Cool Hawk

TRIUMPH OR TRAGEDY: REFLECTIONS ON VIETNAM by Richard N. Goodwin. 142 pages. Random House. $3.95.

Dick Goodwin, of Boston, Tufts, and Harvard Law School, was one of President Kennedy's young brain-stormers. Not yet 30, reputed to be as eloquent as the peerless Ted Sorensen but faster with his ghostwriting pen, he turned out the basic draft of J.F.K.'s famed Alliance for Progress speech. Later, L.B.J. tapped him for help in composing the even more famed Great Society address.

Though he has now moved from the White House to a Wesleyan University fellowship, Goodwin still hankers to shape national policy. His reflections on Viet Nam, expanded from a recent New Yorker magazine article, are a kind of memo to L.B.J. A flashy but not always illuminating exercise, it ends up sounding improbably like a cool hawk trying to placate hot doves.

Credibility of Power. In the debate over Viet Nam, Goodwin sees three "tangled lines of argument." No. 1 concerns the U.S.'s "vital stake" in Asia. Goodwin has doubts about a genuine American interest in defending any country in the area except India--it is "inconceivable" not to use "the full force of American power" to protect India against aggression. But there is a general "almost idealistic" American "judgment," he concedes, that favors helping other Asian lands against conquest by "a hostile power." He has no use for the "Chinese sphere of influence" concession advanced by some dovish intellectuals. On the other hand, "we are not compelled to fight for every inch of Asian soil or hazard war each time Chinese influence begins to grow."

Argument No. 2 concerns American intervention in Viet Nam. Goodwin holds that the U.S. got involved through miscalculations, misjudgments and misreadings of recent history. The nature of the struggle isn't simply freedom versus antifreedom. It is partly a civil war, partly a case of "internal aggression." The "credibility of our military power" is what is at stake. It is not the presence of a Communist government in Saigon but an American military defeat that would shake the non-Communist governments of Asia. The U.S. cannot surrender, he writes, and should not withdraw.

Argument No. 3 concerns future U.S. policy. Goodwin does not differ with L.B.J. when he advocates a "parallel course" of fighting and offering to negotiate. He cannot understand why the enemy does not see the point. "Hanoi's unwillingness to negotiate is one of the great mysteries of the war." Goodwin leans to the dove school of thought that wants the Saigon government revamped to include Buddhists and neutralists and others more acceptable to the Viet Cong.

Academic. He does not question President Johnson's "painful, consistent" desire to avoid military defeat while "resisting proposals to enlarge the conflict." And though he wrote his book before the U.S. struck the petroleum targets at Haiphong and Hanoi, he foresaw that the President would find it necessary to move "imperceptibly" in the direction of more blows against North Viet Nam.

Goodwin opposed that move, and in fact recommended a slowdown or halt in the bombing of North Viet Nam, an argument that is now academic. More to the point is his case for the "pacification" of South Viet Nam. Here the U.S. must commit whatever military force is needed, whatever lives must be expended, to clear the guerrillas from the countryside--not to "crush the Viet Cong in pursuit of an unlikely surrender but slowly to retake key areas of the country, mile by painful mile."

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