The Pentagon Papers: On Imitating the Communists

There’s no law that says that I,
wishing to restrain another from
tyranny and cruelty,
should practice them myself . . .

—From Calderón’s Life Is a Dream

It is now being said everywhere that anti-Communism was in the main responsible for the policy we followed to disaster in Southeast Asia. Is this indeed the case? Had we been liberated from “anti-Communism” (and from which those who use the term make it clear they would like to liberate us), would we have been able to frame a “good”—that is to say, an intelligent—Southeast Asian policy?

Now I do not see how any foreign policy for this country that may be called intelligent can do without some elements of anti-Communism. All the same, I cannot but grant that there is one particular sense in which it is quite true to say that our policy in Southeast Asia—or rather, what was bad about this ...