'Senator Mansfield': He Told Them So
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/12/books/review/12FARRELT.html
By JOHN ALOYSIUS FARRELL
Published: October 12, 2003
There are parts of this fine new biography of Senator Mike Mansfield,
as he pleads with Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson not to plunge
America into war in Southeast Asia, that could break your heart.
Mansfield served with the Marines in China in 1922, then worked his
way from the copper mines of Montana to become a college instructor, a
congressman and the Senate's acknowledged expert on Asia. He never
varied in the advice he gave about Indochina: the United States had no
compelling national interest to defend there, and it would lose any
war it chose to fight. Had he been able to persuade his two old
friends, there might be no need for that black granite gash and its
58,000 names on the Mall in Washington.
"We cannot hope to substitute armed power for the kind of political
and economic social changes that offer the best resistance to
Communism," Mansfield, then majority leader, wrote his friend
President Kennedy about Vietnam in 1961. "If the necessary reforms
have not been forthcoming over the past seven years to stop Communist
subversion and rebellion, then I do not see how American combat troops
can do it today." A year later, he warned that the United States was
in danger of being drawn "inexorably" into the doomed role and bloody
fate of the French colonial armies in Southeast Asia: "To ignore that
reality will . . . be immensely costly in terms of American lives."
Kennedy's face grew red with anger. "This is not what my advisers are
telling me," he said.
Mike Mansfield
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