Presidential Advisors: How Much Are They Told?

Jerome Weisner, now president of MIT. and George Kistiakowsky, professor emeritus of Chemistry at Harvard, were science advisors to Presidents Kennedy and Eisenhower, respectively, and were among the leading spokesmen for the scientific community during the period covered by the Pentagon Papers. The interview took place in mid-August at Woods Hole. Massachusetts. in the offices of the National Academy of Sciences. Wiesner and Kistiakowsky retained the right to edit their remarks, a right both have exercised. The few places where the printed version truncates the actual discussion, or where amplification is required, are indicated in italics. Elinor Langer

Langer. (Let me start by saying that) the assumption behind this interview is that the Pentagon Papers may have more serious implications than the level of public discussion so far has really indicated. It was conceived as a kind of fishing expedition to see what people like yourselves, who were in positions of some power--at least we were led to believe at the time--(and of) relative knowledgeability when some of the events were going on, made of the Papers...You were not familiar, at that time, with the plans and projections that were being made about the bombing campaign in North Vietnam?

Wiesner. I certainly knew nothing about it.

Kistiakowsky. Well, you were already out of office.

Wiesner. I had been out of Washington since March '64 and the war blew up after that. In addition, I haven't studied newly released papers sufficiently to be able to talk about what was just contingency planning that is necessary and what was, in effect, government policy. I think that one has to be very careful in making such interpretations.

Kistiakowsky. Yes, I must say for myself that by that time I was already, I think, sophisticated enough to sense the internal workings of the government: the fact that not everybody speaks the same language, not everybody has the same objectives. The Pentagon, for instance, is very different from the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and so on. But I was naive enough to think that when the President of the United States was running for election and made quite a flat, public statement that he was for peace as contrasted with his opponent--I was naive enough to believe him.

Wiesner. Well, I believed him for other reasons, too, in spite of the fact that, as I said earlier, I was not on good terms with the President. I had seen him push for disarmament initiatives inside the White House: press on the White House staff, including myself. I was not involved in Vietnam discussions because they were not a prominent part of the government business during the first months that he was President and I was still working there. There were other issues that were much more important. But in the contacts we had with him and with his senior staff during the campaign, he certainly gave us the impression of very different views about Vietnam than those that emerged later. And I suspect that neither of us would have worked for him to the degree that we did, or at all, if we had been able to anticipate the way the war was going to go.

Langer. Does it strike you in retrospect as surprising that in your position you didn't know very much? I'm struck by the way you both sound like ordinary citizens, like the "man on the street," when in fact you both were in and out of Washington, knew a lot of people, and presumably had some power.

Kistiakowsky. I think you exaggerate my position. By then I ceased to be--not that I was fired or anything--I ceased to be a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC). Jerry, you still were a member, weren't you?

Wiesner. Yes, I attended meetings, but even so, strategy issues were not discussed in PSAC. The point is, the thing that appalled us about Goldwater was his threats to use nuclear weapons and his very strong jingoism. Johnson never talked like that, and the contrast was attractive. We never asked the President about Vietnam specifically, so we can't say we were deceived in any literal sense. On the other hand, we were given the impression that we were supporting a peace platform: there is no question about that.

Langer. In preparing for meeting with you today, I reread a story I wrote for Science in 1967 based on telephone interviews with everybody who had been on Scientists and Engineers for Johnson. The range of disaffection then was certainly very great, but the article ended up by commenting on the feeling of powerlessness of all the people who had been on that committee, and I remembered wondering to myself, if those people felt powerless, who was feeling powerful at that time? Who was feeling in control?

Wiesner. I don't know.

Kistiakowsky. As a reward for my services during the election campaign. I was appointed a member of--as it turned out--a fictitious organization called something like the President's advisors or board of advisors on foreign policy. It met once or twice during the campaign for a briefing and never met afterwards. But I was never formally dismissed. Hence, I wrote a letter to the President urging him to de-escalate the war in the fall of '65, about Christmas of '65.

Kistiakowsky. I must say my first strong, explicit disappointment with President Johnson was in January or early February '65, when the so-called Gilpatric (Roswell Gilpatric, Deputy Secretary of Defense, 1961-1964) committee (appointed by the President) of which I was a member, orally recommended to him that he should place great emphasis on the issue of nonproliferation of nuclear weapons. The recommendation was immediately buried. There was hardly a "thank you" to the members of that committee.

Wiesner. Well, you remember what happened to us on the ABM issue? In '67 we were invited by Secretary McNamara to come to the White House to discuss the ABM.

Langer. You two, or you two with a large group?

Wiesner. With a larger group.

Kistiakowsky. All the former science advisors.

Wiesner. All the science advisors and all the previous directors of DDR&E, including (Harold) York and Harold Brown, who was head of DDR&E at that time. To a man we were opposed to both the big system and, as far as I recall, the smaller system too, some of us more vigorously than others. And he not only made the decision to deploy the small system, but McNamara then sort of misused, I'd say, our position there in support of the small system. I think that we may have had many reasons to feel ill-used, but I didn't think the President ever owed me anything. I wasn't supporting him for his own sake or because of any personal trust. I did it for what I thought was the best interest of the country. You can question whether it was, of course, as things turned out. I think it was probably still better to have had Johnson than Goldwater, but that's a poor choice.

Kistiakowsky. And of course the issue of the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam was very much in our minds. I might mention another episode. It was about the period of the Tet offensive, when one of our senior generals from Vietnam made a public statement saying that there was no need to worry about the fate of Khe Sanh, because if conventional weapons didn't work, we would use tactical nuclear weapons. When I read that I became very much exercised and I telephoned the two gentlemen, who were science advisors before I was, and chairmen of PSAC under Eisenhower, namely (James) Killian (chairman, MIT Corporation) and (I.I.) Rabi (professor of Physics, Columbia University). They agreed with me that this was a very dangerous thing even to talk about. And we constructed a telegram to ex-President Eisenhower (who was then in Palm Springs) quoting the general and saying that this would be disastrous in its own right and also raised a danger of expanding the war. We sent that telegram to Eisenhower, and as luck would have it, President Johnson was visiting Eisenhower a day or so after he got the telegram. Apparently Eisenhower was very much concerned and talked very vigorously to Johnson about it. I judge that that was the case because within less than 48 hours, each of us, Killian, Rabi, and myself, had a personal phone call from Secretary McNamara saying that he had been instructed by the President to state firmly that there was no planning, even contingency planning, to use nuclear weapons.

The "summer study" discussed below was a seminar of 47 scientists which was held under the auspices of the Jason Division of the Institute for Defense Analyses in the summer of 1966. Further discussion of it can be found in the Bantam edition of the Pentagon Papers (pp. 483-485) and in Document No. 117 (p. 502). The New York Times citing the original Pentagon study, emphasizes that the scientists' work was a major influence in persuading then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that the bombing of North Vietnam was ineffective in curtailing North Vietnam's military activities in the south.

Langer. What was the kind of thinking that led up eventually to the 1966 summer study which, at least according to the Times, turns out to have been so important?

Kistiakowsky. I'll try to summarize that briefly. Jerry and I probably were responsible for its start. We had prepared several letters to President Johnson in the winter of '65-'66. We got what amounted very much to a brush-off.

Wiesner. A pointed brush-off.

Langer. Did the study require some kind of presidential assent to set it up?

Wiesner. No, the study came about in another way. We had a small, self-initiated discussion group in Boston whose purpose was to see whether we couldn't find an acceptable way of stopping the war. We looked at a large variety of different ideas, and every time we thought we had one that looked acceptable to all sides, we would try to get the President to listen to it.

Kistiakowsky. There was no substantive consideration of our proposals. They were all just dismissed.

Wiesner. What actually happened on the study referred to in the Times was that we began to examine General (James) Gavin's enclave proposal seriously and we decided we didn't have enough facts about where the troops were, where the civilian population was, and a great number of other important questions. We called somebody, I believe it was John McNaughton (Assistant Secretary of Defense for international security affairs) and asked him for a briefing and he said he would send up (Adam) Yarmolinsky (Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense) to give us the data we wanted. And Yarmolinsky came up with a lot of facts and data and...

Kistiakowsky. Then he went back and there were some discussions in which I didn't take part. The result of them, however, was an offer to finance, out of the funds available to the Office of International Security Affairs, a study in the summer of '66 in which a considerable group, largely of physical scientists but also some social scientists, would be involved. I don't know that I'm at liberty to mention who they were, though Jerry and I were in the steering group. Out of that study came a number of recommendations to the Secretary.

Wiemer. And a number of observations, some of which have been in the Pentagon Papers. I think, as the paper said, the study probably played a very decisive role in convincing Secretary McNamara that, in certain respects, the intelligence information he was getting was wrong, that the estimates he was getting of where they were going were not very useful.

(The concluding part of this interview will appear in tomorrow's Crimson)

Copyright 1971 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science