The Fallon resignation leaves me wondering if we’ve reached a Saturday Night Massacre and a McMaster point simultaneously.
H.R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty tells us that during Lyndon Johnson’s acceleration of the war in Vietnam, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were ambivalent about a land war in Asia. To a man they agreed that the American system had to be defended against the godless Commies, but there were questions about what it would take to win in Vietnam, whether it was worth it, whether we had the resources and the resolve, and so on. Not to mention which service should take the lead. Should the Navy shell the enemy from the sea, or the Marines establish beachheads, or the Air Force bomb them into submission, or the Army put boots on the ground to excerise the only real control that matters? Interservice rivaly contributed greatly to their failure to offer better options early on, and more coherent resistance to the poor decisions as the quagmire deepend.
Many members of Johnson’s inner circle, in fact, lacked trust in the military and intelligence communities.
- CIA recommendations and predictions led to the debacle at the Bay of Pigs.
- Civilian officials considered much high-level military strategy obsolete in light of atomic weapons.
- The military and intelligence communities do not seem from the record (imperfectly reliable with respect to covert agencies) to have supported releasing the photos Adlai Stevenson showed the UN to engage the world in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The themes of Stevenson’s bravura performance were repeated as farce in Colin Powell’s fiasco preceding the US invasion of Iraq.
As a result of their perceived ambivalence about taking over the colonial burdens of the French in Indochina, the Joint Chiefs were consigned to tasks involving only tactical considerations. In the planning stages they were rarely consulted except for political cover or occasional feasibility studies. Input from the military at the strategic level was unwelcome.
The CIA was also feeling ignored. Its frequent reports of difficult social and economic situations in Vietnam, and the political realities that arose from these conditions, were generally edited out of the situation reports to Washington from the US embassy in Saigon. The Agency, of course, was not dependent on State to get its reports back to Langley, so some administration skeptics eventually heard some of the information. But the tide of groupthink was too strong, and the lure of war profits too great, for a few leaners to change the course of the ship of state.
In the end, the CIA director resigned in protest against the LBJ inner circle’s refusal to accept Agency input on the situation in Vietnam; but none of the military brass whose advice and experience was treated with sometimes-polite contempt followed his lead. McMaster’s book is well enough known to prompt the question among intelligent military folks of when it’s time to resign rather than accept a destructive and probably illegal order.
Then there’s the Saturday Night Massacre, involving consecutive firings by the embattled Richard Nixon of two Attorneys General (Eliot Richardson, William Ruckelshaus) who refused to rid Nixon of the troublesome Special Proscutor investigating Watergate, who had him dead to rights. Finally the one left standing at main Justice was the ever-helpful Robert Bork, who courageously stanched the flow. Perhaps Michael Mukasey can manage to keep the courts from hauling George W. Bush before the bench for the next ten months or so? My mantra is, There’s no statute of limitations on war crimes.
