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HEADLINE: VIETNAM-ERA AIDES CITE THE LESSONS OF A US DEFEAT
BYLINE: BY SCOTT ALLEN, GLOBE STAFF
President Lyndon Johnson didn't mention Vietnam as he
discussed the major issues facing the nation during the long
night after John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November
1963. But by 1968, amid mounting US casualties and Pentagon
requests for more troops, the unpopularity of the war forced
Johnson to drop out of the race for reelection, leaving him
a broken man, a former adviser recalled yesterday.
"No president can win a war when public support for that war
begins to decline and evaporate," said Jack Valenti, special
assistant to Johnson from 1963 to 1966. "It's like letting a
heavy body roll down a hill and, once you let go, you lose
control of it."
Few people have greater empathy for the challenges facing
the Bush administration in Iraq than Valenti and the other
speakers who appeared yesterday at a unique conference on
"Vietnam and the Presidency" at the John F. Kennedy Library
in Dorchester. As top advisers to the Vietnam-era
presidents, they know firsthand about making decisions based
on unreliable intelligence and the fear that failure would
only embolden US enemies around the world.
But the four men Valenti, Henry Kissinger, Theodore
Sorensen, and Alexander M. Haig Jr. had plenty of
hard-earned lessons for Bush and other political leaders
from the worst military defeat in US history, costing more
than 57,000 soldiers' lives. Though the lessons depend
partly on ideology, all four saw similarities between
Vietnam and the war in Iraq.
"Every asset of the nation must be applied to the conflict
to bring about a quick and successful outcome, or don't do
it," said Haig, an adviser to presidents Johnson and Nixon
who says more troops are needed to succeed in Iraq.
President Bush's father had 660,000 coalition soldiers for
the 1991 Gulf War invasion, more than twice as many as his
son had for Iraq's initial invasion.
"Vietnam and the Presidency," the first conference sponsored
jointly by all the presidential libraries, drew more than
500 people to the Kennedy Library, including some who
arrived at 6 a.m. for good seats and another 1,000 watching
by satellite from the nearby University of Massachusetts.
Caroline Kennedy, President Kennedy's daughter, introduced
the morning discussion among the four former advisers, all
approaching or past 80 and still strikingly sharp in
recalling events of decades ago.
Kissinger, who as Nixon's secretary of state faced some of
the toughest questions from the audience and protesters
outside insisted that the Vietnam War was fought for "noble
motives" to stop the spread of communism. Today, he said,
the public needs to understand the broader strategic
importance of the invasion of Iraq, which he also supported.
"We all ought to understand the consequences of a failure.
We are facing a jihadist radical Islamic challenge" that
could shake governments all over the world, Kissinger said
after the panel discussion. "There ought to be some sympathy
for the complexity of the situation."
But Valenti said today's government needs to be wary of
self-delusion. He said the rationale for the Vietnam War
that South Vietnam's defeat would trigger the fall of other
governments like dominoes turned out to be "a piece of
defunct mythology." In fact, he said, a lot of the
information that fueled the war, including 60 percent to 70
percent of the intelligence reports about how it was going,
turned out to be false.
"I learned in Hollywood that nobody knows anything," said
Valenti, the former head of the Motion Picture Association
of America. "In government, nobody knows anything. On Wall
Street, nobody knows anything. . . . The vagaries of error
affect us all."
President Carter, in a videotaped interview for the event,
said Bush's reason for invading Iraq represents "a new and
radical departure for all Democratic and Republican
presidents in recent history." Carter said that presidents
believed the Vietnam War was stopping the spread of
communism but that the Iraq invasion was strictly a
preemptive measure to prevent Saddam Hussein from attacking
the United States with weapons of mass destruction that were
later found not to exist.
Kissinger said he suffered no deep moral qualms about his
role in Vietnam, calling it "highly inappropriate" when
moderator Brian Williams of NBC News asked whether he wanted
to apologize for anything that he had done. Kissinger said
he rarely takes part in public discussions of Vietnam and
only joined yesterday's panel out of loyalty to the Kennedy
family. Much of the criticism of his role, Kissinger said,
is based on isolated lines taken out of context from
extensive documents.
"I have no regrets,"
said Kissinger, who left Nazi Germany for the United States.
"I had an opportunity to serve the country which is all
anyone can ask for." When he went to lunch with his
daughter, Kissinger passed antiwar demonstrators who had
been chanting, "Kissinger should go to jail, no bail."
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