Vietnam-era aides cite the lessons of a US defeat
Kissinger, others at Kennedy site
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."
Scott Allen can be reached at allen@globe.com 