The Experts: 100 Years of Blunder in Indo-China, by Clyde Edwin Pettit
Clyde Edwin Pettit was an American whom I had the honor to know in Bangkok in the mid-1990s. I first met him in a Burger King on Silom Road sometime in 1993, and he quickly became an important mentor and friend.
Ed was from Arkansas and had worked as an aide to U.S. Senator Carl Hayden, had done radio journalism in Vietnam during the war, and was the author of The Experts: 100 Years of Blunder in Indo-China (alternate subtitle: The Book That Proves There Are None). He had known Bill Clinton when Clinton was 19 years old. (On the day Clinton was inaugurated as President of the United States, Ed told the BBC that his memory was of young Bill pushing a delivery cart down the corridors of a Senate office building and, whenever he passed anyone coming the other way, sticking out his hand and saying, “Hi. My name’s Bill Clinton.”)
Ed gave me a copy of the letter he had written to Senator J. William Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on January 13, 1966, “on a borrowed German typewriter, on morphine and alcohol,” while recovering from a bad accident in Bangkok. Fulbright caused Ed alarm at the time, but lasting pride, by causing the letter to be published in the Congressional Record, spawning headlines such as “Fulbright Reveals Note from Vietnam Saying US Losing” and “Arkansan Doubts Viet Nam Victory.”
Having talked “intensively to over 200 people from colonels to privates, journalists and businessmen, Vietnamese, and English and French colonials” in Saigon in late 1965, Ed asserted that it was “vitally incumbent that we speak and speak with sincerity” to the Vietnamese:
I question both our original involvement and the deepening of our commitment. … I am very frightened. I could talk about bright spots; there are many. I do not think they override the stark, terrifying realities of a stalemate, at best, purchased at inconceivable cost and coupled with humiliating setbacks and losses. Then always, and I do not say this lightly, there is the unlikely but ever-present possibility of catastrophe. The road from Valley Forge to Vietnam has been a long one, and the analogy if more than alliterative: there are some similarities, only this time we are the British and they are barefoot. … I would rather America err on the side of being overly generous than on the side of military miscalculation of inconceivable cost. For what, the world might well ask should we win the gamble, have we won?
“If you hear something a hundred times, you’re inclined to believe it,” said Ed. “If you hear it a thousand times you begin to wonder: am I mad, or is the rest of the world crazy? I made the perilous assumption that it was the rest of the world.”
Ed’s other masterpiece was The Experts, a copy of which he pressed on me with a fulsome inscription. “Read nothing but the foreword,” he instructed me. “Then read the book from the front through Dien Bien Phu. Most people pick it up and flip through it randomly looking for Top Secret reports. Or they look in the index to find themselves. But the whole point is that you’re supposed to read it straight through, from front to back.”
The Experts consists of 439 pages of nothing but direct quotations from politicians, professors, and press pundits, all purporting to understand what was happening or to know what was going to happen in Vietnam, arranged chronologically. Published by Lyle Stuart in 1975, it amounts to a narrative of mounting horror and increasingly tortuous self-delusion. Vietnam, Ed told me, taught him that “all governments are bad.” Or, as he puts it in the foreword:
This is a book about power and the men who wield it. It is about the press and those who control it. … It is also about ourselves: our own credulity and the inexplicable tendency in all of us to believe what we are told and to follow those whose ambitions are to lead. It is about our forgetfulness of the history of our species – the record that there is no morality among nations and the only law is the law of the jungle. …
The Vietnam War is a textbook example of history’s lessons: that there is a tendency in all political systems for public servants to metamorphose into public masters, surfeited with unchecked power and privilege and increasingly overpaid to misgovern; that war is necessary to any elite corps, which has no reason to exist without it; that even free peoples are inevitably led to death and maiming because they do not have the intelligence to realize that all wars are against their interests. …
Here is the chronological account of a crusade doomed to certain failure before it began and those who were too blind to recognize it.
Here are those who were destined never to turn the tide and never to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Here are The Experts.
Born in 1965, the year U.S. combat troops first went to Vietnam, I grew up aware that there existed something big and ugly that the older people around me were pointedly not talking about – or at least not talking about to me. Ed taught me the history that other Americans preferred to forget.
Ed passed away in 2001 and bequeathed me, in his will, a duty to carry forward his legacy. I plan to do public speaking and publishing on the subject of this important and all too enduringly relevant book and the remarkable man who produced it.
If you would like to obtain one of the few remaining copies of the first edition of The Experts, or if you are a college or high school teacher who would like to use it as instructional material, please contact me.
Ethan Casey
Seattle
October 30, 2010
