A Light That Failed

Atlantic FOUNDED IN 1857

In the fall of 1964, fewer than 25.000 American troops were engaged in Vietnam, and they had been only lightly bloodied—not more than 300 dead and about 1000 wounded. Still, they represented a major commitment of American prestige and power, and that commitment was going badly. President Johnson’s civilian and military advisers were preparing to urge on him a fateful step, the employment of heavy American bombing of the North and ultimately a deeper involvement in the war. As the discussion was beginning, Undersecretary of State George W. Ball sent a long memorandum to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, McGeorge Bundy. The Ball memorandum of October 5, 1964, was an argument against escalation. “Once on the tiger’s back,” Ball warned, “we cannot be sure of picking the place to dismount.”

The document reads today as if it had been written after the fact, so prescient was its prophecy of disasters for the Vietnamese, deaths by the thousands for Asians and Americans, and the frustration of American power. For all its prescience, the document failed to avert the Administration’s painful, reluctant journey into a wider war.

The Ball memorandum has a curious history. After they read it, McNamara and Rusk and Bundy debated the arguments with Ball on two successive Saturday afternoons. Ball did not ask that the document go before the President at that time because LBJ was preoccupied with his campaign for election. But in January of 1965, Ball called the memorandum to the attention of Presidential Aide Bill Moyers, and Moyers promptly laid it before the President. Mr. Johnson was impressed and disturbed. He ordered Moyers to keep him supplied with all such documents in the future, and encouraged Ball to speak out all his doubts, and to offer alternatives to bombing North Vietnam and sending more American troops into action on the ground in South Vietnam.

For reasons that are not dear, the Ball document does not appear among the several versions of the Pentagon Papers, nor do several others from the stream of written dissents and recommendations for alternative policies he produced over nearly two years. These omissions leave an impression that there was virtually no dissent at the top from the government’s “consensus” of 1964-1965, an impression amplified by President Johnson’s limited references to Ball’s role which, in his memoir, The Vantage Point, Mr. Johnson characterizes as a sort of pro forma “devil’s advocacy.” The full record shows, however, that the President devoted much attention to Ball’s proposals, and in some instances, deferred some escalatory acts because of them. In the end, though, he decided that Ball’s alternative proposals were a prescription for “losing” a war that America had to “win.”

The paper shows that the policy-makers did in fact have before them, from the beginning of their deliberations, an argument that ran counter to their own assessments and cast a bright light on the inherent risks and the probable consequences of escalation. It was, however, a light that failed.

Even though the document has been classified top secret—arbitrarily, as is the case with so many matters of public interest—we choose to make it public because it is an uncommonly instructive piece of history, and also because of its pertinence to the present. It dramatizes a chilling truth about the way the decision-making process works these days in the American republic, a process that has become increasingly confined to an isolated President and a very few advisers and that thereby becomes immune to the intrusion of intelligent dissent and sound second thoughts.

Just as President Johnson argued in 1965 that though there seemed to be choices, in fact there was only the choice of widening the war. President Nixon told the nation on May 8, 1972, “We now have a clear hard choice among three courses of action: Immediate withdrawal of all American forces, continued attempts at negotiation, or decisive military action to end the war.” Then he went on to say: “It’s plain then that what appears to be a choice among three courses of action for the United States is really no choice at all.”

As the document you are about to read makes clear, there were other choices then. Surely there were other choices in 1972.

—ROBERT MANNING