 The debate continues on American involvement in Vietnam. Tonight, friends of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library will hear from the man who has become the focal point in the last month or so of that debate. I'm George Christian and his vice chairman of the Lyndon B. Johnson Foundation. I'm happy to introduce our distinguished speaker. Once I asked John Connolly, who had been secretary of the Navy for President Kennedy, who he thought was the ablest person in that administration. Without hesitation, he named Robert S. McNamara. I know firsthand that President Johnson had that same high regard for Bob McNamara. Our speaker's background is well known, so I will present it only briefly. Harvard graduate, longtime executive of Ford Motor Company, recruited by President Kennedy to be secretary of defense, retained in that position by President Johnson, president of the World Bank from 1968 to 1981, tireless worker for human development. Now the author of In Retrospect, The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. I would urge all of you to read the book. Don't rely on reviews, talk shows, other brief excerpts to make a determination of how you feel about this book. President Johnson died before the pullout from Vietnam and before the capitulation of the South Vietnamese government 20 years ago. In the final years of his life, Vietnam continued to torment Lyndon Johnson. He reflected on all the what-ifs, but always came out with the conclusion that he could have taken no other course than the one he did. How would he have felt about this anniversary and the passions of the moment? You and I know President Johnson always enjoyed a good debate. Of course he preferred to come out on top. I do believe he would underscore the fact that our goals in Vietnam were not victory but containment and not military conquest but a halt to aggression through negotiation. Mr. Johnson was well aware in 1967 of Secretary McNamara's doubts about our prospects for success. There were others in the administration then and later who shared those doubts. I'm confident that the differences between these two men never diminished Mr. Johnson's admiration for Mr. McNamara. I believe that President Johnson would very much have wanted Mr. McNamara's book to be presented and discussed here at the LBJ Library. I'm pleased to introduce Bob McNamara to you. Thank you for your warm words, George. I'm very grateful for John's presence as well. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I don't think I have to tell you that publication in retrospect has generated a storm of interest and discussion, and it's led to a host of questions. I'm going to try to focus in my opening remarks on four of those and then later when we come to the questions that the panel will put to me based on your filling in the cards, I'll try to address the other questions that are in your minds. The four questions I'll begin with are these. First, why after a silence of 30 years have I chosen to address the subject now? Secondly, with hindsight, and I stress the hindsight, did U.S. actions in Indochina contribute to the security of the West as we believe at the time they would, or were they a costly failure? And thirdly, if the latter, if we did fail, how can one account for the errors of judgment which caused that failure? And finally, are there lessons which can be drawn from our Vietnam experience, which the United States and the world can apply to relations among nations in the 21st century? There are several reasons why I've chosen to speak out on Vietnam now. The most compelling one, I stayed in the preface, and I'll read it for you. We have the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and the traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in the light of those values, yet we were wrong. I believe we were terribly wrong, and I believe therefore we owe it to future generations to explain why. So that's the major reason why I'm speaking out now. But another factor also greatly influenced my decision. In recent years, I've come to understand how examination of past confrontations among nations can contribute to avoiding similar conflicts in the future. I participated in five extraordinary meetings of Soviet, Cuban, and United States officials who directed the activities of their nations during the missile crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Those meetings extended over a period of five years from 1987 to 1992, and they underscored at this point that we can learn by retrospectively examining past confrontations those in which we failed and those in which we succeeded in avoiding war, as we did succeed in the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I think it's now widely recognized that in 1962 the actions of the Soviets, the Cubans, and the U.S. By the way, at the time, October 1962, the Kennedy administration was just beginning to substantially expand its force of military advisors in Vietnam. But at the time of the missile crisis, none of the leaders of those three countries, Soviet Union, Cuba, U.S., intended to bring their nations to the brink of nuclear war, but that's exactly what happened. And our meetings with the Soviets and the Cubans, therefore, were focused on the misinformation, miscalculation, misjudgments, which brought events to that point. And I think retrospectively reviews the kind we expose the missile crisis to can help provide guidance to avoid similar crises in the future, and I very much hope that this book in retrospect will do the same. Let me go on and talk about the missile crisis just for two or three minutes. I do so in part because during the Vietnam War, during the seven years I was associated with it, the Joint Chiefs of Staff referred to the use of nuclear weapons on several occasions. Those weapons continue to be part of our arsenal. Their use continues to be part of our contingency war plans. And for that reason I've dealt with the risk of nuclear war in an appendix in the book, and I suggest ways to reduce that risk. If you buy the book, please, please read that appendix. We are continuing to face the nuclear risk. We should act to reduce it. We vastly underestimated the risk during the missile crisis. Two years ago, the Soviets in Moscow published facts that were unavailable to us about the events of some 30 years earlier. In October or rather November, two years ago, the Soviets said that 30 years earlier in October 1962, they had 162 nuclear warheads on the island of Cuba. At the time, the CIA said we have photographs of the missile launchers, but they believed there were no nuclear warheads there. The Soviets said we were wrong. There were 162, about 100 were tactical warheads. And moreover, the Soviets reported two years ago that at the height of the crisis, on October 25th, 1962, the Soviet commander in Cuba, General Plyov, had instructed his officers to move the warheads closer to the launch vehicles. And he had sent a cable to the Defense Minister of the Soviet Union, Malinowski, informing him of that action. And Malinowski sent the cable into Khrushchev. Khrushchev scrawled approved on it and sent it back to Malinowski. Now, I believe that had not Khrushchev two days later on Sunday announced the withdrawal of the missiles. The majority of President Kennedy's military and civilian advisors on the following day, Monday, would have recommended to President Kennedy that we carry out our contingency attack on Cuba. The first day called for attack by 1080 aircraft bombing sorties to be followed by a sea and land invasion with a combat force of 180,000 men. The operations were to be commanded by the commander of all U.S. forces in Atlantic, St. Glenn, Admiral Dennison. Admiral Dennison had asked that his force be equipped with nuclear weapons. The President and I had refused his request. We didn't believe there were nuclear warheads in Cuba. The CIA, as I said, reported none. As I suggest now we know there were 162. Our force would have been confronted with those without being similarly equipped. But no one should believe that had American troops face a nuclear attack. The U.S. would have refrained from a nuclear response. We would have responded with fighter bombers out of southeast U.S. carrying nuclear warheads. How would it have ended? In utter disaster. We just barely avoided nuclear war at that time. That's why the nuclear appendix is there. Please read it. Now let me turn back to Vietnam and to the second question. With hindsight, did U.S. actions in Indochina contribute to the security of the West? Or were they a costly failure? For me, my involvement with Vietnam ended the day I left the Pentagon, February 29, 1968. At that time U.S. fatalities totaled about 17,000. But the war didn't end for the U.S. until the last troops left some five years later in 1973. By then we'd lost over 58,000 men. Our economy had been damaged by an improperly financed war effort. The political unity of our society had been shattered and it wasn't to be restored for decades. Now where such high cost justified? Until his death, last December 20, Dean Russ, the Secretary of State, whom I loved, and it was a patriotic servant of this nation, in war and peace until the day of his death, December 20. Dean Russ believed those costs were justified. And I believe that today many other geopoliticians, including, for example, such an outstanding government leader as Lee Kuan Yew, the former Prime Minister of Singapore, many geopoliticians would say today the costs were justified. And they would conclude that without U.S. intervention in Vietnam, communist hegemony, both Soviet and Chinese, would have spread farther through South and East Asia to include control of Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and perhaps even India. And some would go further and say that the USSR would have been led to take greater risks in Western Europe, elsewhere in the world, including perhaps an attempt to seize the oil-producing nations of the Middle East. Now I don't share those judgments. The danger of communist aggression during the four decades after the end of World War II, the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, the danger of communist aggression during those four decades was often perceived, misperceived and often exaggerated, but it was real. And to have failed to defend ourselves against it, I think would have been foolhardy and irresponsible. That's what we thought we were doing in Vietnam. But that said, today I question whether either Soviet or Chinese behavior and influence in the 70s and 80s would have been materially different had the U.S. not entered the war in Indochina or had we withdrawn from the war on several different occasions during the 10 years, 1963 to 73. Moreover, by the early, or certainly by the mid-1960s, it should have become apparent that the two conditions which underlay President Kennedy's decision to send military advisers to South Vietnam were not being met. President Kennedy had said we must have political stability in South Vietnam without it. Neither their effort nor ours can be successful. And moreover, he said it's a South Vietnamese war can only be won by South Vietnamese. There was not political stability in South Vietnam in the mid-60s and after. And it was very clear by then or shortly after that the war could not be won by the South Vietnamese alone. Now given those facts, and I think indeed they are facts, I believe today we could and should have withdrawn, as I suggest, on any one of several different occasions between 1963 and 73. With hindsight, I do not believe that U.S. withdrawal at any of those junctures, if it had been properly explained to the American public and to the rest of the world, would have led Western Europeans to question the credibility of our guarantee to NATO or led the Japanese to question the credibility of our guarantee to their security. But we didn't withdraw. Now why didn't we? My associates in the Kennedy and Johnson administration were an exceptionally able group of young people. Very bright, very well-educated, very hard-working, dedicated servants of this nation. They eventually came to be known as the best and brightest in that majority phrase. Now how did they get it wrong, or how did we get it wrong? I include myself now in the group that got it wrong. How did we get it wrong, and what lessons can we draw from that experience which are applicable to the world of today and will continue to be applicable to the world of the 21st century? That's the story I tell in the book. My part in it begins with the day after John F. Kennedy's inauguration. It was one of the proudest days of my life. It was January 21, 1961. I gathered with my nine fellow cabinet members in the East Room in the White House to be sworn in by Chief Justice Warren. I took my oath of office in unison with my colleagues, and after the oath I was then the eighth and the youngest ever Secretary of Defense. As I said, I was immensely proud to be appointed to that office. But at the same time, I couldn't help but feel a deep sense of foreboding because two days before, on January 19, we had our first confrontation with the Indochina problem. It was in a meeting with President Eisner and his senior associates, the Secretaries of Treasury, State, and Defense, and his military system, who met with President Kennedy and Secretaries of State, Defense, and Treasury in President Kennedy's administration, and Clark Clifford, who was taking notes. The purpose was to lay out the problems the new administration would face. We covered an immense amount of territory that day, but we focused primarily on Indochina. It was clearly the most pressing problem for both persons. And several of the participants, including me, wrote Memoranda for the record. And these and subsequent memoirs in the meeting reflected very different views of what President Eisner had advised us to do. Eisner was focused during the discussion was actually on Laos rather than Vietnam because at that time Laos was facing the most critical problem. And here's what Clark Clifford wrote, and I quote, President Eisner stated that Laos is the present key to the entire area of Southeast Asia. If Laos were lost to the communists, it would bring an unbelievable pressure to bear on Thailand, Cambodia, and South Vietnam. And President Eisner stated, therefore, that he considered Laos, and by implication, Vietnam, of such importance that if it reached the state where we couldn't persuade others to act with us, then he would be willing, in his words, as a last desperate hope to intervene unilaterally. Dean Rusk remembers that meeting largely as Clark Clifford reported it. But my memorandum, which I had prepared later at President Kennedy's request from notes I took at the time, suggested in contrast to Clark's that Eisner actually was giving a mixed message. And I had the impression he was deeply uncertain about the course to follow. However, I did record that at the end of our meeting, he said, if Laos is lost in the long run, we'll lose all of Southeast Asia. And Doug Dillon, who had served as an Under Secretary of State under Eisner and who was President Kennedy's Secretary of the Treasury, later told a scholar that his recollection, Doug's recollection, jibed with mine instead of Clark's. Doug went a step further and said that it was his impression in his words that, quote, Eisner and Herter, the Secretary of State, got a certain inner satisfaction from laying a potentially intractable problem in Kennedy's lap, unquote. I think Doug's impression was absolutely correct. Eisner didn't know what to do in Southeast Asia, and he was glad to leave it to the Democrats. And I can't fault him for that. The Indochina was intractable. Indochina problem was intractable, as both Eisner and we were defining it. Just how intractable our nation was to learn over the next seven to 10 years. I think there's other evidence that President Eisner also felt stumped, because it was later reported, and there's a document that indicates this, 15 days before he met with us, he had told his staff these words from the document, we must not allow, allow us to fall to the Communist, even if it involves war. Would Eisner ultimately have gone to war in Vietnam as we did? I don't know. I don't think it's really an appropriate question, because the decision was ours, not his. We made it, and we were wrong. Now, to demonstrate how and why we went wrong, I review and detail the key decisions we made on Vietnam during the following seven years while I was Secretary. And I discussed the decision-making process related to each, and it's from that review that I identify our failures, and it's from that review that I draw from them the lessons which I believe will be applicable and relevant to the 21st century. And I'm going to go very quickly over 11 of those lessons, 11 of the mistakes, 11 of the lessons. My oral statement now will be a superficial treatment of these, the last chapter of the book is devoted to the lessons and treats them in more detail, 11 of them. First, we misjudged at that time as we have since and as I think we are doing today the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries. In that case, the adversaries were North Vietnam, the Viet Cong, the Chinese, and the Soviet Union. We exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions. Secondly, we viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience. We're continuing to view for our nations in that light. We saw in them then a thirst for and a determination to fight for freedom and democracy. We totally misjudged the political forces within that country. Thirdly, we underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people, in this case the North Vietnamese. We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values. We continue to do so in many parts of the world today. Fourthly, our misjudgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, politics of the people of the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders. We might have made similar misjudgments regarding the Soviets and the three major crises that I participated in during the seven years I was Secretary. Their attempt to take Berlin in August 61, the nuclear problem in Cuba in October 62, and as I've suggested, their support of Egypt to wipe Israel off the map in June of 67. We might have made similar errors in reacting to those crises. We might have brought on World War on any one of those three. Had we not had the advice of Soviet experts, U.S. experts in Soviet culture, history, politics, personalities, in particular the advice of senior State Department officials, Tommy Thompson, Chip Bullen, and George Kennan. They had spent decades studying the Soviet Union, its people, its leaders, why they behaved as they did, how they would react to our actions. And their advice was absolutely invaluable. They were the heroes of the successful outcomes of the three major crises I mentioned. No Southeast Asian counterparts existed for senior officials to consult with during the period we were dealing with Vietnam. Fifthly, we failed then as I think we have since to recognize the limitations of modern high technology, military equipment, forces, and doctrine in confronting unconventional, highly motivated people's movements. If you doubt my statement on that, just think back to Somalia. Sixth, we failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion of the debate and the pros and cons of a large scale U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia before we initiated the action. We had the Tonkin Gulf resolution, which gave the President full authority to do what he did in Southeast Asia. That had never been the intent of the Congress when they passed the resolution. It had never been the intent of the President when he asked for it. We never fully debated it with the people or with Congress. One of the reasons we didn't, by the way, ignore the doves in Congress, wanted it brought back for fear it would lead to divisive debate within the Congress. That's the price we have to pay for carrying the people with us whenever we go to war, and we must be prepared to pay it in the future. We weren't in this case. Seventh, after the action got in the way and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course, we failed to retain popular support, in part because we didn't explain fully what was happening, as I indicated, and we didn't explain why we were doing what we did, and therefore we hadn't prepared the public to understand the complex events we faced and we hadn't prepared them to react constructively to the need for changes in the course we were following as we confronted uncharted seas and an alien environment and the need for drastic changes in our policies. A nation's deepest strength lies not in its military prowess, but in the unity of its people, and we failed to maintain that. Eighth, we didn't recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. We haven't learned that lesson today. We continue to believe that we know its best for the rest of the world. We don't. Our own security is not directly at stake. Our judgment of what is in another people's interests or another country's systems should be put to the test of open discussion in international fora. We don't have the God-given right to shape every nation in our own image, or as we choose. Ninth, we didn't hold to the principle of U.S. military action other than a response to direct threats to our own security, and I underlined that. Other than that, U.S. military action should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully and not merely cosmetically by the international community. Our defense budget today, our military strategy and tactics today are not based on that principle. Tenth, we failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions, certainly no military solutions. Now, for one whose life has been dedicated to identifying problems, believing every problem at a solution, trying to solve them, this is a very hard lesson for me to put before you, but I think it's absolutely essential we understand it. At times, we may have to live with an untidy and an imperfect world, and I suggest to you that today, Bosnia falls in that category. Eleventh, underlying many of these errors, lay our failure to organize the top echelons of the executive branch to deal effectively with the extraordinarily complex range of political and military issues involving the great risks and costs, including in particular the risk of loss of life, associated with the application of military force under substantial constraints over a long period of time, in other words, in limited war. Such organizational weaknesses would have been costly had Vietnam been the only task confronting the President and his senior advisors, but of course it wasn't. It coexisted with a wide array of other domestic and international problems confronting us. We hadn't organized to deal with the multiplicity of problems that we were faced with. Now, these were our major failures. I believe that pointing them out today will allow us to map the lessons of Vietnam and will place us in a position to apply those lessons in the post-Cold War world. I want to conclude with one other thought, but before I do that, let me digress for just a moment to say a few words about my feelings toward President Johnson. I enlarge on this in the book and you may wish to read it for that point alone. Johnson was perfect. No man is. But I admired him immensely. And despite the stress and tensions in 12 and 14-hour days during which we confronted problems ranging from the burning of U.S. cities to conflict across the globe, we developed extraordinarily warm and affectionate relationships. Johnson was a towering, powerful, paradoxical figure. George and I were discussing him briefly before we came on this stage. Very few people knew him. Very few people understood him. As George said, he didn't want to be fully known and fully understood. And I must say to you, I think that is a strength of a leader rather than a handicap. But apart from that, the fact is that he did fully know him and fully understand him. He reminded me of a verse from Walt Whitman's song, Myself. You may recall it. Whitman wrote, Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes. Now that was Johnson. In the end, the tension between us, between two men who loved and respected each other, reached the breaking point. And to this day, many of you won't believe this. But to this day, I don't know whether I quit or whether I was fired. If I was fired, he did it exactly as I would have expected him to do it, to the point where he didn't know whether you were fired or not. What I do know is that when President Johnson on my last day as Secretary of Defense awarded me the Medal of Freedom at a glittering ceremony in the White House East Room, a ceremony which was attended by, of course, family and friends, but by all of Washington's officialdom, I was so filled with emotion, I was speechless. And I was unable to respond to his words of praise. I've often thought that had I been able to speak, this is what I might have said. Today, I end 1,558 days of the most intimate association with the most complex individual I've ever known. Many in this room believe Lyndon Johnson is crude, mean, vindictive, scheming, untruthful. And perhaps at times he has shown each of these characteristics, but he is much, much more. And I believe, therefore, that in the decades ahead, history will judge him to have done more, for example, through the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Great Society legislation. Civil Rights, history will judge him to have done more, to alert us all to our responsibility toward the poor, the disadvantaged, and the victims of racial prejudice than any other political leader of our time. Had it not been for Vietnam, the war which he inherited and which admittedly neither he nor we managed wisely, we would have been much further along in solving those problems because of his leadership. Now, my conclusion. In this conclusion, I want to refer again to the future in relation to the past. My earliest memory is of a day in which a city was exploding with joy. The day was November 11, 1918, Armistice Day. I was two years old. The city was San Francisco. It was celebrating not only the end of World War I, which, of course, we had won, but the belief widely held by many Americans, the belief held by President Woodrow Wilson, that we'd won a war to end all wars. But how wrong we were. The 20th century will prove to be the bloodiest in history. We will have killed 160 million people by wars of aggression and conflict within nations. But now, as this century comes to a close, I believe we have an opportunity to view the future with hope. World War has ended. We have the lessons of Vietnam before us that can be learned and applied. We should see more clearly the dangers and the risks of a world armed with thousands of nuclear warheads based on the agreements that President Bush and Yeltsin signed, which, by the way, haven't yet been translated to treaty. We'll have a world of about 10,000 nuclear warheads in the year 2003. We may have 40,000 a day. I don't think a survivor of an exchange of 10,000 could tell the difference between that kind of a world and a world of 40,000. So we still face that risk, but we know how to deal with it if we're wise. We have a better understanding of the potential and the limitations of mortal, outer institutions for minimizing and alleviating disputes within and among nations. So don't we have reason to believe that the 21st century, while it will certainly not be a century of tranquility, there will be Rwandas and Barundas and Somalians and Bosnians across the globe. It won't be a century of tranquility, but it need not witness the killing of another 160 million people by war. Surely that must be not only our hope, not only our objective, but our plan. We must lay out a means of assuring we don't kill another 160 million. Now some, perhaps many of you in this room, may consider such a statement so naive, so simplistic, so idealistic as to be quick-sighted. But as human beings, citizens of a great nation, with the power to influence events in the world, can we be at peace with ourselves if we strive for anything less? I think not, and I hope you'll agree. Thank you. Our 25 minutes or so for questions. As I think Harry told you, we're going to handle it through this panel here with the written questions. And I'm going to call on Neil Spelz to come up with the first question. George, thank you. Let me indicate that those of you who've not sent in questions, there is still an opportunity to do so if the ushers have come by. They're going up and down the aisles now and they'll send them up here. And our process is very simple. We get a stack of questions. Without looking, I take about a third and pass it down to each of the other panelists. And we select some out. I've already noticed out of the questions, there are many on the same topic, just worded it a little differently. But we're going to try to go through each of us panelists, have our own question we're going to kick off with. And then we'll sift through as time will allow and go through the stack here. George, I'll defer the first question to Jerry Lindauer. And then I'll have the second and Andrea the third and then we'll start through the stack. Jerry. Good afternoon, Mr. Secretary. I'd like to put my question on human terms, which you ended your discussion with. In July of 1965, my rifle company went to Vietnam with six officers and 200 Marines. Eight months later, on March 4th, 1966, my company was reduced to one officer and 50 Marines. And on that day alone in Operation Utah, 20 of my Marines died and 40 of us were wounded. If I could but one more time, have my first sergeant fall in Fox Company, and battalion, 7th Marines to explain to them your book. I would say to them, your Secretary of Defense has written a book that has taken away every geopolitical rationale for the war and any contribution you may have made to win the Cold War. And with that very heavy heart, I would tell my Marines based on your book that they have fought and died in vain. Having said that, I have no quarrel with your book to be written. Vietnam was a tragedy and there are lessons to be learned, but I have read and heard all of your reasons for not writing sooner, and I respectfully state that I do not accept them. I'm sure it occurred to your publishers that releasing the book on the 20th anniversary of the fall of Saigon would make your book the best seller that it is. But my question is, did it ever occur to you in your book at this time, it would inflict the maximum pain and sorrow on the families of the dead and on the hearts of those who survived and that 10 or 20 years earlier or 10 years later might have eased the pain? First, it's absolute happenstance that the book comes out now. I signed a contract to do an autobiography over a period of four years, and in which case it would have been published about two or three years from now. I knew it would have to include Vietnam. I couldn't write anything about my life that didn't include that, so I hired a researcher who was a very young assistant professor of history at the Naval Academy and written one book on Vietnam to do research because I had no diary, one of the reasons you guys why I waited so long to write it. I took no papers with me from the Defense Department. I had no capability to, in effect, write it myself. This researcher came to me to suggest a book to be written and he would be happy to do the research on it. That's how it got started. Even then, I didn't agree to do it until one day about three years ago, I sat down, by the way, let me go back a bit and say, I'm sorry to take so long and answer this first question, but it's absolutely fundamental. In 1966, Professor Neustadt at Harvard and Professor Kissinger was then teaching at Harvard, asked me to come to Harvard and speak, which I did, and I was mobbed by protesters. It was quite a dramatic event. After that, I met with faculty members at dinner, old friends, when I'd been a faculty member at Harvard, and I said to them then that I didn't believe we were going to be able to achieve our objectives in Vietnam, certainly not at the cost that we had thought we could, and that I believe that scholars in the future should examine why we hadn't been able to and that knowing about government as much as I did, I didn't believe the papers would be available, the documents would be available for scholars to do that. It wouldn't be that people had shred them or destroyed them, but they just get dispersed, and therefore I thought they should be collected. And that's what led to the origin of the Pentagon Papers Project, which started in December 1967. So that's where all this began. And after the war, scholars did write, but there's been no statement by one of the senior participants of the kind that I have presented here. I didn't feel capable of it to be quite frank with you until two things happened. One, this researcher became a battle, but second, more important than that even, I didn't really see clearly, after you read the book, maybe you will dispute some of the conclusions I come to, but I didn't see clearly the conclusions I presented in the book until about three years ago. For 13 years I'd been at the World Bank from 68 to 81, and after that I'd been involved in a host of activities, not of course related to Vietnam. And I didn't see clearly the errors we'd made, the lessons that could be drawn from it, the application to the future. About three years ago, I don't use a computer unfortunately, but I sat down on my desk one day, and I wrote out pen and ink on a pad of paper the errors, the lessons, the mistakes that are now expanded and elaborated on in the last chapter. So the specific answer to your question as to why I didn't speak earlier was I didn't feel capable of it. That's the first point. Now the second point, I think nations make mistakes. I think we the West made a mistake in responding to Hitler's aggression. In that case we ultimately won, but as Churchill said, we lost millions, millions of men and women because we didn't respond earlier. It'd be interesting to go back and examine why the nations of the West didn't respond earlier. It's rare that as nations we go back and look at our mistakes. I think we should do it more often. It's very painful. It's painful for those who paid the price. It's painful for those who are responsible. But I think it's irresponsible not to do it. That's the reason the book's written. Mr. Secretary, in your book you say that President Kennedy would have withdrawn from Vietnam. In as much as it was the advice that you gave President Johnson to the escalation, do you mean that you would have given the same advice to President Kennedy and President Kennedy would have rejected it? That's a very good question. I'm glad you raised it because I put it in there. I've been asked for 30 years what would Kennedy have done. Well, he didn't tell me. So I can't base whatever I say on a statement from him. I do give evidence and there's a very important meaning that occurred six weeks, seven weeks before he died. October 2nd, 1963, which is referred to in there. I didn't realize that President Kennedy was taping Holla Nixon secretly taping meetings of us, the National Security Council, Cabinet, and others. I didn't realize it until two or three years ago when George Bundy learned of it and he obtained access to one of the tapes. So when I got to writing this, I called the Kennedy Library and asked them what other tapes they had. Well, I said they weren't available to researchers. Well, I said, how do I have to? I said, A, do you have other tapes? Yes. Well, B, do you have a tape of certain meetings, particularly this October 2nd, 1963 meeting? They said, yes. Well, I said, what do I have to do to get access to it? They said, well, you have to go to the family. I don't know quite why, but in any event I did and I got access to it. No transcript. The quality is lousy. But I listened to that tape for hours, as my researcher did. And I am positive that the statements in the book, but what happened that day are correct. And what happened was that President Kennedy decided, number one, we'd plan to withdraw our advisors by the end of 1965, December 31, 1965. Number two, there were 16,000 advisors there then. We'd plan to withdraw the 16,000 by the end of December 1965. Number two, as the first step in that plan, we'd withdraw 1,000 within the next 90 days. That is to say, by the end of 1963. He had died before that point, but we took the 1,000 out. And number three, because it was so much debate and controversy among his advisors on these points, to set it in concrete, he would announce it and he did. And that doesn't prove that he would have gotten out. And I really don't want to put great weight on that. I don't speculate as to what Kennedy would have done to enhance his reputation. I speculate on it because of the point that's in your mind. If I think Kennedy would have gotten out, why in the world did those of us leave President Johnson out of it for the moment? Why in the world did those of us who were associated with Kennedy and it was essentially the same group that went on, why didn't we get out? And I think that the burden is on me to answer that question. And the answer is in the book. I'm not trying to sell a book, but this is a very complicated point. And one of the points is learn to cut your losses. When events change, learn to cut your losses. Political stability was totally lost. The South Vietnamese very clearly couldn't win the war by themselves. I'm not suggesting that my judgment as to whether we could have done better or not would be shared by all of my associates. But my judgment is that when you're dealing with something that has important elements of a civil war in it and political stability has been totally lost, my judgment is outside military force cannot substitute for national military force, and that's what we try to do. Secretary Bagnamera, at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, and Financial Management, Economics, Policy Development, and Ethics, among others, in order to prepare us to become future policymakers. And as a future policymaker, it scares the hell out of me that I would ever be tempted to enact or support policy that went against my very moral fiber, either out of intimidation, situational factors, or ignorance. Outside of our coursework, could you provide us with some insights and practical suggestions on how we can prepare ourselves to better handle tough policy decisions that inevitably incur in any branch of public service? Well, first, I would agree with you. If the policy decision went against moral fiber, I would hope you wouldn't enact it. And by the way, there are many in this audience that are more expert than I in addressing an issue I want to put before you. And that is, what is the relationship of moral values to the determination of foreign policy and foreign policy decisions, and the same in relation to military decisions? I want to suggest to you that I believe that today there is a major moral question associated with the U.S. nuclear policy. We don't have time to go into it, but I just want to suggest to you. You ought to be asking yourselves, are we morally justified in the nuclear policy we are currently following? I don't believe we are. Now, some will say, well, you don't understand. We live in a practical world. I understand that. And I'm going to come back to your question. I understand that. And as long as our potential opponents have nuclear weapons, of course we must. But suppose we could move them away from that. Suppose we could protect ourselves against what we call breakout, violation of agreements to avoid them. Are we morally justified in planning on the use of nuclear weapons? And I want to suggest to you I don't believe we are. And therefore I don't think we should continue our present policy. And that's my answer to your question. I don't believe that senior policy makers should act, should make decisions that are contrary to moral values. The problem is the moral values aren't clear. If you accept what I call the Churchillian judgment, that by failing to respond to Hitler's aggression early, we killed several million Americans, French, British, et cetera, then I think it would have been morally right to respond earlier. What we thought we were doing in Asia was deterring further Soviet and Chinese aggression. Let me, on this point, let me just read an amazing document, which I never saw until I started drafting this text. I think it came out of the Johnson Library, as a matter of fact. It's by Dean Rusk. I don't, in the seven years I was associated with Dean, we were extraordinary because I loved that man. I don't think he ever sent an important paper to the president relating to anything I was interested in that I didn't see. This I never saw. This is what he said to the president. The integrity of the U.S. commitment, that is to say, to South Vietnam, is a, and more generally to Seattle, the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization and to our security commitments in general, is a principal pillar of peace throughout the world. Peace depends on fulfillment of U.S. commitments. If that commitment becomes unreliable, as it would if we withdrew or failed to support the South Vietnamese, that would lead to our ruin and almost certainly to a catastrophic war, meaning a third world war. Now, you can argue with his judgment, but that was the moral foundation for what we were doing. Substituting a lesser in humanity for a greater in humanity. I'll give you an illustration. I was on the island of Guam. This is the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the nuclear bomb at Hiroshima. Much controversy should we have dropped it or not. That was dropped in July 1945. I was on the island of Guam in March. I was part of the command that dropped it. I was on the island of Guam in March 1945. I was there on temporary duty from headquarters, the 20th Air Force stationed in Washington. I was participating in the interrogation of the lead crews as they came back from bombing Tokyo in one single night. We killed 100,000 Japanese by fire bombs. Is that moral? You have to think about what happened on Okinawa and Iwo Jima just shortly before that. And you have to think of what might have happened if we had to go in and take Japan. So these are very difficult issues but the time to think about it is now for the 21st century. We can avoid that in the 21st century. And I think it's our moral responsibility to think ahead and begin to take the action to avoid it. Jerry, do you have a question from the audience? Yes. If you were certain then and now you think you were wrong what makes you certain you are right now and how do you react to Walt Rostow's evaluation of the war? Walt is a dear friend. I see him sitting down here and he's fully capable of taking care of himself. And look, I don't know how many mistakes you all have made but I've made many in my life so I'm not certain of anything anymore. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't speak out on things I think are probably correct without being certain. I think the statements in the book are probably correct. I'm not certain. And the second part was how do you react to Walt's evaluation? He is perfectly capable of presenting his own ideas. I'm not going to present them for him. He would probably not let me. Speaking of the book, a question from the audience. What will you do with the proceeds from your book and if you do benefit financially how can you justify this? Well, the answer is I don't know. I see my agents sitting right down here and he maybe knows better than I what the proceeds are but roughly two-thirds of them have gone already for expenses and research. And I don't know what I'm going to do with the rest. I spent 38 out of my last 53 years in public service. I'm not interested in money. If I had been I wouldn't have been doing what I've been doing. My family isn't interested. My wife and children don't care about it. I live quite well. Don't feel sorry for me. But I'm not interested in money. I'm not in this book for money. I don't tend to profit from it. What I'm going to do with it, I haven't decided. I've been working in the last 15 years since I left the bank and a number of public causes, some of which I finance. I've been trying to... There's a major study going on now to reduce the risk of nuclear war on part of that. I've contributed to addressing our national problems. I think this country is in the deepest of trouble today. If you want to talk about moral issues, everybody in this room should feel morally offended by what's happening in our nation. And I am offended and I'm concerned about it. I'm going to spend some of this money worrying about that. And if you want to talk about moral issues, you ought to be offended by the fact that there are 1 billion human beings, if you can call them human, living barely on the margin of life. I dealt with this for 13 years in the World Bank. 1 billion human beings in what is called absolute poverty. And we define that as caloric intake so low, literacy level so low, health care so low as to be barely alive. I have been working in that. I'm going to continue. So these are the ways I hope to use it. Why did you feel, quote, loyalty to the president instead of to the country and the Constitution? I didn't. That's the answer to that. Now, let me expand on it a bit. You know, nobody kept me in the cabinet. I was a free agent. I didn't have to stay there one day longer than I felt justified in doing so. But I believe that every citizen, everybody in this room, has a responsibility to serve in government when asked. I believe every citizen who has accepted an appointment, particularly a senior appointment in government, has a responsibility to stay there as long as the president wishes him to and as long as he feels he can, he will morally justify his actions. And I had no problem with that point. The president and I disagreed as the book makes clear. At the end, we were in total disagreement. And I couldn't persuade him and he couldn't persuade me. In a sense, that's why I don't know whether I quit or was fired. But I stayed because I thought, A, he wanted me to. And B, I felt that I was continuing to affect his decisions in ways that I considered advantageous for the nation. Secretary, thank you for being here and friends of the LBJ Library. Thank you for attending. We're experienced for the first time a tumultuous period in American history, a new and powerful exhibit of the 1960s. Admission free.