374
NATIONAL INTEREST
paganda line to try to reconstruct the Russian threat of the 1950s as
the basis of the next "missile gap," and "bomber gap," and so the next
gap and the next gap. Notice that here, too, you have a very sys–
tematic error, just as in the case of the judgment of the control of
revolutionary movements by foreign communists. Professor Morgen–
thau is exactly right in saying that anyone who believes that we were
trying to wipe out the Vietnamese to stop China now has no rational
basis whatsoever for believing that. So why don't they calI the war
off? Well, they are not going to call it off, because that was never
the reason for it, it was only the excuse. That's quite different. In
the 1950s, the motive was the threat, the idea, that a unified Viet–
nam would be successful enough to cause the rot to spread. That was
the ideological threat. They never thought, I'm sure, that Ho Chi
Minh was going to swim over to Indonesia and overthrow the gov–
ernment. That's not what they thought was going to happen. What
they thought was that a unified Vietnan: under communist control
probably would be a model of some sort that would be mimicked by
forces in Thailand and some other place. That was not entirely irra–
tional.
If
you look at the intelligence reports of about 1959, they say
that North Vietnam is developing a large industrial base. It's build–
ing for the future, and so on and so forth. In South Vietnam, there
is much more gaiety and freedom , the report says. I don't know how
they figure that out exactly. But it's not getting anywhere, just living
off an American dole. That was the basis for the rational form of the
domino theory ; that was the "threat of communism." Not that the
Chinese were going to march down and conquer Indochina. There
was never any real fear of invasion, though Secretary Rusk may have
believed that. I don't know. But the rational planners never expected
that. They expected the domino effect to come through the ideological
threat, which in fact they often talked about. Now, notice something
very interesting. Say, in 1950 we supported France, because the U.S.
planners said that it is "now clear" that there is a coordinated Krem–
lin-directed offensive to take over Southeast Asia. Well, in fact it
was not "clear." They didn't have a particle of evidence for it. It was
sheer nonsense. But, nevertheless, they said it is "now clear" that that
is the case in the same NSC report that I quoted from earlier. In
the 1960s it was clear, equally clear, that the Chinese were about to
conquer Vietnam and that we had to beat back China. So that was
clear that there is an American interest - perhaps even a combined
U.S.-Chinese interest - in preventing Russian hegemony over Viet–
nam. So, what is "clear" keeps changing with very startling rapidity.
But one thing stays common: namely, kill Congo That conclusion re-
