Word: ellsbergs
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...wrong men might get elected. To find out why, Nixon visited the home of Major General Edward Lansdale, the U.S. coordinator of civil pacification efforts. Members of Lansdale's team were also present, including a 34-year-old former State Department expert in games theory named Daniel Ellsberg...
This is how Ellsberg remembers the gathering: "After shaking hands with each of us, Nixon asked: 'Well, Ed, what are you up to?' Lansdale replied: 'We want to help General Thang* make this the most honest election that has ever been held in Vietnam...
...learned on the playing fields of Whittier, President Nixon must now settle for considerably less than a win in Southeast Asia. Whatever "winding down the war" in Indochina eventually comes to mean, Nixon cannot have it look like an outright American defeat. Neither could any other postwar President, says Ellsberg in "The Quagmire Myth and Stalemate Machine," the principal paper in this cool, rigorously logical collection of essays, dramatic eyewitness reports and congressional testimony. Ever since the fall of Dien Bien Phu, says Ellsberg, the first law of political survival has been "Do not lose the rest of Vietnam...
...obey this law. Although he resisted advice to commit a large force to Viet Nam, he still had to send enough troops to ensure a stalemate. That the escalations of subsequent Presidents were made after considerable pessimistic advice and with one eye on the Gallup poll leads Ellsberg to dismiss the general belief that the U.S. sank slowly in the East like some hapless woolly mammoth in a tar pit. Perhaps Presidents overestimated the consequences of clear-cut withdrawal not only because of the advice they received but also because of their own timid estimates of what the American people...
Among the most serious imperfections that Ellsberg deals with are the increasingly flimsy veils of optimistic fictions that Presidents have had to weave over the pessimistic realities in Southeast Asia. As the Pentagon papers showed, Presidents deceive and are deceived, sometimes by their own deceptions. Testifying before Senator Fulbright's Foreign Relations Committee, Ellsberg offered a frightening model: "When the President starts lying, he begins to need evidence to back up his lies because in this democracy he is questioned on his statements. It then percolates down through the bureaucracy that you are helping the Boss if you come...