On Thu, 26 Nov 2009, SA wrote:
> 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."
You realize of course that if you use this as evidence, you'd have to say that everyone in the elite today is for getting out of Afghanistan :-)
> 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.
This seems to pretty much concede my point that they were the exceptions who proved the rule. They were smarter the rest, they were righter than the rest, and everyone allowed them to speak because they were so respected. But their position was recognized by everyone, including them, as being the opposite of the elite common sense. Which they didn't change, and which in fact controlled policy in league with Fortuna.
> 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
Here I'm intrigued. I can see how the split ultimately leads to the idea of playing off one against the other 10 years later. But I don't see how at this period it changes the basic fear that every country "we" lose "they" gain, and that when one country leaves it encourages five others. At first sight it would just seem that we've got 2 opponents rather than one: no real gain.
> the German question had been tacitly resolved between the great powers,
> and nuclear parity was around the corner.
I can see how that makes a big difference in Kennan world, where the argument is that we should concentrate on main chance and not dissipate our resources. But for the rest of the elite, who thought we must respond to every disturbance everywhere, the third world was fissioning like crazy and the global battle ground was expanding every day -- and "we" were losing simply by default, since every independent colony left out camp and went into the questionable column. Against that background, the significance of Vietnam looks very different. It looks like a domino getting bigger every day.
Michael