Conversations With Daniel Ellsberg On Why We Go To War
By Arn Menconi, May 2015
Chapter 4
(see also summary)
(time: 0:00)
The very first covert operations by what became the CIA ..., after the covert operations in war time covert operations agency, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) was disbanded by Truman as early I believe as 1945 or 1946, on the grounds that he did not want what he called a "Gestapo". He did not want a domestic spy agency. But then he needed something like that, so this OPC that I mentioned, the Office of Policy Coordination, their first operation was to intervene in the Italian elections of 1948, and French elections, to assure that the Communist Party was not part of a coalition government. Now, with our worry that Italy, which is not contiguous to the Soviet army or to the Warsaw Pact, would become a Soviet satellite ... well, that's what we said, but that was not really realistic and it was not what we were worried about. We just didn't want the Italian Communists to have a left leaning, labor oriented role in Italy which is close to being, you know, it is one of these indirect ruled places. ... Were most Italians Communists? By no means. Were most French Communists? By no means at all. Were they attracted to Marxist doctrines or Stalinist slogans or whatever? No, no worry there. But in Italy and France the Communist Party had the prestige of having been the leading element in the resistance to the Italian Fascists and the German occupation. You get a good deal of prestige in both France and Italy -not by everybody, because some people were quite comfortable with Fascist regime or Nazi occupation- but not the majority. But the majority without being Communist still respected the credentials of the Communist Party that had led the resistance efforts against the German occupation or in the case of Italy the Mussolini Fascist organisation or, when that was overthrown, then there was the German occupation, and again the Communists were leaders to the resistance to that. As they were in Greece.
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So they had a real potential for being part of a government. They were closely allied with the Unions in all these countries. They had the presitige that the Communist Party had in Yugoslavia, where it has led the resistance to the Germans. Or the Chinese Communist Party where in contrast to Chiang the Communist Party had led the resistance to the Japanese occupiers. Or - to mention another obscure part of the world- the Indochinese Communist Party had led the opposition to Japanese occupation and then to the French occupation.
(time 3:41)
So, it was very hard to exclude them from politics, except by covert means. You couldn't openly do it. They were popular, they were legitimate, despite their Marxist dogma ..., which differed from one country to the next..
Our first covert operation after the war was intervention by bribery and coercion and killing or what-not in the Italian elections in 1948, where by the way they passed the hat, this OPC literally kind of passed the hat in meetings what was called "The Metropolitan Club" and other clubs of elite, corporate leaders in Manhattan's Wall Street people. So, money, now ... government ... but it had to be covert. We were supposedly protecting freedom, we weren't supposed to be intervening in elections, democratic elections in an allied country. Italy was now an allied country, and France. So that had to be covert, so the money had to come from outside the government. Nowadays you wouldn't need that, because there is an endless amount of money, black money, inside the budget. But in those days, in 1948, you still didn't have arrangements in a what was somewhat an isolationist Congress for intervention abroad.
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Although FDR in 1944 and earlier had talked to his son, Elliot Roosevelt, and others very critically about the French administration of Indochina, saying that they had left it. It was more poor, less literate, more oppressed than when they had first arrived there, they were not good trustees of the area, they did not deserve to be running Indochina. But by early 1945 in terms of the Big Four, I think they called it, America, Russia, Britain and China, they've come around that they should be able to regain control of Indochina, its colony in Indochina despite their bad record there, in large part - I think- in deference to Winston Churchill. Churchill was very anxious that we not take an anti-colonial attitude towards France or the Dutch or anybody else, because that would reflect on the British empire and their control of India. So, Churchill - who was very close to FDR by this point- was very anxious that the US not take an anti-colonial attitude. ... So FDR had concluded that we would have to back the French, and he told the French, various representatives, that we would after all back them. And that applied to Truman early on, when he came in. In the earliest stage it was just not being anti-colonial in deference to the British to a large extent.
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The desire to re-arm the Germans really took effect for other reasons -that I will be going into- later, in 1949 and 1950. We were financing the French. It was a French-American war, paid almost entirely by America. The Vietnamese knew that, but we Americans didn't know that.
Arn Menconi: In what year would have started this?
Daniel Ellsberg: 1945, 1946. That's why the Pentagon Papers were titled "US decision making in Vietnam 1945 - 1968". It had that title. What decision making were we making? Well, the answer was we were financing the French re-conquering their former colony. Because we wanted to be in good terms with the French so that they would agree to our re-arming Germany, which they had reservations about, because they were invaded twice by Germany.
Arn Menconi: This started under Truman?
Daniel Ellsberg: Oh, absolutely, yes. Oh, it started under FDR. Not at the end of the war, but FDR had already agreed. In 1944 he was telling his son "The French do not deserve to be returned to Indochina. They had been milking that country for a hundred years, the country is poorer and less literate than it was when they started. They do not deserve to have trusteeship. But by early 1945 -FDR still alive and still in power- he realized that for reasons of Real-Politik and geopolitics we had to be close with the French. So, he had already changed the policy that the French return, even before Truman.
Let me leap ahead here, too, because it's so important for Europe: As Khrushchev pointed out to us frequently, nobody except Germans in the West really wanted either a united Germany or a re-armed Germany, although Adenauer (the gentleman we supported in Germany) insisted on a western NATO-US-German policy, had always said "We want a united Germany", and that Germany must be free to have armaments like everybody else to be a great power or at least a power, at least as part of an alliance. But htey have to be free to be armed and they should be united.
(time 10:36)
Now, we wanted that West-Germany be re-armed as part of a NATO alliance that we dominated. We did not particularly want a united Germany any more than France, England, Russia, Belgium, Luxemburg, Holland, anybody else who had been invaded by the Germans. Almost nobody wanted a united Germany at that point, but above all a united armed Germany. People other than us could conceive a united Germany that was disarmed, somehow neutralized, may be under some UN auspices or something. That proposal was made quite a bit - a united but essentially disarmed Germany. But nobody wanted a united armed Germany. Except, in principle, Adenauer and German conservatives and nationalists were for that. But that was not very much of an active ... they did not really want it that much. So, the idea of a united Germany was a myth as an objective that we supported and that Adenauer insisted on as a myth. But the idea of a separate, divided Germany in which both sides were armed, but in separate alliances and thus kept under the control of a dominant superpower -Germany not an independent factor here- that was acceptable on both sides, eventually acceptable.
But initially France was not eager to see that at all, a re-armed Germany, even a re-armed West Germany. So to persuade them to accept a re-armed divided Germany, Western Germany within a NATO alliance, we catered to and supported early French desires -which went across the political spectrum pretty much and initially it wasn't just the right wing French, even the Communists went into this. The French Communists wanted to burnish their nationalist credentials in France by supporting regaining their colony in Indochina. So even the Communists at first, they later changed this, but in the late forties, early forties, even the Communists supported French regaining Indochina. And so we supported that, to get French support for German re-armament. We replaced the French essentially as colonial administration in South Vietnam. And why? Our French ally having been defeated in the north -which has earlier been described as the end, a domino that would knok over all the other dominos, we ... to prevent that as the end of the world, basically. Now we had to accept it as "ok, we can live with that, but no further. They can't take over the south, which they would have been surely to do in the election of 1956, had we allowed that election to take place.
Arn Menconi: As the French are pulling out and there is a Geneva accord that gets signed by everybody but the United States, what was the transition of the United States going in with military force in South Vietnam?
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Daniel Ellsberg: What happened was: There was this arrangement that Bao Dai, the emperor, would be the chief authority in the South, south of the 17th parallel, Ho Chi Minh in the North. For a while the army under Bao Dai, which up to that time had been paid entirely by the French -it worked for the French essentially- against the independence of their own country of Vietnam, they were now in the South, and the question was, who is to pay them. Now we had actually indirectly being financing their pay since basically 1949 or somewhat earlier. We were paying 80% of the French costs of the war, which meant that we were funneling through the French and the French were then getting money to Vietnamese and their own troops and so forth.
As the French troops left, and the Vietnamese who had worked for the French were now regrouped to the South, the French continued to pay them for a while, but very shortly in 1954 the US took over the direct payment. We'd been financing earlier, because we wanted the French to stay in the war and they weren't willing to do it, thus we financed the war. So it was a French-American war, basically. Eventually they said "Even with your paying we want out, we want stop losing troops here, casualties, and we don't want the remaining expenses we have. We want out of that." We essentially took over. We'd already been paying the money, so we started paying it directly.
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A great turning point in our relations with Vietnam was when Chinese Communists took Beijing and most of China in late 1949 and 1950, because the US had regarded the China market as of immense interest to American industry and agriculture for a very long time as William Appleman Williams has shown. A feeling that we needed exports. Our industry and our agriculture produced more than could be absorbed at home and needed export markets and other places to invest and so forth. They'd always seen China as a major market for them ... (?) As China -as we saw it- went behind the Iron Curtain, that was seen as a very great loss economically and politically in this country, in part also, by the way, because it was seen from the missionary point of view. ...
Now, part of this notion that we could have prevented that by some other policy and that had been rejected by the Marshall-Acheson mission in 1947/1948 in China, which had concluded that we didn't have much prospect of affecting the prospective government of China, and that the people we had been allied with during the war under Chiang [Kai-shek], the nationalists under Chiang, was so corrupt and so involved in the dope trade specifically and in financial dealings that they really had no popular following in China -except for their own army- compared to the increasing popularity (?) control by the Communists, who had been much more important in opposing the Japanese in the last stages of the war, whereas Chiang had been concentrating on opposing the Communists, basically, for rivalry within domestic politics in China. And it was Chalmers Johnson, in particular, who was a China scholar working both academically and with the CIA, had put out the thesis that the major basis support that Mao Zedong and the other Communsist had gotten was not based on their revolutionary aspects or their land reform, but on their leadership of a nationalist struggle against Japanese occupation, in other words: it was as nationalist they had really gotten their major support in the population, though it was also connected with land reform, and their basis was more the poor population in China, but very much on a nationalist appeal.
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As was true, by the way, of Ho Chi Minh in his struggle against the French, having much more impact for his support than revolutionary aspects, though those also figured.
After all, the Chinese Communists were almost unique along with the Yugoslav Communists and the Vietnamese Communists in establishing a Communist regime that was not based on Soviet troops, but was based on local forces, and largely -in all three of those cases- on a patriotic, nationalistic appeal as having opposed foreign leaders, the Yugoslavs opposing the Germans, the Chines opposing the Japanese, the Vietnamese Communists opposing the French and later the Americans.
The US, by the way, consistently underrated the nationalist appeal of all of these forces and saw them as having come to power through Communist machination, coercion, terrorism and Communist organizational weapon, their tight cadres, their secrecy, their discipline and so forth.
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So, in the late forties, then, the notion grew up -especially it so happened in Republican circles- that China could have been kept in the capitalist western mould by some foreign support for Chiang. And I want to say they really got very specific about how this should have been done. The Democrats, who were in power at that time under Truman, what Marshall and Acheson were saying was, the future of China was not in our hands, that it would be decided by Chinese, and that actually very strongly favored the movement that was led by Chinese Communists. At one point, when pressed to give more aid than they were giving to the nationalists, Marshall in the report made the comment "We do not believe in toying with the mousetrap", very pressing a phrase which applies to a great deal of what's going on in the last 70 years and what is going on right now, namely, that there is a potential in events for our becoming trapped or enmired or, as the metaphore goes, going into a swamp or quagmire, being caught and being unable to get out and unable to avoid escalation, and the mousetrap as well as the term quagmire suggests something that happens rather abruptly, in a nonlinear fashion, not as a gradual encroachment, that you trigger something that like that you find yourself the door as having closed to an exit, and you have become entrapped in a cell.
(time 33:52)
And so Marshall declined to give any further aid at a certain point to Chiang. It so happens, Acheson's relative by marriage, McGeorge Bundy, whose brother, Bill Bundy, was married to Acheson's daughter - I believe it's correct - McGeorge Bundy edited Acheson's early memoirs, collection of speeches, edited them, wrote a foreword and so forth with great consequences for the future when he became national security assistant to Kennedy and Johnson, (Acheson became Secretary of State under Truman). Acheson was excoriated by Joe McCarthy and others, many other Republicans, for "having lost China". McGeorge Bundy drew the conclusion that Acheson had made himself particularly vulnerable by refusing to do almost anything after a certain point to help Chiang to avert the Communist victory, that he could be charged with having had a no-win policy, but especially of having done nothing that could have been done. Now, what could have been done? They could have given more economic aid, they could have given more material aid, and there is a spectrum here, an escalation ladder: We could have given advisors, or we could have given specialized combat troops, more intelligence, more communications, and eventually ground troops and air power.
But hardly any really recommended sending ground troops to China, because obviously it was so vast, any manpower they were confronting was so enormous that you couldn't deal with them, they felt, on the level of ground combat troops. I'm not aware of anybody who really recommended that. China just looked too big.
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We made the mistake later ...(?) deciding that Vietnam, which is much smaller than China, was not too big. Actually, it was for what we wanted to do. You could say, Grenada was a very good, bit size choice for Reagan, eventually. It was something we really could deal with on the level of ground troops. But we thought, Vietnam is so much smaller than China, we don't have to be so inhibited sending ground troops, although MacArthur, who had been in charge of the Pacific, of course, in the Second World War, had always advised "Do not send ground troops into Asia. Don't try to deal with Asians with ground troops." Well, what else? Air power, of course. But can air power really deal with a vast country like China? And of course it was not successful in Vietnam, either, or essentially anywhere by itself, without ground troops.
The idea of air enthusiasts that air power alone could win a war has essentially never been validated. It's been a dream on which they based their budget requests and their strategies and so forth all these years that air power could do it by itself. But it really never has.
What is not mentioned in the whole dispute about who lost China and what could have been done, is that this was all coming to public attention just a few years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now, actually at that point we had very few atom bombs, by which I mean -figures differ- but we are talking about dozens, very small number. I think by 1950 (I have to check this), it took til about 1949 or 1950 to get up to the level of a hundred. After that it got very much larger very quickly because new production facilities were put into it and the numbers got quite large. But in the late 1940s they were fairly small. Even so, you can say a hundred, if you use them on cities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki you kill a lot of people ... (?).
Almost never in the discussion to this day the question of using atom bombs used against China is mentioned at all. And yet it's hard for me to believe that the Republicans, when they talked about we possibly could have held onto China, I think they have to have been thinking of atom bombs, and oddly it just hasn't surfaced one way or the other. If not that, what were they willing to do? Yes, you had a big nationalist army, but it has proven itself very impotent compared to the Communist army at that point. So, just improving that ... I remember that Herman Kahn once told me that he thought -who had been an enlisted man in the CBI theater (China-Burma-India) somehow, but somehow it got me the impression ... and Andy Marshall who remained important almost to the last year in Pentagon things into his 90s had said that if you could have handled the corruption in China simply by controlling the finances, the US being the paymaster, and controlling all the payments to the troops and everybody else, and curtailing the corruption, that could have made a big difference. All this is very unlikely. I think Marshall is essentially right as he said the future belonged as of 1948 and 1949 to the Communists, and there wasn't anything we could do about it.
I'm going on about this, because -you see- that was disputed -and always has been disputed- mainly by Republicans who have not been specific about what they really thought could have been done and presumably does not mean a huge ground employment. It had to be air power, and that basically had to be nuclear. And yet, I am saying, that -as far as I can tell-, that is totally missing, it's underground, it's got to be tacid.
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In December of 1949 and in 1950 the Chinese Communists reached the borders of Indochina in their control. From that point on -as an unindicted co-conspirator of mine, Vo Van Thai, who was under the generals an ambassador to the US from Vietnam and later a human (?) economic expert in Africa. What he told me at one point was -and this was also true of another expert, Hoang Van Chi, who wrote a book "From Colonialism to Communism". The way Thai put it, the war then became unwinnable for the French or the Americans because you could not essentially cut off the supply lines into Vietnam from their Communist supporters in China or Russia. [see also pages 286ff in Robert S. McNamara, "In Retrospect - The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam" - J.G.]. Support from East Europe, China and then Russia came through China on the whole, although some of it came through Cambodia and some through Haiphong port. But most of it came through China, and a lot of it came from China itself.
At that point -in other words- you could not cut off Communist led forces, nationalist forces in [South] Vietnam from supply from Communist supporters elsewhere, externally, in China or Europe or Russia. Which meant, you couldn't really beat them. Even if you drove them out of Vietnam they could go into China and operate from sanctuaries there ... you couldn't really defeat them. It wasn't an island that you could isolate. Cuba, for example, we always had the ability of fighting guerillas in Cuba, we could surround Cuba from any external supply, and that would make it a significantly different prospect in any guerilla operations of Vietnam. But Vietnam with its borders with Laos and Thailand and Cambodia and with China above all could not be isolated from its external supplies. So that was a major factor in the inability to win, to actually defeat Communist forces there.
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But ironically, as Vo Van Thai put it, at the same time it became impossible politically, or extremely costly politically for the US to accept defeat, because it would be defeat in part at the hands of China, and we had just lost China in 1949, 1950. In other words the Chinese Communists had just taken over there. At that point now it became very costly for the Democrats who were now accused of having lost China - that was a major charge against them (I'll come back to that) in 1950-, it was at that point that Acheson, who was now Secretary of State, said to various people in charge of Southeast Asia in the State Department "It must be taken for granted that the Communists do not advance any further". So it became very politically costly to imagine adding the loss of Indochina to Communist control to the loss of China.
So, at the very point now when the Communists in Indochina became unbeatable, it also became essential not to lose to them, which meant stalemate became very much more preferable to getting out. And stalemate was the most you could get. So the future now was for a ..., it could be seen by people who understood in this way, for a very prolonged stalemated war. An escalating war, increasingly basically stalemated in terms of the areas of who controlled what.
Arn Menconi: You have to clarify how Truman lost China.
Daniel Ellsberg: The Communists took power and he hadn't prevented it. That's the argument. Could he have prevented it? No. Could he have done more? Oh, ya, he could have a tremendous lot more. But won? No.
Remember: It's a kind of an insane story.
Arn Menconi: Were editorials supporting this story?
Daniel Ellsberg: Yes. Actually, a key aspect of it was a series of articles. I'll mention one of them. The Republicans, who had every prospect of winning the 1948 election on a number of grounds, they totally expected to win the elections, to the extent as the famous headline, the Chicago Tribune Dewey headline, had Dewey winning. They didn't have a Truman version.
By the way: I just made that up. I've never seen the question asked ... very often they have alternate headlines, depending on who will win the election. I've never seen anybody ask: "Did the Chicago Tribune have a Truman headline, or had they only prepared the front page in which Dewey won?" I think, the latter. My guess is: the latter. They lost, now they are desperate.
Here is what actually happened. The Chinese take power in late 1949. They win the fight, essentially, Chiang's army is gone over to Taiwan, they escaped to Taiwan. The Chinese now have control of all of China, essentially from December '49 on. In early '50 Joseph Alsop has a series of articles in the Saturday Evening Post, which was then one of the very major journals, perhaps the most widely read journal, of who lost China. How did it happen? In early '50, the Chinese just won. A number of things come together at this point. I don't want to go into all of that ... The "Who Lost China" thing comes in _ I think for the first time, essentially, in those articles. Robert Taft, who is the frontrunner and Mister Republican still at that point and very much the leader of the Republican Party, and who'd been a quite respectable guy in many ways, he is not a wild man, a decent conservative, who I was very opposed to because I was working to be a union organizer or union economist -that was what I was doing in college then- and Taft was the author of the Taft-Hartely Bill, which made him the devil as far as I was concerned. So, I hated Taft at that point. But looking back on it, Taft had a lot going for him. Not the Taft-Hartley Bill, that was bad for me. I still regard that as bad. But on international things he was much more conservative, he wasn't a big interventionist. He was called an isolationist, because he wasn'r for going to war all over the place.
(time 39:53)
Taft was -as I say- regarded as a guy with generally clean hands. But in the spring of '50 he did not have clean hands. ... He was the number one guy in the Senate. But now, Dewey having lost twice, I believe, (I think Dewey ran twice, he probably ran in '44 also and lost again in '48.) So now Taft is the frontrunner through the Republicans, and they really are desperate at this point. Taft picks up the "Who Lost China" in '50, just after the Chinese have come in. It's at that point where Acheson, he's now Secretary of State, says to a high-level guy "It is to be taken for granted that we will not accept any further advance of Communists in Asia. Now we get to draw the line". That meant Indochina, basically. "We're not get to let Indochina go." This is under the Democrats.
(time 41:25)
So, they greatly upped their aid to France at that point. The military aid grows a lot higher. France by '50 is almost ready to get out, actually. He says "No, no, no! You can't get out". So we have to pay them, we pay the war. It's a colonial war, but we pay the cost for it. Here we are the big anti-imperialist nation! So we're now paying all the costs, because we -, we don't want to fight, we want France to fight for us to keep that from going Communist.
Joe McCarthy, then, comes into prominence in precisely this time -more or less by coincidence. And I won't go through the whole list there, but it is in February of 1950 when Joe McCarthy holds up in West Virginia and says "I have here in my hand a list", which he never showed, and he first said 22, and then a hundred "card-carrying Communists in this State Department". Now, they never found one card-carrying Communist currently in the State Department, ever. But he had 22, 58, 106, something, never allowed anybody to see this list, just held it up in the air! "I have here in my hand ..."
(time 42:41)
Ok, the dirtiest politics there could be. Taft, Mr. Clean, he is called "Mr. Clean" as well as "Mr. Republican", is saying to Joe McCarthy "Keep at it, Joe! If you fail with one set of charges, come up with another!" That is almost an exact quote. "Keep hammering!" The dirtiest possible politics, and they're going after the State Department's homosexuals and reds. How could that have happened, how could we have lost China - before Korea- except -and this is what McCarthy is saying, and Weary and Noland and various others, Taft didn't use these exact words himself, he let the others do it- except by an act of treason so horrendous, the greatest treason in the history of mankind! They were claiming in effect that Marshall, the most respected man in America practically, competed with Eisenhower, was deemed a Communist dupe, an Architect of Treason. He was Eisenhower's mentor and superior. But not just the superior, he was his idol, Eisenhower's idol, basically. But when Eisenhower runs in '52 in Acheson's and McCarthy's calling in Wisconsin, he's calling Marshall "Traitor! Architect of Treason!", this and that, and Eisenhower was going to denounce McCarthy in Wisconsin, to seperate himself from this, I should say: defend Marshall, and he is persuaded to take that out of his speech. He does not contradict McCarthy. (This is when he was running for president, 1952, that's little later.)
(time 44:40)
With all this going in early '50 - the Russians have exploded an atom bomb in August of 1949. The scientists have predicted in '45, they were saying "in 4 years they'll have it". But even the scientists, since it wasn't happening, we didn't have any intelligence coming in - those were 4 years in the future, it was a rolling deadline. They had said, it would take them 4 years, and that's what it did take them, but it came as a surprise, especially to the country - and even to a lot of scientists. "Oh, my God, the Russians, these backward people, have now got an atom bomb!". The sky is falling. So, we go for the H-bomb. That's a big story - that's going to be a large part of my book. We go for the H-bomb in early '50. Truman, he can't really resist it, because the Republicans are pressig him on this, we've got to overmatch, we've got to overbid the Russians. So we've got to have an H-bomb, maybe they're already working on it. We've got to have it before they do.
Second: The atom bomb spies come out: Fuchs confesses in Britain that he was a spy in the Manhattan Project ever since. Fuchs's trial is in January or February. The Chinese have just taken over in China. All this is in '50. That's all very embarrassing to the Democrats. And then Taft and McCarthy pick up this "Who lost China". In the spring of '50 it becomes a big thing. In June, I think it was June, North Korea invades South Korea. Now, under these circumstances are we going to let them take South Korea, Communists in North Korea being allowed to take South Korea? No.This is in '50, all this is happening at the same time. And there is a lot more to it at that point. In other words: the Cold War becomes cast in iron, practically, in the spring of 1950.
(time 47:34)
Let me see if I can say very briefly a number of points before I elaborate on them. What people still don't understand about North Vietnam. One is a very general one, that this was all part of an imperial policy, meaning part of the policy in which the president of the United States, the executive branch, supported by Congress and the media on the whole, and then the public, thought of the United States, that is the government, having the right and the capability to determine the governments of other countries not by their popular consent or by election or even by influencing their media in various ways, but by essentially determining with a variety of means definitely including violent means, illegitimate means of intervention in their affairs that would determine who rules that country. And, of course, the point of that was that we wanted governments in those countries that served our interests, and when I say "our" I mean of course the interests of factions that were dominant in our own country, the interests of our own corporate sales, investments, profits abroad, and very largely along with that the interests of our military in being able to project power abroad and in terms of bases all over the world and relationships with local militaries, that will enable us to project power all over the world. But, again, to what effect? Essentially to run the world to the extent possible in the interest of our economy. And a derivative of that was the domestic political interest of the administration, since we were running an imperial policy where success or failure of an administration was largely measured by the electorate, as manipulated by the media, by speeches in Congress, moves in Congress, in terms of whether the US was succeeding in its imperial interests. In other words, when governments arose for whatever reason that were against our business investments, our trade investments abroad, that was seen as a failure of the American Administration, and the interests of the politicians in both, in Congress and Executive, in keeping their jobs thus reflected the degree to which these served these imperial purposes. That, of course, has been a constant certainly throughout the Post-World War II period, when we emerged as incomparably the leading power in the world in terms of wealth and ability to project military force, ability to give aid in various ways. So that the idea appeared plausible that a US Adminsitration, the Democrats under Truman, had "lost China", this vast country, as if we had indeed a right to decide who should rule China, and an ability to do that. Both points were remarkably ridiculous and absurd, and yet potent in our domestic politics, as if Harry Truman could have prevented that.
(time 52:00)
And no president has wanted to face similar charges again. I think even Harry Truman's inability to run again facing charges that he lost China has been misinterpreted by Lyndon Johnson. He didn't want to be charged with losing Vietnam, he said, the way that Truman had been charged with losing China. But he ignored the immediate cause of Truman's being so weak politically that he couldn't even run in 1952 and had given way to Adlai Stevenson, was not immediately China but Korea. Korea was a stalemated and hopeless unnecessary war as far as the American were concerned that he had gotten involved in as his response to the charges that he had lost China. In other words, he couldn't afford losing another country. Thus he got us into Korea, a place in which we had no vital interest, and where he could not prevail against the Chinese intervention on their border. Whether they should have intervened is another matter, but it was certainly not unlikely that almost any country facing these armed invasions of a neighbor coming up to their own borders by essentially a hostile power would have tried to protect their borders as the Chinese did. It was the fact that he was embroiled in a stalemated war in Korea. It was a bloody ... war that made Truman's position untenable. In trying to avoid what he saw as Truman's mistake of vulnerability, I should say, actually he reproduced Truman's predicament almost exactly. He went into Vietnam in a big way, produced a war that was even bigger than Korea, actually, the number of troops involved, and was again hopelessly stalemated like Korea, in order to avoid the charge that he had lost Vietnam. He got us into a Korea-like war just like Truman, and like Truman he was not able to run in 1968 for his second term.
(time 54:47)
Arn Menconi: Why did Eisenhower want us be a proxy ...
Daniel Ellsberg: Essentially for the reason I gave: for good relations with France above all, up to '54 when he offered the French three atom bombs. They weren't H-bombs yet, three nulear weapons to protect them at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The French turned them down, but that's another story (see below after time 1:11:51). Eisenhower had offered that. The French then were forced out of Indochina, and we took over the French financing of the colonial army that had fought against independence for the French, and that [i.e. the colonial army, J.G.] became known as ARVN, Army of the Republic of Vietnam. And that was not to allow the resistance movement that had just beaten the French -not stalemated, but beaten the French- to take over the South where they were at that point very popular, because their leader, Ho Chi Minh, was a Communist.
His lieutenants, the other people around him, the movement was led by Communists. Most of the people in it were not Communists, they'd fought against the French. But the movement was led by Communists, and if they with their popularity as an independence movement, the Vietnamese independence movement, under what was then known more or less a George Washington of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, if they took over the whole country, then he -Eisenhower- would be accused of having lost Vietnam, the way he and Nixon, I should say Nixon, his Vice-President, had accused Harry Truman of losing China. Now, since they had come into office precisely on that charge, the previous president had lost a country to Communists, they were not at all anxious to see them faced with exactly the same charge, which they would have been by the Democrats, by the way, to get them back in, of having lost Vietnam to Communists. The French just lost North Vietnam, but Eisenhower was determined not to lose South Vietnam.
We were deluded, we believed in the Domino Theory. We thought they would take over all of Indochina. Bullshit! The CIA never told a president that they will take over all of Indochina, let alone even further Malaysia, Thailand and so forth. The Domino Theory was never endorsed as a probability. For the reason I'd given you: that they did not want the president in office, when Saigon became, or what it did become later, Ho Chi Minh City. He did not want to be there when the Communist flag flew over Saigon. He'd be accused to be the person that lost Saigon.
Now it is true that Johnson said privately to Henry Cabot Lodge (Republican, ambassador to Saigon at that time) within a week of Kennedy's assassination, he was back in Washington and Lyndon Johnson, the new president, said to him "I'm not going to be the president who lost Vietnam the way the Democrats lost China". Even more than that. What he said precisely was "I am not going to be the first American president to lose a war". And he didn't.
(time 58:37)
The fear that Republicans would charge the Democrats with having lost some new area to Communism, Communist control, unnecessarily, that could and should have been averted by some Democratic military action which they hadn't taken, the fear of that charge was present, I think, in Democratic minds from beginning to end in this particular conflict, in Vietnam. They did not want to be charged with having lost Vietnam to Communism, and for that matter the Republicans, who had used that against the [Democrats] up to Truman, did not want to be charged with the same failure by the Democrats. They were sure the Democrats would pick up that weapon against them, that charge, just as Nixon himself had done or would do if he were out of power. So the incumbents, whether Democrat or Republican, were always afraid of being charged with having lost Vietnam the way that the Republicans had charged the Democrats with having lost China, and then -you bring in Korea- with having gotten us into a stalemated war which they were unwilling to win in Korea.
Now, Eisenhower did not come into office determined to win in Korea in the sense of pushing the Communists back, as MacArthur had briefly sought to do in the fall of 1950. So the Republicans didn't charge with that, but Eisenhower did use -with Nixon watching as his Vice President- the threat of nuclear weapons, if the Communists did not accept what he thought were acceptable terms. If they demanded terms that were dishonorable to us. In particular the issue in Korea was the Communists wanted us to repatriate, give back, a large number of North Korean and Chinese prisoners that we had ... Eisenhower deemed that this would be dishonorable, and unless they were willing to let these prisoners stay in South Korea, if they wanted to, we would be dishonorably sending them back to prison or to Communist-type conditions, which were like prison for everybody. We couldn't do that. So unless they accepted our terms that the Communist prisoners could stay, he was prepared to use nuclear weapons to force our expansion in the war, or if they launched a new offensive.
(time 1:01:42)
This was an early instance where a US threat of nuclear first use, that is initiating nuclear war, was used to political effect, and Eisenhower and Nixon believed that this had been critical in getting them an armistice agreement, or a ceasefire agreement in Korea. That the nuclear threat had been effective. Now, that's very much challenged by historians who looked at that. They said "The outcome would have been much the same without any nuclear threat, and that was not critical in the minds of the Communists", and actually that's hard to determine. We don't have enough data on the Communist side to have a very strong opinion. But what is not understood by most people and is important, is that Eisenhower and Nixon believed that their threat of initiating nuclear war had been critical in getting them the seizefire they wanted, the terms that they wanted, and that encouraged them to do it in other circumstances ... In the Taiwan Straits Crisis over Kinmen, the off-shore islands in '54 or '55 and in 1958, they continued to use this threat, and in Indochina, and that is almost never understood by anybody up to this day. ...
From the Geneva Accords in 1954, which provided a separation of regroupment zones, a tentative conditional separation of North Vietnam and South Vietnam at the 17th Parallel in Vietnam, that that was understood not as creating two separate countries. In fact, that was denied in every document relating to them. There was not a permanent separation into a North and a South Vietnam as two different countries, but rather simply a provisional adminsitrative situation where Communist troops south of the 17th Parallel would go north for a period, would regroup, separate, and the colonial troops under the French that were in North Vietnam, north of the 17th Parallel, would come south, tentatively.
(time 1:04:34)
But all of this was a provision awaiting an election no later than 1956, two years away. The Communists would have liked it sooner, but the Western side got it to be put off for two years. That would determine ... (?) Vietnam as one country, in which both Communists in the South and Non-Communists would run for election and determine who would run Vietnam as one country. That's what the Geneva Accords called for.
Let me say this in 5 minutes. In the Geneva agreements the Communist-led forces in the south, I'll call it South-Vietnam, because that's what it became, but at the moment it was just the southern administrative district of Vietnam, below the 17th Parallel, they are regrouped to the North provisionally, for a limited period, until elections in '56, so that there won't be - the idea was, by the way, to prepare for these elections without having the risk of the "Bandidos and Crusadors" getting into firefights, in different turfs. We'll separate the two forces, so then we won't have Communists fighting looking at Frech colonial forces in the South and in the North. We'll put the French colonial forces in the South and the Communist-led forces, even though they are Southerners, will go north for two years, before and till the election. So, we'll separate the armed forces and the political camps.
The North of course then continues to build up and organize now as regular forces what were guerilla forces up to then from '45 to '54. So now they were more regular, conventional forces, and they get some armament form the East, Europe and so forth. They are getting more into regular forces. The colonial forces have been organized not as guerillas but as regular forces all along. But they'd been fighting for the French. Their morale as Nationalists, their prestige is in the toilet, because they've been beaten by the Communists, and they were fighting for the French. So they have no prestige, and their morale is not very good. And they are not very good soldiers.
So in a fight between the South Vietnamese forces -which are the former colonial forces- and the Ho Chi Minh's forces it would be like the Russians walking into Berlin. In other words, the North Vietnamese forces would go through them like a knife through butter. They were nothing without foreign air support and perhaps foreign troops, as they had in the North French troops. Now there is no longer the French troops, and there's not yet American troops. So, South Vietnam is now "defended" if it came to a military issue, which is not supposed to happen, because elections are coming But if there were a military issue, the South would be occupied by the North very quickly, in days, weeks.
But it doesn't happen. Why doesn't it happen? Well, first of all, there is no elections. Diem with our support, our determination, says "No, I'm not going to observe the Geneva Accords. There's not going to be any elections. They couldn't be free in the North." That's rather true, it's kind of a police state, a very popular police state, South is also a police state. When Diem does go for election thanks to my later boss Ed Lansdale who persuades him to go for an election against Bao Dai, he wins in the Saigon area by 104% of registered voters, and Lansdale said to him "Don't do this, it doesn't look good! 60% is very good. 60% is all you need, 70%. You do not need 99%, and you definitely do not need 104%." "No" [says] Diem, like other people, "That wouldn't be fair, elections up in the North, therefore there can be no election."
(time 1:09:15)
Well, as everybody understood, the fairer you make it, the bigger the majority for Ho Chi Minh. They didn't rely on police state for Ho Chi Minh to win an election. Definitely not. They didn't have elections in the North, not because he wasn't popular, but because Communists do not believe in elections - a whole different approach to things. But could he have won an election at that time? Absolutely, nobody disagreed, and in the South as well. I mean, there were pictures of Ho Chi Minh in every hovel, every hut in the South, practically. I exaggerate a little bit, except in the catholic areas.
So, he is very popular in the South, as much as in the North. So, there is no elections. So, now you have North Vietnam and South Vietnam, and the North now has been denied the elections, which led them to stop the war, the fighting. That was the agreement: there would be elections, otherwise they could have kept fighting and won the whole war. Why did the North not come down to the South and simply take it over? There is really only one reason: American airpower from carriers in Guam armed with nuclear weapons. Was that threat explicit? Yes. Massive retaliation! Nuclear weapons are conventional weapons as to the Eisenhower doctrin. It's just like bullets, use them everywhere. Our main use of our forces are defensive, the Free World "is based primarily, though not exclusively, on nuclear weapons". That was the top secret basic national security policy. Our war plans called for the use of nuclear weapons from US carriers in Guam and possibly Okinawa, wherever, in the event of North Vietnamese aggression against South Vietnam. Those were the plans.
I'm coming to the end of my 5 minutes here. Was that just a bluff? Well, not in their minds. I have no doubt that Eisenhower and Dulles, I know from other matters during the period, the Taiwan Straits, Korea and so forth, they absolutely accepted plans, and the plans were for the use of nuclear weapons.
(time 1:11:51)
Now, here's something that essentially no one says, except me, and I think this one other book of David Kaiser, I believe this is the one. Nothing else kept the North from simply continuing the war as they had. No one would have disputed, by the way, the legitimacy of their doing this after the Geneva Accords were flouted, violated by the US and South Vietnam. Those were the conditions for ending fighting, ok? Not going to have elections, fighting resumes. If fighting resumes, they walk down the coast of South Vietnam and simply take it. There would have been essentially no more resistance than ISIS just got in Tikrit, or than they got in 1975 with people clinging to the helicopters, and so forth. Essentially no resistance.
The only thing they faced was what they faced at Dien Bien Phu, when Eisenhower offered 3 atomic weapons - they didn't have H-bombs then yet- to the French, 2 for Dien Bien Phu and 1 for China. That was the idea according to Bidault. He was offered this by Dulles, orally. He said "use at Dien Bien Phu, where we're surrounded, is too close to French troops, too dangerous to French troops, too much from radiation and so forth, and against China that would lead to incalculable consequences. Now, China didn't have nuclear weapons then, but they were then a close ally of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union did have nuclear weapons. So the Soviets would either reply with nuclear weapons or move elsewhere, walk into Berlin, that was always one of the things they could do. If we did something very aggressive, they always have the choice of waking up the next morning and West Berlin is now part of unified Berlin inside East Germany. And they could do other things. So the French refused it.
The French then don't save Dien Bien Phu with nuclear weapons, which in the short run they could have done, presumably now is a nuclear war ... Nixon was for that, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff very much for that. Eisenhower had offered the weapons, but wasn't that unhappy to have them refused. He wasn't a fan of this idea. That's the big story at Dien Bien Phu.
Dien Bien Phu over, the French say "That's it! We've had it. We want out of here". And Dien Bien Phu falls on virtually the first day of the Geneva Conference, which wouldn't necessarily have come to much without that. But with Dien Bien Phu falling right on the first or second day or so of the Conference, the French say, "OK, that's it. What are the terms we can get here?" And they argued over whether the dividing line should be the 17th Parallel or the 15th, or the 14th, and whether the electionsshould be in '56 or '55 or '54, and actually they got their way, pretty much.
(time 1:15:12)
One last minute on this: Militarily, if there was going to be a seizefire, Ho Chi Minh, the Viet Minh had the cards on this and could have pressed for very much better terms, gotten the dividing line down further south, and they would have had the control of Quang Tri and ... (?), the northern most provinces, and they would have had soon elections, since that's what they wanted. The Chinese and the Russians, at that moment, in 1954, wanted better relations with the US, and they wanted to defer to Dulles and the others, and they twisted the arms of the Communists to give in on most of the bargaining points, so as not to continue the war, to get this one behind us and now we can have ... they wanted -they didn't get- the Chinese and the Russians, both wanted, so they both twisted the arms of the Vietnamese and say "Accept the 17th Parallel, accept 1956, accept various things. Let's get that over with". The Vietnamese were very unhappy, the Viet Minh, but they had to accept it because they relied on Chinese and Russian material and finance at that point. So they accepted it unhappily.
The US then decides "We're now not going for 1956. We're going to violate that treaty", which they hadn't signed. But the legal aspects of this didn't matter. Dulles did say, we did make an undertaking. "We will not obstruct the Geneva Accords agreements by armed force. We will not engage in hostilities to overturn." We then build up a South Vietnamese military force, we pour in military aid of every kind. We support Diem as he proceeds to execute, exile, torture or detain everyone who had supported the Viet Minh beforehand, whether they were Communists or not, and most of them were not. They were against the French, but they weren't Communists. But [because of] the fact that they had been for the independence, for the Communist movement, he kills them, deports them, tortures, does every kind of thing -call that violence- to keep the Accords from being accepted, keep the elections from occurring, because these people were in favor of elections which they expected to win, and which they would have won. So, he destroys that support for the elections. Ok, that is why.
(time 1:17:55)
So then, the Communists keep saying to the Russians and the Chineses "Come on, aren't you going to fight for us to get these elections?" And the Russians and the Chinese: "Ah no, not really, you know." And they don't really give them any real support. So they [the Vietnamese] are very mad at the Russians and Chineses, but they still depend on them.
So now, what I'm drawing to is the following conclusion, which is: A success for nuclear threats, which didn't have to be 100% credible, may be have to be just sufficiently credible, a success for nuclear threats in the post-war era, in the Cold War, was that the North Vietnamese army did not invade South Vietnam. Which they had a right to do, would have liked to do, wanted to do, and it would have been good for everybody, if they had, actually. It would have avoided the war. We'd get to where we are now, without much violence if any. The other sides would have just evaporated in front of them. They just walk down and take it. And we wouldn't have had the Vietnam war, the second phase of the Vietnam war.
(time 1:19:11)
Western Europe is another question. That was also our threat. We threatened with nuclear weapons in Europe in two circumstances - and I want to say, if we ever talk about Europe, there is a third one with even greater importance, and it's rarely discussed. But the ... circumstances were these:
(time 1:23:51)
The US has never challenged the question, actually, of whether we had a right or along with it an ability to determine the government of other countries. In many cases we have actually been quite successful without having the right -that's especially in Central America and parts of Latin America- when we were able to conduct a covert empire and to determine the government by means that were not legitimate but not public and [we] could disclaim as being our actions and our responsibility. Assassinations, coups by military that we had an ...(?) influence on, paramilitary operations, as in Guatemala, where we organized a fake invasion by CIA rebels. That's what we attempted to do of course in Cuba, but unsuccessfully.
So we do have, we have had an empire in Central America with extremely bloody, repressive dictatorships as in Guatemala, of exploiting the people in the interest of our corporations, essentially, in very brutal imperial fashion. That's the first one.
This is part of an imperial policy whose nature remains hidden to the American public. We look out in the world where the United States does not presume of act to determine the regimes of other countries, and that is untrue, that is what we do presumably do, and we do act on it and sometimes successfully and sometimes unsuccessfully. It's much more apparent to the rest of the world than it is to Americans because our leaders deny it all the time and we're taught in the schools that this is not who we are. We came into being as a nation in opposition to the world's greatest empire, the British Empire, and we think of ourselves as anti-imperial.
How does a country conduct an imperial policy, a democratic country, with the support of a public that thinks of itself as anti-imperial or non-imperial? The answer is: secretly, and with a great deal of lying and thus depends very much on an apparatus that can keep the decision making in government, its aims, its methods, its projects secret and lie about them and be sure that the lies will be not exposed and embarrass the leaders
[A good estimate of the amount that deserved protection for national security was about 5% of what was stamped "Classified". But after a couple of years it is 0.5%, ... What is overclassified is ... after a couple of years 99%, and even at the time 95% that should not be classified. Why is it? A lot of it is because it reveals things that would be -to say the least- embarrassing to the officials, to the administration. I'm talking about bad estimates, mistakes of various kinds, but very quickly coming into criminal actions, deliberate deception of the public on matters of war and peace, very, very serious wrongdoing by the government. For the bulk of the material classified in any given time, the purpose of that is not to protect national security, but to protect the asses of the people who wrote it, to protect their job security, their prestige, their carreers. That's what it's for. To this day, people like Chelsea Manning or Ed Snowden in their presumption when they put out an enormous amount of classified material they must have endangered national security, or why would it be classified. That's the presumption. It's mistaken. The burden of proof here, the notion there's a presumption, there's a likelihood, a probability that something that has been stamped "Secret" should have been kept secret, is wrong, actually, for most of the material - not all of it. ... The journalists do not remotely get what the public needs. I identify with Chelsea [Manning] and Ed [Snowden] than any other people on earth. ... I am flattered to be in the same character level with them. Source: time 27:25 - 31:58 in: Daniel Ellsberg Interviewed by Joe Lauria, Sept. 2018].
Since the public does not on the whole accept the idea that being an empire it's right and necessary for its leaders to lie to it. Lying to other people, yes, but to the public is not accpted, but it's done all the time, every day, every hour of the day, and that was not possible if the leaders could not count on the myriad of people, whether it's dozens, hundreds or thousands of people inside the government who understand that what the president is saying is untrue, the president has to be able to account on their refraining from speaking out on that subject and telling the public they're being lied to, or the Congress, or even worse, much worse, giving documentary evidence or tapes that prove that these are conscious lies and not just errors. Actually you can rely on these people very well for carreer reasons, for reasons of identity, as president's men who are loyal to the president, would never embarrass him, and the fact that their carreers definitely do depend on their acting that way. The fact is that 999 out of 1000 such people will keep their mouths shut, even when they know that very many Americans and 10 times as many foreigners are being lied to death by these lies.
So, that is a human characterisitc, not merely the American, it's bureaucratic, it's imperial, but being bureaucratic and imperial is part of being human. So, that's the way we conduct this empire to a large extent.
(time 1:28:31)
Within that context the military very often -and for that matter the CIA- very often, since their success is judged by their ability to order the world in the interest of the American economy, which is to say in the words of Charlie Wilson of General Motors "What's good for General Motors is good for the country", what's good for PE, what's good for the oil companies is good for the country. The military do their best to do the best for the country, and the CIA especially which works almost directly for Wall Street firms in terms they go in and out from Wall Street firms and have the world perspective which does identify the welfare of the United States with their welfare. They are after all not only too big to fail, or too big to be jailed, but on their profits and health depends the American economy - and that's true to a large extent.
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