>> The fact is, you didn't have to be very radical in 1963 or 1964 to
>> want to pull out of Vietnam. I know this sounds like it violates the
>> laws of nature, but it's true. The general belief among American
>> elites who followed foreign policy closely was that a war in Vietnam
>> would be a disaster and should be avoided if at all possible.
>
> Just to play devil's advocate and to learn more from what is clearly
> diligent scholarship, can you name some important members of the
> decision-making or opinion-making elite who held this position during
> that period besides George Kennan, Walter Lippmann and William
> Fullbright -- all three of whom seem the exceptions that prove the
> rule? (The rule being that elite common sense was the complete
> opposite of this, and that they were exceptional members of the elite
> for publicly and articulately opposing it).
First off, Lippmann, Fulbright and Kennan weren't some band of gadflies. They were probably the three most respected foreign affairs specialists outside the Executive Branch. At the time, the standard political science textbook on the Senate noted in its section on foreign affairs that Walter Lippmann was far and away the leading influence on the views of senators. Kennan was still seen as the intellectual god of the Cold War (he didn't yet have the reputation of a gadfly despite some unorthodox public comments on Germany in the 50's). Fulbright was ex officio the number one foreign policy voice of Congress.
But the reason I cited Lippmann and Fulbright in particular (other than the fact that I've worked a bit on their views in this period) is that they pass even a "hard test": They didn't just say "we should get out" but they actually went so far as to elaborate *detailed* policy alternatives, *in writing*, that *explicitly* acknowledged the acceptability of an eventual Communist ascendancy in South Vietnam. Another person you can add to that list is Charles De Gaulle - while not American, De Gaulle, who was especially popular among conservative politicians and intellectuals, had big megaphone in the US at the time and was of course a leading Free World ally against the Communist Menace. (It wasn't until around 1966 that US conservatives started souring on De Gaulle.)
Now if you set aside that hard test, you could move down to the level of those who merely said things like "we've absolutely got to get out ASAP," without specifying anything about what should be done instead. But once you get down to that level, the test becomes absurdly easy. *Everyone* who wasn't a Goldwaterite or Stalwart Republican or Scoop Jackson/Thomas Dodd type was saying that. Picking up my copy of Fred Logevall's _Choosing War_, I see that Richard Russell, the conservative Georgia House Speaker, told the president in Dec. 1963: "[We should] spend whatever it takes to bring to power a government that would ask us to go home." Mike Mansfield (Senate majority leader) felt the same way. That was the nature of the Vietnam issue: Everybody was "against" going in but nobody wanted to be the one to say out loud (even in private) that a Communist victory was to be accepted.
Only those who were most absolutely sure of their stature as statesmen would have the gall to make a bold, detailed policy proposal accepting a Communist victory - in other words, Lippmann, Fulbright, or Kennan. (Kennan was a little different, though.)
> Eisenhower described SE Asia in terms of the domino theory in 1954.
> If the domino theory, which was popular ever after, isn't a discourse
> of not tolerating a little country's rebellion on the grounds that it
> would send shock waves through the empire, what is?
In Eisenhower's understanding of the world (and he was not alone in 1954 - by 1964 it was a very different world, though), there was no such thing as a communism that was not an agent of the Sino-Soviet monolith. So for him, a defection from the world capitalist system was literally indistinguishable from a concrete blow to the military/geopolitical security of the United States. What made Vietnam a dilemma for elite policymakers in 1964 was that it came just as everyone (among the elite!) was realizing that the Cold War had become utterly transformed - there was a Sino-Soviet split, the German question had been tacitly resolved between the great powers, and nuclear parity was around the corner.
SA