Each Sunday this summer, we’re sharing an essay from the archives that provides a rare first-person account of history as it unfolded. This week, we’ve chosen a 1969 essay by Clark Clifford, who served as secretary of defense under President Lyndon B. Johnson, and turned from a staunch defender of the Vietnam War into a leading advocate of de-escalation. Clifford chronicles the transformation of his thinking, tracking “the intimate and highly personal experience of one man” as he “plodded painfully from one point of view to another, and another, until he arrived at the unshakable opinion he possesses today.”
A consummate Cold War-era Washington insider and presidential adviser, Clifford had long supported U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He had been in the room with Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson as they escalated American participation in the conflict throughout the 1950s and 1960s, fueled by the fear that a communist victory in South Vietnam would prompt the fall of other countries in the region. In 1968, with U.S. casualties mounting and public support for the war effort flagging, Johnson appointed Clifford to his cabinet and charged him with reevaluating the country’s position on Vietnam.
Once in the job, Clifford quickly had to confront the realities of a bloody guerilla conflict and hazy U.S. war aims. One of his realizations was that none of Vietnam’s neighbors were sending troops in support of South Vietnam: “If the nations living in the shadow of Viet Nam were not now persuaded by the domino theory, perhaps it was time for us to take another look.” Clifford’s concerns deepened as he witnessed the U.S. military increase its deployments without any clear endgame. “‘Will 200,000 more men do the job?’ I found no assurance that they would. ‘If not, how many more might be needed—and when?’ There was no way of knowing.”
By the time of writing, in 1969, Clifford was out of office, but the war in Vietnam was still raging. In the pages of Foreign Affairs, Clifford urged Washington to withdraw, writing that “American military power cannot build nations, any more than it can solve the social and economic problems that face us here at home.” U.S. forces would not leave Vietnam for another four years—by which point more than 58,000 U.S. soldiers and as many as two million Vietnamese civilians had died.
