I'd spent from the fall of 1964 to 1965 as an assistant working on the planning for the escalation in Vietnam. That was a period of great pessimism in Washington. One could say. One could say Realism. There was certainly no belief that the war could was soon to be won by any means. I've learned since that there were people in Vietnam who believed that the arrival of American troops would very quickly make a difference, but nothing that we saw in the cables was suggesting that.

As a matter of fact, Ambassador Taylor with his long combat experience did not believe that. He had believed that American troops would likely lead to a lessening of effort by the Vietnamese troops. It is hard to say whether that is precisely what did happen. But, in any case, ahm ah we weren't led to believe in Washington. I saw two different paths being used, and I wanted to align myself very strongly with one ah represented with the man I volunteered to go with, General Lansdale.

He had written ah an article in Foreign Affairs that appealed to me very strongly that was very critical of the American bombing that had started while I was in the Pentagon in early '65. It seemed it was likely to turn the population against the regime we were supporting and against our aid and ah be "counterproductive", and it was against our ideals. That ah it's burden was felt by the women and children, the noncombatants of Vietnam. The people we were in principle trying to help. Ah.

That that attitude was very much in line with my own concerns, and I volunteered to go to Vietnam with him to help find a kind of political solution to the war. In principle to help those elements of in Vietnam that could see ah and the harmony between a nationalist and aims aspirations in Vietnam and ah support from the United States, and would compete with the Viet Cong for the nationalist sympathies of the Vietnamese and for the ah and offer a regime that would be as efficient perhaps as the as the Viet Cong could offer but much freer and more in line with Vietnamese traditions.

And, really I got to Vietnam and met Vietnamese the ones I respected most like Tran Ngoc Chau who had been in the Viet Minh, the precursor to the NLF, the Viet Cong, confirmed ah in his point of view, in his own mind that the Buddhist traditions were ah, and he was a very religious and ah dedicated Buddhist were ah more harmonious with a noncommunist government, that the communist would work against the family traditions, the basis for dignity in the peasants, ah, would be anti-traditionalists totally. He led me to see the the communist ideology as a kind of foreign input that ah we had a chance to counter and that it was reasonable to counter in terms of the interest of the people themselves.

He believed in working with and to some degree for the Americans. What I believed as an American official. That there was a possible harmony of interest between what was good for the US and what was good for the people of Vietnam, and it was also always clear that there was another approach which did, in fact, take over totally to ah our victory or our stalemate, our avoiding of loss in Vietnam, and that was represented by the commander of the first division, General DePew who told me on one occasion, the solution here is more bombs, more shells, more napalm.

Not to win the hearts of Vietnamese, but in effect, to move the bodies of those who incline to support the Viet Cong into refugee slums in the heart of the cities where they couldn't support the Viet Cong, where we could control them. Ah. Basically, to lead even the Viet Cong to ah discouragement, tire them, living in the jungles, living in the tunnels under our bombing.

They didn't get discouraged and ah as soon as I arrived in Vietnam and talked to people who had been there fore years I lost the sense that they were likely to get discouraged by the bombing as they as they never did, of course. I maintained the hope for some months that we could find Vietnamese who would be both our allies and respected by the Vietnamese people in general. It took me a long time to realize that those two criteria were just contradictory. Ah.

Excuse me.

Let's start now with some of your sense of place throughout Saigon.

I loved Saigon from the day I arrived really until I left, although it changed a great deal during that time. Smog arrived with clouds of Hondas and ah military vehicles. The smog killed the beautiful trees that the French had planted along these broad boulevards. But, I liked the crowded ah colorful city, and it was very ah, a very romantic place in many ways. In fact, when I first arrived, the Viet Cong had just cut the power ah at a number of the ah generators that supplied Saigon so that the city at night was lit by candles.

Even the hotels where the officials and ah news pin had candles on the stairs to light your way up since the elevators couldn't work. And, as you walked along the streets the bars were lit by candles along the bar and the little tires along the street. It was a very, very, very romantic pla, it was a lovely city at that point. Flares in the distance ah giving that edge of excitement about there being a war.

I came with lists of people that I'd been told I should meet, people who spoke Vietnamese, were close to the Vietnamese, had been there for years. And, they did, in fact, prove to be very knowledgeable people. Like Ev Bumgardner, and Frank Scott and and ah I came with people like General Lansdale whose whole theme, as like Bumgardners and the others, was this, this war must be won by Vietnamese and that we were there to help them, basically, and that we were looking for patriots.

Vietnamese patriots who, at the same time, saw their goals as compatible with ours, to prevent a communist victory, and there were such people, naturally. The question came to be very quickly within weeks after I arrived, why are such people all boxed in among the Vietnamese themselves. Why do they have such little responsibility? The people that seemed to us the most effective, the most potentially popular of the Vietnamese. Why are their superiors so markedly incompetent and corrupt. Ah.

One rule I came to propose to various people to see if they agreed or not- everyone agreed- was ah that there wasn't an American officer in Vietnam as an advisor who couldn't name half a dozen Vietnamese of his acquaintance in a given unit that he was advising that he would be better than the given commander who was his counterpart. Ah. Why did it, why did we seem to be working so inevitably with people who had no ability to command anyone's respect. Their own subordinates, the people they were working among. Corrupt, cowardly, ignorant.

It's not characteristic of Vietnamese, in general, as the Viet Cong, for example, showed very clearly. But, it wasn't ah necessarily ah true of the Vietnamese on our side. There were many dedicated ah comp—very competent, very brave people. But, as I said, they ah they tended to be out of positions of power, to be constantly frustrated. The result of having this incompetent, corrupt leadership was a performance by the troops that not only was very unmilitary, very ineffective militarily, but was creating Viet Cong by their practices of raping, stealing, ah ravaging places, using artillery indiscriminately against their own people. Ah.

How did we get stuck with troops like this, and what could be done about it? That was the problem that ah those of us who were concerned about the Vietnamese side of this picture. Ah. Who thought of ourselves of helping the Vietnamese. This was our problem. Ah. How do we help get better leadership? How do we motivate them and so forth? I think underlying our own frustration and the ah the fact that this problem never was solved was our own inability to perceive clearly what our role was there. Ah.

Who what what the Americans were doing there. The problem was very simply, how do you motivate people to patriotism, to fighting for their country when they are rather manifestly fighting for someone else's country, my own, the United States? How can foreigners, who unlike the red coats in 1776, didn't even speak the same language as the people of the colonies, of America? Ah. Did not share a common tradition or culture? How could ah how could they come there and instill ah courage, commitment, motivation to protect, basically, our interest, American interests in that country. The answer was...

And, you were saying the answer, beep, just a second. Okay. Go ahead.

A complaint that anyone who went into the districts and villages would hear very quickly from, both from American advisors and from Vietnamese ah who spoke to us, was the complaint about the corruption of the Saigon, the GVN officials, and how that ah precluded really any real sympathy or willing commitment on the part of the GVN which was perceived as a very self interested, selfish group, working for the rich for the landlords.

The, in contrast to the Viet Cong who were perceived as quite incorruptible, disciplined, a characteristic by the way they have not preserved into peacetime, but they were ah very ah perhaps instrumentally ah dedicated, disciplined during the war and were, in fact, very committed, dedicated, disciplined in great contrast to the Saigon troops. I remember though one Saigon general telling me one night when the subject of corruption came up, he said you, he said first you must understand that ah there is no chance of of getting the dedication of the lower officers when they see who is leading the country.

Who you Americans have selected ah as our leaders. It's undignified. It's humiliating. As another Vietnamese put it to me, we don't mind having leaders who are American puppets, but you can select more respectful puppets that wou—would not humiliate us. Like Ky or ah others who were so un Vietnamese in their nature. Well, this general went on to say ah on the question of why these leaders were so corrupt. He said that a an official goes into a province and he very quickly realizes that there is no way for him to make real progress ah against the Viet Cong. Ah.

He cannot do what he wants to do which is to win the war in his area against the Viet Cong given especially the national leadership that you have selected. That is a drag on these operations. It's a burden. You can't overcome that, and so he turns to something that he can do. There's a man names Zu who was then a colonel actually. What he can do is provide for his family. He will be in office only a limited period of time and so he charges tolls, he charges missals, AID material, ah he will even sell weapons in some cases to Viet Cong. He makes deals of various kinds, and he provides for his family before he turns over the office to his successor.

Start with So Zu says if Colonel Zu . .

Okay. This Colonel Zu says the officer then realizes that with the kind of leadership the Americans have provided for the country in the way of Vietnamese, there's no chance of winning hearts, of making real progress, so he turns to what he can do and that is providing for his family. Ah. Getting what money he can out of his province ah before his position is taken by someone else's. Zu must have been speaking from the heart as he told me this because he was later, I was told the fall guy, but anyway removed from his command in Tukor for major dope dealing operations.

The way this ah effected, of course, the countryside was very immediately apparent. We were trying to win hearts in part, for example, by aiding development, by giving cement for clinics, dispensaries, schools. Ah. I remember very much inspecting one of those for the deputy ambassador Porter, and as I walked through this school that had just been provided by American funds ah my heel was sinking into the cement, ah, which was crumbling under our feet as we walked across it, and it was explained that that was because of the various, the many bags of cement that had been provided by AID the district chief had sold most of them for villas, for the rich ah nearby and and the school was made then of one bag to ten of sand or something like that.

I don't remember what the portions were supposed to be but as it was it was primarily sand, which as we walked across it, was literally crumbling and blowing in the wind. Swirls of sand covered the floor of this school. As we watched in the wind it simply blew away, and that was the nature of so much of the positive we were trying to bring there that it was undermined underco—subverted by our own ah Vietnamese officials, our own Vietnamese officials who ah who were ah selling it. Ah. Hearts were not in the in the task. What one didn't come to realize, I think, while you were in Vietnam was that this was a policy that the United States really was not about to change in terms of the leadership we backed.

We those advisors who saw the problem could not be influential on changing this because it was a problem the US really couldn’t transcend. It's essentially the problem of finding patriotic honest quislings to do our work. You can't find people who will fight to the death courageously, inspire others to do the same for the interest of a foreign country. When the ah the Viet Cong were perceived as Vietnamese patriots fighting for the unification of the country, something that all Vietnamese accepted, they believed they were fighting for a just cause.

Okay.

I came to Vietnam from the Pentagon where the official line was...

Start again.

I came from the Pentagon where the official line which I'd help draft from time to time was ah that the war was aggressioned from the north, that a country to the north, North Vietnam, was invading across an international boundary, it's neighbor, and we were trying to get Hanoi to "leave its neighbors alone".

As soon as you got to Vietnam and you talked to any Vietnamese, pick at one at random of any type, ah you discovered that that didn't correspond to anything in the heads of Vietnamese. They were all very clear that there was one Vietnam, that there was no possibility of invasion by foreigners. The only foreigners in Vietnam as they were all well aware were the Americans, and the few...

As soon as one arrived in Vietnam and talked to almost any Vietnamese, officials or otherwise, you learned that the basic image of the war in America was a myth. That propaganda image, very effective in mobilizing American support including mine for the war, was that of two countries, one of which was being invaded by the other. Aggression from the north. The word neighbors was the key image with an invading army infiltrating and coming across aggressively. Across a boundary ah into the south and we were aiding the south, an independent country that wanted to remain independent. Ah. This didn't correspond to anything in the minds of any Vietnamese.

North or south. On our side or not. Ah. Or, nor did it correspond to any historical reality. The Vietnamese saw themselves as members of one country, Vietnam. In fact, both ah administrative sections, north and south, had it written into their constitutions, there is one Vietnam, ah corrupt as our leaders were in Saigon, you couldn't find one so foolish as to associate himself with a slogan that there should be an independent south Vietnam. He he couldn't, I don't know, have faced his family or anyone. Ah.

It would have been such an un Vietnamese thing to say and yet that was the key notion of what it was that we were defending and trying to maintain there. Ah. You also found that there was no prospect of victory partly because of the degree of Viet Cong control in the south. Ah. The lack of cooperation with the government ah of most of the people of the south ah and their degree of active cooperation to the Viet Cong which didn't necessarily represent ah real loyalty or total commitment to the Viet Cong side. Ah.

Many people that we dealt with say that they regarded the Viet Cong as cruel, as very tough guys in American idiom, as they were. And, ah as likely to ah ins—institute a very harsh regime in which people had to work harder and under harder discipline than Vietnamese really wanted to do in the delta, and ah as being un Vietnamese in various ways culturally. Ah. Against religion, against family and so forth. So there were many Vietnamese who did not really want if they had a choice to be ruled by the communists. But, at the same time, one quickly saw in talking with them or about them to people who knew them ah they saw the Viet Cong as dedicated, patriotic, efficient, brave, selfless, loyal Vietnamese.

All corresponding to the way the Viet Cong behaved, and as ah as the people who would in the end because of all these factors win, the people who would eventually be there when the foreigners went home. We had Vietnamese who were fighting on our side for us against the communists but they were perceived by other Vietnamese and themselves really as biding their time eventually until the Viet Cong, until the foreigners went home. Then they would be in trouble.

They'd have to immigrate, they might be killed or they'd have to change sides. Ah. You couldn't get highly courageous, dedicated behavior out of people with that point of view. So, when you, when you talked then to advisors, the people I learned from over there, you got the picture that it's not aggression from the north, but it's civil war. And, that was the delusion that that led to our own puzzlement as to why we couldn't change anything over there. First of all, you did begin to get the sense that in some way we were on the wrong side in the civil war. We were on the side of the corrupt, the rich instead of the poor.

The ah the un-nationalists and so forth. The incompetent as opposed to this this other group. But, that, too, was really and we wondered why that was and we sought to change it from within. If the Czar only knew, if the president only understood the the depravity or the simple incompetence of the people we were putting in office and were backing as officials ah surely he he would give orders and all this would be changed. I think there, I came to realize as the war went on that ah the American policy was not to allow under any circumstances a communist victory in South Vietnam whatever the people of Vietnam might want at any point in terms of wanting the war to end.

Let's pause there.

Just a second. Okay.

It took many months, probably more than a year, for me to realize as American troops began to come in that the kind of Vietnamese we were getting as officials to advise in their inadequacies related very much to the way the Americans meant to fight the war and had to fight the war ah which meant with a great use of artillery and of bombing, of napalm, white phosphorous. A very heavy burden on the civilian population of Vietnam. Remember that the American, the American army hadn't fought a colonial war since the Philippines at the turn of the century and ah they were pretty brutal about that then I now discover. But, in any case, the American army that went to Viet Cong, ah Vietnam to ah...

Start again, the American...

The American army had kind of material and habits at that time which were suited to fighting very large, modern, industrialized armies. Ah. We relied very much on artillery, on bombing, on close support to minimize US casualties. In a war remember which was not so popular at home, that the president thought that he could afford to have very many US casualties. The effect then of sending American divisions into a populated area was to kill a very great many civilians, and include them in the body

Okay.

Something I've never seen in a in a history of this period and for which I give Ambassador Lodge some real credit was his conviction that it would be very bad to send American combat units into the heavy populated delta below Saigon and he set himself as I understood it working for his Deputy, William Porter, to try to ah slow down, and if possible, and postpone maybe prevent the deployment of US troops and he did not totally prevent it, but I think he did in fact postpone it to some degree and save a lot of lives ah thereby.

When the troops went in they did, in fact, act as a kind of scourge. Ah. Spraying .50 caliber machine guns along canals that were densely populated. Ah. Killing, filling the hospitals with civilians. Children, women casualties basically and calling them Viet Cong. Achieving a body count for the 9th Division US 9th Division probably never achieved in any warfare. Ah. Also one of the highest relations of bodies counted to weapons captured. Ah. These were all civilians essentially. Lodge encouraged me for Porter to go down and work walk with the troops and observe what was going on in hopes of ah of slowing down these.

Okay.

Well, Ambassador Lodge and Deputy Ambassador Porter encouraged me to go down to walk with troops ah in the delta. One of the first units that was to go into the delta south of Vietnam, and see what I saw, and the expectation that that would be discouraging of further deployments. For about a ten day period ah of ah at the Christmas season in 1966 then I went out on virtually every patrol and every company action ah several a day with this battalion in WO KIEN which is an area that had been uncontested Viet Cong territory until these battalion dropped in with helicopters and I saw the attitude and the behavior of the troops change in the course of that.

First, from extreme confidence ah Viet Cong will not be within fifty miles of this place. This is a reinforced battalion as the exec said. That changed that night when the Viet Cong dropped mortars on every house in the line of huts that we were living in which had been their houses previously and which they had pretty well taped with mortars, very precise mortaring that night.

In the course of, we didn't see many Viet Cong. We heard them when they shot at us. But, then bringing down artillery, waiting for evac helicopters to come ah to take away the wounded that would result from these first shots, bringing down air support before we went ahead. This was army procedure I realized in the 1960's. All that gave the Viet Cong snipers who had attacked minutes before plenty of time to get away and shoot at us from another tree line when we got on the position.

Very adroitly working as ah teams ah one after ah another. The people who ah were not telling us the names or the whereabouts of Viet Cong, old people in the villages, in the huts that we came to ah were very frustrating to the troops who ah felt these people, you know, here we were trying to help them and so forth. Ah. I pointed out to some of the troops that there were very obviously people within a hundred yards of us at that moment watching us as we stood there.

Day after day after day ah the troops that I was with had this experience, being shot at approximately every half hour, losing one, two or three casualties in that first volley. Then, by the time that we got on the position where the first had come from after bombs had been laid out and after artillery had hit it, after people had been evacuated by helicopters the woun—ah our wounded, the Viet Cong were not there and minutes later ah we would be hit from ah another position and we would go over to that and go through the same thing. One rarely saw a Viet Cong, although in fact, I did a couple of times ah and an indelible impression.

I usually walked with the point, I chose to walk with the point at the head of the column, In this kind of war that's where you saw most of the action and on two occasions I had the chance to hear the firing behind us, the three or four of us who are walking in front. Look back and see Viet Cong who had been within yards of us, perhaps feet of us in thick rice as we walked through the patties having now come up ah from the ah the water where we hadn't seen them and were firing at the main body of the troops behind us. They had gotten between the point and the main body of the troops so as to fire at the main body. Very impressive.

They, obviously, knew the area very well. They lived there. They were local boys. They were firing from their front porches in effect. I remember at the end of one day having gotten fired at almost every half hour, twenty minutes, ah the platoon leader that I was with looked ahead at the artillery base ahead of us where we were going. He said, well, that's it. The day's over. There was one tree line between us and our base, and ah, to be sure we'd been fired at from almost every tree line but this one was now between us and the battalion.

We said well they won't be there. And, I remember the ah the radioman ah lying next to me saying I wouldn't be so sure. And, as he said Pfffffuuuu all broke out and there they were between us and the artillery. Ah. And, and it was on that day that I asked this same corporal radioman, have you do you ever feel like the red coats going through these rice patties and he said I've been thinking that all day, and I believed him. You couldn't miss your grade school imagery of your local boys firing from tree lines and from their own front gardens basically at us. Ah.

One didn't while you were in Vietnam feel hesitation about firing back when you were fired on and you weren't likely to ask yourself why you were there in their front yards exactly. But, it is something you did think about when you got home. At any rate, the ah troops got great respect for the Viet Cong that they were fighting. These people fighting against a reinforced American battalion with it's air support and everything else, but also very frustrated. I thoroughly understood the attitude of the troops at My Lai later.

Okay.

Well, as day by day this kind of combat went on with the Americans losing ah a few a wounded with almost every volley and ah perhaps a hundred in the course of little over a week and never seeing Viet Cong, never having any sense that they were having any effect on the enemy at all, their frustration and their anger at the situation was growing daily. On the last day that I went with them I ah actually was prevailed on to stay an extra morning and go out on patrol with two platoons that I had been with earlier and one of them began ah burning each house that we came to and I was surprised by this because I knew the battalion commander had given orders that there should be no burning of huts in this area. The troop's attitude was ah let them, the VC.

Let them hump it in the rain the way we have to. Of course, that was unrealistic. There were lots of houses left. The Viet Cong weren't going to have to sleep in the rain if they didn't want to, but ah in any case they had the feeling that that at least marked our presence, that it had some effect, if the did that, and so they were doing it. I assumed the orders had been changed. This same platoon leader who was doing that was doing another tactic, a reconnaissance by fire.

As we came to a set of huts, he would order his men to fire or throw grenades into the huts, and ah I pointed this out to the platoon leader I was with and he took the lead. He was senior to this other one. He took the lead and the next hut we came to had a bunch of children huddling in a one of the little shelters that most of the huts had. The earlier huts had been empty fortunately, and I said ah those children came kind of close to getting it, and he said that's why I replaced this other platoon leader. At any rate, at the end I I I was going back. I went to the battalion operations officer and I...

Okay.

When I got back to the base from this operation I went to the battalion operations officer and I said why did you change your orders on the burning of the huts. He said, we didn't change any orders. The orders are not to burn any huts. I said ah look back. You can see columns of smoke a few miles from where we'd come. Column after column. I said what do you think those are. He said they told me by radio that they were burning the thatch off foxholes. Off ah bunkers. I said they're burning every hut they're coming to.

In one week this battalion had gotten to the point where the troops were willing to burn these huts and lie to their respective officer and their operations officer about it. Ah. But, unauthorized burning like that, of course, was not the big burden. Ah. Here was an area where a helicopter couldn't come into that delta without blowing away a hut practically. It was so densely populated. One of my jobs, in fact, was to hand out AID money to reimburse the people who had just lost their hut ah while I was down there. The real effect, of course, was the artillery, the napalm, the 50 caliber, that was loosed on the population especially after Tet.

And, it was clear that the more American troops went down there, the more artillery would go with them, the more civilians would die as a result, and really this was the secret of the kind of Vietnamese leadership that we and the Vietnamese were burdened with or that we chose for them. Vietnamese who really were patriotic, who had a concern for their own country, who were anti communist and could ally themselves with Americans for that reason up to a point were also people who had a limit as to what they were willing to inflict on their fellow Vietnamese.

And, the Viet Cong effort supported by the troops from the north was ah rising as our involvement rose. The level of violence needed to stalemate them, we never did push them back, was always rising. We were always very skeptical. We, the American high command, was very skeptical of Vietnamese who got in our way by criticizing the use of napalm, the use of 50-caliber in populated areas, and they were pushed aside. The reason that we ended up with division commanders who were notable more for their corruption and their cruelty than for any degree of competence in fighting communists was that they had met the one essential requirement to their holding office. They would let us do anything.

They were willing to see any level of violence inflicted on their own people, even if they knew, as they all did know, that that made Viet Cong the croots that it worsened the military situation for us, but they kept their mouths shut about that. They kept their jobs and they protected their families with the flow of income. These then were the people that we found it so frustratingly impossible to criticize or to get rid of at our advisory level, at the lowest level. They were people that the US command picked because they were the only ones who would go along with this with this assault on their own country.

I thought then and I think now that the American people had to be lied to as much as they were to support the war with their taxes and their sons as they did over the years. They had to be lied about who we were supporting. What aims we were. What we were doing to the people of Vietnam. These things had to be concealed from them. Ah. I don't think, I don't think I'm just being naive about this. I don't think the president was mistaken to prevent the public from knowing just how many people we were killing over there and ah our intentions in terms of keeping that war going whether or not the people of Vietnam really wanted it. Ah.

He wasn't mistaken it he wanted the support of the public. We had to think that we were fighting to help ah people over there who wanted our presence. By the time I came back from Vietnam and especially after the Tet Offensive, I think there were very few knowledgeable in the Pentagon or the government who believed in what we were doing or believed that the bulk of the Vietnamese people wanted that war to continue and yet we were continuing it. Very few of them asked themselves whether we had a right to impose a war on people who wanted that war over. Whether we could pursue our perception of our global interests in that sense in terms of dominoes and our general prestige and influence at the cost of so many Vietnamese lives.

When I heard that question asked, I mean when I got home, it was very ah powerful. It was a catalyst of thinking about it because I'd never thought about it before. Whether we really had a right to do that. Again, if people were asked to intervene again as they are being and will be, I would hope that the Americans have learned from this. To be skeptical now of what our own government tells us. Ah.

The next time that Americans are asked to intervene as we did in Vietnam whether it's with advisors or with combat troops or with air, I would hope that the American people will this time be much more skeptical about ah the government account of who it is we're aiding and what our aims really are there. Very skeptical of the notion that we're helping independent people who have asked for and deserve ah our public's help. We should ask who who put those people in. Could they stay in without American support? Did we select them in the first instance? If we did, that doesn't necessarily mean that their the worst leaders that country could have. It does mean that we should be very self critical of our right to kill other nationals in that country to keep those men in office.

Basically, we should ask once, twice, ten times before we delegate to ourselves the right to kill anybody in a foreign country in order to determine the government of that country as we see fit. We don't have that right. Ah. And, I think the American people don't really want us to act in that imperial role, which is why they have to be lied to as much as they are. But, this is a still country, this is still a country where you can pierce through those lies a good deal, if you, if you know what questions to ask, if you pursue it.

Beep. Beep.

Okay.

The elections that are were slated for 1966 probably were relatively honest, as a matter of fact, because they were for a constituent assembly which no one took seriously, and ah the GVN didn't bother really to bribe or fix the election very very ah as much as they did in '67 and in later times when they they took it more seriously, but as far as the Americans were concerned, these elections were needed for the folks back home to support this basic myth that we were supporting ah, not only a popular cause in Vietnam, and we were doing what the Vietnamese wanted us to do with all shot and shell, but that we were also supporting values that we could believe in.

Self-determination, democracy, and as a matter of fact, Lansdale, my boss, took the prospect of elections more seriously than a lot of Americans did as something that could really compete with the Viet Cong and I think he had, ah, there was something to what he said, as Tran Ngoc Chau in the Pacification Program then told me, ah, to be sure these people are, don't have a tradition or a culture of elections. He said, but it doesn't take long for people to ah warm up to the idea of being able to get rid of a cruel, corrupt, brutal district chief or a village chief by an election process.

That doesn't take centuries of preparation. It's a very glowing idea. Ah. In fact, the Viet Cong's appeal to a large extent was that they did offer a way of getting rid of an a very oppressive district chief by killing him, but that brought down American troops and American artillery, and if you could do it in an election, Vietnamese would have very much accepted that I think. Ah.

On the other hand, the people that we were supporting, the people who were willing to see the war go on indefinitely without negotiations with the NLF, denying the largest most nationalistic body of Vietnamese any role whatever in the Saigon regime, and ah being able to kill, being willing to kill any number of Vietnamese to keep them out of that government, these people would not have been elected in fair elections, and the war couldn't have gone on then with their support.

So, neither our interest, the US interest, nor these officials' interests were served by honest elections. Ah. The elections couldn't be anything after that but a facade. This...

Sorry.

Go ahead.

One thing that sustained the morale of officials like myself and and people junior to me and people higher than me throughout the war was the belief which was probably correct, that the Viet Cong didn't have the fully committed loyalty of more than the fraction of the people, perhaps fifteen, perhaps at the highest twenty five percent. Of course, we knew that the Saigon regime had even less committed support, but it was important for us to believe and and realize that we weren't actually fighting ah the majority of the people in terms of of a a country that wanted communist rule entirely and that reassured us that we had a right to be doing what we were doing to fight the communists.

That, in part, was ignorance of our own history and of other revolutions. Ah. It wasn't til I got back that I read that John Adams had estimated the number of supporters to our revolution in this country. Our War of Independence had one third at most and much less than that in many parts of the country. Ah. That isn't, revolutions don't occur, in fact, with majority heroes ah who are ready to fight large empires in order to gain independence. The key thing we were missing was, I think, that the majority of the American ah of the Vietnamese people would have preferred to see that war over with either side a victor than to see the war continue and ah we...

Okay.

In the last couple of years when students have asked me what Vietnam was like and why we were there so long, I've had a more immediate answer to give them. I've said look at Afghanistan on your television screens and watch that operation closely. It's about the same. It's not hard for us to use the words aggression or invasion or imperialism about the Soviets in Afghanistan and all those words are right and they're right about what we did in Vietnam. That was very hard for me to see as a US official at the time.

That the US could commit war crimes, that we could be imperialist, ah that we could commit aggression. To go into a country whose leaders are people that we have put there for the purpose of asking us in, if necessary, ah doesn't constitute anything other than an invasion, and that's what we did in 1965. I think if Americans come to see the possibility that we're acting in the world the way we can see very clearly the way the Russians act in their sphere of influence ah we'll stay out of a lot of such interventions.

I don't think the Americans want an imperial role, the American public, and if they don't want it, if they don't want this kind of great power bullying, they will have to participate more citizens democratically they'll have to act to take more democratic control of our foreign policy than we've had since WWII. That's the lesson I would like them to draw.

The ah Truman doctrine ah came when I was in my junior year in high school and my senior year in the summer we had the Berlin blockade. Ah. I came to be a convinced cold warrior, liberal cold warrior. I thought of myself as a Truman/Acheson democratic. In the late fifties that was an unusual way for anybody to describe themselves and there were a few of us who thought that way.

I admired them, in particular, not ju—not only for being liberal at home and tough on the Russians abroad, but at the same time restrained in their violence. I admired Truman's decision not to use nuclear weapons and to keep the war limited in Korea and that made it easier for me to volunteer during the Korean emergency and to go into the marines, which was by the way, a service that I saw as one that believed in cold steel as its symbol. Meaning weapons that don't kill women and children unintentionally.

That don't inflict what we collateral damage call at Rand which was the inevitable result of nuclear weapons; that is, indiscriminate slaughter. I was opposed to the slaughter of civilians, to massacre ever since I was lecturing WWII newsreels and ever since Hiroshima, and when I joined the Pentagon ah and the marines it was, in part, to oppose that kind of warfare and I was not alone in the Pentagon in thinking that way.

Ah. Why did you go public when you did, with the Pentagon papers, and... talk about Congress not moving.

Well, I had, I had given the Pentagon Papers first to Congress in 1969 and 1970.

Start again.

Okay. It was in 1969 and '70 that I became convinced, partly by reading the Pentagon Papers, and seeing ah the number of presidents that had lied in the same ways and escalated and accepted stalemate in the same way, that I realized that only Congress or the public acting on public could possibly shift this policy. So, I gave the papers to Congress. It didn't seem to me that the executive branch for which I worked should should alone have this information about our history, and I hoped that Congress would hold hearings but they didn't.

Two invasions went by, Laos and Cambodia, and eventually, ah though it looked less and less likely that the papers would have any effect, when they were revealed they were increasingly out of date, it still seemed worth trying to educate the public on this, and so I gave them first to the New York Times, eventually to seventeen newspapers in hopes that the American public ah would not want to be lied to in the future as in the past and this would help them see through the lies that were being given to them right at that time. The lies that we were ending the war.

Well, the immediate effect in the course of a lot of publicity was ah an effect on public consciousness of the origins of the war.

I just want to avoid your sh...

Moving. Okay. Start again.

Just start again.

Can I take a drink?

Ya, sure.

The immediate of the Pentagon Papers was on public consciousness. Ah. In terms of their awareness of the origins of the war, the pattern of escalation. Above all, on the fa—the fact of a pattern of lying by

Excuse me. Let's start again. Start again.

Prior to the documentation in the Pentagon Papers of presidential lies, the notion that an American president lies systematically was an almost unsayable say of words. Just as the thought that America may commit aggression or act as an imperialist remains unthinkable to this day to most Americans. That's no longer true, the idea that a president may be lying to us. It took documents to prove to Americans that their president really had quite consciously misled them, and not only one president, but a succession of presidents had done that.

But, the documents were out and I think that effect may be irreversible, and I think that'll make our democracy work a lot better. Ah. Beyond public consciousness it wasn't clear for years that there had been any effect on the conduct of the war at all. The bombing that I expected, the mining of Haiphong, the continuation of the war that I expected when I released the Pentagon Papers happened pretty much as I had expected it, and I ah, if you'd asked me when we were bombing Hanoi in December of '72 if the Pentagon Papers had made any difference, and I was asked that, I said, no, nothing had made any difference.

The antiwar movement as a whole had made no difference. But, that wasn't wrong. Now, it's knowable from the memoirs of the president and Henry Kissinger and H.R. Halderman and others of that period. Nixon did have a secret plan to win the war. He wasn't kidding about that and his plan was to escalate much more sharply and much sooner than he actually did, including ah to threaten nuclear weapons against the Vietnamese, which he did, through Kissinger. And, he did that in the fall of 1969.

He tells the story. The antiwar movement as a whole of which I was part acted as early as '69 to prevent that. We didn't know we were doing it. I was copying the Pentagon Papers then, but they didn't get out then. But, the people who marched in the streets, in the moratorium of 1969 were preventing a massive escalation of the war in the implementation of what Nixon calls in his memoirs My November Ultimatum.

So, in fact, the antiwar movement including the Pentagon Papers, not only put a ceiling on the violence that Nixon was prepared to carry out, an effective ceiling, but in the end it played a major role in a in a ending the war by playing a major role in getting Nixon out of office. He was led to take criminal actions and then to use criminal obstruction of justice to cover up those actions against the antiwar movement.

In particular, against myself with his Plumber's Unit and his psychological profile and the break in to my doctor's office and other effects which he had to cover up later. All to keep secret from the public a policy that the American public would not have accepted democratically and understood it. Because he took those actions, he was vulnerable to being removed from office, and as a result of circumstance and luck and his own actions, he was removed from office and I think that was essential to ending the war as was the Congressional ceiling on the funding, and, that, too, was helped along by the Pentagon Papers.

So, in both those ways, it turned out ah the action had been useful ultimately in ending the war, along with the action of every seven year old and nine year old and teenager who marched or went to jail as a draft resistor and their parents who helped then. It turns out it was all necessary. It was all effective in ending the war, and none of it was too soon or too late or too much. It was essential.

The final questions. Ah. The final questions. Ah. Sound to go with Camera Roll 755. Beep.

Well, after giving the Pentagon Papers to Senator Fulbright in the fall of '69 and '70.

Would you just start without saying well.

Oh hmm. Okay. Ah. I gave the Pentagon Papers...

Excuse me. Just give me a pause.

No.

Ya.

Okay. I gave the Pentagon Papers to Senator Fulbright in the fall of 1969 and finished giving him the seven thousand pages in the spring of '70. I hoped that he would soon have hearings. In fact, they were scheduled in the fall of '69 and then cancelled because Nixon had convinced people that ah he really was getting out of Vietnam. This was a hoax but Senator Fulbright didn't think that he could convince his own committee ah to hold strong hearings at that time.

Likewise after the Cambodian invasion Fulbright expected to use the Pentagon Papers in hearings, but again ah the public mood really washed away on the assumption that Nixon had made an error and wouldn't repeat it. This was wrong. Nixon knew what he was doing which was trying to convince Hanoi that he would carry out the threats he'd made as early as '69 to escalate the war enormously, and he was bound to do it again as he did in Laos and later.

But, in the spring of 6... '71 I ah was encouraged by Fulbright to try other people in the senate, some of whom said yes and then changed their minds. Others did say yes provisionally but meanwhile I was working with the New York Times and eventually they brought it out in June. In the course of going around to all these people ah my wife who had not yet read the Pentagon Papers asked me how can you be sure that these are worth the risk because it was assumed that I would go to jail forever if I put them out, ah when they came out. How can you be sure that's worth it she said.

Senator Fulbright doesn't seem to think it's worth the risk, nor do any of the others. And, I said, well I don't know. They may be right. As Fulbright said to me, after all, it's only history. I said the trouble is ah I'm the only one who's read these papers and I can't go by their judgment. They may well be right, but I have to trust my own judgment that the American people need this history. There did come a time when I thought that she was in this so much .

Finally, after my wife helped me ah copy make copies of these papers so that the FBI couldn't get them away from me in the spring of '71 she was now so close in it herself that I thought she'd better read some of it, and I picked out parts from the time I'd been in the Pentagon during the escalation and gave it to her to read so she would have a sense of of whether this was worth the risk. She was actually the first woman ever to read these papers except for secretaries who'd typed it, which I think did affect her reaction or the the reaction I got.

You know I'd gone to Vietnam ah very concerned that there were thresholds I didn't want America to cross and that I wouldn't be party to their crossing. One was the use of nuclear weapons, the other was massive bombing of the population, and another was torture. And, when I was in Vietnam I had looked into allegations of torture, but unlike Colonel Herbert who saw it, I didn't find evidence for it. That was important to me in terms of staying in the effort.

She came back into the room having read these documents which had to do with our bombing program and used phrases in the officials' statements like progressive squeeze causing enough pain to Saigon, to Hanoi. Ah. The water drop technique like Chinese water torture turning the bombing on and off. The ratchet effect of turning it up bit by bit to cause maximum pressure and she was crying and she said, this is the language of torturists, and I realized that it was language that had crossed my desk in the Pentagon written by these friends of mine, my colleagues, my bosses. And, I had managed not to perceive the simple description for what we were doing, torturing a country into submission. I'd been part of that.