argues that the nation should avoid future Vietnams by fighting only popular, winnable wars; Secretary of State George Shultz counters that the U.S. must be ready to use force, even in ambiguous situations, to support its interests.
Vietnam frightened America. It was the nation's first defeat in war, and it made Americans more cautious and less certain about the world. Indeed, in the decade after Vietnam, the U.S. has been wary of military commitments and uncharacteristically worried about the future. The perceived hesitation and drift in foreign policy came to be known as "the post-Vietnam syndrome."
The after-effects of the war can be seen clearly in the two groups that were most involved in running it: the military and the foreign-policy establishment. Both groups waged war in the mid-1960s with bravado and conviction but suffered crises of confidence after the defeat, attacked as they were by the left as warmongers and by the right as losers.
Vietnam set America wobbling. Television brought the killing and the seeming futility of the conflict into every home and sparked public protest, and some old values and institutions were weakened. Much of the public came to distrust the country's leaders, especially those who had involved America in Vietnam. Congress distrusted the executive branch. And press reports fostered an atmosphere of suspicion. The tradition of bipartisan foreign policy disintegrated.
Harold Brown, who was Air Force secretary during President Johnson's buildup in Vietnam and later was President Carter's secretary of defense, explains: "There was more than a loss of confidence among the foreign-policy elite, there was a loss of legitimacy. And it wasn't just the defeat in Vietnam that did it, it was the backbiting that followed."
The acrimony continues. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security adviser, says the old establishment lost its will to rule, and that it now wants the U.S. to be loved rather than feared and respected.
"The Vietnam War contributed to a loss of self-confidence and moral self-righteousness with which any elite has to be imbued. Today, the members of the old elite are self-searching, agonizing, apologizing," Mr. Brzezinski says.
"Baloney," responds McGeorge Bundy, who was national security adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. He says of the Brzezinski critique of the establishment: "The people I know who fit into that category -- including me -- don't strike me as demoralized." Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk dismisses the Brzezinski argument as "manure."
Ronald Reagan, who called the war "a noble cause," entered the White House in 1981 hoping to end the post-Vietnam syndrome. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger argues that Mr. Reagan's election itself was part of the national reaction to Vietnam. "Vietnam put in motion such a weakening of America and created so many frustrations that a reaction to the right was inevitable," Mr. Kissinger says.
President Reagan may have eased the residual pain of Vietnam, with his patriotic talk about standing tall. But certain problems of the post-Vietnam era remain, especially the absence of bipartisan foreign policy. The bitter debates of the past four years over Lebanon, Central America and arms control suggest that the old consensus is dead.
"One of Mr. Reagan's achievements is that he has undone much of the damage we have suffered," says Mr. Kissinger. "But he can't undo the sequence of events -- Angola, Iran, Afghanistan, Nicaragua -- which were the indirect consequences of Vietnam. The fact that we have such difficulty today discussing Central America in strategic terms -- as opposed to abstract moral terms -- is a burden Reagan must carry."
Richard Holbrooke, a politically liberal former State Department official who spent three years in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, sums up how the war changed America's image of itself:
"I grew up in school believing that the United States had never lost a war. My children don't think that. I grew up thinking that the United States was the strongest country on earth. My kids think that maybe Russia is. Suddenly we became fallible."
Looking back at the war and the civilian strategists who haggled over every bombing target, Mr. Holbrooke concludes: "The basic, simpleminded American view was right: Win it or get out."
Vietnam was a "limited" war run by civilians for strategic goals. President Kennedy began a slow escalation of U.S. involvement in 1961 by sending military advisers to help South Vietnam resist a Communist insurgency sponsored by North Vietnam. President Johnson sent troops in increasing numbers starting in 1965. At the peak of the war in April 1969, there were 543,000 U.S. military personnel in Vietnam.
John McNaughton, at the time an assistant secretary of defense, described American goals in a March 24, 1965, memo: "U.S. aims: 70% -- to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat . . . 20% -- to keep South Vietnam (and then adjacent) territory from Chinese hands; 10% -- to permit the people of South Vietnam to enjoy a better, freer way of life." That, of course, was not the way it was presented to the public. And, in the end, 58,014 Americans had died.
As the war proceeded, anti-war protest erupted on campus and then in Congress. In 1969, President Nixon began the process of disengagement, which he called "Vietnamization." The 1973 Paris peace agreement ended the direct American combat role. But fighting continued between North and, South and on April 30, 1975, Saigon fell to North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces.
In 1974, Brig. Gen. Douglas Kinnard surveyed the attitudes of 108 of the 173 U.S. Army generals who served in Vietnam from 1965 to 1972. He had just retired from the Army himself and was gathering material for his doctoral dissertation. The Kinnard findings suggested the frustration the brass still felt about Vietnam.
Almost 70% of the Army generals said that U.S. objectives in the war weren't clear, and 52% said that the stated objectives couldn't be achieved. Also, 91% said that if the U.S. ever planned to fight such a war again, it should start by deciding what it wanted to accomplish.
Vietnam severely hurt the U.S. Army, the service that did most of the fighting and lost the most men. The war sapped Army morale, eroded discipline, and embittered both officers and enlisted men. Some soldiers returning home in uniform from Vietnam were heckled and spat upon. The experience taught a generation of officers that the Army had best avoid future Vietnams.
As Gen. Goodpaster puts it: "Many Army people feel that there is something immoral about sending young men to fight and die in war that our country isn't prepared to support. I think the Army leadership doesn't want to see that happen again."
America before Vietnam -- a nation where a confident elite ran foreign policy and expected the rest of the country to follow -- lives on in Dean Rusk's office at the University of Georgia. On the wall behind the former Secretary of State, peering over his shoulder, are portraits of the men he worked under at the State Department during the late 1940s and early 1950s -- George C. Marshall, Dean Acheson, Robert Lovett, and John Foster Dulles.
These were the men who had shaped what Henry Luce once called "the American Century." They had helped accomplish heroic deeds: vanquishing Hitler, rescuing Europe, containing Stalin's expansion. Mr. Rusk says that when he became secretary of state in 1961, he was conscious that he was heir to a great tradition.
"I was part of a generation that had been given heavy responsibility during and after World War II," he says. "During the 1930s, we had been led down the path to a war that could have been prevented. We came out of World War II thinking that the key to preventing World War III was collective security."
As Mr. Rusk desribes the doctrine of collective security, he reassembles the premises that he says led the U.S. into Vietnam. Collective security meant forming alliances and signing mutual-security treaties. Maintaining those alliances required the U.S. to demonstrate its credibility. The logic of credibility was such that if the U.S. didn't honor its treaty commitment to, say, South Vietnam, it would appear weak and unable to defend what mattered most -- the Atlantic alliance.
It may seem a peculiar notion that to protect Europe the U.S. had to go to war in the jungles of Southeast Asia. But there was almost universal agreement among the foreign-policy establishment that the U.S. should draw the line in South Vietnam.
Mr. Rusk says he still has no mea culpa to offer about the U.S. attempt to limit the spread of communism in Asia in keeping with the provisions of the now-defunct Southeast Asia Treaty Organization.
"If you stand back and look at it," Mr. Rusk concludes, "the U.S. went halfway around the world, lost 50,000 dead and 300,000 casualties, to make good on the promise of the SEATO treaty. Because of that, people still have to bear in mind, even in Moscow, the possibility that those damn fool Americans might do it again."
After Vietnam, the U.S. sought a new approach to foreign policy. The doctrine of collective security, which caused some to regard America as the world's policeman, gave way to the Nixon doctrine of relying on regional allies, such as the Shah of Iran, to maintain local security. That approach failed in Iran during the Carter administration, and Iran became a symbol of American weakness.
If President Reagan has restored an image of strength in foreign policy, it is thanks to his military buildup. But in dealing with regional crises -- especially in Lebanon and Central America -- the administration's foreign policy has seemed confused.
Lebanon illustrates America's continuing difficulty in using military power. It combined unfortunate aspects of Vietnam and Iran: an idealistic but ill-planned strategy, a weak client, and the use of troops for uncertain objectives. The military was wary about the venture from the start, and Congress soon got cold feet.
Lebanon contributed another disturbing image to post-Vietnam foreign policy: the bombed-out rubble of the American Embassy and Marine headquarters of Beirut, which the U.S. couldn't protect and wouldn't avenge.
Gen. Goodpaster argues that the post-Vietnam syndrome isn't all bad. "I think the war made us gun-shy, and I think we need some of that," he says. But he likens post-Vietnam America to Mark Twain's story about the cat that got burned on a hot stove: "Now she won't sit on a hot stove. But she won't sit on a cold stove either."
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