ARCHIVES: THE MIND OF THE RULING CLASS

624

BY PAUL SWEEZY & HARRY MAGDOFF
THE EDITORS OF MONTHLY REVIEW

As we write in early May (this piece, written by the editors,  appeared in Monthly Review in June 1972—Eds), the long-expected crisis stemming from the collapse of Nixon’s Vietnamization policy has burst upon the world. How it will be resolved is still unknown, and anything that might be written on the question would certainly be overwhelmed by events long before it could be published. But it does seem an appropriate time to try to improve our understanding of the forces at work, especially one of the most elusive of these forces which has taken on enormous significance at this stage of history, i.e., the thought processes of those responsible for making U.S. policy. What are their preconceptions and prejudices? What are their aims, ambitions, hopes? How do they think they can get what they want? What is, or is likely to be, their reaction to failure? These are some of the questions that immediately come to mind. And while there are obviously no simple or uniformly valid answers, there is a great deal of relevant evidence at hand which ought to be carefully examined and weighed. In what follows we shall focus mainly though not exclusively on one piece of such evidence, the recently published autobiographical memoir by General Maxwell Taylor, who for many years was at the very center of the events which led up to the present crisis. •

Taylor’s career is the very epitome of an American success story which, true to its context, ends in totally uncomprehended failure. Born in 1901 the son of a small-town Missouri lawyer who moved to Kansas City when the boy was two years old, Taylor was never in doubt about what he wanted and never frustrated in his efforts to achieve it. “On a sixth grade form,” he tells us, “I recorded a commitment to the military life by listing as my future profession, major general.” (p.23) He made it all the way, and beyond. West Point class of 1922. A busy military career in the 1902s and early 1930s that included attendance at numerous army schools and several years of teaching French and Spanish at West Point. During this period Taylor got to know intimately and be a leading member of the group of career officers who, because of the accident of their ages, were destined to provide the leadership of America’s enormously expanded war machine during and after the Second World War; for a military man, Taylor could not have been born at a luckier time.

The second half of the 1930s was spent in the Far East, first as a Japanese-language officer at the Embassy in Tokyo, then on assignment to a Japanese regiment, and finally as a Japanese-speaking aide to General Stilwell in China (where, characteristically, he began to learn Chinese; later, while commanding the Eighth Army in Korea, he learned enough Korean to read a speech in Korean as a way of flattering Syngman Rhee). Taylor was called back to Washington in mid-1939, accompanied General Matthew Ridgway as a Spanish-speaking aide on a tidying-up mission to Latin America in 1940, and in 1941 joined the staff of General George C. Marshall, the new Army Chief of Staff and Roosevelt’s closest wartime military adviser.

During the Second World War Taylor got in on the ground floor of the glamorous new airborne branch of the army and ended up as the commander of the 101st Airborne Division. On the way to this position he took part, both militarily and diplomatically, in the Sicilian and Italian campaigns. After assuming command of the 101st Airborne in England in 1944, he participated in the D-Day landings, in the famous Arnhem operation, and in the Battle of the Bulge.

Taylor’s post-Second World War career can be conveniently summarized in the following abbreviated chronology:

• 1945-1949 — Superintendent, Military Academy, West Point
• 1949-1950 — U.S. Commander, Berlin
• 1952-1954 — Commander U.S. Eighth Army, Korea
• 1955-1959 — Army Chief of Staff
• 1959-1960 — Chairman of the Board, Mexican Power & Light Co.
• 1960-1961 — President, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (serving under John D. Rockefeller III as Chairman)
• 1961-1962 — Special inquest on Bay of Pigs disaster for President Kennedy, then Military Representative of the President (after being offered Directorship of the CIA)
• 1962-1964 — Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
• 1964-1965 — Ambassador to Spain
• 1965-1968 — Special Consultant to President Johnson

As a glance at this chronology will show, there is a break in Taylor’s career after his term as Army Chief of Staff. He retired in 1959 from the military and, like many other high officers of his generation, went on to his reward in Big Business and its related ideological/cultural institutions. But he was not to be allowed to finish his life’s work as a faithful servant of the Rockefellers and their fellow oligarchs in the upper reaches of the big bourgeoisie: there were still more pressing duties to be performed, and Taylor had demonstrated that he was the man to perform them.

Here it is necessary to emphasize that Taylor’s term as Army Chief of Staff overlaps the two Eisenhower administrations and ends approximately with the second. The dominant strategic doctrine during these years was “massive retaliation,” which had its origins in the period of U.S. nuclear monopoly but lived on, more and more anachronistically, as that monopoly faded away. By the end of the 1950s the United States had plenty of nuclear power, but so did the Russians, so that neither could use it without risking mutual annihilation. In the meantime, non-nuclear forces had been neglected to the point where the United States was less and less able to use, or threaten to use, military power in support of its supposed world-wide interests. (The reasons for this state of affairs were only partly , if at all, rooted in outmoded military doctrine: much more important, it seems, was the fact that the kind of conservative Big Businessmen with whom Eisenhower liked to surround himself were fiscal fundamentalists, and massive retaliation was a relatively cheap strategy. It is owing to these circumstances that many people now tend to look back on the Eisenhower years as a sort of golden age of peace and stability. It is an illusion, of course, but not one without some basis in fact.)

Taylor, and before him General Ridgway, his predecessor as Army Chief of Staff, regarded massive retaliation as a “strategic fallacy” which they opposed to the best of their ability, and not without some successes. But Taylor emerged from his term of office far from satisfied and determined to do what he could from outside the government to gain acceptance for a new doctrine of “flexible response.” It was with this in mind that he wrote his first book, The Uncertain Trumpet, published in 1960, arguing among other things the case against massive retaliation and for flexible response. It played a role, perhaps a decisive role, in opening up for him a new career in a more congenial military and political environment.

Once Kennedy became the Democratic candidate and began speaking out on national and international issues, I found much to like in the candidate. I was particularly interested in early indications that he had recognized the deficiencies of a military strategy based upon Massive Retaliation and would do something to change it. In a campaign speech, he indicated an intention to seek military advice from senior retired officers, mentioning Generals Ridgway, Gavin, and Taylor along with Admiral Robert B. Carney as the kind of people he had in mind. About the same time, he sent me a friendly note regarding the strategic views presented in The Uncertain Trumpet, which he described as “most persuasive” and helpful “to shape my own thinking.” All of this was good news to a scarred veteran of the Pentagon wars who had fought in opposition to Massive Retaliation and in support of Flexible Response.

Against this background, it is hardly surprising that Kennedy, confronted with the humiliating rout at the Bay of Pigs, turned to Taylor to head up a postmortem. From the outset there was a full meeting of the minds. There is no indication that either man, any more than Eisenhower before them, had any scruples about invading another country with which the United States was at peace, a fellow member of the United Nations, a co-signatory of a whole series of inter-American treaties banning the use of force by any one state as a way of influencing the policy of another. The only questions were, what went wrong and how to do it better next time. Neither Kennedy nor Taylor had any doubt that there would be a next time. In his famous speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 20, 1961, a few days after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy declared:

We dare not fail to see the insidious nature of this new and deeper struggle. We dare not fail to grasp the new concepts, the new tools, the new sense of urgency we will need to combat it, whether in Cuba or South Vietnam. And we dare not fail to realize that this struggle is taking place every day, without fanfare, in thousands of villages and markets, day and night, and in classrooms all over the globe…

No greater task faces this nation or this administration. No other challenge is more deserving of our every effort and energy. Too long have we fixed our eyes on traditional military needs, on armies prepared to cross borders or missiles poised for flight. Now it is clear that this is no longer enough–that our security may be lost piece by piece, country by country, without firing of a single missile or the crossing of a single border. We intend to profit from this lesson, We intend to re-examine and reorient our forces of all kinds– our tactics and other institutions in this community. We intend to intensify our efforts for a struggle in many ways more difficult than war, where disappointments will often accompany us. (Quoted in this space, MONTHLY REVIEW, June 1961, p.57.)

Two days later Kennedy sent the letter to Taylor asking him to head up what came to be known as the Cuba Study Group. “It is apparent.” he wrote, “that we need to take a close look at all our practices and programs in the areas of military and paramilitary, guerrilla and anti-guerrilla activities…[I]n the end what I want is your own report, drawing from past experience, to chart a path towards the future.”

Thus was formed the partnership which launched the United States on its great global counter-revolutionary offensive of the 1960s.

It is clear from Kennedy’s letter that everyone in Washington was well aware that “the next time” had already come–in South Vietnam. Less than six months later, in October 1961, Kennedy sent Taylor on the first of a seemingly endless series of missions to Vietnam, charging him:

I should like you to proceed to Saigon for the purpose of appraising the situation in South Vietnam, particularly as it concerns the threat to the internal security and defense of that country and adjacent areas…I would like your views on the courses of action which our Government might take at this juncture to avoid a further deterioration in the situation in South Vietnam and eventually to contain and eliminate the threat to its independence.

Taylor went, reported, recommended. So did many others. Kennedy disappeared from the scene to be replaced by Johnson and then Nixon. A variety of approaches and strategies were attempted, including Americanization and Vietnamization. Nothing ever worked. No lessons were ever learned. Why? What explains this apparent American addiction to a losing game?

From Taylor’s observations, arguments, and rationalizations we can derive at least partial answers to these questions. In a most general sense of course responsibility must be placed on a persistent inability or unwillingness of the U.S. leadership to face reality. But this displaces the question rather than answering it: how can able and intelligent people (and men like Taylor certainly qualify as such) maintain and act upon, year after year, views and beliefs which are manifestly contradicted by a massive flow of undeniable factual evidence? To accomplish this feat certain conditions have to be satisfied: First, one must not be obliged by force majeure to abandon the mistaken views and inappropriate courses of action. This gives them at least a chance to survive. Second, one must have deeply rooted, and preferably even unconscious, preconceptions which continually lead one to expect things to happen differently from the way they actually do. And third, one must be able to invent persuasive (to one’s self and one’s peers) reasons for the discrepancies between expectation and reality. All these conditions have been fulfilled in the Vietnam case.

If the United States had stayed out of Vietnam after the Geneva Accords of 1954, the country would of course have been unified under the victorious Vietminh and its revered national leader Ho Chi Minh. This was prevented then and later only by the U.S. presence, however much its form and scope may have varied from time to time. At no time have the Vietnamese revolutionary nationalists had the power–or probably even the ambition–literally to throw the United States out as, for example, the British were thrown out of France in 1940. It follows that the Americans and their Vietnamese clients were never obliged by force majeure to abandon the aim of creating and maintaining a neocolonial state in South Vietnam. This set the stage for everything else.

As for the American assumption that establishment of a neo-colonialist state was a real possibility, the decisive factor here has all along been what it is hardly and exaggeration to call a belief in American omnipotence based not only on armed might but also on taken-for-granted moral superiority. These attitudes have of course been drilled into the national consciousness from earliest times, no doubt with special thoroughness in the professional military establishment. They show through on practically every page that Taylor writes and are, as usual with white Americans, combined with a profoundly racist outlook on the world. The Vietnamese are treated as a lesser breed –“ours” as quarrelsome children, the others as tools of the unmitigatedly evil “Communists.” We of course know what’s best for them and are only doing what we’re doing for their own good. At one point Taylor summarizes a cable sent from Saigon suggesting peace terms. After detailing what the United States should ask form the other side–essentially that they should stop fighting–he continues:

in exchange for agreement on these points, our side should be willing to offer amnesty and civil rights to Vietcong wishing to reenter society and safe passage to North Vietnam for those who wished to go there. We could also offer the progressive reduction of foreign military personnel in South Vietnam to the 1954 ceiling, the restoration of trade relations with North Vietnam, and participation by all parties in an American-sponsored development program for Southeast Asia.

Translated into simpler language, the terms offered come to this: Capitulate and as a reward we will let you join the American empire. And Taylor & Co. doubtless thought they were being really very generous. Elsewhere, Taylor pays his own kind of grudging tribute to the North Vietnamese (who are of course the only enemies) when he says that “they proved to be incredibly tough in accepting losses which, by Western calculation, greatly exceeded the value of the stake involved.” Apparently “by Western calculation” national independence and unity are not worth much–for Asians. One seems to remember that Hitler felt the same way about Europeans, but at least he made no bones about his belief in the supposed superiority of the Germanic “race.”

But the question inevitably arises: How could the Americans in Vietnam go on believing in their omnipotence in the face of an unbroken record of failures and and defeats? Here what is needed is a never-failing and imaginative power of rationalization both before and after the fact. And Taylor shows himself to be a past master at this demanding art. First, there was what at one point he calls “the time-gap required to increase the effectiveness of the Vietnamese forces.” There was never any doubt in the minds of Taylor and his colleagues that, given enough American equipment and training, the forces of the Saigon government could be built up to be a match, and eventually more than a match, for those of the National Liberation Front and Hanoi: it was only a matter of time. This typically technocratic view, ignoring all the relevant  lessons of twentieth-century history, provided the perfect overall rationalization for every twist and turn of U.S. policy. And it logically entailed the further rationalization that after every escalation or change in policy, the elusive increase in the effectiveness of the Saigon forces was at last materializing. It would take a computer to count the number of times it has been announced by Presidents and Secretaries of Defense and Generals and Ambassadors and special envoys that the tide was at last turning and that the war would soon be over, South Vietnam saved, and the American boys home by Christmas. Characteristically and fittingly, Taylor continued to believe this right up to the end of his active involvement in Vietnamese affairs. He concludes his chapter on the last phase of the Johnson administration as follows:

So President Johnson retired to private life, unhappy at having left the nation at war in spite of his unceasing efforts for peace. I suspected that he regretted the unilateral concessions he had made to Hanoi in deference to the urging of most of his advisers, but that he had felt obliged to run the risk of trying them for the sake of national unity. In any case, he had left the seeds of victory implaned in the soil of Vietnam for cultivation and harvesting by his successor–if Mr. Nixon could hold the country together for the time required for the reaping.

Johnson, it seems, had set the stage for Vietnamization, which at long last was about to usher in the promised day. This must have been written in 1970 or 1971. One wonders whether the time-gap illusion can have survived, even in the mind of a General Taylor, the shock of April-May, 1972.

There are of course other rationalizations of defeat, only one of which we will take the space to mention here. This is the myth that if only Diem had remained in power in Saigon and been loyally supported by the United States, everything would have happened differently. There is not the slightest basis for this fantasy, even in Taylor’s own highly biased account of the events leading up to the overthrow of Diem in the autumn of 1963 (the “Autumn of Disaster,” as it is described in one of Taylor’s chapter headings). And yet in retrospect this event loomed larger and larger in Taylor’s reconstruction of the past. He speaks in one place of the “disastrous effects of American intervention in the overthrow of Diem,” and elsewhere he states:

There was the memory of Diem to haunt those who were aware of the circumstances of his downfall. By our complicity we Americans were responsible to some degree for the plight in which the south Vietnamese found themselves. That thought gave pause to any consideration of abandoning them.

One could easily dismiss this as a mere bit of wishful thinking, but this would be a mistake. In truth it is part and parcel of a whole implicit theory of history which assigns to leadership the decisive role in determining the course of events. Militarily, Taylor makes clear that he regards common soldiers as pretty much the same in all armies at all times, and that what makes the difference between them, apart from equipment, is leadership and esprit de corps. (“Students of military history have often tried to determine why some men fight well and others run away. it never seemed to me that ideological motives of political or moral concepts had much to do with it.”) Of General Kanh, one of Diem’s numerous successors in Saigon, Taylor writes that “he was a great disappointment to most of us who knew him well because, with some character and integrity added to his undeniable ability, he might have been the George Washington of his country.” (Taylor forgets that Ho Chi Minh had already preempted that position!) And he carries his leadership theory to its farthest limits in his attempt to explain the evident deterioration of U.S. society during the 1960s:

In the course of the Vietnam tribulation, we have discovered within our society attitudes and weaknesses which we never knew existed or which perhaps we had not wished to recognize: a growing polarization of social groups, multiplying extremists on the right and left, increasing disparagement of our institutions and of the symbols and substance of conventional patriotism, loss of pride in America and its accomplishments, and unashamed defeatism in time of national crisis as soon as the going becomes hard. I would be inclined to date many of these changes in the national mood and behavior, or at least their visible manifestations, from the death of President Kennedy and to attribute much of the change in mood to the despondency generated by his loss. Without the hope which his leadership had inspired, the appeal of former national goals steadily waned, and nothing replace them to provide a national unity of purpose.

That this kind of fetishization of “leadership” lends itself to all sorts of authoritarian doctrines and, in extreme crises, political solutions goes without saying. Nor is this the only or even the most important authoritarian and antidemocratic element in Taylor’s thought. After returning to the United States at the end of his term as Ambassador in Saigon, he went around the country on a number of speaking tours. He was, he writes,

impressed not only by the general support accorded our Vietnam policy by the substantial people of the country but also by the widespread criticism that the government was not adequately explaining what was going on. There was considerable suspicion that it was holding back or distorting the facts. It was apparent that the antiwar movement would grow in 1966 unless a candid public information campaign were set in motion to forestall it.

“Substantial people of the country” of course means people of wealth who collectively make up the ruling class. Taylor was not worried about them: their support for the war could be taken for granted. But he was plenty worried about the rest of us. The problem, as he puts it a few pages later, was “how to get a better understanding of the issues and of the situation on the part of the general public and of special groups such as the media and the universities.” It probably never occurred to Taylor and his fellow policy-makers in Washington that the trouble (from their point of view) was precisely that the general public, the media, and the universities were getting an all-too-good understanding of the issues and the situation. In any case, it is clear from this and many other passages in his book that these elements, which in democratic theory are supposed to play the key roles in the maintenance and wise functioning of popular sovereignty, are thoroughly mistrusted and, in the case of the media, even reviled by Taylor. Spiro Agnew himself would be hard put to it to match the vitriol of Taylor’s diatribe against the media on pages 411-413.

Against this background it will come as no surprise to the reader that the peace movement is anathema to Taylor. What may come as a surprise, however, is the great importance he attaches to it. The closing chapters of the book (“Lessons from Vietnam” and “Adjustments to Declining Power”) can be read as unintended tributes to the antiwar forces, organized and unorganized, which brought about the downfall of Johnson and, in Taylor’s view, threaten to render the United States impotent in the future crises which he is sure are on the way. (Frustrated peace activists who believe that the continuation of the Vietnam war is a proof of their failure should be able to get a new perspective and much needed encouragement from studying Taylor’s book.) To be sure, these views may be in some degree a part of the system of rationalization of past U.S. defeats: the hawks can always take comfort in the thought that they have been right all along but have been prevented from proving it by the evil machinations of the peaceniks. But it would be a great mistake to suppose that for Taylor the peace movement is no more than a convenient scapegoat. He sees it as a clear and present danger, and the proof is the kind of policies and actions he recommends for the future. It would be appropriate to quote nearly all of the last two chapters in this connection, but space limitations force us to be content with two particularly revealing passages:

The gradual erosion of public support for President Johnson should remind any future President of the many factors he must take into account before deciding to lead the American people into another intervention like Vietnam. Before charging up the hill, he had better be sure his troops will follow. He should be certain that the cause at stake is of clear, unchallengeable importance which can be explained in simple terms. He should verify that there is a high probability of attaining his objective in a short time well within the probable limits of the national patience. If it requires the use of armed force, he will be well advised to obtain Congressional approval before committing himself and then to seek a declaration of war or emergency to silence future critics of war by executive order. To be perfectly safe from adverse public reaction, his military objective should be attainable without large scale resort to conscripts or reservists. While circumstances may oblige him to deviate from some of these criteria, he should know that when he does so he is acting counter to the lessons of Vietnam.

If you are beginning to suspect that Taylor is really hankering after something more than the temporary power “to silence future critics of war by executive order,” you are right. “How,” he asks, “can a democracy such as ours defend its interests at acceptable cost and continue to enjoy the freedom of speech and behavior to which we are accustomed in the time of peace?” And his answer in the final analysis is that it can’t be done:

Faced with this evidence of declining American power and of the erosion of its source, may we not find ways to forestall the misfortunes which may flow therefrom? Certainly some of these shortcomings are correctable and such remedies as are possible should be undertaken at once.

A first step is to recognize the new Cold War technique directed against the sources of our power as a formidable threat to our national security. This form of attack is not new in its weapons–propaganda, subversion, power seizures by minorities. But the acuteness of the threat is new because of the increasing strength and boldness of the internal revolutionary movement and the mind-numbing power of press and television in their effect on the critical judgment of the public. This threat strikes at the root of national power, particularly at our national unity, without which we are an easy target for all enemies, large and small, foreign and domestic. To cope with it, we need a new concept of national security broad enough to assure that defensive measures are taken against subversion in this form. Surely the defense of our national unity merits a dedication of effort at least equal to that which we have lavished in the past on the protection of our overseas possessions, our coast lines, and our air-space from overt foreign foes.

So, in the end, the real lesson of the Vietnam war is that we must have a police state in order to be able to go on fighting more wars in future.

We may be sure that this is a view which is by no means confined to right-wing “militarists” like Maxwell Taylor, nor does it relate only to a post-Vietnam period which some people find it convenient to talk about as a way of obscuring the fact that we are still living not only in the Vietnam period itself but in its most critical phase. Richard Nixon, faced with the collapse of Vietnamization, has reached the end of the blind alley and must either follow Johnson’s example by retiring from the scene or commit himself to an increasingly frenzied course of escalation both inside and outside Vietnam. If he chooses the latter, he will be increasingly forced into adopting Taylor’s advice. It is not future wars but this war, here and now, which can no longer co-exist with even the restricted freedoms of bourgeois democracy. In the last paragraph of this book, Taylor says: “One thing is sure: the international challenge tends to merge more and more with the domestic challenge until the two become virtually indistinguishable.” We do not interpret the challenges in the same way as Taylor, but at least we must agree that about their indistinguishability he is absolutely right.

(May 12, 1972)

Paul M. Sweezy and Harry Magdoff served as editors of the legendary Monthly Review magazine, an independent socialist publication, for most of its existence since its foundation in the late 1940s. MR remains a vital source of anti-capitalist thought and an informal “college” for those wishing to understand the socialist option.

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