The Nation: The Rules of the Game

ONE obvious lesson of the Pentagon papers is that bureaucracies do not always function as they are supposed to, especially in their primary role of advising the President. Less apparent are the reasons why. Leslie Gelb, 34, and Morton Halperin, 33, both middle-ranking officials in the Pentagon under Robert McNamara, played key roles in the preparation of the Viet Nam study, and are currently at work on books. Working separately, the two arrived at similar conclusions on bureaucratic breakdowns. Part of the answer, they suggest, lies in the “rules of the game” by which all Washington bureaucrats traditionally play. Some of these rules and their gloss:

RULE ONE: YOU DO NOT RESIGN

“You don’t resign, you don’t carry your case to the public,” says Gelb. “Lower level people in Washington see themselves as understudies. Each is trying to learn the part he hopes to play next, even though he knows that the odds are very much against his getting that future role. It is not really necessary to quit, go public and release classified documents to make your case. Would George Ball have needed to do that? No. His departure in itself would have had enormous impact. If you read his words literally, he felt very strongly. But he didn’t take the next step.”

Halperin agrees, noting that “there is nobody who fits the following criterion: a full-time employee of the U.S. Government who worked on Viet Nam and who resigned and publicly stated that he was doing so because he disagreed with our policy there. There isn’t even anyone who fits most of it.”

Halperin gives four reasons why this is so: “First, you can always tell yourself you can do more by staying. This is defensible. Often you can. Second is the perception that nobody will care. This is partly because nobody has ever done it and made a difference. Third, it seems a betrayal of your boss. Finally, it’s not how a gentleman plays the game.”

RULE TWO: ALL POWER TO THE CONSENSUS

“If you disagree with the bureaucracy’s shared images,” says Halperin, “you must hide it, or no one will take you seriously on particular policy issues. If you say Viet Nam does not matter, you cannot have a credible opinion about strategy or tactics. Ball endorsed one of the proposals to begin the bombing since he thought that rejecting it entirely would make him appear so opposed to the whole effort to keep South Viet Nam free that no one would ever take him seriously.

“The fact that Johnson wanted a consensus meant two things: great pressure for everyone to agree in order to please him; compromise proposals without priorities. The decision process was largely an effort to find a common denominator everyone could live with rather than the shaping of real recommendations.”

Reasons Gelb: “Whoever plays the game within the consensus can get his little piece of the pie. Those who wanted a serious negotiating effort got a bombing pause and sometimes changes in position. Those who wanted more bombing got that. But a lot of these things are contradictory. Why does everybody get his slice? One, because the guy who is handling a piece of the action is thought to know best. Two, because this is the way to preserve the consensus, and that is the summum bonum.”

RULE THREE: ARGUE TO CONVINCE, NOT TO BE CANDID

“This is basic,” says Halperin. “The bureaucrat tries to persuade his superior, ultimately the President, not to set forth why he believes what he does. It is wrong to read real beliefs into many of the arguments in these memos. They were often believed neither by the person doing the writing nor by the readers. One reason some of them read so uniformly is the tendency to get together on policy rationales, lest differences make the President unwilling to act.”

“Tables should be pounded on many more occasions,” Gelb adds, “but the Viet Nam papers came as no special revelation to those with experience in Government.”

RULE FOUR: NEVER MENTION DOMESTIC POLITICS

Why were domestic politics not discussed in these papers? asks Halperin. His answer: “Because of the widespread perception that it would be immoral. Foreign policy matters should not be decided on the basis of domestic politics. This is related to the fact that Government communications are written on one of three levels: those formal papers that everyone in Government above certain levels will see; those circulated somewhat less widely; those written only for a boss or a friendly associate. Everyone assumes that everything but the third category will come out publicly. No one wants to appear to have been thinking about politics. It is a basically undemocratic perception, but one everyone seems very happy with. As a Frenchman once said of Alsace-Lorraine: ‘Think of it always, speak of it never.’ “