35b
HANS MORGENTHAU
its being untrue. For it seems to me that the Pentagon Papers are
a good example of the self-sufficiency of intellectual errors to deter–
mine policy, foreign and domestic. In other words, we all, in our
private capaci ty think and act frequently in noneconomic terms, and
frequently we are led to disaster by the autonomous force of our
emotions. There is no reason to believe that if policy-maker X acts in
this manner in his private capacity, he will not act in the same man–
ner in h is public capacity.
It
seems to me indeed that if you look at
the whole web of erroneous ideas and misconceptions, the whole veil
of superstitions which in the guise of an interpretation of reality has
been spread over reality in order to conceal it, that this by itself is
sufficien t to explain the misadventure in which we are engaged.
The question has been raised , what is the function of those ideas
and those misconceptions? Are those misconceptions an intrinsic ele–
ment in the economic drive ; are they part of the ideological super–
structure seeking to justify and rationalize and make acceptable to
the public at large those economic drives?
It
is obvious that ideas can
be used and are typically used for the purposes of ideological justifica–
tion and rationalization. The Bible is the main example. But it doesn't
follow that the significance of a system of thought exhausts itself in
being misused for such ideological purposes. Again, look at the Pen–
tagon Papers and, more particularly, at the overall justification in
recent times of our policy in Vietnam, and consider the spontaneous
reactions of two successive presidents. When Ambassador Lodge re–
turned from Vietnam in November 1967 to brief President Kennedy
on the hopeless situation in Vietnam, President Kennedy was dead.
He briefed President Johnson, and it was one of his first acts as
president to listen to Mr. Lodge. Mr. Johnson's spontaneous reaction
was that he would not be the first president to lose a war. And Mr.
Nixon repeated this statement verbatim when he became president.
It
makes no difference that the statement is historically incorrect, for
Madison certainly didn' t win the War of 1812. What is important is
that we are here confronted not with the objective laws of historic
development in the form of economic determinism, but with the
frailty of human beings, in which we all have, to a greater or lesser
extent, a part.. In other words, here are statesmen, so-called, who are
simply too weak to recognize publicly, although they might recognize
privately, that they and their predecessors have made a terrible mis–
take, and in consequence they aren't able to liquidate that mistake.
A statesman who had a superabundance of self-confidence, de Gaulle,
was capable of liquidating the Algerian war, for he was convinced
that his position in history could not be negatively affected by that
