Camelot: From the Bay of Pigs to Dallas, Texas

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Chapter 22

Camelot: From the Bay of Pigs to Dallas, Texas



DURING THE AFTERNOON, SNOW BEGAN TO FALL. It had that windblown, leaden look of a major storm. Those who could, slipped out of their offices early to beat the traffic. Few cities in the world suffer more in snowstorms than Washington. The view from the big windows in the office of the Secretary of Defense, out over the Tidal Basin and the Potomac, was wintry and beautiful. A heavy curtain was falling on the end of an era. Men who had been in Washington since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt were planning to leave, or at least to retire from the daily commitment to government.

In 1960 Washington had become a rather shabby city. The massive government buildings stood stark and cold. The many parks and monuments had been neglected by the aged tenants, who had grown too accustomed to their appearance. No one noticed any longer how drab the whole city had become. They never remembered it any other way. It was evident everywhere that this was the end of an era. An era of depression and recovery; of major war, victory and hopeful peace; of the atom bomb and of worldwide, instant communications. An era of great depths and an era that had the promise of great heights. But all of its leaders were now old and spiritless. Their great moment, those years of preparation for the ultimate summit conference and for the crusade for peace, had come to a shattering end. Now, in the shambles of that dream, that weary generation was turning over the mantle of government, the greatest government the world has ever known, to a young man who was barely a youngster when they had first come to Washington. And as many of the old stalwarts gathered in the office of the Secretary of Defense to say their farewells to him and to the world of great power they knew so well, they looked for the last time out over the Potomac into the sweeping and deepening snow as the night, and history, closed over them.

As if to presage the change that was taking place beneath the surface of the glittering events, the streets of Washington had been plowed, shoveled, and swept clear of all snow for the inaugural parade, not by the municipal equipment other cities would have used, but by the U.S. Army and its heavy equipment. The Kennedy Administration owed its very inaugural festivities to the might of the U.S. Army, to its stealthy appearance by night into the streets of the city -- a United States city. And this was part of the new era, too. Subtle changes, which had been under way, began to burst forth into the open with the inauguration.

From the first, changes were visible. The Kennedy team had been together through a tough and long battle. Their operational procedures were honed and ready. There was a Kennedy way and there was the other way. They changed Washington a lot with the Kennedy way. Eisenhower had been precise in his administrative practices. He had made great use of the National Security Council and of the implementing support of the Operations Coordinating Board. His decisions were the product of open and free discussion in the NSC chambers; and then having been made, those decisions were followed up by the OCB to assure their proper accomplishment within the Government. But Kennedy saw no real need for the NSC method. In the beginning he did not recognize and understand its usefulness and significance. When he wanted something done, he called upon one of his close friends, even upon one of his relatives, and after a brief discussion, they would go out and do what he had directed. This system can work in an operation such as the campaign had been, where the campaign team is the whole organization. However, in any organization as large and as immobile as the ponderous U.S. Government, this system is quite ineffective and leaves much undone and uncontrolled. It tends to leave tens of thousands of lesser bureaucrats on their own and to their own devices. It encourages the stagnation of the bureaucrat, and the catastrophe of the irresponsible in action.

Almost immediately following the inauguration, the ST saw that the door was wide open. With practically no NSC meetings, and therefore no Council to effectively control the CIA, there was no application of those crucial parts of the National Security Act of 1947 that require the NSC to direct the Agency. Without such direction and control, the CIA was practically free to act on its own.

Few men in the new Government had any idea of what was being put into shape for the Cuban invasion. Those who did knew only bits and pieces of the whole plan. These men were not accustomed to the double-talk and undercover language and actions of the Agency. They heard briefings, but they did not know what they really meant. On the other hand, a large number of the new Kennedy team were old CIA hands. They did know exactly what was going on, and they used their special knowledge and experience to further isolate those who did not.

There is a peculiar and dangerous characteristic that derives from the continuing application of secrecy. In an open government such as this country has been accustomed to having, it is only natural to believe that if a man is a fire-fighter, then his job has to do with putting out fires; and if he is a soldier, then his job is being prepared for war. In a simpler sense, Government workers are trained to expect that if the men in the next office are working on the Military Aid Program for Pakistan, then those men are doing that work. Customarily, if they meet those occupants of that next-door office in the snack bar or at the dining hall, they might be expected to ask them how things are going on in "Pakistan".

Now if the men who are supposed to be working on the Pakistan aid program are not working on that program at all, but are actually working on a special support program for the border police of India, and the Pakistan aid program is simply a cover story, then whatever they tell their office neighbors is part of their cover story too. In other words, it is false -- more plainly, a lie. However, they justify that lie as being permissible, in fact necessary, because they have been told that the "border police project" is highly classified and that they cannot tell anyone about it. So if you are on a classified project, it is all right, in fact it is essential, for you to lie. So you lie, the other man lies, everyone lies. But it is all supposed to be for the good of the cause.

Over a period of time this can develop many strange situations too involved to mention here; but one or two examples may be useful. In the Pentagon there are many offices established to do one thing. They really do not do that thing at all, but something entirely different. As a result, there are hundreds and even thousands of men who either cannot say what they are doing; or if they are forced to say something, they must lie. The polite thing is to say that they are "following their cover story".

This can lead to further complications. Even within the cover Story scheme there will be factions. Some men may be working on a certain project with a cover story, and others may be working on exactly the same project under another cover story; and neither group will know about the other. Later, when the Secretary or some other high official wants to be briefed, he may meet with one group and not the other -- simply because the first group did not know of the other's existence. And he will not hear the whole story; he will hear only the first group's version of the activity. So it is not that the new Kennedy team was not properly briefed about anti-Castro activities as it was a matter of the inability of any one briefing officer to give all the facts at one time. There may have been no way to have rounded up all the facts and present them; so much of what was going on was decentralized. In spite of this, each briefing officer may have thought that he knew all the facts and that he was telling the whole truth, as happened when Tracy Barnes was sent to give Adlai Stevenson his briefing at the United Nations.

Other complications crept in. Under the cover of the Bay of Pigs operation, much bigger moves were being made. All over the world the MAP training program was picking up volume and momentum. Thousands of foreigners from all forty countries converged upon the United States for training and indoctrination. The new curriculum was either the one at Fort Bragg or like it. The Army interest in political-social-economic programs, under the general concept of "nation building", was gaining momentum. For every class of foreigners who were trained and indoctrinated with these ideas, there were American instructors and American soldiers who were being brainwashed by the very fact that they were being trained to teach this new doctrine. These instructors did not know otherwise. To them this new nonmilitary political, social, and economic theme was the true doctrine of the U.S. Army. A whole generation of the American Army has grown up with this and now believes, to one degree or another, that the natural role of an army lies in this political field. Also they believe that an army mixes some medical and educational ingredients into this nation building. They believe the army is the chosen instrument in nation building, whether the subject be political -- social, economic or military. In many cases, due to the great emphasis the CIA placed on training the police forces of certain foreign countries, a large number of American servicemen who were used for such training became active in what was really police work and not the scope of regular military work.

It was the CIA, with help from a few other agencies, that put together the Inter-American Police Academy during the early Kennedy years, which played such an important part in emphasizing national police power in the nations of Latin America. The CIA brought in police instructors from all over the United States and from the military for this school. The success of this school, operating covertly from an Army base in the Canal of Panama, led to other schools in the United States that have carried on this type of work for police forces in this country. Part of the impetus behind the great buildup in the strength of police force all over the country dates back to this CIA police academy work and to the other schools it spawned. This police work not only involved training but it integrated new weapons, new procedures, and new techniques into American police work, some of which has been good and much of which has been quite ominous.

Anyone who doubts that this nation building and police activity has not become real and very effective right here in the United States need only visit the area around Fort Bragg to find one of these early paramilitary CIA-oriented specialists, General Tolson, sending his American soldiers out into the countryside with nation-building programs for the citizens of the United States. If such tactics continue, it is possible that an enlargement of such a program could lead to a pacification program of areas of the United States, such as the CIA and the U.S. Army have carried out in Indochina.

At the same time this training program was under way, larger and larger civic action teams and other benevolently named organizations spread throughout the world. MAAG units were no longer small logistics and training organizations. They had grown to large size and were frequently and almost augmented by large units on temporary duty in the host country. This Army accounting device of "temporary duty" is always interesting because of the way the Army uses it. The Army may tell an unwitting Congressman or reporter that there are 50 men in the MAAG of a given country, although there may be many more men there. The Army will justify this lie about the total number by claiming that the extra men, sometimes many more than the regular staff, are there on temporary duty. And of course there may even be 100 or 150 more men there, but since they are on the CIA cover payroll, the Army won't report them either even though they are there on Army cover. In that case there will be another justifiable lie to protect the existence of the CIA.

All of this is a game. The secrecy can't mean a thing to the host country, they know exactly how many men are there and it makes no difference to them whether they are Army, Army temporary duty, or Army cover. By the same token, the Soviet embassy, and all other embassies, will know exactly how many Army men are there. And to them, the fine distinction makes no difference. The only people these devices fool are American. American reporters, American Congressmen, American government specialists, and of course the American public. There was almost no way in which anyone in the United States Government could unravel the whole clandestine business. But at least a beginning was made as a result of a most unexpected series of events and as a result of some very shrewd and clever work by Bobby Kennedy and his closest associates.

What had grown quietly, secretly, and almost totally unobserved within the infrastructure of the U.S. Government was by 1961 so large that it was time to bring it to life and give it some reason for existence. While Jack Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy were seriously pondering what had gone wrong with the Bay of Pigs operation, this new doctrine and new organization was emerging. It remained necessary, then, for the Kennedys to find the master key to all of this activity. It took the Bay of Pigs Board of Inquiry to perform this feat. The day-by-day litany of the Board was designed to indoctrinate Bobby Kennedy and to win him over to this new doctrine of counterinsurgency, flexible response, civic action, nation building, and the rest -- and through him, to win over the President. While the Board was meeting day after day in the back room in the Pentagon, something more important than the fate of the Bay of Pigs was being discussed and elaborated upon. As witness after witness filed through the Board's chambers Bobby Kennedy sat there saying absolutely nothing, just soaking up the hearings and searching for cracks in the story. At the same time, Allen Dulles and Maxwell Taylor paraded a hand-picked group of disciples into the room for interviews and questioning. These men were selected to preach the doctrine of the new covert intervention. Their interviews were designed to train, indoctrinate, and to use an overworked term, even to brainwash Bobby Kennedy. What he heard each day was the Maxwell Taylor new-military-plan-for-flexible-response theme, blended with the White House Committee report material, and topped off by Allen Dulles's own theme of secret operations. This was a most heady mixture, and it was effective. Some of the men who were called to talk about the tactics of the Bay of Pigs had not been connected with it at all, but were Special Forces men from the Army Staff or directly from Fort Bragg. Bobby Kennedy emerged from the incessant catechism of the "truths" ready to soak up the doctrine of counterinsurgency. This was to be the new watchword. The Kennedy Administration became hooked on counterinsurgency, and the indoctrination occurred to a good measure right there in the Board of Inquiry process.

Thus the inner Kennedy clan came out of the Bay of Pigs disaster with two strong convictions. Closely held and deeply felt was the conviction that the CIA had somehow done them in and that they had better be extremely wary of anything it did in the future. This was a very deep feeling and only seldom revealed in any official actions. In fact, Jack Kennedy developed a cover story of his own by giving the appearance as much as possible in public that he could go along with the CIA, when private actions and discussions tended to support otherwise.

The second conviction was that the world was being divided sharply into two strong camps in the battle between the "world of choice" and the "world of coercion". It was President Kennedy who said to Chairman Krushchev, "The great revolution in the history of man, past, present and future, is the revolution of those determined to be free." The Dulles contribution to this philosophy was the reiteration of the Krushchev challenge to support all wars of national liberation; and the Maxwell Taylor contribution was the simple reflex of the counterpuncher, the plan of flexible response. Defined in terms of the infantryman, this meant counterinsurgency.

One of the better definitions of counterinsurgency as practiced in the Kennedy era was that written by a general who worked for the Secretary of Defense: " . . . the technique of using, in appropriate combination, all elements of National Power in support of a friendly government which is in danger of being overthrown by an active Communist campaign designed to organize, mobilize and direct discontented elements of the local population against the government." Although counterinsurgency has been generally regarded as a military activity, careful analysis will reveal that it is really more a civilian-controlled action in the paramilitary area of operation. This is a most important consideration as we observe the country moving from the "Roosevelt-Eisenhower" era into the "Kennedy-Johnson" era, which includes the Vietnam episode. Note also how the definition of counterinsurgency, above, written by an Army General closely allied with the CIA and with the authors of the President's Committee report, almost precisely paraphrases sections of that report. In other words, the actions of this Government, which were called counterinsurgency, were not very different from the actions that were attributed to the Communists and called subversive insurgency. As a matter of fact, they seemed to be identical.

This may seem to be a fine point, but it is the key to much that has happened since then and particularly in Vietnam. Note that the same material written by the spokesman for the Office of the Secretary of Defense continues as follows: "A successful counterinsurgency strategy requires, therefore, the integration of all U.S. Government activities in the country concerned, under the central leadership of the Ambassador or [if the local situation had deteriorated to the point where U.S. Armed Forces are actively involved] the military area commander. In the final analysis, the defeat of a Communist-led insurgency hinges largely on the effectiveness of the Country Team. This depends in great measure upon the willing cooperation of the government departments and agencies in Washington."

When one realizes that this was written by a man who was for years the executive assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense and in his own right an acknowledged leader in the new Army doctrine, he begins to see that this is another part of the pattern that was changing this country's entire traditional idea of military action. We have a new doctrine at the Special Forces school, we have worldwide MAP training in the political-social-economic spheres, we have the new creed dramatically spelled out by the President's Committee report and then, to tie this all together, we have the definition of counterinsurgency. We find the official version of counterinsurgency is not to be confused with the more or less public idea of counterinsurgency, which assumes that it is a form of anti-guerrilla fighting against Communist-inspired rebels. The official doctrine of counterinsurgency states clearly that it is carried out "under the central leadership of the ambassador". This means that counterinsurgency is intended to be civilian directed, even though it appears to be a military program, and that the senior man is to be the ambassador. He is placed in charge, not actually to be the country-team commander in chief, but to make it possible for him to delegate his authority to the CIA station chief rather than to some senior military officer.

This has shaped the total efforts of the United States in Vietnam for the past decade and more. All of U.S. history prior to the past decade, more or less followed the general principles of warfare which state that in time of peace the Army trains for war, and during this time the affairs of the nations are carried out by diplomats. When diplomacy fails, then the military men take over and accomplish by military means what the politicians had been unable to accomplish. It has always been clear that when war was the only remaining means of accomplishing national objectives, the ambassador and his staff would leave the scene and the generals would take over. Now here was the highest echelon of military power in the United States stating publicly the new doctrine of the Kennedy era to the effect that counterinsurgency (a form of war) would be "under the central leadership of the ambassador".

Why would a ranking U.S. Army general on a special assignment to the White House define the new training program for mutual security, and another ranking U.S. Army general on assignment to the Office of the Secretary of Defense define the new method of warfare designed to counter the Communist support of "wars of national liberation", and both in terms of civilian direction of the military operations of U.S. forces? To anyone trained in the profession of arms, this is heretical. The answer is simple, although it has lain buried under the long years of the horrible disaster in Vietnam. Both of these men were closely affiliated with and had served with the CIA, and both were the type of men who make up the ST. Even though they wear the uniform of the U.S. Army, their primary allegiance has been with the STICIA new method of operations in peacetime. They saw that the time had come for the ST to make its big move and for it to sweep out beyond the DOD and the CIA to form a massive paramilitary international power under para-civilian leadership and a monstrous cloak of security. Their words were so simple and so Boy-Scout sounding; yet they have changed the entire world during the past decade.

They went on to say, "The United States therefore has made the decision to enter the lists early, to throw its national power into the counterinsurgency campaign on the side of our allies, the local authorities. The problem of counterinsurgency now is receiving the personal attention of the President and his senior advisors. A major effort is being made throughout the government, and particularly within the DOD to develop sound doctrine for the conduct of this unorthodox form of warfare. The JCS, for example, have recently established within the Joint Staff a special staff section dealing exclusively with the problem of counterinsurgency. . . counterinsurgency is not susceptible to a purely military solution. . . it requires the closest possible coordination of political, economic, psychological, and military actions." By the end of 1962 this nation had gone so far down the line following the Agency, the new Special Forces doctrine, the MAP, and the new U.S. philosophy as outlined in the President's Committee report, that it was saying openly it was well on its way to carrying out as top national policy a major clandestine operation so big in fact that the entire government would be involved. Obviously, it could not be really clandestine in the sense that it would be kept secret from our enemies; on the contrary, it was a new kind of "clandestine", so it would be kept secret from all Americans.

When such men stated that the war would be waged under civilian leadership, and then named the ambassador as the commanding and senior officer, they simply were carrying out their usual cover-story double-talk. Any such counterinsurgency would be initiated and directed by the CIA. Of course the generals involved would be real generals; but they would be working inside of and for the CIA -- or in some cases not exactly inside of the CIA, but certainly under its direction. Has it ever been properly explained why this country has retained an ambassador in Saigon since the first one was selected by the CIA to go to that new piece of real estate, a new nation called South Vietnam, back in 1954? Why should the longest war in which this country has ever been involved, and the second costliest and second most destructive, have been waged through all these futile years under the direction of an ambassador? Is it because of the above doctrine? Is it because we entered this conflict to support what were, at first, minor CIA operations? Then when these actions grew and grew, there never was a time when the "war" transitioned from the clandestine operators to the military operators. During all of these years the ambassador has remained as a sort of minor commander in chief, one step down from the Commander-in-chief role of the President. And this has been done so that he could serve as a referee between the CIA and the military, the end result being that neither one of them has been really in complete control since 1964, when the first Marines arrived in Vietnam. Before that, the CIA was in control of operations, while the military played a logistics role and perfunctorily acted the part of a military organization.

At that time, 1963-1964, the ambassador could have been withdrawn in favor of the military commander as the escalation went into effect. Then the CIA chief should have been relegated to the Fourth Force role he should have in a wartime situation. As late as the end of 1963, every U.S. Army combat soldier in Vietnam (excepting a few assigned to such offices as the legitimate MAAG section -- as differentiated from the oversized cover MAAG section) was under the operational control and direction of the CIA. It was only after the beginning of real escalation that the Army soldiers under Army generals began to take over certain roles and missions and areas in Vietnam. They never did take over full responsibility for what was called a "war". One reason for this was that there never was a real honest to God military objective of this war. There never has been in Vietnam that objective, which when achieved by military force, would have spelled victory. There never has been that battle which, if won, would assure victory. Of course, the counterinsurgency supporters have said, "That's the nature of this type of warfare. You can't beat insurgents that way." That is nonsense. When a nation is ready to demand from its people fifty-five thousand lives and more than $200 billion of its wealth as a contribution to some foreign action, it should at least have an objective that can be achieved in a tangible manner so that one can tell when it has been reached or when such attainment is beyond reach. What has happened in Vietnam is that the CIA got in over its head, and the Army was sent in to attempt to bring some order out of the chaos that existed there after the assassination of President Diem. Only then, when the Marines and the Army arrived, were troops serving under the actual command and direction of their generals.

One of the real reasons the Army got in there in the first place was because when the Marines came in they refused to take the field under the CIA. By that time, General Krulak, formerly the Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities on the Joint Staff, and then commanding general of Fleet Marine Forces, Pacific, knew too much about the CIA and its activities to permit his Marines to hit the beaches of Indochina under any command other than Marine and the U.S. Military Command, Vietnam.

Kennedy undoubtedly saw the beginnings of this serious problem after the Bay of Pigs investigation. At that time he wrote two very powerful National Security Action Memoranda, NSAM 55 and NSAM 57. Both were issued from the White House in June 1961. NSAM 55 was a brief memorandum of greatest significance, which was addressed directly to the Chairman of the JCS and was signed personally by the President. In essence it said that Jack Kennedy would hold the chairman (Lemnitzer) responsible for all action of a military nature during peacetime in the same manner as he would hold him responsible for such action in time of war. In other words, the President was saying that he wanted any and all peacetime operations (military type-clandestine, covert, paramilitary, etc.) to be under the control, or at least under the close scrutiny, of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. One way to interpret this in light of the then current events would be, "No more Bay of Pigs." This was a powerful memorandum, which set forth Kennedy's views without equivocation. It was in fact more positive as an action against the non-addressees than it was for the addressee, the JCS.

General Lemnitzer, a fine soldier of the old and traditional school and one of the best administrators to serve after World War II, did not take advantage of this memo. He knew exactly what it meant, and he did not intend to abuse it. The best way he knew to have no more Bay of Pigs disasters was to have no more Bay of Pigs. He noted the memo, had the Joint Chiefs of Staff "Red Stripe" (formally approve it), then filed it for future use, if needed. As far as that old soldier was concerned, that memo meant there would be no more clandestine military operations in peacetime and that such things as Indonesia, Laos, Tibet, and the Bay of Pigs were a thing of the past.

I was the officer responsible for briefing this paper to General Lemnitzer and to the other Chiefs of Staff, and that NSAM rested in my files. There need be no misunderstanding about what the memo meant, what the President meant, what Lemnitzer understood and did, and what the other Chiefs of Staff understood.

This was an unusual memorandum because Kennedy sent it directly to the chairman and sent information copies only to McNamara, Rusk, and Allen Dulles. It should also be noted that Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, and Allen Dulles knew that NSAM well and understood its full meaning and intent; and they knew exactly what President Kennedy meant by it. In other words, President Kennedy by the explicit publication of this brief memo was letting the entire top echelon superstructure above the ST, wherever it existed, know that from that time on there were to be no more such ill-conceived, inadequately planned, and inherently dangerous clandestine operations. If this directive had been followed explicitly and if Kennedy had lived to assure that it was followed as he intended it to be, there is a very good chance that United States involvement in Indochina would never have been escalated beyond the military-adviser level. He had learned his grim lesson at the Bay of Pigs, and as his directive made clear, he was not going to become involved in that type of operation again. If evidence of this is needed, consider how he handled the missile crisis in Cuba a year later. Once he had been convinced of the gravity of the situation, he directed the mobilization of sufficient troops overtly, and challenged the Cubans and the Soviets to comply with his demands. He respected the proper employment of military power and had seen how undercover military power fails.

The second memorandum, NSAM 57, though issued at the same time, was signed, as most NSAMs were, by a member of the NSC staff for the President. Coming as it did paired with NSAM 55 there could have been no misunderstanding that it carried the same thrust as NSAM 55, and that it fully expressed the views of President Kennedy. This memorandum was much longer, and it gave much more detail.[1]

Following the policy of the National Security Act of 1947 and of such other directives as NSCID 10/2 and later NSCID 5412/2, it recognized that there might be requirements for clandestine activity from time to time. Then it went further than those earlier directives and became much more explicit. It said that any small and truly covert type of operation "may be assigned" to the CIA and that any which were larger would be the subject of special study and planning and then "may be assigned" to the military, that part of the military which would be sufficient only to carry out that one operation on a one time basis. It directed that large covert operations would not be assigned to the CIA.

This attempt at clarification provided the opportunity for the CIA and its fellow travelers with a chance to blow up the balloon. They counterattacked with a long and drawn out argument about what was a "small" operation and what was a "large" one. They then proceeded to argue about what happens if the Agency goes into some country with a small operation, and then it expands. At what point will the CIA operation be transitioned from the CIA control to the military solely on the basis of size, since it might be assumed that it might or might not have remained covert. The CIA argued that if it remained covert, regardless of size, no such transition of direction could take place. The whole point of the CIA argument was to invalidate the President's controlling mechanism, which depended upon a scale of size.

This started some very long and heated arguments, and as often happens, since the real career military such as Lemnitzer had very little interest in this subject anyhow, the well drilled opposition made quite a bit of headway. After all the dust had settled, it began to appear that except for NSAM 55 which Lemnitzer had let remain in the file (his being of the it-can't-happen-here school), Kennedy's directive had been turned into an encouragement to the CIA to go out and start small fires and count on the military to bail them out. This may seem an odd conclusion -- almost funny -- but it is exactly how we got into Vietnam in spite of the directives from the White House. The ST is perfectly capable of turning a No into a Yes by its gift of irrepressible argument.

I have quoted the ranking U.S. Army officer who worked in the office of the Secretary of Defense, with reference to his definition of the term "counterinsurgency". Now I shall add a few lines written almost exactly one year after the NSAM 57 arguments about how big and when to transition to the military, and which take on a special meaning in this relationship. In this one critical year here is exactly how the fight came out: "A successful counterinsurgency strategy requires, therefore, the integration of all U.S. Government activities in the country concerned, under the central leadership of the ambassador . . . or, if the local situation had deteriorated to the point where the U.S. armed forces are actively involved, the military area commander." In this special sense, read "deteriorated" to mean "expanded beyond the ability or desire of the CIA to continue to be involved". This is exactly what was happening in Laos at about this same time. The CIA had become overextended, and things were going very badly. The CIA wrote a letter to the Secretary of Defense, asking relief or suggesting the abandonment of the Meo tribesmen whom they had been supporting.

Recall how the trouble in Vietnam started. The CIA had been involved in a great number of brush fire operations there for a number of years in one way or another since the OSS days of 1945. These raged out of control, becoming a general conflagration by the end of 1963. At that time there were more than sixteen thousand American military personnel there, more or less in the ostensible role of advisory personnel; but all of these were under the actual direction of the country team, which meant that they were under the operational direction of the CIA. (Some parties may wish to deny this in an attempt to maintain the fiction of those earlier days; but the early general officers who were serving in Vietnam at that time were either serving with the CIA under the cloak of CIA or were closely affiliated with the CIA, such as the Special Forces. One more bit of operational evidence is offered by the combat intelligence available in those days. There was none of the real military kind. What was there was a form of CIA village network intelligence, which on most counts was dependent upon the native population. Even as late as the attacks on the villages in the My Lai complex, it was the Agency intelligence functionary who told the military to attack.)

On the "when to transition" concept it will be noted that even ten years later and after the escalation of military manpower had reached the staggering figure of 550,000 men -- to say nothing of gross amounts of civilian manpower -- the central leadership was never transitioned to the military as President Kennedy's NSAM 57 had ordered. If anyone ever wanted an example of how far the ST can turn things around, this is one of the best. In June 1961 the President stated one thing categorically; by 1962 the Army's spokesman (actually in Army uniform; but a CIA/ST spokesman) had totally turned this around in his counterinsurgency doctrine and definition. Then, after President Kennedy died, the ST retained control of most of the Vietnam war from its earliest birth pangs to the peak of escalation. Even to this day the combat phase of the Vietnamese war, which is called "pacification" and which in fiscal year l972 cost more than $1 billion, is totally under the direction and control of the CIA.

The key to all of this, the matter that made it so easy for the ST to wrest control of this major peacetime "covert" operation, even from the hands of the President and Commander in Chief, lay in the words of the Army general quoted above: "The JCS have recently established within the Joint Staff a special staff section dealing exclusively with the problem of counterinsurgency." This was a carefully designed move, and it emerged from a formative series of events. Almost from the time of the creation of the CIA, the Secretary of Defense had maintained on his immediate staff an Assistant to the Secretary for Special Operations. Among other things, this man was charged with the responsibility for liaison with the CIA, NSA, Department of State, and the White House. His area of interest was almost totally within the field of clandestine operations, although he was interested in routine intelligence matters and other related functions. For the five or six years prior to the Kennedy inauguration, this office was filled by an extremely able and wise figure, a retired four-star Marine general, Graves B. Erskine. He had served in that capacity longer than any man had ever served in the office of the Secretary of Defense at such a level of responsibility. His tenure had covered service under Charles Wilson, Neil McElroy, Thomas Gates, and for a brief period, Robert McNamara. As he was utilized by the secretaries prior to McNamara, he kept a close eye on all CIA operational activity that involved the military in any way, and whenever in his judgment things were going too far he would inform the Secretary, and in most instances the CIA would be asked to drop its request for military support, which generally was tantamount to halting the project. Erskine's role was one of considerable quiet power; yet he used it sparingly. Then shortly after U.S. Air Force Colonel Edward G. Lansdale came back from Saigon, where he had been working for the CIA ever since the establishment of the Diem regime and immediately before that had been in Manila during the selection and establishment of the Magsaysay regime, he was assigned to General Erskine's office at the specific request of Allen Dulles. Along with a number of other CIA agent cover "plants" in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Lansdale provided a strong counterfoil to his boss, General Erskine, within the military departments, where he was known, except to a few, only as an Air Force officer on the Secretary of Defense staff. (By 1961 the CIA, partly as a function of the vast U-2 project, was widely and deeply entrenched in the DOD.)

When McNamara became Secretary, he was advised that he really would not need an Assistant for Special Operations. He abolished that office. Then many of the old office staff were dispersed, especially in one sudden move the day after the failure of the Bay of Pigs operation. Those who were left moved to a new location in a new office, which was then headed by General (recently promoted) Lansdale. During this period, I had been assigned to the Erskine staff and was performing a rather special function, which I had been doing for about five years before in the Pentagon, but in a different staff location. Shortly after the new Lansdale office had been established I was asked by General Earle Wheeler, then the director of the Joint State, if that function would not be better applied if it were moved from OSD to the Joint Staff, so that it might he applied uniformly for all the services and for the many major military commands overseas. He discussed this further with McNamara. In a most unusual administrative maneuver, required because of the stringent limitations of the size of the Joint Staff, my office was transferred from OSD to the Joint Staff, along with the necessary manpower spaces and authorization to staff the office with representatives of all services and administrative support. This small staff was joined later by another highly classified group, which performed a somewhat related function. Then, as a progression of this first move, the Joint Staff created an office called the Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities (SACSA). This new office was much larger than the original office that had moved down from OSD, and it brought with it a large staff of CIA oriented personnel from all services. It had several temporary special assistants, among them General Hemtges and General Craig, before it acquired its greatest and most dynamic driving force, U.S. Marine General Victor H. Krulak.

The important thing to understand is that the much-heralded office of SACSA had very few military responsibilities. It was almost entirely CIA oriented. Most of its dealings with the services were in areas in which the CIA was most active. For example, the great proportion of its dealing with the Army was strictly limited to Special Forces activity. With the Air Force it was for the most part limited to Special Air Warfare activity, and with the Navy it was active in the Sea, Air, Land (SEAL) teams. There were other duties of course; but most of them gave the office something it could say it was doing while it performed its primary task of supporting the CIA, the ST, and of breathing life unto the massive Frankenstein called counterinsurgency.

SACSA played another very important role in the highest level policy discussions of this country. It has been said that Kennedy wanted to get out of Vietnam in 1963 but deferred it "until after his re-election", as he told Senator Mike Mansfield, because such a move would stir up a "McCarthy (Joe) wave of sentiment" and would lose him the support of the JCS.

The JCS Kennedy knew best was the voice of SACSA. The one officer he saw from the Joint Staff more than any other during those crucial days was General Krulak. (See how often Krulak's name appears in the Pentagon Papers, and then see if the name of General Dean ever appears. Technically, General Dean should have been the action man -- he was the operations director of the Joint Staff -- but General Dean was not the CIA/ST man.) This was because Allen Dulles and Maxwell Taylor (at that time the military advisor to the President) opened the door for Krulak, since Krulak's job was to "support the CIA". General Krulak's closest advisors were such men as Bill Bundy, a long-time career CIA man on McNamara's staff at that time; General Lansdale, and other key CIA agents and high officials, whose names will be omitted because some of them are still active. (Some of these highly placed officials were so deeply covered that it is possible that no one in OSD, including Krulak, knew that years ago they had been planted by the CIA. Thus, when he worked frequently with a man in the Department of Research and Engineering, from whom he had been told he could get some assistance, it is quite possible he never knew the man he saw was from Dulles's office.)

Later, when Maxwell Taylor had become the chairman of the JCS, the only JCS John Kennedy knew was even more CIA biased, since Maxwell Taylor himself was by that time more oriented toward the ST than the military, and Krulak was closer than ever to the President.

Thus it was not the real military that Kennedy would have offended if he had withdrawn from Vietnam in 1963. It was the chameleon STICIA military who made him think they would have objected, and who made him think that they represented the military. In this special sense the creation of SACSA and the appointment of Maxwell Taylor as Chairman of the JCS were most influential events. It is no wonder ST writers have made so much of the great importance to them and to the CIA, of SACSA. A careful reader of the Pentagon Papers will see how well documented all of this is, especially if he observes how many "JCS" papers were actually not bona fide JCS papers but were in reality SACSA/STICIA papers, attributed only to the JCS.

As important to the ST as SACSA was, of equal importance was the return to the government and especially to the Pentagon of Maxwell Taylor. After the Bay of Pigs, it was inevitable that Allen Dulles would leave the CIA. His chief lieutenant, Dick Bissell of U-2 fame and of Laos and Bay of Pigs infamy, left the Agency to become the head of the Institute of Defense Analysis, an organization with many interesting functions -- among them acting as a conduit for CIA activities. Dulles again showed that uncanny ability of his and of the Agency's to rise above each fiasco on to new heights. During the Bay of Pigs inquiry he ingratiated Maxwell Taylor to the Kennedys so firmly that Jack Kennedy assigned General Taylor to the position of Military Adviser to the President. This was a good cover assignment for General Taylor. For those who thought he might be interfering with the duties and prerogatives of the chairman of the JCS, this assignment caused a few raised eyebrows. Dulles and Maxwell Taylor were content to let those rumors and fantasies spread because they did much to help transfer some of the blame for the Bay of Pigs from the CIA to the military. However, everyone else in the need-to-know clan knew that Maxwell Taylor was in the White House to be the President's liaison man with the CIA. The President may not have known how closely Maxwell Taylor's aspirations and those of Allen Dulles matched each other. During the last days of the Dulles era, Maxwell Taylor served as the Focal Point man between Dulles and his Agency and the White House.

This was a perfect role of Maxwell Taylor. He had quit the Army in a dispute with the Eisenhower Administration and now he was in an ideal position to encourage with all support and haste the urgent development of the new flexible response army, attuned to the trumpet of Taylor's own choosing -- counterinsurgency. All the pieces were coming together, and during this formative period a new special group was formed. This was the Special Group (of the NSC), Counterinsurgency, better known as the Special Group CI, or CI. This group presided over the CIA, State and Defense Departments, and others, who hastily put together a host of counterinsurgency nations. It was a watch list, which varied from time to time as intelligence inputs rose and fell with the tides of international events. The Special Group CI list usually ran to about sixteen or seventeen countries, in the order of how deep they were along the path to insurgency and decay. It is worth noting that although the automatic target of CI was Communism, not a single "Communist" country, including Cuba, was on the list. It was characteristic of the new ST focus that the United States was to intervene in the affairs of its friends and not in the affairs of Russia's friends or of China's friends.

This game as it was then played in Washington was a most serious business. As countries were added to the list their military aid programs were hastily escalated, and literally hundreds and sometimes thousands of American military personnel of all types descended upon them. Sometimes they arrived in uniform and sometimes in civilian disguise. They went to work immediately in support of the new political-social-economic doctrine, and before long new schools were being built -- by the army; new hospitals were being built -- by the army; new farming techniques were under way -- by the army; irrigation and water purification projects were under way, -- again by the army. Underlying all of the paramilitary and sometimes real military work was the CIA, working with the host government to weed out, to identify, and to categorize all of the subversive insurgents. In countries where the word Communism had never been applied to bandits, beggars, and rebels before, all of a sudden all opposition was given the name "Communist". All the problems were attributed to Communists, and the counterinsurgency action was under way.

These rather amateurish activities were met with all kinds of receptions in the various host countries. Some were cool to this love-your-army doctrine. Some were stunned. It was pretty bitter medicine for many countries, where hatred and fear of the army had been traditional, to find the Americans coming in with a program designed to make the army into local heroes according to the Magsaysay formula of a Robin Hood game. But what were they -- the Colombians, Congolese, Laotians, Jordanians -- able to say in the face of American "goodwill" and concern? It did a lot of good for the "do-gooders" of counterinsurgency action in the U.S. Government, and if nothing else it served to quickly coalesce the ST. The next move, as SACSA and the Agency consolidated their power and influence in the White House and in the DOD, was to propose the "logical" move of General Taylor to the Pentagon to become chairman of the JCS. As soon as this was accomplished, the Army actively threw itself into the Special Forces mold and set out to win back its position of number one on the defense team.

Thus, all of these pressures and behind-the-scenes efforts piled up before Vietnam, and came to a head in Vietnam. As we have said before, the logistics equipment in huge amounts from Indonesia, Tibet, Laos, the Bay of Pigs, and many other operations all began to accumulate in Vietnam along with the ST personnel, who saw an opportunity to accomplish, almost with abandon, all of the things that they had failed to do or had been unable to do before.

While this was going on quietly and quite subtly before his eyes, President Kennedy did a lot of talking with many old hands about "what has gone wrong with the Bay of Pigs" and "what is the meaning of Vietnam". As has been ably reported by many good writers, President Kennedy was forming his own opinion of what was going on, and the evidence is that he was quite close to the facts and to a real evaluation of what was happening. One of Kennedy's closest friends, Kenny O'Donnell, reports that General MacArthur had "stunned" the President in 1961, after the Bay of Pigs, with his warnings about the folly of trying to match Asian manpower and about the absurdity of the domino theory "in a nuclear age." O'Donnell further reports, "The General implored the President to avoid a U.S. military buildup in Vietnam, or any other part of the Asian mainland. . . ." And Mary McGrory, a reporter, has said, in words more truthful and important than she knew, "President Kennedy, who at the time was caught up in the counterinsurgency mania which had swept the New Frontier, was subsequently startled by the passionate objections of Mansfield. But he told Mansfield privately, after a White House leadership meeting, that he agreed with him "on a need for a complete withdrawal from Vietnam, but I can't do it until 1965 after I get re-elected".

Kennedy had the misfortune, which he was overcoming rapidly, of being young and inexperienced in the inner ways of government, such as those employed by the ST. He could not have realized that Maxwell Taylor, for example, by the time he had returned to the Pentagon as chairman of the JCS, was actually more of a Judas goat, as far as the military was concerned, than the leader of the herd, as he had been when he left three years before. Few great armies have been so vastly demoralized and stricken by an integral campaign as has the U.S. Army since those dark days of 1964 and 1965, when Maxwell Taylor and his ST counterparts led them into Vietnam under the banner of counterinsurgency.

Vietnam is not a simple thing. There were many new forces at play there. It had always galled the Navy and the intelligence community the way General MacArthur had dominated the Pacific during World War II and then later in Korea; and in so doing, he had gained the complete upper hand over all of his adversaries in the U.S. military, especially over "Wild Bill" Donovan of the old OSS. They were violently jealous of him. Admiral Radford, who had been Commander in Chief, Pacific Forces, objected strenuously to any decision that would make Southeast Asia an Army theater of action as MacArthur had made the Korean action an Army show. Radford supported the CIA and Lansdale when they moved into Saigon from Manila. For other reasons the Navy and the CIA had the full support of Cardinal Spellman, since he strongly urged the installation of a Catholic in the President's office in Saigon, and Ngo Dinh Diem and his family were pillars of the Catholic Church in Indochina.

Businesses that had been all but knocked out of the defense contract arena by the end of the Eisenhower regime -- some by the sudden and abrupt swing to ballistic missiles and space during the late fifties -- saw new light at the end of the tunnel in the resurgence of the foot-soldier army and the ground warfare this new dogma presaged. They could expect to go back to making World War II type munitions again and dumping them on the shores of Asia. Perhaps the strongest support for the Vietnamese war has always come from the national defense industries, which benefited tremendously by this windfall. The helicopter industry, which was on the ropes in 1958-59, became a major supplier of war material for Vietnam. At the beginning of the war in Vietnam the Air Force had very few aircraft that could carry a respectable tonnage of bombs -- not because the planes could not carry the load, but because they had all been designed to carry nuclear weapons. As the war became a bombing war -- what McNamara called the "sophisticated war of the North -- all of these huge bombers had to be refitted to carry bombs, and the huge munitions industry put back to work manufacturing bombs. There were many periods in the early days of the bombing when the Air Force actually ran out of bombs while the industry was getting out its old tooling and delivering World War II weapons again.

This war halfway around the world was a major bonanza for the transportation industry and especially for the air transportation groups. During peak years, the DOD was spending three quarters of a billion dollars on charter airlift for Vietnam alone.

In the services, military personnel who saw forced retirement facing them during the sixties were looking at the inevitable retirement as majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels, until a whole new vista opened with the new plan and its return to a ground war of massive troop strength. Men who had lingered in the grade of lieutenant colonel got their colonel's eagles and some of them leap-frogged by way of the Green Berets and CIA recommendation to become brigadier general, major general, and even lieutenant general. There were so many diverse interests, which all came together in the springtide of Vietnam and grew and grew from under a cloak of classification and secrecy. It would be interesting to discover how men like Lansdale, Peers, Dupuy, Stilwell, Tolson, Rosson, and so many others had served with the CIA and also made rapid promotions to the grade of brigadier general and higher as a result of the CIA, Special Forces, and Vietnam. The list is long, and mostly comprised of the men who are listed in the Pentagon Papers, including of course a great number of civilians in the same category.

Few people realized how some of these operations got started, and how important some of these seemingly small things were in the escalation of Vietnam. The Agency brought a squadron of helicopters down from Laos, and immediately these complicated machines needed a great number of skilled men to support them; then these vast agglomerations of men and machines created their own requirements for additional men to protect them and to feed, house, and support them. The first helicopters came in under the wraps of secrecy. No one seemed to know how they got there; but once they were there the great logistics tail that was essential to keep them operating had to be built in the open, without classification. It could not have been kept secret, even if anyone had tried.

On top of this, since the ST was running the beginnings of the war from Washington, they felt that every gimmick they could dream up was worth a try. Even before the escalation, this plan to build up the action in Vietnam was foreshadowed and preordained by official military-type ST doctrine, which stated: "These natural advantages [of the guerrilla] can be largely neutralized by the imaginative employment of modern technological advances which military research and development have been perfecting since the last war . . . night vision devices, lightweight body armor, portable radar for infantry use, invisible phosphorescent dyes, defoliants to deprive the guerrillas of their jungle cover; fast lightweight, silent, shallowdraft boats for river patrol, and tiny reliable short-range radios. . . . Practical uses for all these new developments can best be found by establishing combat development and test centers in the country where the counterinsurgency campaign is being waged."

Such centers were set up later in Vietnam and proved to be the modern counterpart of the horn of plenty and the runaway Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. The center in Saigon was given the highest priority to send daily messages to the Pentagon, and from there every single request, large and small, important or unimportant, was given a high priority to be carried out, all on the assumption that each and every request of the CDTC (Combat Development Test Center) would help win the war of counterinsurgency. The floodgates were open for the zealots, the irresponsible, and the special interests. Such things make small wars grow fast.

The CIA was the first in Vietnam with helicopters. It introduced the M-16 rifle there, and it brought into Indochina the B-26 bombers left over from Cuba and Indonesia and the T-28 trainer aircraft modified as a ground-attack plane. It had the first L-28 utility aircraft, and it brought in the old C-46, C-47 and C-54 aircraft of World War II vintage. It introduced many new ships, such as the Coast Guard patrol ships and the Norwegian-built PT boats. It used the U-2 and had the use of the product of the RF-105 reconnaissance planes. Many of the battlefield tactics used later by the army were first used in the field by the CIA.

By the middle of 1963 it had become evident that either the President was going to have to step in and put a halt to the spread of this counterinsurgency conflagration or it would consume the country. Everywhere the young Kennedy team turned, they came up against CIA and ST specialists. With the sage and powerful General Erskine gone from the staff of the Secretary of Defense, his replacement in this type of activity was either Bill Bundy, a long-time CIA man; Ed Lansdale, a long-time CIA man also, or others too numerous to mention and so well concealed (such as those who really sent the U-2 out on that fateful May 1 mission) that the unaware McNamara had no defense against their continuing pressures. Even in the office that he thought would give him some buffer between the Agency and the military -- that special office in the Joint Staff -- SACSA, McNamara was getting almost 100 percent CIA action, and when Maxwell Taylor became Chairman even his efforts were expended more in support of the ST, as he saw it, than in regular line military.

This was most discernible to those of us who had been in the Joint Staff for some time. In the days of other chairmen, such as Twining and Lemnitzer, JCS meetings used to be wide-open, entirely professional, and generally constructive. This is not to say there were not some strong differences and stronger language when such men as Arleigh Burke the Chief of Naval Operations, or Curt Lemay, the Air Force chief, did not see eye to eye. In any case, they were marked by discussion. They were not dominated and controlled by the chairman. Then, when Maxwell Taylor became chairman, the meetings were somber and apt to be a one-man-show. Little was ever said by any of the Chiefs pro and con when he was in attendance; but let Taylor be away and the meeting then be chaired by another man, the meetings would be open again.

These top military men who had known Taylor for years, had seen him leave the Army in a huff and had watched him return to the White House, where he cast his lot with the CIA and the ST. They knew that even though he was among them officially as the chairman, he was no longer one of them. He was leading the Army and certain elements of the Navy and Air Force away from their traditional roles and into an opportunistic and uncertain future with the CIA and the ST -- into the orgy of Vietnam.

We have seen earlier that President Kennedy's directive NSAM 57, which laid out the ground rules for covert operations and broke them down on the basis that very small was for CIA and the larger ones must be reviewed and probably assigned to the military, had been so turned around that it had become, in practice, almost meaningless on the intangible issue of when to transition from the CIA to the military. To demonstrate how totally this directive has been circumvented, we should note that there has never been a transition in Saigon, even when the force strength stood at 550,000 men. How large does a peacetime operation have to get before the CIA is told to give up its more than intelligence and more than clandestine operations role? How long before the ambassador is withdrawn? before it is placed in the hands of the professional military commanders?

We have not seen what had happened to NSAM 55, the memo Kennedy had sent directly to General Lemnitzer. The General filed that memo and used its silent power to assure that the military would not become involved in covert operations. When Maxwell Taylor became the chairman, he inherited this power. As a prime mover of the inner and security-cloaked ST, he now had the scepter of greater power in his hands. Whereas the President had called upon the chairman of the JCS to advise him in peacetime as he would in wartime, now he had appointed an adviser who was with the other side. The CIA knew that Taylor would not advise against them any more than Lansdale and Bundy would, up in McNamara's office.

Therefore, with the move of Maxwell Taylor to the chairmanship of the JCS, the ST had checkmated President Kennedy on both NSAM 55 and NSAM 57. As the country moved into the crucial summer of 1963 the President admitted to his closest confidants that he could not move against the right-wingers and the ST. As he told Senator Mansfield, "I can't do it until 1965, after I'm re-elected." And as he told Kenny O'Donnell, "In 1965, I'll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don't care. If I tried to pull out completely now, we would have another Joe McCarthy Red scare on our hands." Then in a broadcast on Sept. 2, 1963, President Kennedy gave a hint of his plans for disengagement when he said, speaking of the Vietnamese, "In the final analysis it is their war. They have to win or lose it." Then, as Mary McGrory says, "But Kennedy, like the two presidents who have followed him, was a captive of the Saigon Government." It is typical of reporters and other researchers to give such limited conclusions, because even as close as they are to the Government they are unable to get behind the screen of secrecy and see how the ST really works. Not only was Kennedy captive of the Saigon Government but he and the Saigon Government were captives of the ST.

As we look back to the beginning of this narrative and to those remarkable papers called, quite incorrectly, the Pentagon Papers we recall that early in October 1963, only one month after the above cited broadcast, McNamara and Maxwell Taylor reported to the President that it looked to them, after their visit to Saigon, as though things could be put under control and that we would be able to withdraw all personnel by the end of 1965. Now we can see why they chose that date. This was the date the President had used in his own discussions with his closest advisers. They all knew that he planned to announce a pullout once he had been re-elected. Less than one month after that report, the men who had been running South Vietnam since they had been placed in power there by the American CIA, along with Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu, were dead, and the government had been turned over to one of the friendly generals who more properly fit the pattern for counterinsurgency and the new plan. If South Vietnam was to be redeemed it would best be saved by a junta of benevolent army generals -- or so the new military doctrine went.

Less than one month after that date, President Kennedy himself had been shot dead in Dallas. And what is even more portentous, it was less than one month after that tragic date that the same two travelers, McNamara and Taylor, returned again from Saigon and reported to a new President that conditions were bad in South Vietnam and we would have to make a major effort, including American combat troops and a vast "sophisticated" clandestine program, against the North Vietnamese.

The ST struck quickly. While the echo of those shots in Dallas were still ringing, the ST moved to take over the whole direction of the war and to dominate the activity of the United States of America.

In the face of these shocking and terrifying events, who could have expected a man who had been in the range of gunfire that ended the life of his predecessor, to make any moves in those critical days that would indicate he was not going to go along with the pressures which had surfaced so violently in Dallas? He knew exactly what had happened there in Dallas. He did not need to wait for the findings of the Warren Commission. He already knew that the death of Lee Harvey Oswald would never bring any relief to him or to his successors.
_______

1.

It may be worthwhile to note that both memoranda were very well written, exceeding by far the usual bureaucratic language of such papers in style and clarity. The writer -- Sorenson? -- was certainly more than one of the run-of-the-mill memo writers. Since the Pentagon Papers seem not to have contained these memoranda, it may be some time before we can learn who wrote these excellent and extremely significant papers for the President.

http://www.ratical.com/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp22.html
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This is...
Gunny G's...
GLOBE and ANCHOR
Marines Sites & Forums
By R.W. "Dick" Gaines
Gny Sgt USMC (Ret.)
1952-'72
Semper Fidelis
~~~~~~~~~~
Note:
GyG's G&A Sites & Forums is an informational site and not for profit. Copyrighted material provided soley for education, study, research, and discussion, etc. Full credit to source shown when available.
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Marines should toast Buchwald

Marines should toast Buchwald

Charles Norton/For the Tracy Press Friday, 26 January 2007

— Letter from Charles Norton

Marines owe the memory of columnist Art Buchwald, 1925-2007, a heaping handful of gratitude. The trouble is many of the post-Vietnam and perhaps pre-Vietnam veterans don’t know why. Buchwald’s contribution to Marine Corps history could quite possibly be held on a plateau equal to the legends of “Chesty” Puller, Dan Daley or “Manila John” Basilone. His contribution may be not equal on the heroic deed scale, but certainly significant on the scale of tradition.

Buchwald enlisted in the Corps in 1942 before his 17th birthday. The legend says he bribed a drunk with a bottle to pose as his father to give parental consent to his enlistment. According to recruiting standards, this is a fraudulent enlistment because of age. But what the heck At the time, we were in a war for survival. This already contributes to the making of a legend. Art Buchwald served with the 4th Marine Aircraft Wing in World War II.

Fast forward to the 1960s. Robert McNamara was defense secretary under first, President John Kennedy, and then, President Lyndon Johnson. McNamara was tabbed one of the administration’s “whiz kids” because of his reputation as a cost-cutter at Ford Motor Co. McNamara’s Holy Grail was to cut defense spending by elimination of duplicate or redundant procurement. Uniform procurement differences among the military branches fell into his sights. McNamara gained fame or notoriety by his analysis of brassiere procurement. He was said to have questioned why the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines Corps each had different specifications for uniform brassieres for their female members. I won’t go there.

But I do remember the “McNamarazation” of the Marine Corps uniform in the 1960s.

The herringbone twill “dungarees” of World War II and Korea vintage went the way of the fair leather belt and collar clips to be replaced by a rather blah uniform identified as “sateen utilities” that were identical in appearance to the Army “fatigues.” Our combat boots and field shoes, aka “boondockers,” were replaced with the combat boot, universally maligned by Leathernecks worldwide as “McNamara Boots.” The latter were one inch shorter and eschewed the eyelet and hook lacing arrangement required by amphibious troops. The Marine Corps working uniform could be distinguished from soldiers by the USMC transfer on the breast pocket and a distinctive utility cap not resembling what we called the “Beetle Bailey” cap worn by our Army brethren.

One distinguishing Marine Corps uniform article survived McNamarazation.

The defense secretary decreed that all the services would procure identical belts and buckles as a cost-cutting measure. McNamara reasoned that the primary purpose of a belt was to keep one’s trousers in the proper position, regardless of the color or buckle. Here is where the secretary’s reasoning failed and where Art Buchwald saved a venerable tradition. Then a columnist for The Washington Post, Buchwald provided a logical reason for preservation of a distinctive buckle and belt for Marines. “The Marine Corps belt buckle is the only buckle that can be used to open a beer bottle,” he wrote.

Today, Marines can thank Buchwald for our belt buckle, which has survived the war in the Pacific, the Inchon landing, Beirut, the Cuban missile crisis, Khe Sanh, the Dominican Republic, the Mayaguez, Grenada, Desert Storm, Bosnia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Djibouti and a cost-cutting secretary of defense.

How about a cold one, Art Hand me that bottle and I’ll open it for you.

And Semper Fi, Marine.

Charles Norton, the Tracy Press Our Town Paws for Thought columnist, is a 25-year Tracy resident. He served 25 years in the Marine Corps, retiring in 1980 as a lieutenant colonel. He served in Vietnam with the 3rd Marine Division.
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This is...
Gunny G's...
GLOBE and ANCHOR
Marines Sites & Forums
By R.W. "Dick" Gaines
Gny Sgt USMC (Ret.)
1952-'72
Semper Fidelis
~~~~~~~~~~
Note:
GyG's G&A Sites & Forums is an informational site and not for profit. Copyrighted material provided soley for education, study, research, and discussion, etc. Full credit to source shown when available.
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Gunny G's Marines Sites & Forums -- LINKS

Gunny G's Marines GLOBE and ANCHOR Sites & Forums--The Best Damn Marines Sites On The WWW!--was originally composed mainly on topics of interest to Old Salt Marines of what was known as "THE OLD CORPS!." --Mostly those years between the wars (WW I and WW II), and The Banana Wars, Nicaragua and Haiti, The China Marines, etc. But it was also heavily into WW II and Korea, leaving all that came later to the boots to boast and brag over.Keep in mind, there has not been an official "declared" war since WW II.

Politics was avoided, but with every coming year we find what was once known simply as "politics" has now become warp and woof of everything in our daily lives. Therefore, the GunnyG webpages now includes information relating to topics political, social, politically incorrect, unusual, history (Marine Corps, and other military, and much little-known and/or little mentioned items relating to history), and so on and on.

Articles of interest are now posted daily from news sources, etc. Still, personal stories, and personal accounts of this and that are also posted. Much of the postings fall under the heading of, again, politically incorrect, thought-provoking, eye-opening, and, hopefully, interesting.

Please note, however, Gunny G's is not for ALL hands--so just take what you find useful, and pass by the rest. Hope your visit is worthwhile, and that you will pass something on to others.

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POLICE AS A STANDING ARMY...?

PART II

POLICE AS A STANDING ARMY

It is largely forgotten that the war for American independence was initiated in large part by the British Crown's practice of using troops to police civilians in Boston and other cities.244 Professional soldiers used in the same ways as modern police were among the primary grievances enunciated by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. ("[George III] has kept among us standing armies"; "He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power"; "protecting them, by a mock trial....").245 The duties of such troops were in no way military but involved the keeping of order and the suppression of crime (especially customs and tax violations).

Constitutional arguments quite similar to the thesis of this article were made by America's Founders while fomenting the overthrow of their government. Thomas Jefferson proclaimed that although Parliament was supreme in its jurisdiction to make laws, "his majesty has no right to land a single armed man on our shores" to enforce unpopular laws.246 James Warren said that the troops in Boston were there on an unconstitutional mission because their role was not military but rather to enforce "obedience to Acts which, upon fair examination, appeared to be unjust and unconstitutional."247 Colonial pamphleteer Nicholas Ray charged that Americans did not have "an Enemy worth Notice within 3000 Miles of them."248 "[T]he troops of George the III have cross'd the wide atlantick, not to engage an enemy," charged John Hancock, but to assist constitutional traitors "in trampling on the rights and liberties of [the King's] most loyal subjects ..."249

The use of soldiers to enforce law had a long and sullied history in England and by the mid-1700s were considered a violation of the fundamental rights of Englishmen.250 The Crown's response to London's Gordon Riots of 1780 — roughly contemporary to the cultural backdrop of America's Revolution — brought on an immense popular backlash at the use of guards to maintain public order.251 "[D]eep, uncompromising opposition to the maintenance of a semimilitary professional force in civilian life" remained integral to Anglo-Saxon legal culture for another half century.252

Englishmen of the Founding era, both in England and its colonies, regarded professional police as an "alien, continental device for maintaining a tyrannical form of Government."253 Professor John Phillip Reid has pointed out that few of the rights of Englishmen "were better known to the general public than the right to be free of standing armies."254 "Standing armies," according to one New Hampshire correspondent, "have ever proved destructive to the Liberties of a People, and where they are suffered, neither Life nor Property are secure."255

If pressed, modern police defenders would have difficulty demonstrating a single material difference between the standing armies the Founders saw as so abhorrent and America's modern police forces. Indeed, even the distinctions between modern police and actual military troops have blurred in the wake of America's modern crime war.256 Ninety percent of American cities now have active special weapons and tactics (SWAT) teams, using such commando-style forces to do "high risk warrant work" and even routine police duties.257 Such units are often instructed by active and retired United States military personnel.258

In Fresno, California, a SWAT unit equipped with battering rams, chemical agents, fully automatic submachine guns, and 'flashbang' grenades roams full-time on routine patrol.259 According to criminologist Peter Kraska, such military policing has never been seen on such a scale in American history, "where SWAT teams routinely break through a door, subdue all the occupants, and search the premises for drugs, cash and weapons."260 In high-crime or problem areas, police paramilitary units may militarily engage an entire neighborhood, stopping "anything that moves" or surrounding suspicious homes with machine guns openly displayed.261

Much of the importance of the standing-army debates at the ratification conventions has been overlooked or misinterpreted by modern scholars. Opponents of the right to bear arms, for example, have occasionally cited the standing-army debates to support the proposition that the Framers intended the Second Amendment to protect the power of states to form militias.262 Although this argument has been greatly discredited,263 it has helped illuminate the intense distrust that the Framers manifested toward occupational standing armies. The standing army the Framers most feared was a soldiery conducting law enforcement operations in the manner of King George's occupation troops — like the armies of police officers that now patrol the American landscape.

Ref
http://www.constitution.org/lrev/roots/cops.htm
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ARE COPS CONSTITUTIONAL?

Roger Roots*

ABSTRACT

Police work is often lionized by jurists and scholars who claim to employ "textualist" and "originalist" methods of constitutional interpretation. Yet professional police were unknown to the United States in 1789, and first appeared in America almost a half-century after the Constitution's ratification. The Framers contemplated law enforcement as the duty of mostly private citizens, along with a few constables and sheriffs who could be called upon when necessary. This article marshals extensive historical and legal evidence to show that modern policing is in many ways inconsistent with the original intent of America's founding documents. The author argues that the growth of modern policing has substantially empowered the state in a way the Framers would regard as abhorrent to their foremost principles.

PART I

INTRODUCTION................................................................686

THE CONSTITUTIONAL TEXT..............................................688

PRIVATE PROSECUTORS....................................................689

LAW ENFORCEMENT AS A UNIVERSAL................................692

POLICE AS SOCIAL WORKERS.............................................695

THE WAR ON CRIME..........................................................696

THE DEVELOPMENT OF DISTINCTIONS................................698

RESISTING ARREST............................................................701

THE SAFETY OF THE POLICE PROFESSION............................711

PROFESSIONALISM?..........................................................713

DNA EVIDENCE ILLUSTRATES FALLIBILITY OF POLICE........716

COPS NOT COST-EFFECTIVE DETERRENT.............................721

PART II

POLICE AS A STANDING ARMY...........................................722

THE SECOND AMENDMENT........725

THE THIRD AMENDMENT...................................................727

THE RIGHT TO BE LEFT ALONE...........................................728

THE FOURTH AMENDMENT................................................729

WARRANTS A FLOOR, NOT A CEILING.................................733

PRIVATE PERSONS AND THE FOURTH AMENDMENT..............734

ORIGINALISTS CALL FOR CIVIL DAMAGES...........................739

DEVELOPMENT OF IMMUNITIES..........................................743

THE LOSS OF PROBABLE CAUSE, AND THE ONSET OF PROBABLE SUSPICION................................................744

POLICE AND THE "AUTOMOBILE EXCEPTION"......................745

ONE EXCEPTION: THE EXCLUSIONARY RULE?......................747

THE FIFTH AMENDMENT....................................................751

DUE PROCESS...................................................................752

ENTRAPMENT...................................................................754

CONCLUSION...................................757

PART I

INTRODUCTION

Uniformed police officers are the most visible element of America's criminal justice system. Their numbers have grown exponentially over the past century and now stand at hundreds of thousands nationwide.1 Police expenses account for the largest segment of most municipal budgets and generally dwarf expenses for fire, trash, and sewer services.2 Neither casual observers nor learned authorities regard the sight of hundreds of armed, uniformed state agents on America's roads and street corners as anything peculiar — let alone invalid or unconstitutional.

Yet the dissident English colonists who framed the United States Constitution would have seen this modern 'police state' as alien to their foremost principles. Under the criminal justice model known to the Framers, professional police officers were unknown.3 The general public had broad law enforcement powers and only the executive functions of the law (e.g., the execution of writs, warrants and orders) were performed by constables or sheriffs (who might call upon members of the community for assistance).4 Initiation and investigation of criminal cases was the nearly exclusive province of private persons.

At the time of the Constitution's ratification, the office of sheriff was an appointed position, and constables were either elected or drafted from the community to serve without pay.5 Most of their duties involved civil executions rather than...
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The role of teaching and learning ...

The role of teaching and learning is actually reversed in the thinking of the world. The reversal is characteristic. It seems as if the teacher and the learner are separated, the teacher giving something to the learner rather than to himself. Further, the act of teaching is regarded as a special activity, in which one engages only a relatively small proportion of one's time. The course, on the other hand, emphasizes that to teach to learn, so that teacher and learner are the same. It also emphasizes that teaching is a constant process; it goes on every moment of the day, and continues into sleeping thoughts as well.

To teach is to demonstrate. There are only two thought systems, and you demonstrate that you believe one or the other is true all the time. From your demonstration others learn, and so do you. The question is not whether you will teach, for in that there is no choice. The purpose of the course might be said to provide you with a means of choosing what you want to teach on the basis of what you want to learn. You cannot give to someone else, but only to yourself, and this you learn through teaching. Teaching is but a call to witnesses to attest to what you believe. It is a method of conversion. This is not done by words alone. Any situation must be to you a chance to teach others what you are, and what they are to you. No more than that, but also never less.

The curriculum you set up is therefore determined exclusively by what you think you are, and what you believe the relationship of others is to you. In the formal teaching situation, these questions may be totally unrelated to what you think you are teaching. Yet it is impossible not to use the content of any situation on behalf of what you really teach, and therefore really learn. To this the verbal content of your teaching is quite irrelevant. It may coincide with it, or it may not. It is the teaching underlying what you say that teaches you. Teaching but reinforces what you believe about yourself. Its fundamental purpose is to diminish self-doubt. This does not mean that the self you are trying to protect is real. But it does mean that the self you think is real is what you teach.

This is inevitable. There is no escape from it. How could it be otherwise? Everyone who follows the world's curriculum, and everyone here does follow it until he changes his mind, teaches solely to convince himself that he is what he is not. Herein is the purpose of the world. What else, then, would its curriculum be? Into this hopeless and closed learning situation, which teaches nothing but despair and death, God sends His teachers. And as they teach His lessons of joy and hope, their learning finally becomes complete.

Except for God's teachers there would be little hope of salvation, for the world of sin would seem forever real. The self-deceiving must deceive, for they must teach deception. And what else is hell? This is a manual for the teachers of God. They are not perfect, or they would not be here. Yet it is their mission to become perfect here, and so they teach perfection over and over, in many, many ways, until they have learned it. And then they are seen no more, although their thoughts remain a source of strength and truth forever. Who are they? How are they chosen? What do they do? How can they work out their own salvation and the salvation of the world? This manual attempts to answer these questions.
ACIM
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IS THE SECOND AMENDMENT ABOUT HUNTING???

"The Second Amendment isn’t about hunting, it’s about keeping our government in line when all else has failed to do so."
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http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/tonso3.html

LewRockwell.com

Second Amendment Lessons From Iraq

by William R. Tonso

Like all informed Second Amendment supporters, I don’t trust any politician who claims support for that amendment and then goes on to relate how much he/she stands up for the rights of hunters as if the rights of hunters were what that amendment is all about. We know why the Second Amendment was put in the Bill of Rights. The Founders left us a clear paper trail including the following succinct statement from Tench Coxe: "As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed in the next article in their right to keep and bear their private arms" (emphasis added).

The Second Amendment isn’t about hunting, it’s about keeping our government in line when all else has failed to do so. It’s the teeth of the Bill of Rights. And that there are still Americans who take seriously the right to defend themselves against a government gone bad worries advocates of dictatorial social engineering through judicial activism and of the ever-increasing centralization and intrusiveness of our government. But are those of us who take this right and its related concerns seriously being realistic? If our government gets to the point where it’s widely considered to be oppressive, could our heavily armed populace do much against the even more heavily armed and highly trained military and police forces that would be the instruments of our government’s oppression? After all, wouldn’t the situation existing in Iraq before Saddam Hussein was ousted seem to undermine our assumptions concerning the protection against oppression afforded by a heavily armed civilian populace?

The official justification for going to war with Iraq, of course, was to get rid of that nation’s weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Since no Iraqi WMDs have been found, the Bush administration’s justification for going into Iraq has shifted to liberating that nation’s people from the horrors inflicted on them by their brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein. That Saddam was a brutal dictator, there’s no doubt, but if his people were so terribly treated by him, why didn’t they rise up against him? I can just hear the scoffing response to this question from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and other Bush-administration shills: "Idiot, how can an oppressed people rise up against a brutal dictator and his military and police forces?" But the answer to this question should be obvious to those who believe that a heavily armed populace serves as a safeguard against oppression. Gun ownership was apparently widespread in Saddam’s Iraq.

"The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence/Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence" claims, "According to media reports, Iraq is one of the most heavily armed countries in the world. It is believed that there are enough guns in Iraq for at last [sic] every person in Iraq to possess one, a level similar to gun ownership in clans in Yemen and Somalia, as well as in the United States. With a population of approximately 24 million, that means there could be millions of small arms in the hands of civilians. The gun culture is pervasive in Iraq. There is even an Iraqi saying, ‘Give everything to your friend, except your car, your wife, and your gun.’"

This anti-gun organization goes on to report that "in February, 2003, Saddam’s governments [sic] held a parade of thousands of small arms-bearing civilians to march down the streets of Mosul to demonstrate the capacity of ordinary Iraqis to wage war." What kinds of guns? All kinds, many old but also many new, the latter including AK-47 true assault rifles capable of full-automatic fire, and "Israeli Uzis and German MP5 submachine guns." Civilians even had rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs). A retired Army Special Operations officer with whom I swap e-mails now and again confirms that that part of the world, with which he is very familiar, is awash in guns. And a soldier returned from Iraq once told Limbaugh about the widespread civilian possession of guns in that country. Rush was surprised, but I’ve never heard him mention it again. So, if Iraqi civilians were actually heavily armed even before they were "liberated" (Ha!), why didn’t the Iraqi people rise up against their brutal dictator and save the United States the trouble of "liberating" them?

Does the failure of heavily armed Iraqis to liberate themselves undermine the arguments of Second Amendment supporters in the United States, few of whom seem to be aware that Iraqi civilians were heavily armed even in Saddam’s day? I’m surprised that the gun prohibitionists haven’t used the Iraq situation to jump on this pro-Second Amendment argument with both feet. "Look! The heavily armed Iraqis couldn’t do anything against Saddam’s police state. Any attempt to overthrow his oppressive regime would have brought about the swift and brutal eradication of rebel forces by his military and police forces. Why, his oppressed masses couldn’t even assassinate him, because he had so many doubles standing in for him and he had spies everywhere. You Second Amendment yahoos are caught up in a bunch of romantic nonsense if you think that you can stand up against the military and police forces of a modern nation state gone bad." Somewhere, I believe on the Internet, I’ve seen at least one Second Amendment-supporter’s response to the Iraq situation. He argued that since the Iraqis didn’t liberate themselves, reports that they were heavily armed must be false. But both the argument that Iraqis couldn’t overthrow Saddam even though they were heavily armed, and the argument that the fact that they didn’t overthrow him proves that they weren’t heavily armed are questionable.

Had the Iraqis been as willing to take on Saddam’s military and police forces as they obviously have been to take on American and British forces far more powerful than any that could have been mustered by Saddam, they could have got rid of him themselves and been less worse off than they are now. As Saddam apparently hoped they would, Iraqis have proven that they can fight and that they’re willing to take casualties, and in doing so they’ve also shown that even if they had the means they didn’t have the will to get rid of him. They’re currently demonstrating that they have both the means and the will to take on rival factions and those whom they consider to be occupiers of their country and despoilers of everything they value. As the retired Army Special Operations officer I mentioned previously e-mailed me: "Every country I have ever spent time in, to include Iraq, the people living there are as free as they are willing to be. This is not just opinion, it is true by definition. Otherwise they would be dead or in jail trying to overthrow people like Saddam. What Americans mistakenly do is transfer their beliefs regarding distrust of government onto others. The vast majority of people around this world believe government to be a good, not evil, force in their lives." Well put. Even a well-armed populace can be oppressed if it doesn’t have the will to rebel. I might add that even in the United States, detractors of the Second Amendment, and even many of its supporters, tend to trust government too much and see it as a force for good as long as their side is in power.

December 13, 2006

William R. Tonso [send him mail] a retired sociology professor (University of Evansville) who has written a lot on the gun issue, both sociological and pro-Second Amendment. His recent book, Gun Control=People Control, is a collection of eleven of his essays previously published in Liberty, Reason, Chronicles, and Gun Week.

Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com



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Suribachi Flag: Living Japanese Survivor, Etc.

http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/waiwai/news/p20061211p2g00m0dm003000c.html

MSN JapanNews
Mainichi Daily News
INTERACTIVE

Flags of Our Fathers:
Japanese Iwo Jima eyewitness tells it in his own words

Joe Rosenthal's famous photo of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima. (AP)
"The Iwo Jima Memorial standing at Arlington Cemetery. The photo showing six U.S. Marines raising the Stars & Stripes on Mt. Suribachi was not only staged, but the summit was retaken twice by Japanese forces, who raised the Nissho-ki (Sun flag) in its place. A young Japanese serviceman who witnessed it all recounts his memories from 61 years ago." (Shukan Bunshun (12/14)

Actually, the U.S. flag was raised by five Marines and one Navy corpsman. The USMC Iwo Jima memorial stands in Rosslyn, Virginia, nearby, but not within the boundaries of, Arlington Cemetery. And allegations that AP cameraman Joe Rosenthal "staged" the famous flag-raising photo have been thoroughly debunked.

Following this acerbic and partially inaccurate lead-in, Shukan Bunshun introduces Tsuruji Akikusa, age 79. In 1944, the 17-year-old Akikusa was dispatched to Iwo Jima as a signalman for the Imperial Japanese Navy. He had enlisted two years earlier following his school graduation.

Akikusa points to a photo in a movie program showing actors portraying American GIs sitting on a patch of grassy turf.

"That would have been impossible," he scoffs. "After the naval bombardment, there wasn't a blade of grass left on the island."

Out of a total Japanese garrison of 21,000 men, only 1,023 men survived, including Akikusa. He was seriously wounded during the pre-invasion bombardment in February 1945 and did not take part in the fighting. Found unconscious in the battle's aftermath, he was evacuated to a hospital in Guam and repatriated the following year.

In "Junana-sai no Io-to" (a 17-year-old on Iwo Jima, Bungei Shunju, 840 yen), his personal memoirs released this month, Akikusa provides a rare eyewitness perspective of what happened on Mt. Suribachi from the opposing side.

Suribachi, the highest point on the island, harbored about 2,000 Japanese defenders. Akikusa himself was situated at a communications post some 3.5 kilometers to the northeast, on a lower peak called Mt. Tamana.

On the morning of February 23, he saw the first U.S. flag go up on Suribachi's peak, followed shortly thereafter by the second, larger flag, the raising of which was immortalized at 1/400th second in Rosenthal's famous photograph. Akikusa's descriptions up to this point correspond completely to American accounts of the event. But what followed afterward appears to contradict the official U.S. Naval version of the battle.

The following morning, as Akikusa relates in his book, "It was not the Stars & Stripes, but the Nissho-ki (Japanese Sun flag) that was waving. Even though the peak was the target of attack from every direction on the island, I thought how hard they must have fought, and tears naturally came to my eyes. The valiant fighters were defending Mt. Suribachi to the death."

The U.S. troops quickly hauled down the Japanese standard and replaced it with their own flag. But early the next morning, February 25, "the Nissho-ki was once again fluttering in the morning sunshine. It was a dazzling, beautiful sight."

"The flag was a different one from the day before," Akikusa recalls. "It was a smaller one, and square. It may have been improvised. The red circle in the center looked brownish, so it could have been blood."

"It may have been made out of a shirt. It moved me to tears. 'Our guys are still up there,' I thought. 'They're giving everything they've got. So will I.'"

"I had hoped to see the Nissho-ki still flying the next morning, but that miracle was not to be," Akikusa writes. "I said to myself, 'Well, I guess that's the end of it.'"

By March 8, the US attackers had turned their overwhelming numerical superiority on Mt. Tamana. Akikusa, wounded in the left leg and right hand, witnessed scenes of incredible carnage. Unconscious from multiple wounds, he awakened in a POW hospital on Guam.

Repatriated after the war, Akikusa called on the families of comrades killed in the fighting. But his visits were not necessarily welcomed.

"Their reactions were about half positive and half negative," he relates. "Many of them told me, 'We've already completed our Buddhist memorial services.' I guess they wanted to put it behind them as quickly as they could."

Shukan Bunshun asks Akikusa if he felt deaths of his comrades in arms was meaningful.

"Considering how this country has been without war for the past 60 years, I think it's commendable," Akikusa replies. "If you regard them as 'sacrificial stones' who caused Japan to relinquish what it sought to become in those times, then I want to believe their deaths were not without meaning." (By Masuo Kamiyama, contributing writer)

December 11, 2006
Copyright 2004-2005 THE MAINICHI NEWSPAPERS. All rights reserved.
Under the copyright law of Japan, use of all materials on this website, except for personal and noncommercial purposes, is prohibited without the express written permission of the Mainichi Newspapers Co. The copyright of the materials belongs to the Mainichi Newspapers Co. unless stated otherwise.
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China Marines by Eric Niderost By Eric Niderost

HistoryNet

China Marines
In the twilight of peace, the China Marines found themselves on the front lines of conflict.

By Eric Niderost

The United States Marine Corps had served with distinction in many parts of the world, but those serving in China in the 1930s faced a unique set of challenges. From 1937 to 1941, as relations between the United States and Japan steadily deteriorated, the "China Marines" became the subject of heated debate between the State Department, the diplomatic corps and the military. The disagreements were in part a reflection of the deep divisions that plagued the U.S. government and the nation at large.

In the final years prior to Pearl Harbor, Marines were stationed in several parts of north and central China protecting U.S. interests as they had done since the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. Perhaps the most famous of these isolated detachments of leathernecks, at least in terms of popular imagination and historical association, was the Embassy Guard Detachment at Peking.

In addition to that assignment, after the departure of the Army's 15th Infantry Regiment in early 1938, Marines could be found in Tientsin, about 83 miles or so from the capital and the traditional gateway to Peking. An additional 20 were stationed at Chinwangtao, a major port 140 miles northwest of Tientsin where much of the China Marines' support arrived from the States.

The largest detachment was the 4th Marine Regiment, which had been stationed in Shanghai since 1927. Its assignment was to safeguard American lives, property and commerce, not only in the great city, but in the Yangtze River valley as well.

First called to the area when China was overrun by warlords, by the 1930s the Marines were still performing the same mission as Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang -- fighting warlords and Communist forces under Mao Tse-tung in a country that seemed forever beset by chaos. A fervent anti-Communist, Generalissimo Chiang seemed so obsessed at times with destroying Mao that he ignored an even more ominous threat.

In 1931 ultranationalist officers within the Japanese army hoped to expand the borders of their country's empire at the expense of China, which they saw as weak and unable to defend itself. They staged an explosion along the Japanese-funded South Manchurian Railway near Mukden and used the incident as a pretext to seize Manchuria from China. Still obsessed with his anti-Communist campaign, Chiang did little to prevent the takeover. Other than delivering a few verbal protests, Western governments were silent, and many people believed that it would not be long before the Japanese continued their expansion.

While it did not noticeably raise the ire of Chiang or the interest of Western leaders, the Japanese seizure of Manchuria outraged ordinary Chinese citizens. An active anti-Japanese resistance movement soon sprang up. The center of that resistance was located in Shanghai. Fighting broke out in 1932 between Japanese troops guarding their settlement in Shanghai and Chinese troops at Chapei, a district of the city just north of the International Settlement.

The International Settlement was a foreign enclave that was home to thousands of diplomats, businessmen and their families. Although technically Chinese soil, it was governed by the multinational Municipal Council. The Shanghai Volunteer Corps had been created to protect the settlement, but real security was provided by the troops sent out by their respective home governments. For the Americans, that meant the 4th Marine Regiment.

When the fighting between the Japanese and Chinese nationalists intensified, the Marines helped maintain a defensive perimeter around the foreign delegations and kept the warring parties from entering until the fighting subsided somewhat.

By 1937, however, the relative calm of the previous five years began to fade. In July the Japanese military accused the Chinese of kidnapping one of their privates in Peking. The charge was patently false, and the missing man was found in a brothel, but the Japanese used the incident to launch a full-scale war against China.

Thousands of Japanese troops poured into northern China, quickly occupying Peking and Tientsin and crushing all opposition. Finally motivated to act, Chiang Kai-shek ordered two of his best divisions to Shanghai to try to stop the Japanese. The Chinese leader knew that the city's foreign community would guarantee a large international audience once battle was joined.

With heavy fighting in Shanghai's Chapei district, the commander of the 4th Marines, Colonel Charles F.B. Price, met with American Consul General Clarence Gauss and Maj. Gen. A.P.D. Telfer-Smollett, commander of the British Shanghai Area Force, to discuss the best course of action. Price could consult with officials within the perimeter, but the colonel ultimately took his orders from Admiral Harry E. Yarnell, the commander of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet. The admiral told Price in no uncertain terms that armed troops from either side would not be allowed into the American sector of the International Settlement and that if any foreign troops tried to breach the perimeter, the Marines were authorized to use force if need be.

The Chinese fought courageously, but they were finally forced to withdraw from Shanghai in mid-November 1937. The International Settlement and neighboring French Concession became small isolated enclaves of Western governance. Despite Japanese control of the city, the Anglo-American portions of the settlement were inviolate -- at least for the moment. Protected by its neutrality, the Chinese government was free to operate within the confines of the settlement -- a fact that made the Japanese grind their teeth in frustration. Chinese customs, post, radio and telegraph offices and Chinese banks all conducted business safe from Japanese interference. Patriotic Chinese newspapers within the settlement were free to report the war and publicize the plight of ordinary Chinese by exposing Japanese atrocities, which occurred with frightening regularity. Such reports only served to secure increased public support in the West for Chiang and his forces.

Anxious to continue their war of conquest without raising the ire of the international community, the Japanese wanted to seize control of the nettlesome Anglo-American settlement. They knew that any overt aggression might lead to war, so they instead relied on a series of confrontational moves that increased tensions and made life for the foreigners increasingly uncomfortable. On December 12, 1937, Japanese planes attacked and sank the gunboat USS Panay, killing two sailors and wounding many others. Americans were outraged, but strong isolationist sentiments coupled with a quick Japanese apology and generous reparation payments averted armed conflict.

Another crisis had passed, but the basic problem remained: How should the United States respond to Japan's brutal conquest of China? In 1935 Congress had passed a series of neutrality acts that rigidly controlled American trade with belligerents in foreign wars. Many isolationist politicians in Congress believed that only strict neutrality would keep the United States from finding itself in another war.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt was sympathetic to China, and he got around the neutrality laws by simply ignoring them. He refused to acknowledge that a state of war existed between China and the Japanese empire. It was a legal fiction helped by the fact that no formal declaration of war had ever been made by either side. Roosevelt was therefore free to send arms to China -- some $9 million worth in 1938 alone. This was a boon not only to Chiang, but to the American economy as well.

Even within his own administration there were diverse opinions of the president's actions. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau believed that U.S. interests in China must be protected by a military and economic buildup. He thought that, like the proverbial schoolyard bully, Japan would back down when faced with firmness and resolve. Others were not so sure. Secretary of State Cordell Hull and U.S. Ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew believed a hard line would only weaken the position of Japanese moderates and would ultimately lead to war.

While the debate continued, the Marines in Shanghai were forced to carry on in an increasingly difficult situation. Since they could not openly seize the International Settlement, the Japanese military kept up the pressure on the remaining foreign delegations through intimidation and veiled threats. In December 1937, they announced that they were going to stage a victory parade though the International Settlement. The Municipal Council protested but, with no real support available from the Chinese government, had no choice but to permit the intrusion.

Chinese citizens within the settlement were told to stay off the street, and the municipal police were placed on full alert. As the Japanese parade tramped into the international area, a Chinese man tossed a hand grenade that killed three soldiers and wounded three policemen. A Chinese constable shot and killed the attacker, but the Japanese used the killings as an excuse to search for more "assassins" within the International Settlement. After creating a good deal of unease with these searches, Japanese authorities announced that they wanted to take control of the settlement to restore order. At this Colonel Price protested and warned the Japanese off in no uncertain terms.

As before, the immediate crisis passed but tension in the city increased as everyone prepared for the next emergency. By 1940, with Europe again at war, the situation for the Marines in Shanghai had become even more precarious. The garrison was about 1,000 men. In the past, this force could have been supplemented with reinforcements from the other delegations in an emergency, but the international situation now meant this was no longer the case. There were 750 Italian troops, but their Fascist government's warm relations with Imperial Japan made any cooperation with American interests unlikely. The French had about 4,000 troops; that force, however, was unreliable following the defeat of France and the establishment of a pro-German Vichy government. That left the British, but after a string of defeats in Europe, all but a small portion of that force was withdrawn from Shanghai on August 26, 1940. If tempers flared, a mere 1,000 Marines now found themselves defending the settlement from the nearly half million Japanese troops operating in the region.

In 1939 Admiral Thomas C. Hart took over the U.S. Asiatic Fleet from Admiral Yarnell. Uneasy about the vulnerability of his badly outnumbered forces, he slowly began withdrawing American naval units from Chinese waters. Eventually all that remained of the once powerful Asiatic Fleet was a handful of gunboats belonging to the Yangtze River Patrol (YANGPAT). Meanwhile, as the Chinese and Japanese carried out their own brutal guerrilla war against one another in the side streets and back alleys of Shanghai, the Marines found themselves acting as a local police force.

On January 3, 1940, Price was replaced by Colonel DeWitt Peck. The new commander was quickly immersed in a bewildering array of military, diplomatic and security problems that would have taxed the ingenuity of King Solomon and the patience of Job. Peck did have a friend and ally in Rear Adm. William A. Glassford, YANGPAT's commander.

On July 7, 1940, the third anniversary of the incident that started the Sino-Japanese war, the foreign delegations in the settlement were put on full alert. It was feared that the Chinese might use the anniversary to demonstrate or even stage a guerrilla-style attack on local Japanese authorities. Those fears were heightened when it was announced that Japanese General Juzo Nishio would be coming to the settlement on an inspection tour. As part of the visit, members of the council proposed that a reception for the general be held in the Cathay Hotel.

Nishio, however, said he would prefer that the reception be held in some other venue outside the perimeter of the British portion of the settlement, where the hotel was located. The Municipal Council bowed to his wishes and the reception was moved to the Park Hotel, which was squarely within the 4th Marines' defensive sector. That placed security during this very tense situation in the lap of Colonel Peck and his Marines.

On the day of Nishio's scheduled arrival, Peck received an urgent call from the settlement's municipal police asking for immediate assistance. He sent Lt. Col. Eugene F. Collier and 25 Marines from the 1st Battalion to Bubbling Well Road. They arrived to find 16 Japanese men loitering in the area, which was not far from the Park Hotel. Not only were they acting suspiciously, all seemed to be armed, their guns badly concealed under bulging coats.

These men were probably Japanese military and it was clear that the situation called for the utmost tact. Any major confrontation might well have international repercussions. The Marines feigned disinterest at first, lulling the suspects into a false sense of security. Then, at a prearranged signal, the leathernecks pounced on their unsuspecting quarry, and all hell broke loose.

The loitering Japanese were finally subdued, but most remained uncooperative and had to be bodily thrown into a waiting truck for transport to the Marines' headquarters on Haiphong Road. One of the prisoners spoke excellent English and finally admitted they were with the military police. He claimed they were an advance party detailed to protect the Japanese general.

Legitimate or not, this was a clear violation of the established rules within the International Settlement. When the commander of troops from one nation wanted to enter or cross the sector patrolled by troops from another, permission had to be asked and at least 24 hours' notice given. A phone call was placed to General Saburo Miura's headquarters. If Miura, the commander of Japanese military police forces, or his representatives could identify the prisoners, they would be released. If not, they would be charged and put on trial for carrying concealed weapons without a permit.

While things were being sorted out, the Japanese were held in a building that housed an indoor rifle range. The door was guarded by a single Marine. Seeing an opportunity, the prisoners rose as one and started for the door. "We are officers of the Japanese Emperor," the English speaker declared with as much authority as he could muster, "and you dare not detain us!"

The Marine instantly grasped the seriousness of the situation. He could not allow them to escape, but he was not in a position to use deadly force. Instead, he laid aside his rifle -- making sure it was out of reach of the prisoners -- raised his fists and prepared to stop them. In the wild free-for-all that followed, four of the would-be escapees were knocked down. Three of the four lost some of their front teeth and much of their courage. Although he had been badly outnumbered, the Marine had stopped the attempted escape.

In the meantime, General Miura had arrived at Marine headquarters for a hurried conference with Colonel Peck. The Japanese officer apologized for the incident, and for not notifying the colonel that his men were going to enter the International Settlement undercover. Peck accepted Miura's apology -- or seemed to -- and the prisoners were released.

The arrest of the 16 men had uncovered a larger, more sinister plot. While the Marines had been busy dealing with the lurking Japanese military police, seven Chinese men who were also hanging around in the area had tried to avoid observation by other Marines providing security. Alerted by the strange behavior of the seven men, several of Peck's men gave chase. In an effort to shake off their pursuers, they ducked into a large YMCA building next door to the Park Hotel.

The Marines managed to arrest three of the seven, and took them back to headquarters for interrogation. They were Chinese criminals who hailed from Formosa (now Taiwan), which at that time was a Japanese colony. The Chinese had been captured with revolvers and hand grenades, and they quickly confessed that they had been working with Miura to carry out an assassination of Nishio when he arrived at the Park Hotel. Further questioning revealed that the 16 Japanese agents arrested earlier were to be on hand to assist the Chinese assassins by firing weapons into the air and creating sufficient confusion for the attack to be carried out. If Nishio had been killed or wounded, there was little doubt that the Japanese would have used the incident as a pretext for moving troops into the Anglo-American sectors of the settlement.

It may seem incredible that a Japanese general would have hatched a plot to assassinate a brother officer. But such was the state of affairs in China at that point, and so anxious were the Japanese to shut down the settlement, that such a plot is not completely beyond belief. The difficulty was further compounded because Miura was deeply involved in a variety of criminal activities in the western suburbs of Shanghai that were known as the "badlands." Bounded by Yu Yuen, Jessfield and Great Western streets, the area had become a notorious center of Japanese-controlled vice. Opium dens, brothels and gambling halls provided a steady stream of kickback income to Miura and a small group of Japanese officers.

What could have been an incredibly disastrous incident had been narrowly averted thanks to a little bit of luck and the vigilance of a handful of Marines. But the situation was still serious -- serious enough to prompt the United States to send all Navy and Marine dependents home in December 1940.

In May 1941, Colonel Peck was replaced by Colonel Samuel Howard, who soon came to the conclusion that his Marines -- indeed, all remaining American military forces -- should be withdrawn from China. Faced with similar challenges of maintaining a minuscule force in the midst of an increasingly hostile situation, Glassford, still in command of YANGPAT, agreed.

The officers brought their concerns to the U.S. consul general in Shanghai, Frank B. Lockhart, who relayed a message to Secretary of State Hull on August 14, 1941. Lockhart began by saying that Admiral Glassford and Colonel Howard had sent a recommendation to the Asiatic Fleet commander, Admiral Hart, that all Marines be withdrawn from China. The consul general went on to say that he concurred with their conclusions without reservation. Not only was the military situation untenable, but Lockhart considered the situation politically untenable now as well.

The consul general explained that the Marines' functions "are now becoming more and more those of a police force, thus increasing the possibility of serious incidents." If there was an open break with the Japanese government, the Marines would find it difficult if not impossible to withdraw: "Their presence apparently has not been a deterrent to the Japanese in implementing their economic policies in this area. Also the strength of the force would be wholly inadequate in the case of military operations directed against them by an organized force."

The U.S. ambassador to China, however, wanted the Marines to stay. Clarence Gauss responded to Lockhart's observations two days later by stating, "I do not believe the Marines should be withdrawn from China unless and until it becomes evident to the American Government that relations with Japan have deteriorated to a point where a rupture appears inevitable, when, if the Marines are withdrawn, facilities should also immediately be afforded for the withdrawal of American [citizens] who do not elect to remain on their own responsibility."

Gauss complimented the Marines as "one of the most important factors in insuring the safety of our nationals during past years." This was true enough, but Gauss was in Chiang's capital at Chungking, roughly 1,000 miles from the Japanese-dominated area around Shanghai and had little true idea of the day-to-day challenges faced by the isolated leathernecks.

The debate on the future of the China Marines was being played out in the shadow of much larger international events. In September 1940, Japan had forced the Vichy government in France to allow their troops to occupy northern Indochina and had also signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. Earlier that same year, Yosuke Matsuoka had become Japanese foreign minister and General Hideki Tojo Japan's minister of war. The appointment of these two known hard-liners doomed the hopes of moderates within the Japanese government to avert further confrontations with the United States.

On July 24, 1941, about three weeks before Gauss' response to Lockhart, the Japanese moved their troops into southern Indochina. In response, Roosevelt imposed a heavy trade embargo on Japan. Ninety percent of the emperor's oil supply was taken away by the president's action. He hoped that such a drastic step would force the Japanese to withdraw from Indochina as well as slow their expansion in China.

As the world watched and waited anxiously to see what would happen following Roosevelt's embargo, the debate over the fate of the China Marines continued. Four days after Gauss' note, the assistant chief of the Division of Far Eastern Affairs in the State Department, a Mr. Adams, wrote in support of Gauss. Discounting the reservations of the military officers on the scene, Adams said Gauss "knows his China better than any of the four officers mentioned above." Admiral Hart fired back, in the third person: "The Commander in Chief favors the withdrawal of all our armed forces." That meant all Marines and the few U.S. gunboats still operating in China. In Hart's mind, "in the event of war with Japan they would be quickly contained or destroyed, probably without being able to inflict even a comparable loss on the enemy."

The State Department finally came around to Hart's views -- but it was an eleventh hour decision that was carried off in the very nick of time. The U.S. Yangtze Patrol, namely USS Oahu and Luzon, left China in late November. The gunboat USS Wake remained behind in Shanghai as a communications station ship for the American consulate. USS Tutulia was upriver, marooned in Chungking, so it was not included in the withdrawal order. USS Mindanao, the flagship -- indeed the only ship -- in the grandly named "South China Patrol," was included in the evacuation.

The 4th Marines left Shanghai in stages. The 2nd Battalion, half the headquarters and service company, and half the regimental hospital boarded the liner President Madison on a cold and rainy November 27, 1941. Colonel Howard and the rest of the regiment, including the 1st Battalion and the band, left the next day.

November 28 was a cloudy day, though the sun made a belated appearance. Colonel Howard and his staff led the way, marching on foot with the rest of his command. The 50-piece band was next, smartly playing the "Marines' Hymn" and "Semper Fidelis," followed by the rifle companies in heavy marching order shouldering Model 1903 Springfield rifles. Thousands of Chinese lined Nanking Road and the Bund waterfront, many pressing gifts into the hands of departing leathernecks and waving Chinese and American flags in farewell. A chapter of U.S. and Marine Corps history was coming to a close.

The last of the 4th Marines boarded President Harrison for the long voyage to the Philippines. They managed to reach the islands safely, and fought alongside U.S. Army and Filipino units during the epic siege of Bataan and Corregidor. They courageously endured six months of hunger, wounds and hardship before the last of the U.S. forces surrendered in May 1942. Thereafter, one kind of hell was traded for another, when the 4th Marines endured 312 years of torment as POWs.

The departure of the 4th Marines still left 203 leathernecks at the U.S. Embassy in northern China. They were due to leave on December 10, 1941, but the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor altered their travel plans. There was a brief hope -- a vain one, as it turned out -- that a so-called "Boxer Protocol" would give a measure of diplomatic immunity to Marine guards serving with the American Embassy.

Captain John White, the executive officer of the Marines at Tientsin, got an urgent radio message on Monday morning, December 8, that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. White immediately relayed the news to the Tientsin detachment commander, Major Luther Brown. The Japanese soon demanded that the detachments at Tientsin and Chinwangtao surrender by 1 p.m. that same day.

Major Brown phoned Colonel William A. Ashurst of the Peking Embassy Guard for instructions and was told to surrender. It was a bitter pill to swallow -- it is a tradition for Marines to never surrender without a fight -- but Ashurst believed his unit could do little else. Brown, devastated and choked with emotion, reluctantly complied. At Chinwangtao, 2nd Lt. Richard Huizenga sent a message that his machine guns were ready and that his 21 men "had a chance to stand them off," and, "Request instructions." Orders were orders, however, and Brown told Huizenga to lay down his arms.

The final chapter was a sad one. Ashurst and the rest of the Embassy Guard were soon made prisoners of war, and at Tientsin Sergeant Robert A. Smith's eyes began to tear as the Stars and Stripes came down to be replaced by the Rising Sun flag of Japan. When the ceremony concluded and the Marines prepared to enter captivity, Smith turned to a nearby comrade and pointed to the circle in the center of the flag's white field. "Look at what's there now," said Smith, "a flaming red asshole."

An era had ended. Why were the Marines allowed to stay so long? Their position was militarily untenable by the summer of 1940, when the British withdrew all their own forces. Some might argue it was hopeless to leave troops there even before that date. But a combination of inertia, isolationism, national pride and the stubborn belief that the Japanese would not risk war had made Washington blind to the situation until it was almost too late. Sixty years on, the issues and underlying causes can be debated, but there is no question that the China Marines performed an impossible mission with the Corps' customary courage and dedication to duty.
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This article was written by Eric Niderost and originally appeared in the November 2005 issue of World War II magazine. For more great articles subscribe to World War II magazine today!
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...Defends His "Bomb The Hell Out Of Them" Statement...

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http://atlanta.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/2002/01/14/daily14.html

Miller defends 'bomb the hell out of them' comment, calls for action against Iraq
Atlanta Business Chronicle - January 15, 2002
by Walter Woods

In a rousing speech Jan. 14 that he himself described as "angry" U.S. Sen. Zell Miller defended some of the most controversial positions he's taken since being elected, including his comment that the U.S. should "bomb the hell" out of those responsible for Sept. 11.

"So far 12,000 tons -- 24 million pounds -- of bombs have been dropped on our enemies. If that's not bombing the hell out of them, I don't know what is," the former governor said to loud applause. "I received some criticism [for the remark, but] the criticism did not come from any who, as I just a few days after the attacks, had stood on Ground Zero amid that smoldering pile of rubble that had become the graveyard for thousands of innocent Americans."

Miller's speech also called on the U.S. to "go after" Iraq and Saddam Hussein, reinstate the military draft and drill in the Alaskan wildlife refuge to reduce dependence on foreign oil, among other proposals.

Miller spoke to a crowd of about 1,000 business and political leaders at the Georgia World Congress Center Monday night, including his colleague, Sen. Max Cleland and many members of the Georgia General Assembly.

The speech, for the Georgia Chamber of Commerce annual meeting dinner, was the first major address Miller has given in his home state since being elected just over a year ago, said a spokesperson, "and he wanted to make an impression."

His remarks, which Cleland described afterward as "great," were reminiscent of Miller's thunderous speech to the Democratic National Convention in 1992.

Miller blasted the Congress and federal government for its political partisanship, its waste of taxpayer money and the soft money from special interest groups, which he called "nothing short of bribery."

"One of these days someone smarter and younger and more articulate than I is going to get through to the American people just how really messed up it has become [in Washington]," Miller said. "And when that happens, the American people are going to rise up like that football crowd in Cleveland and run both teams off the field."

Miller was referring to an unruly Cleveland Browns football game in December when fans threw beer bottles on the field after some questionable calls by the officials.

"As Churchill said, `Democracy is based on reason and a sense of fair play,'" Miller continued. "And there is nothing reasonable or fair about this system."

Miller also insisted that he would continue to buck the Democratic Party line and support ideas from both parties and President Bush, whom Miller described as the "right man" for the job.

"We have the right man in the White House," Miller said to loud applause. "George W. Bush has been magnificent."

Miller also spoke highly of Republican Congressman Johnny Isakson and said he enjoyed working with North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms.

Miller has been criticized for being a sponsor of Bush's tax cut and for being the first Senator to publicly support the nomination of John Ashcroft for attorney general.

Comparing Sept. 11 to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which he remembered as a boy, Miller said he supported a "wider war" against terrorism.

"And as far as I'm concerned, it means at some time -- maybe not next, but some time -- going after Saddam Hussein," Miller said. "We don't have to prove he was involved with Sept. 11 or with Al Qaeda. We know he hates the United States."

Miller also said he will be a co-sponsor of a bill with Sens. John McCain and Joe Lieberman to set up a powerful investigative panel to look into intelligence and diplomatic failures that may have lead to the Sept. 11 attacks.

"I also think we should give serious thought to resuming the draft," said Miller, a former Marine. "It is clear that we're going to have to restructure our military as we prepare for this new kind of war."

Miller said drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska would upset only three square miles of land in an area the size of South Carolina, while it would yield more than 16 billion barrels of oil -- "the equivalent of 30 years of Saudi Arabian oil imports."

Miller closed by promising to fight the status quo in Washington.

"I just don't think I'll ever be able to accept the way things work up there," he said. "Perhaps Washington will never change, but you know something, neither will I."
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The Failure Of The All-Volunteer Military

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Boston Globe
January 21, 2007

The Failure Of An All-Volunteer Military

By Andrew J. Bacevich

"WAR IS the great auditor of institutions," the British historian Corelli Barnett has observed. In Iraq, the United States has undergone such an audit and been found wanting. The defects of basic US national security institutions stand exposed. Failure to correct those defects will only invite more Iraqs -- unnecessary wars that once begun prove unwinnable.

The essential guarantor of US national security is the all-volunteer force. In its hey day -- the 1990s -- the all-volunteer force underwrote America's claim to global preeminence. Its invincibility taken for granted, the volunteer force seemed a great bargain to boot. Maintaining the world's most powerful military establishment imposed a negligible burden on the average citizen. No wonder Americans viewed the volunteer military as the most successful federal reform program of the postwar era. What was there not to like?

In fact, questions of efficacy or economy did not figure significantly in the decision to create the all-volunteer force. Back in the early 1970s, the object of the exercise had been quite simple: to terminate an increasingly illegitimate reliance on conscription. During the Vietnam War, thanks in no small part to the draft, the armed services had become estranged from American society. The all-volunteer force creation severed relations altogether.

This divorce had large implications. After Vietnam, citizenship no longer included an obligation to contribute to the nation's defense. Military service became a matter of personal preference, devoid of political or moral significance. Although providing for the common defense remained a primary function of government, federal officials no longer possessed the authority to command citizens to bear arms. Henceforth, they could only encourage young Americans to enlist, offering inducements to sweeten the invitation.

Historically, Americans had viewed a "standing army" with suspicion. After Vietnam they embraced the idea. By 1991 they were celebrating it. After Operation Desert Storm -- with its illusion of a cheap, easy victory -- soldiers like General Colin Powell persuaded themselves that "the people fell in love with us again."

If love, it was a peculiar version, neither possessive nor signifying a desire to be one with the beloved. For the vast majority of Americans, Desert Storm affirmed the wisdom of contracting out nation al security. Cheering the troops on did not imply any interest in joining their ranks. Especially among the affluent and well-educated, the notion took hold that national defense was something "they" did, just as "they" bus ed tables, collected trash, and mowed lawns. The stalemated war in Iraq has revealed two problems with this arrangement.

The first is that "we" have forfeited any say in where "they" get sent to fight. When it came to invading Iraq, President Bush paid little attention to what voters of the First District of Massachusetts or the 50th District of California thought. The people had long since forfeited any ownership of the army. Even today, although a clear majority of Americans want the Iraq war shut down, their opposition counts for next to nothing: the will of the commander-in-chief prevails.

The second problem stems from the first. If "they" -- the soldiers we contract to defend us -- get in trouble, "we" feel little or no obligation to bail them out. All Americans support the troops, yet support does not imply sacrifice. Yellow-ribbon decals displayed on the back of gas-guzzlers will suffice, thank you.

Stipulate for the sake of argument that President Bush is correct in saying that failure in Iraq is not an option. Then why limit the "surge" to a measly 21,500 additional troops? Why not 50,000? With the population of the United States having now surpassed 300 million, why not send 100,000 reinforcements to Iraq?

The question answers itself: There are not an additional 100,000 Americans willing to commit their lives to the cause. Even offering up 21,500 finds the Pentagon scraping the bottom of the barrel, extending the tours of soldiers already in the combat zone while accelerating the deployment of those heading back for a second or third tour of duty.

After the Cold War, Americans came to see war as something other than a human enterprise; the secret of military superiority ostensibly lay in the microchip. The truth is that the sinews of military power lie among the people, who legitimate war and sustain it.

For the United States to remain a great military power will require a genuine reconciliation of the military and American society. But this implies the people exercising a greater say in deciding when and where American soldiers fight. And it also implies reviving the tradition of the citizen-soldier so that all share in the burden of national defense.

Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of international relations at Boston University
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Boston Globe
January 21, 2007

The Failure Of An All-Volunteer Military

By Andrew J. Bacevich

"WAR IS the great auditor of institutions," the British historian Corelli Barnett has observed. In Iraq, the United States has undergone such an audit and been found wanting. The defects of basic US national security institutions stand exposed. Failure to correct those defects will only invite more Iraqs -- unnecessary wars that once begun prove unwinnable.

The essential guarantor of US national security is the all-volunteer force. In its hey day -- the 1990s -- the all-volunteer force underwrote America's claim to global preeminence. Its invincibility taken for granted, the volunteer force seemed a great bargain to boot. Maintaining the world's most powerful military establishment imposed a negligible burden on the average citizen. No wonder Americans viewed the volunteer military as the most successful federal reform program of the postwar era. What was there not to like?

In fact, questions of efficacy or economy did not figure significantly in the decision to create the all-volunteer force. Back in the early 1970s, the object of the exercise had been quite simple: to terminate an increasingly illegitimate reliance on conscription. During the Vietnam War, thanks in no small part to the draft, the armed services had become estranged from American society. The all-volunteer force creation severed relations altogether.

This divorce had large implications. After Vietnam, citizenship no longer included an obligation to contribute to the nation's defense. Military service became a matter of personal preference, devoid of political or moral significance. Although providing for the common defense remained a primary function of government, federal officials no longer possessed the authority to command citizens to bear arms. Henceforth, they could only encourage young Americans to enlist, offering inducements to sweeten the invitation.

Historically, Americans had viewed a "standing army" with suspicion. After Vietnam they embraced the idea. By 1991 they were celebrating it. After Operation Desert Storm -- with its illusion of a cheap, easy victory -- soldiers like General Colin Powell persuaded themselves that "the people fell in love with us again."

If love, it was a peculiar version, neither possessive nor signifying a desire to be one with the beloved. For the vast majority of Americans, Desert Storm affirmed the wisdom of contracting out nation al security. Cheering the troops on did not imply any interest in joining their ranks. Especially among the affluent and well-educated, the notion took hold that national defense was something "they" did, just as "they" bus ed tables, collected trash, and mowed lawns. The stalemated war in Iraq has revealed two problems with this arrangement.

The first is that "we" have forfeited any say in where "they" get sent to fight. When it came to invading Iraq, President Bush paid little attention to what voters of the First District of Massachusetts or the 50th District of California thought. The people had long since forfeited any ownership of the army. Even today, although a clear majority of Americans want the Iraq war shut down, their opposition counts for next to nothing: the will of the commander-in-chief prevails.

The second problem stems from the first. If "they" -- the soldiers we contract to defend us -- get in trouble, "we" feel little or no obligation to bail them out. All Americans support the troops, yet support does not imply sacrifice. Yellow-ribbon decals displayed on the back of gas-guzzlers will suffice, thank you.

Stipulate for the sake of argument that President Bush is correct in saying that failure in Iraq is not an option. Then why limit the "surge" to a measly 21,500 additional troops? Why not 50,000? With the population of the United States having now surpassed 300 million, why not send 100,000 reinforcements to Iraq?

The question answers itself: There are not an additional 100,000 Americans willing to commit their lives to the cause. Even offering up 21,500 finds the Pentagon scraping the bottom of the barrel, extending the tours of soldiers already in the combat zone while accelerating the deployment of those heading back for a second or third tour of duty.

After the Cold War, Americans came to see war as something other than a human enterprise; the secret of military superiority ostensibly lay in the microchip. The truth is that the sinews of military power lie among the people, who legitimate war and sustain it.

For the United States to remain a great military power will require a genuine reconciliation of the military and American society. But this implies the people exercising a greater say in deciding when and where American soldiers fight. And it also implies reviving the tradition of the citizen-soldier so that all share in the burden of national defense.

Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of international relations at Boston University
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RESTORE THE REPUBLIC!
R.W. "D1ck" Gaines
The Original
"Gunny G"
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