The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2015 53 The drafting task within the State Department fell to David Lambertson, a fourth-tour FSO who had spent three of his first four tours of duty dealing with the war in Indochina. Lamb- ertson served in Saigon in various roles from 1965 to 1968, as spokesman for the American delegation to the Paris Peace Talks from 1971 to 1972, and then returned to the Bureau of East Asian Affairs in Washington (as it was then known). Gradually he moved further into the policy realm, and was deeply engaged in Vietnam policy as congressional support for South Vietnam disintegrated in 1974 and 1975 and as the final North Vietnam- ese offensive in March and April 1975 ended the war. As he later recalled, “the frailty and the flaws in the Paris Agreement on Vietnam were becoming more and more evident. … It was pretty clear that things were headed down the drain.” In an Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training inter- view in 2004, Lambertson recounted: “Within a week of the fall of Saigon, we got a memo from Brent Scowcroft, a Scowcroft- Springsteen memo in which the department was asked to provide the White House a paper on the ‘lessons of Vietnam.’ I became the chief author of that, and I collected a lot of views from people in the bureau. Everybody had things to say. I wrote that memo, Bob Miller cleared it and Phil [Habib] signed it. … It’s a good memo, the sort of thing we might have done well to read carefully before our latest adventure in the Middle East.” It was indeed a good memo, thoughtful and thorough, covering all the aspects of a strategic estimate and what might be learned from both the achievements and the failures of Vietnam. In it, Lambertson recognized the problems inherent in any attempt to apply lessons learned: “The danger may…be not that we will ignore the lessons of Vietnam, but that we will be tempted to apply them too broadly, in East Asia and around the world. Nonetheless, although not all of them are universally applicable, the lessons of Vietnam are clear, and numerous.” The paper went to the NSC, where it ran afoul of a staff review by Richard Smyser and Bill Stearman. Their review, forwarded to Kissinger, took issue with the most basic assumption of the State Department draft: that there were useful lessons to be learned from Vietnam. The NSC considered Vietnam “a unique situation, geographically, ethnically, politically, militarily and diplomati- cally,” summarizing their view that “the war had almost universal effects but did not provide a universal catechism.” The NSC went on to a point-by-point critique of the State Department’s draft, in nearly all cases focusing on the difficulty of applying general precepts in a particular situation. The NSC staff nonetheless went on to offer several guidelines and lessons of their own, and forwarded their own draft to Kissinger. The action stalled at that point, and nothing was ever forwarded to the White House. The tumult of the Mayaguez inci- dent, involving the seizure of the SS Mayaguez by Khmer Rouge forces, preempted the attention of the entire interagency policy community, and the “lessons learned” process halted there—a circled “OBE” (Overtaken By Events) scrawled across the cover memo. At about the same time, an apparently unrelated analysis of the Vietnam experience was produced by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That document was published in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, Volume X, Vietnam, January 1973– July 1975. That volume also contains both the State Departmen t memo and the NSC draft for Henry Kissinger that are repro- duced in the following pages. Notably, none of these informed and thoughtful contempo- rary analyses attribute the loss of South Vietnam to the media, which in the years since seems to have taken on a major role in the nation’s popular memory. All remain well worth reading, despite the passage of four decades and all the hard-won experi- ence gained in the intervening wars. n “It’s a goodmemo, the sort of thing we might have done well to read carefully before our latest adventure in the Middle East.” —David Lambertson