Word: morgenthau
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...booze allowance" (Congressman John Rooney) but under a flood of paper work springing from "the bureaucratic necessity that everyone has to write so much to justify his existence" (Ambassador to Kenya William Attwood), while working under an overall policy based on "the lowest anti-Communist denominator" (Professor Hans Morgenthau) with a surplus of "pedestrian people" (former Ambassador James Gavin) headed by a Secretary with an "irrevocably conventional mind" (Arthur Schlesinger...
...article in The New York Review of Books of September 16, 1965, Morgenthau brought his criticism closer to home. He argued that our foreign policy was based on a series of myths about Vietnam and misunderstandings about the nature of national interest, power, and prestige. He showed how an incorrect policy is self-sustaining: the policymakers, fearful of being proven fundamentally wrong, identify the problem of American prestige with their personal political prestige and redouble their efforts to formulate a victorious strategy from their mythical conceptions. Finally, he argued that our practice of terror and destruction in Vietnam was brutalizing...
...Morgenthau's speech at Lowell Lecture Hall tied together many of these arguments and added another specific condemnation. Our basic misunderstanding of contemporary revolutions and our related myths about Vietnam, he said, were resulting in a policy which worked against our national interest. By failing to grapple realistically with the revolution in Southeast Asia, and by destroying the political and social fabric of South Vietnam, we were unconsciously establishing the preconditions for successful Chinese domination...
...tone of Morgenthau's speech was rational and analytical, and contained some irony born of disappointment. He spoke to the absent government as if to a simple child, explaining that if you want to end a war by negotiation, you have to negotiate with your opponents, even if they are "rebels". But it is his values, as much as his rational analysis, which separates Morgenthau from the strategists in Washington on the perception of Vietnam and the general disease of American foreign policy...
...Morgenthau, as a "realist" thinker concerned with America's security, would agree that the United States must oppose Communist threats at certain places and under certain conditions. His disagreement with the "realists" in Washington-say, with McGeorge Bundy-derives from his differential view of the Vietnamese situation and from his different hierarchy of values in the realm of foreign affairs. Thus Bundy apparently rates the American national interest in South Vietnam as relatively high, while Morgenthau sees it as relatively low. But even more important, Bundy and Morgenthau disagree on the cost, as determined by values, of sending thousands...