Conversations With Daniel Ellsberg On Why We Go To War
By Arn Menconi, May 2015
Chapter 5
(see also summary)
(time 0:00)
In April of 1961 Kennedy can not afford to lose Vietnam, which was a very real possibility at that time. There had been a coup against Diem in 1960, before he [Kennedy] came into power, which would have succeeded, except that the US opposed it strongly and in the end more or less persuaded the coup leaders to back off. That would have overthrown Diem, right there. When I visited Vietnam in '61 it was understood, Diem cannot avoid defeat by the hands of his opponents by this time, because he has no support among non-Communists, his own army doesn't and so forth. But can you afford to let Diem lose under Kennedy, quite aside from the fact that he was catholic. I don't think that that mattered too much for Kennedy. But he couldn't let another come, just like Eisenhower didn't want South Vietnam to go Communist.
The question was: How do you prevent that? The first thing that I discovered in the Pentagon Papers, in the study that I did in 1967 - and I was looking at 1961- was the entirely unknown fact -up to then, I'm talking now about 1967, when I was doing this and I was looking at 1961- the myth was that Kennedy had decided in October of 1961, and in November, to more than double the number of advisors we had there. The Geneva Accords had fixed the number of American advisors to South Vietnam at the same level as -I guess- as we had had in '54, in the South, at about 640, something like that, advisors. You couldn't go above that. He increased the number of advisors very quickly to over 1000, which was aginst the Geneva Accord, a violation of it. The myth is: Well, that's what he did in order to win in Vietnam. That's all he needed. The White House announced at the time that he was following the advise of all his military advisors. They had requested this increase in advisors, no combat troops would be needed at that time. There'd been a question earlier, and they would decide sending on combat troops. No combat troops would be necessary, because the military had not requested, and if necessary, more steps might be taken.
(time 3:00)
So, even chomsky to this day takes this that Kennedy doing whatever had to be done, to hold on to South Vietnam - that's all he thought needed to be done. What I discovered was, this is a total lie, total myth. That in fact, virtually all of the civilian and military advisors, with one or two exceptions, John Kenneth Galbraith being one of them, his advice was different. All of his other advisors said "If you don't send combat troops now, right now, we will lose in Vietnam. Not we'll be stalemated, not we won't be able to win, we will lose. The dynamic is against us here, and the only thing that can change it -this is the secret stuff that is very hard to find when one goes through that all, that took some real investigation by me in the Pentagon when we were trying to do this history... and I finally discovered it- that the actual recommendation of McNamara and the Joint Chiefs and everybody else was "Send combat units right now!". They talked about regiments, divisions, possibly ultimately having to reach several hundred thousand, but now right away, and also eventually bombing the North. That was in Taylor's and Rostow's recommendation in the fall of '61, as early as that. But the immediate thing was, you must send combat troops. And the most significant decision that Kennedy made, almost alone against the advice of virtually all of his advisors, McNamara, McGeorge Bundy in the National Security Council. Rostow actually went both ways on this, Rostow didn't go that strongly in either directionon. But his other advisors and all the Joint Chiefs and Gilpatrick, Deputy Secretary of Defense, said "Send troops right away, right now!". General Maxwell Taylor especially, he's the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, but is still advisor to the president.
(time 5:40)
Kennedy's major decision at that time was not as was announced, to send advisors, that was virtually assured, nobody was against that, there [he] had no opposition. It was taken for granted that would to be done. The question was, would he do what the military said was necessary, send troops. His major decision was not to do that, despite their advice "If you don't send them now, we will lose, eventually, but not right away".
So essentially there was this question in my mind: How could he be doing what everybody said would be inadequate to avoid defeat, and not getting out. And why didn't he go higher? Now, not going through it too much now: Bobby Kennedy told me that year, 1967, that his brother was determined and had been determined ever since the '50s, but in '61 specifically, was determined not to send combat troops, which by the way -as I believe- where Obama is pretty much in respect to Iraq -as far as I can tell-, he does not want to send combat units.
Now, is he on the edge of it, is he toying with the mousetrap? Absolutely! He's sending advisores, and he's sending special operations people in that area under pressure. But when he says he doesn't want to send combat units, and he won't do it, I beleive that's telling us his actual personal committment. That does not mean that he won't do it under pressure. But it does tell me that like Kenndy he doesn't want to do it. He regards that as triggering the mousetrap, as Kenndy did. Kennedy said "Once I send combat troops, and they begin to take casualties, there's no turning back. And we'll take over the war from the local people, they will turn it over to us, it'll be our responsibility to win, lose or stalemate. And what we'll probably do is an escalated stalemate until we finally get out, eventually some time, ten, twenty, thrity years from now. Kennedy did not want to do that, just as Obama did not want to do it in Afghanistan after his first sending of troops. But he did ultimately send them under pressure. So Kennedy might have sent them later, but he didn;t want to and he refused to do it in '61.
(time 8:16)
I said the biggest actions were taking place in Laos in early '61, between '60 and '61. That was to clear the way for the Ho Chi Minh-trail. If there was going to be a war in Vietnam, it was going to be fueled first by regroupees coming back along the Ho Chi Minh trail from Laos into Vietnam, and then by North Vietnamese regular army units coming along the Ho Chi Minh trail in the jungles and the mountains bordering Vietnam and down into South Vietnam through Laos and then coming into South Vietnam. That was all very predictable. And what the fightingwas on the border of Vietnam and Laos had to do with who controlled those passes and those jungle trails on the assumption that you're going to have to fight a war in South Vietnam. Eisenhower told Kennedy on their meeting before Kennedy's inauguration that he was prepared to send ground troops into Laos to stop this.
Now, Laos has no port. Laos is land locked. You have to get in there either on the ground by air. So Kennedy was dealing with the Joint Chiefs on this who wanted to intervene in Laos, and the question he and Bobby Kennedy and other raised was "What if they do what they did in Dien Bien Phu, if they closed the air fields on you, so you can't get out and can't get in, and your troops there are surrounded? This is on the border of China. So, say, they are surrounded by Chinese troops in superior numbers. What do you do?" "Well," the Joint Chiefs said, "you use nuclear weapons. Against Chinese you have to use nuclear weapons. They are too many of them. We can't fight China without using nuclear weapons. That was the lesson we learnt from Korea." Never again, there was a never again school in the army. But that is usually told as "Don't ever fight in Asia again!" That was a truncation of a slogan. The slogan was "Never again without nuclear weapons, no just the threat, but actually using them. So do not fight the Chinese again without the willingness to use tactical nuclear weapons to decimate them!"
So, the JCS said you've got to use nuclear weapons. As a matter of fact, you had to do it on very short notice, so you have to delegate authority to use nuclear weapons through the local commanders. Well, Kennedy did not want to do that. Eisenhower was prepared to do that sort of a thing - that's a whole other story. But Kennedy was not.
(time 11:13)
So the idea of using nuclear weapons was anathema to Kennedy. He decided to go instead for a negotiated solution in Laos, which would allow for a -what was anathema since China- coalition government that would include Communists. Now, that's what Marshall had talked about doing in China and he was denounced for later, that the idea of a coalition government was appeasement of the Communists. They were bound to take over by their Machiavellian maneuvering and their ruthless threats and so forth. If he let them have any foothold in the government, they would take over the government. They looked at the Czech example at 1948.
(time 11:57)
So, he went for a coalition government which was -as I say- a terrible heresy and in combination with the Russians, negotiated with the Russians (but that's a whole other subject), which led the military of course distrust Kennedy very much. He was strengthened in doing this by his anger with the Joint Chiefs which had misled him by very bad advice on the Bay of Pigs. He said later to -I think Sorensen- "If it hadn't been for the Bay of Pigs, we'd be in Laos right now. I would have believed what the Joint Chiefs were saying that we had to do in Laos, and we not have gone for a coalition government in Laos."
Kennedy the pushed aside the idea of using nuclear weapons, which obviously Eisenhower had been willing to threaten and the Joint Chiefs very much so. I suspect, strongly, that the Joint Chiefs of that era, which were Eisenhower Joint Chiefs, very wedded to massive retaliation, very wedded -all of them- to the notion that nuclear weapons were our first line of defense, not our last line of defense, not only strategic weapons but tactical weapons for the army and navy, and that our defense depended on that. So they were nuclear cultists, you might say in effect. My guess is -now, here I am speculative, but it's not random speculation- what the Joint Chiefs saw in Laos above all was a chance to use nuclear weapons against China. But that was not just a contingency. That was going to be a way of destroying the Communist hierarcy, the apparatus, decapitating it in China, that might or might not lead to Chiang to be able to come onto the mainland and take over the country. But whether it did or did not -it might do that, but if it didn't do that at any rate we would have punished the Communists for taking over China. Bejing would be gone, all of the major cities would be gone. We might kill a hundred million people. Now, they were definitely advocating it in both in Laos and Vietnam.
Arn Menconi: What changed for them?
Daniel Ellsberg: Well, first of all it is a different set of Joint Chiefs. This is a very big difference. These were Eisenhower Joint Chiefs. Back in Korea we had the people from the Second World War. They were a much more grounded bunch of people. The people who had been running the Second World War were stil very important in the military apparatus. So they had people like Marshall and Eisenhower for that matter, himself, who was in Europe, but Bradley. It was a World War II group. They were very experienced in war. They were replaced by people who had had junior roles, much lesser roles in WWII, but who had achieved major carreers during the period of Massive Retaliation, when the way to get budget money for their service, and the way they have a major role for their service was to offer a nuclear offensive role. That was the way they got it. So they got more and more wedded to the idea of threatening, deploying, producing, creating nuclear weapons. So they were very committed, this is very different form the Korean situation. And also in effect they were more militarists. These other people had been through WWII, and in a peculiar way, you know, they had had their war, they didn't have to prove their manhood for one thing, and they weren't really enthusiastic about small wars, actually wars they did have to fight. Later Radford and the others were in fact enthusiastic about having wars to fight.
(time 16:15)
I think, the first thing that is very clearly laid out in the Pentagon Papers, but has scarcely been noticed by any commentators or scholars since then, is that the Vietnam War had a potential for becoming -especially from 1961 on- had a potential for becoming very, very much larger than it ever did become. By potential I mean that the Joint Chiefs of Staff very consistently, particularly from 1961 on, were recommending, urging that success in Vietnam depended on a very large escalation, larger than in fact any president ever carried out. From early '64 they were recommending what we in the Pentagon used to call a 'cataclysm' or a littany (?) of recommendation, a package, that they urged frequently on every occasion when they were asked for their advice. The essence was really cutting off the Communist led forces in South Vietnam from supply either from North Vietnam or from China. Also, in naval terms, in other terms indirectly from East Europe or Russia, cutting off in other words all external sources of supply.
This was, practically speaking, impossible, because the essentially the open border between North Vietnam and China, which had a great many rivers for water supply, and roads, so many, in fact, that it was not really practical to think of cutting them all off. Thus the JCS repeated recommendations to mine and blockade the port of Haiphong through which a lot of supplies did come from Russia or East Europe, was not practical in terms of actually reducing supply to North Vietnam or thus to South Vietnam, because in fact the amount of supplies needed by the forces in South Vietnam -especially when the war was mainly a guerilla war in the ealry '60s- was extremely small. It amounted to a few truck loads, really, of ammunition, or of special ammunition. The National Liberation Front (NLF) actually made o lot of their ammunition itself in terms of improvised mines using American unexploded ordnaces as a major source of explosives. That is to say artillery shells supplied to the ARVN, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the Saigon organized forces that had earlier fought for the French and now fought essentially for the Americans, paid entirely and equipped by the Americans. The artillery gave them, supplied a lot of unexploded shells to the Vietcong or NLF which they used for mines or mortars. And our bombing did the same: a tremendous amount of unexploded bombs and ordnance, some of which are still exploding and killing people in Vietnam forty years later.
But a certain amount of material did reach South Vietnam from North Vietnam and from outside North Vietnam, but it was such a small amount initially that it was not remotely practical to shut it off by any means. Later, when the North Vietnamese army was operating in a big way in South Vietnam, the supplies needed were larger, even so could easily be supplied from China. Also more than CIA realized for a long time material was coming in through the port of Sihanoukville in Cambodia and from Cambodia. It would have been necessary to go to war there to stop the Cambodian harbors as well, which Nixon was prepared to do.
So, as I say, the JCS wanted to mine Haiphong, they wanted to hit essentially all imaginable targets in North Vietnam as near simultaneously as possible. It wasn't possible to hit them all in one night. But in successive days, in a very short period of time they wanted to hit all major targets including air defenses and communications, transport, any kind of oil reserves, factories and so forth, including targets very close to the Chinese border. They wanted to hit those right from the beginning. Also blockade the entire coast of North Vietnam and stop any coastal traffic from China or from North Vietnam to South Vietnam, also hit so-called sanctuaries, bordering regions in Laos and Cambodia that were used for tranporting men and material from North Vietnam. So they wanted to attack Laos and Cambodia in the air and conceivably on the ground from the beginning.
(time 22:25)
The possible invasion of North Vietnam was not something they always recommended immediately, but it was always a contingency in the air, in effect, and a back-up. I think it could very well be argued that the Joint Chiefs always thought that at the very least it was necessary to attack the southern part, the narrow part of North Vietnam, just above the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone), and to cut off infiltration through that. That would have taken a number of divisions because it was necessary not only to occupy that part of North Vietnam, but to go through to Laos and cut off the infiltration through there. So although that was often considered by the JCS, they never adopted it as a definite, immediate recommendation. But it was studied and it was something they thought of as possible.
Also, I think, there were certainly studies of attacking through Haiphong into Hanoi and the northern part of North Vietnam, as the French had done in 1946. Always, I think, that was in the back of the military planning as what would ultimately be necessary to win the war, basically to occupy North Vietnam. Now, ironically, the French had occupied North Vietnam, the eight years of the preceding war, and had been beaten. The military didn't seem to take that as a significant precedent. They had such contempt for French military capabilities. We were always hearing that the French had lost two World Wars, WWI and WWII, except for American intervention. They didn't have as many helicopters. they didn't have the air force. They were generally colonialists that we thought were totally innocent of.
(time 24:51)
By 1965 the Joint Chiefs were saying it would take 500 000 troops five years. Now, they were talking about South Vietnam, not being in the North. To go into the North would have taken more than that as they eventually did recommend in 1968. But as early as 1965 they were recommending 500 000 would be necessary as a kind of minimum. But General Wheeler, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was speaking of 750 000 as possible to Johnson in the summer of 1965, and possibly a million. This is a list of proposals. This is especcially under Johnson, starting right away when he got in in early 1964. ... Now, early under Kennedy rather than recommending all of those things -and tha was before the war had gotten nearly as big as it has gotten, as ealy as 1960 and '61, '60 under Eisenhower and '61, they were recommending sending troops into Laos to stop the infiltration, any infiltration into South Vietnam, with the understanding that that might well bring in the Chineses, and that nuclear weapons should be used against them.
Kennedy drew back from that, and got into negotiations, as I said. But in the fall of 1961 they all strongly recommended, and most of civilian advisors did too, McNamara nd Gilpatric,that we should send combat divisions immediately into Vietnam, both for morale purposes and as a signal to the North that we were totally committed to this, and with the understanding that that might well lead to escalate to more troops, although they talked about three hundred thousand, they didn't talk about five hundred [thousand] or a million.
(time 26:58)
Under Kennedy we conducted what could be called a "covert war"... He only admitted to the presence of advisors, which were in larger numbers than was permitted by the Geneva Accords, that was a violation of the Geneva Accords, which he rationalized as reflecting the infiltration from the North. ... That's very questionable legally, by the way, Anyway, that was the position. And claimed of course that our troops were not involved in combat at all. In fact, the advisors did go into combat with ARVN troops that they were advising, or calling in air support. Now, again, in terms of the air support, that was a covert operation. We had T-28s which we described as trainers, in which there would be an American and a Vietnamese pilot. The real purpose of this was: essentially the American was flying the plane and dropping the ordnance. The presence of the Vietnamese was litterally "to have a yellow body in the plane if it crashed" to support the cover story that this was a Vietnamese mission, not an American mission. So, actually, we were flying combat air support pretending that it was Vietnamese and it was simply training what they were doing. That is sometimes been described as a big air war, and fair enough except for being covert it really was on a relatively small level. When we went over, which was in spring of 1965 under Johnson, where American planes were now openly conducting air support to ARVN troops and US troops, the scale of that went up tenfold, almost overnight. It was an enormous change. So, although you could say that the air war began to some extent in '61, it didn't really begin til '65. In other words, the advisors were giving intelligence support, they were doing communications, they were listening to North Vietnamese communications which, by the way, we weren't able to decode during much of that time, but we did traffic analysis. The American public was led to believe that we were helping the Vietnamese ... The fact that we had advisors over there was also known, although the extreme increasing number of advisors was under the radar. I'm not even sure the executive was fully conscious of the fact that we went from 600 advisors in the summer of 1961 to twelve thousand by the time Kennedy was assassinated, and I think in early '65 still using advisors as th cover or the story -and that included by the way, as I said, a lot of logistics people and helicopter repair people, but particularly a lot of communications intelligence personnel. These weren't really advisors, they were in combat, but not in the shooting front line.
(time 30:44)
So, this increase in the number of involvement up to 12 thousand and then eventually to 16 thousand in early '65, was not in the American discussion or consciencness wise. But if you ask 'did Congress know of it?', yes. I guess, the top people in Congress, it was a Democratic controlled Congress n both Houses
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