1000th letter - 24 March 1968

I wish that this thousandth letter could be about the spring or American children, or any one of the many amiable things we've talked about down the years.

But it must be about the thing that bewilders the American people like nothing else, in all these thousand weeks. For last week, the administration was brought to the bar of a standing committee of Congress. And nothing, either in the parliamentary or a federal system, can offer such an inquisition as a congressional enquiry, which is the nerve system of what Americans like to call the democratic process.

And nowhere is it seen to more impressive effect than in the cross-examination of a secretary of state by the Senate foreign relations committee. Which, among other things, has the power to reject ambassadors and treaties proposed by the president.

So now, the committee was anxious to recall the president to his constitutional duty to seek the advice and consent of the Senate on a war that had got away from both of them – the undeclared war in Vietnam. Here was the secretary of state, called as the president's understudy, and subjected to the third degree by the representatives of the people.

And, if that sounds a little lurid or sentimental, let me remind you of the cast of characters that sat like a court of judges the other day, and challenged Secretary Rusk from ten in the morning till 6.30 one day, and from nine to two the next. There was a farmer from Vermont; a mining engineer from Montana; a Rhodes scholar from Arkansas; the schoolteacher son of a hardware merchant from South Dakota; an electric products manufacturer from Missouri; a stockman from Kansas; a professor of Far Eastern history; a former secretary of the air; six lawyers – not too many to reflect the preponderance of lawyers who sit in Congress, and who do, after all, make the laws.

None of these men had been in the Senate for less than twelve years and the farmer had been there 28 years, and two others for 24 years.

Secretary Rusk had resisted this call for two years, but then there was a well-substantiated rumour that General Westmoreland wanted another 200,000 troops, and suddenly the world expressed its distrust of American policy by losing its confidence in the dollar.

For two days, Secretary Rusk was questioned and quizzed and lectured to and pleaded with by a committee whose old ration of hawks to doves was significantly shrinking. The role of Chairman Fulbright, as a scold and ironist, could now be presumed. So could the ringing patriotism of Senator Mundt of South Dakota. And the troubled curiosity of young Senator Church of Idaho. And the holy wrath of Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, God's favourite maverick.

But, last week, only Fulbright and Morse stayed with the usual script. The others were sufficiently disturbed to think aloud with more honesty and eloquence than they had shown before, and all of them maintained a gravity and courtesy such as men do when they’re scared, when they’re losing an attitude, and acquiring an anxiety.

Nothing was more startling than Senator Mundt's suspicion that elections in south Vietnam were not alone worth ensnaring half a million Americans into the continental bog of south-east Asia.

And a bugle sounding the retreat is not more ominous than the confession of Senator Symington, a resolute hawk, that he was now a prey to misgiving. Senator Symington had been saying for years that the war had better be won or written off since the day was coming when the United States would have to weigh the cost of it in gold that wasn’t here.

He has always been indulged by his colleagues and friends as a man riding a comical hobby horse. Last week he had the sad satisfaction of being taken seriously. And, at last, the American casualties in Vietnam surpassed those of Korea; a turn which I suggested a year ago would be the hardest test of the peoples' tolerance of the war.

So, we were starting all over again with the fundamental questions: how had it come about? Was it indeed a crusade, or a vast miscalculation? Would Asia crumble to Communism, if south Vietnam failed? Was it the wrong war in the wrong place, or the right war, in the wrong place? Was the United States the only man in the boat rowing in time?

A hundred books and a thousand editorial writers have recited and disputed the political origins of the war, and enlarged on the human tragedy of its conduct. What matters, or will come to matter, to most people I think, is not any new balance we can strike in the old argument, but the realisation that America, which has never lost a war, is not invincible. And the very late discovery that an elephant can trumpet and shake the earth, but not the self-possession of the ants, who hold it.

So, when I say how did it come about, I am not thinking of splitting the hair between the south-east Asia treaty's pledge to resist aggression, and the American protocol that stipulated Communist aggression. I mean how did the American people move from their early indifference or complacency to the recognition of a nightmare?

Well, the war crept up on us with no more menace than a zephyr. South Vietnam was only one of many strange place names that joined the noble roll call of countries which America, in the early glow of its world power, swore to protect and defend.

If Russia, that atomic dinosaur could be scared off Iran, and Greece and Turkey, and foiled in Western Europe, it never crossed our minds that we couldn’t intimidate Asian Communists, who fought with sticks and stones. Certainly it would have been churlish to deny these brave little countries the handful of American technicians they needed to train their armies.

Well, Johnson came in and for a year or more, the shadow of Vietnam failed to darken the bright procession of legislation he drove through the 89th Congress. It dawned on us very slowly that the American technicians were turning into American soldiers. Then we admitted that the men were off to the rice paddies and not the desks behind the lines. The draft felt the chill and the college boys and the Vietniks were born. It was not, with most of them, a conscientious objection to war itself. Most, I think, would have admitted that Hitler had to be stopped and that Korea, the first United Nations' war, was a good war.

But they were baffled by the morality of this war which killed more civilians than soldiers, and devastated the land we were sworn to protect. A war in which there were no attacks at dawn, no discernible lines and few human restraints either of rules or weapons.

Napalm and fragmentation bombs came into the language and sickened us, though our own strategical bombing of Dresden, in the second war, had been worst than Hiroshima, and millions of women and children had been routed from their homes in Europe too. War, the administration could only remind us, was hell. So we piled up the forces and piled on the force, and dropped more bombs than all the bombs dropped in Europe and Africa in the second war.

These, and many other doubts and disasters were aired and tossed before Dean Rusk. The administration’s position had something of the straightforward grandeur of Johann Sebastian Bach; if only Bach were the tune that's called for.

The theme was that the war in Asia was a continuation of the European struggle – first against Hitler then against the Russians. The United States was pledged to resist aggression against free nations. If one pledge was betrayed, then the other wards and dependents would panic and succumb to Communism. The countries of south-east Asia are a stack of dominoes and if one falls, so will they all.

It seems to me that anybody who ridicules this theory is obliged to say who and why it’s wrong, and to suggest some better way, of ... as Dean Rusk puts it, "organising the peace" – either through the United Nations, or through some other alliance that can guarantee preponderant power.

Preponderant power, that has always been the true deterrent, in spite of the Christian rhetoric that breathed so piously through the preamble to the treaty of Westphalia, 1648. And through the preamble to the charter of the United Nations, 1945.

All these favourable balances of power have expressed that power through their willingness to use their ultimate weapon. With the British it was the navy, and it was through their navy that they could patrol the seven seas, put down wars in Asia, confine all big wars to Europe, as a backstop for landbound allies.

Today, it seems to me, the United States is the world’s greatest power, but only through its nuclear power. And what is never acknowledged, the universal taboo against the use of this power, disarms America at a blow, and leaves it a large and rich, but far from omnipotent, power capable of fighting one or two unconventional wars with conventional weapons. This, it seems to me, is the real American position in the world today and the reason why its best aims are frustrated.

The United States has 132 military bases abroad and solemn treaty commitments to come to the aid of 43 nations if they are attacked, or what is more likely these days, disrupted from within. The earnest and gentle Senator Church put his finger on this Achilles heel by asking the secretary if the great conflict was not between commitment and capacity – in other words, America maybe right, but is she able? How did it come about that this country led successfully by a soldier, then an alert foreign affair student, and then by the shrewdest of politicians, committed itself to play St George to 43 dragons?

We must go back, I think, to what I called the early glow of American world power in the early 1950s. That is when the pledges were given, and when the cost of them was never counted.

The Communists, not to mention the nationalists and the millions of Asians who simply want to see the white man leave their continent for good, had not attempted a test of American power. As late as the day of Kennedy’s inauguration, the United States was still flexing and rippling its muscles for lack of exercise. And on that day, the president delivered himself of a sentence, magnificent as rhetoric, appalling as policy.

Secretary Rusk very much moved, recited it the other day to the committee as the touchstone of America’s resolve, "Let every nation know whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

This, I suggest is fine to read but fatal to act on. It maybe the wish of a strong nation to do this, but in reality, it will not support any friend or fight any foe or bear any hardship, or support the burden, say, of a civil war in its own land, in order to rush to the aid of 43 friends, and fight 43 foes.

Vietnam, I fear, is the price of the Kennedy inaugural.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.