Vietnam, consensus, and the belief systems of american leaders

World Politics

Volumn 32, Issue 1, 1979, Pages 1-56

  Holsti, Ole R ^a   Rosenau, James N ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84972003169     PISSN: 00438871     EISSN: 10863338     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2010081     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. Fairbank, “The Meaning of Vietnam,” New York Review of Books, XXII, June 12, 1975, P. 31.
2. Arthur H. Vandenberg, Jr., ed., The Private Papers of Senator Vandenberg (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1952), 1.
3. A bibliography of these items appears in Appendix A of Holsti and Rosenau, “The ‘Lessons’ of Vietnam: A Study of American Leadership,” a paper prepared for the 17th Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, Toronto, 1976.
4. John E. Rielly, ed., American Public Opinion and US. Foreign Policy 1975 (Chicago: Chicago Council on Foreign Relations 1975);
5. Barry Sussman, Elites in America (Washington, D.C.: The Washington Post Publishing Co., 1976);
6. Bruce M. Russett and Elizabeth Hanson, Interest and Ideology (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman 1975);
7. Allen H. Barton, “Consensus and Conflict Among American Leaders,” Public Opinion Quarterly, XXXVIII (Winter 1974-1975), 508-30.
8. News conference, May 6, 1975.
9. Philip E. Converse, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” in David E. Apter, ed., Ideology and Discontent (New York: Free Press 1964), 207. It might well be argued that, since the hypotheses all pertain to the single issue of Vietnam, neither they nor the data used to test them are sufficient to justify the derivation of coherent belief systems—that, while the issue is an important one, the internal consistency of beliefs will break down once analysis moves beyond the issue of Vietnam. This argument is valid, but we have attempted to answer it elsewhere: our questionnaire included a number of items on foreign policy issues other than Vietnam that are analyzed in
10. Holsti and Rosenau, “America's Foreign Policy Agenda: The Post-Vietnam Beliefs of American Leaders,” in Charles W. Kegley and Patrick J. McGowan, eds., Challenges to America: U.S. Foreign Policy in the 1980s (Beverly Hills: Sage International Yearbook of Foreign Policy Studies, IV, 1979), 231-68.
11. This theme may be found in Kennan's American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1951), and continues through his writings up to his most recent book
12. The Cloud of Danger (Boston: Atlantic-Little Brown 1977).
13. It should be noted that the Paris Peace Agreement was signed in January 1973, some time before the Nixon Administration's cover-up of the Watergate scandal started to unravel.
14. Alastair Buchan, “The Indochina War and World Politics,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 53 (July 1975), 649.
15. On January 26, 1976, two hundred members of the House of Representatives signed a resolution opposing American aid to Angola, and on February 18 the Senate passed a foreign aid bill that included a prohibition of covert military aid to any forces in Angola. The Senate vote was 60-30. Our questionnaires were distributed during the first week of February.
16. A preliminary analysis of responses to the sources of failure and the lessons of Vietnam according to occupational groups also revealed a somewhat mixed pattern on the items dealing with the proper role of the United States in the world. See Holsti and Rosenau, “The Meaning of Vietnam: Belief Systems of American Leaders,” International Journal, XXXII (Summer 1977), 471.
17. A number of prominent academic observers had proposed that such an intervention would be feasible, as well as necessary to avoid the costs of any future oil embargo. See Robert W. Tucker, “Oil: The Issue of American Intervention,” Commentary, Vol. 59 (January 1975), 21-31;
18. Tucker, “Further Reflections on Oil and Force,” Commentary, Vol. 59 (March 1975), 45-56;
19. Edward Friedland, Paul Seabury, and Aaron Wildavsky, The Great Détente Disaster: Oil and the Decline of American Foreign Policy (New York: Basic Books 1975).
20. Holsti and Rosenau, “Does Where You Stand Depend on When You Were Born? The Impact of Generation on Post-Vietnam Foreign Policy Beliefs,” Public Opinion Quarterly, forthcoming.
21. For a similar conclusion based on different kinds of data, see James Chace, “Is a Foreign Policy Consensus Possible?” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 57 (Fall 1978), 1-16.
22. That is not to say that belief systems only change suddenly and as a result of great calamities. Alexander L. George has shown that the beliefs of Harry Truman and many of his advisers during the early postwar years changed gradually, and initially at the level of beliefs about tactics—for example, on how best to secure Soviet postwar cooperation. It was only many months after the end of the war that Truman and his advisers came to question and then discard some of the more optimistic elements of Franklin D. Roosevelt's “grand design” for postwar cooperation among the United States, Russia, England, and China. See Alexander L. George, “The Role of Cognitive Beliefs in the Legitimation of a Long-Range Foreign Policy: The Case of F. D. Roosevelt's Plan for Postwar Cooperation with the Soviet Union” (paper presented at the Conference on Approaches to Decision-Making, Oslo, August 9-12, 1977).