Clark Clifford: The Wise Man of Washington

12. The Wise Man

12 The Wise Man As secretary of defense Clifford had achieved a position of enormous prestige and had served with honor and great personal courage. Once out of power Clifford joined the community of Washington elder statesmen, like the group he had assembled to reassess the Vietnam War in March 1968. He continued to crusade for an end to the war, and because of his stature his words commanded significant attention, as well as the enmity of the Nixon administration. In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal the Democrats regained the White House, and he would be called upon again, although with far less frequency, to advise another president. As a result of his age, experience, and status as a former Cabinet secretary, Clifford was now more than simply a Washington power broker. He was now one of the wise men. When Richard Nixon took the oath of office, Clifford was forced to the sidelines. There had been pressure on Nixon to retain Clifford as secretary of defense, but the new president believed that it would be a mistake to retain someone who supported the policies that Nixon had criticized during the campaign.1 Clifford’s efforts to extricate the United States from the quagmire of Vietnam had been for naught. He believed, however, that it was only a matter of time before Nixon pulled out the American troops. The circumstances were reminiscent of 1953 when Eisenhower took office, with Nixon as his vice president, and ended U.S. involvement in another unpopular war. “Surely,” Clifford thought, “we will be out within the year.”2 With that thought in mind, he refrained from publicly criticizing the new administration. By the summer of 1969, however, it was clear to him that Nixon was not moving toward a withdrawal ; and, while he could not directly influence U.S. foreign policy, as a former secretary of defense his words carried weight. Accordingly, Clifford published an article entitled “A Viet Nam The Wise Man 329 Reappraisal: The Personal History of One Man’s View and How It Evolved” in the Summer 1969 issue of the influential journal Foreign Affairs. Given the title, the article was, to an extent, an apologia. Curiously , however, Clifford made no mention of his initial opposition to escalation. “When decisions were made in 1965 to increase, in very substantial fashion, the American commitment in Vietnam, I accepted the judgment that such actions were necessary,” he wrote. No doubt Clifford wanted to avoid offending Johnson, but the article certainly provided him with the opportunity to set the record straight and go on record as having opposed the war in the first place. Instead, he wrote: “At the time of our original involvement in Vietnam, I considered it to be based upon unassailable premises, thoroughly consistent with our self-interest and our responsibilities.”3 Clifford recounted that by March 1968 he was convinced that continued U.S. involvement in the war would be counterproductive. “A further substantial increase in American forces could only increase the devastation and the Americanization of the war, and thus leave us even further from our goal of a peace that would permit the people of South Vietnam to fashion their own political and economic institutions ,” he wrote. But in addition to arguing that it was time to withdraw , he also noted that the United States had already achieved its objectives. The United States had entered the war with limited objectives , he argued in language reminiscent of the Truman Doctrine. The objective in Vietnam was to “prevent its subjugation by the North and to enable the people of South Vietnam to determine their own future.” Clifford asserted that the United States was not obligated to undertake a nation-building exercise in Vietnam, nor was it obligated to ensure a complete victory by South Vietnam over the North. Invoking the doctrine of limited war, Clifford argued that the American commitment was well out of proportion to the objectives and that the material and human costs were no longer justified. Continued involvement would only “continue to devastate the countryside and to prolong the suffering of the Vietnamese people.”4 Accordingly, Clifford stated that it was time to reduce the U.S. military commitment and withdraw all combat troops by the end of 1970. He suggested an aggressive schedule of withdrawal and firm deadlines to force the government of President Nguyen Van Thieu to assume primary responsibility for waging the war. Clifford’s plan entailed a reduction of 100,000 American...