The Foreign Service Journal, December 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2020 65 McNamara to tour the country hand-in-hand with its newly installed leader. Today, Lake describes the decisions made during that period in terms tantamount to crossing the Rubicon: “We sent the message to the Vietnamese that we were the ones who really controlled their country, which meant that we had become responsible for fighting their war.” A Deepening Quagmire When Lake was assigned to the American consulate in the provincial capital of Hue in the fall of 1964, he eagerly embraced his new surroundings. As one of six provincial reporting offi- cers at the time, he traveled widely throughout the countryside, receiving briefings fromU.S. military advisers and using his language skills to meet with village leaders. As he reported on developments in the region, he came to realize that national- ism, not communism, was driving the growing insurgency in the country. “We found ourselves in a trap,” he says. “The government relied on us to survive, but the more we helped it do so, the more we undercut its credentials—and the more our ally looked like the puppet of a foreign power.” As the war in South Vietnam grew, so did the threats to U.S. diplomats. Lake’s official duties entailed working in areas where the Viet Cong were active; they would later capture one of his colleagues, Foreign Service Officer Douglas Ramsey, and hold him prisoner for seven years. In reflecting on his experience, Lake laments the fact that increasing security restrictions and rising partisan political rancor would make a Foreign Service assignment like his tour in Vietnam all but impossible today. “In my view, officers such as Christopher Stevens are heroes, not vic- tims,” he remarks. “Diplomats have the same right as the military to risk their lives in service to their country.” When Lake returned to the Harry S Truman building in the summer of 1965, Vietnam followed him. Initially assigned to State’s VietnamDesk, he later joined the staff of Under Secretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach, a skeptic of the war. Lake’s duties included notetaking for the weekly meetings of the “Non-Group,” the senior-level discussion sessions on Vietnam heldThursday afternoons on the seventh floor of the department. He listened as the participants, several of whom had been early architects of the war, struggled in vain to find ways to prevent the conflict from engulfing Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. Lake watched as developments took a physical toll on McNamara, later writing of his own difficulty seeing “personally decent men make policy about people as if they were merely playing chess, when so many Americans and Vietnamese were dying.” By the time Richard Nixon became president in January 1969, Lake had been assigned to pursue graduate studies at Princeton. It was there that he received a phone call fromHenry Kissinger asking him to return to Washington. Lake had taken Kissinger’s class at Harvard as an undergraduate student; now the new national security adviser was recruiting his former student to join his staff. Aware of Lake’s opposition to the war, Kissinger sug- gested that he could work from inside the White House to end it. After initially hesitating, Lake accepted the job. It was to be his last in the Foreign Service. The Decision to Resign To explain his decision to resign over the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, Lake cites a term coined to underscore the disastrous consequences of complicity in Washington, D.C., during the VietnamWar. In a 1968 Atlantic article, “How Could Vietnam Happen?,” East Asia specialist James Thomson described how the “effectiveness trap” led working-level government officials, when faced with policies they knew to be ill-conceived, to censor themselves. “The inclination to remain silent or to acquiesce in the presence of the great men—to live to fight another day, to give on this issue so that you can be ‘effective’ on later issues—is over- whelming,” wroteThomson. It was this phenomenon that had helped propel the United States into a war the author described as “brutal, probably unwinnable and, to an increasing body of opinion, calamitous and immoral.” Lake’s own liberal political views never aligned with the conservatism of the Nixon administration. However, he pas- sionately shared Kissinger’s stated desire to bring the war in Vietnam to a close and understood that his position on the NSC staff afforded him proximity to power: when the national security adviser traveled to Paris to initiate secret talks with the North Vietnamese, Lake accompanied him. Back in Washing- ton, he and another staffer wrote early drafts of a speech on the war that President Nixon delivered to the nation over televised broadcast, while recommending to Kissinger that the presi- dent avoid rhetoric that would sink Nixon deeper into what he described as “the Johnsonian bog” in Vietnam. Lake’s time in the Nixon White House affirmed his view that dissent is an act of loyalty, not only to one’s country, but also to one’s boss.