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Obama's Sixties Flashback
This syndrome, often fueled by ideological journalism, can affect presidents as well as senators. Halberstam writes that the hawkish columnist Joseph Alsop “could make the case for holding the line in a way which implied that manhood was at stake. Those years would show, in the American system, how when a question of the use of force arose in government, the advocates of force were always better organized, seemed more numerous, and seemed to have both logic and fear on their side, that in fending them off in his own government, a President would need all the help he could possibly get.”
Chester Bowles, who was forced out as Kennedy’s undersecretary of state for being too dovish (and who in retrospect was right about almost everything, including Vietnam) wrote in his diary after the Bay of Pigs fiasco about the limits of the obsession with pragmatism. “The question that concerns me the most about this new administration is whether it lacks a genuine sense of conviction about what is right and what is wrong.” Halberstam recounts a moment at which Kennedy’s UN ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, told Secretary of State Dean Rusk to delay a resumption of nuclear testing because it would give the country moral leadership. “I wouldn’t make the smallest concession for moral leadership,” Rusk snapped at him. “It’s much over-rated.”
Of course the Democratic president whose foreign policy Obama would least like to be compared to is Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, about whose foreign policy team Halberstam wrote, “The options they would deal with in 1965 were artificial ones. Given their outlook and their conception of the country and their own political futures they would be driven to certain inevitable highly predictable decisions but they still had the illusion that they could control events…If someone in those days had called them aside and suggested that they…were tied to a policy of deep irrationality, layer and layer of clear rationality based on several great false assumptions, and buttressed by a deeply dishonest reporting system which created a totally false data bank, they would have lashed out sharply.”
The neocons and their allies have lost their administration but not their agenda or their wiles. Halberstam’s book reminds us that intellect and resumes are not sufficient to forestall disastrous policies.
Obama will need a rigorous re-analysis of many of the foreign policy assumptions of the last several administrations. In addition to the dazzling political skills that got him nominated and elected, Obama has an advantage that neither Kennedy nor Johnson had. Millions of voters who identified with his early opposition to the Iraq war are well-organized and passionately opposed to a more “competent” version of the Bush-Cheney mission. Obama will need all of these assets as well as moral courage to withstand the hawkish pressures of a wide array of political and intellectual interests that rival anything JFK and LBJ had to contend with.
John Talks Joe
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
Why America Must Learn to Bow
Martin Jacques is the cofounder of the UK think tank Demos, writes a regular column for The Guardian, and is a visiting research fellow at the London School of Economics Asia Research Centre. His new book, When China Rules the World, is available now.
Going Rogue: The Index
Christopher Buckley's books include Supreme Courtship, The White House Mess, Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men, and Florence of Arabia. He was chief speechwriter for Vice President George H.W. Bush, and is editor-at-large of ForbesLife magazine. His new book is Losing Mum and Pup, a memoir. Buckley's Daily Beast column is the winner of an Online Journalism Award in the category of Online Commentary.
Danny is always brilliant
It's amusing that the media create an issue then harrumph, cluck, and otherwise fluff themselves up warning how a strong Cabinet can overpower a President, as if this might apply to Obama.
He's young, charismatic, a Democrat, he must be a JFK, or so the bobble heads are punditing away. Leave Camelot already, Mr. Goldberg. When frantically trying to make the glass slipper fit, it could be Cinderella or an impostor. Only time will tell.
With this article we see the real limitations of the Iraq-Vietnam analogy as well as a determination by the writer to view Iraq as a Vietnam re-run despite the template having been invalided by the facts. Never was the Vietnam War brought to the level of success that our effort in Iraq has reached over the past year-and-a-half. Never did the people of Vietnam support our effort to the extent the Iraqis now appreciate our military in Iraq. The enemies of Iraqi democracy have been weakened and delegitimized in a way that the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese never were.Unlike the Vietnam War, which grew progressively worse as our strategic assumptions were exposed to be false, our effort in Iraq has become increasingly successful as our ground tactics have proven our strategic assumptions about Iraq to be correct. It's true that Bush and Rumsfeld were absolutely wrong about post-Hussein Iraq and that for three unforgivable years they bungled the execution of the war. But those were tactical errors, not errors of overall strategic vision. Once the right tactical approach - the surge - was finally adopted, our effort has proven to be remarkably successful. There is a real chance Iraq will, as the neo-cons intended, prove to be a bulwark of pluralistic democracy in the Arab world that will counterbalance Iran and, possibly, inspire the people of other Arab countries to move away from dictatorial regimes. This, in turn, will naturally undermine Muslim extremists. Furthermore, Iraq has been removed as a regional and global danger. Had we been as successful in Vietnam as we have been in Iraq, the insights and conclusions reached by David Halberstam in The Best & the Brightest would have been very different.
excellent piece. you have a way of articulating what I and alot of my friends believe but didn't know quite how to express. i think obama has a real chance of avoiding mistakes of the past, but only if we keep up the pressure.
Thank you.
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