Volume 17, Number 6 · October 21, 1971
Eyeless in Indochina
By Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
In the spring issue of Public Policy, the journal of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, Daniel Ellsberg advanced an arresting and subtle interpretation of the American adventure in Indochina. He was concerned to disprove what he called 'the quagmire myth'—the proposition, that is, that our leaders did not know what they were getting into in Southeast Asia; that they marched blindly, step by step, into a morass; that our descent into the Vietnam catastrophe was marked (as Mr. Ellsberg accurately states the essence of the quagmire thesis) by 'lack of foresight, awareness, or calculation.'[1]
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