For the better part of my professional life I have been preoccupied by the problem of our involvement in Vietnam. Not an unusual preoccupation given my age and generation. I still recall with clarity my anxiety as I queued, manila x-ray envelope in hand, at the South Boston Naval Station for my pre-induction physical--I failed. Good academician that I am, I read, and read widely and copiously. The more I read the more I found myself drawn to explanations reflecting research drawn from the cognitive sciences and studies of confirmation bias. While I have no definitive answer, I can taste the beginnings of one, and it runs something like this.
In our perception of reality, to borrow from the physical sciences, it is as if our mind abhors a vacuum. We are hard wired to search for meaning, to connect the dots so to speak. In doing so we often resort to the use of analogy and metaphor. Once formulated, these explanations behave according to a psychological law of inertia, continuing on a trajectory continually confirmed by further encounters with perceived reality. All of this is reinforced by a social component, the desire to conform to acceptable norms we identify with. The thing is, our perceptions often bear only slight resemblance to the factual reality we are attempting to understand. We like to imagine ourselves as rational beings subjecting our conclusions to the rigors of logic. More often than not I suspect that the phenomenon of confirmation bias is at work rather than the dispassionate detachment of rationem.
Our analogies may be apt or not, but in either case they often misappropriate detail which is unconsciously applied to the "new" situation without analysis. Yes, a comparison can be made between Munich in 1938 and Soviet expansion in eastern Europe in 1947, but closer examination reveals the myriad political, social, cultural, and historical differences which should modify our comparisons and policies. Could "containment" inhibit Soviet expansionism, thus building on the hard lesson learned by "appeasement" at Munich? Was there actually a centrally orchestrated red tide of communism spreading over the globe much like the famous Sherman-Williams paint can? The use of metaphor also can be fraught with its own pitfalls. We tend to forget that "countries" in reality are not "dominoes." They are not as uniform as dominoes, and actually behave quite differently from one another due to their particular cultural-social circumstances and histories. The problem is that we act upon these analogies and metaphors appropriate or not. In the sphere of foreign policy this has produced unintended and tragic consequences.
We have to start somewhere, and in this instance, to understand the inception of our involvement in Vietnam I have chosen to begin with the dictation of a 5500 word telegram on February 22, 1946. Often called the "Long Telegram" it encapsulated the thinking of George F. Kennan, deputy head of mission in the United States Embassy in Moscow. Harry Truman, a new president of less than one year, with little foreign policy experience, was struggling to articulate a coherent foreign policy vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. Struggling, because at that point there was little agreement among the mandarins of the foreign policy establishment as to what the Soviet Union was all about and what its intentions were, and correspondingly what our responses should be. The necessities of a war time alliance had papered over many cracks which now waited to be addressed. It was into this milieu that Kennan's telegram landed with more effect than he could ever have anticipated.
