In yesterday's diary on Watergate Nixon accuser John Dean's appearance at an ACLU rally held in the shadow of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, I neglected to report on a key comment he made about the value of legislative oversight and its almost complete absence in the Iraq War today.
Dean noted that he began his career as a House Republican aide at the time of the Vietnam War. The Democrats controlled the House and the Senate then, but they engaged in vigorous scrutiny and public debate of President Johnson's war policies. Dean was proud to be a small part of that effort.
I am a first-hand witness to this history, as I served as a House intern in 1967 for Congressman William J. Green of Philadelphia and a Senate intern in 1968 for Senator Joseph S. Clark of Pennsylvania. Even the interns got involved in the oversight process. My main contribution was opposing attempts of Republican interns to create an ethical standard for interns banning public statements on the war by interns.
Beyond doing our jobs helping our bosses, Democratic interns in the 1960's circulated a petition opposing Johnson's war policies, held almost daily and sometimes twice a day meetings with members of Congress and leaders of the foreign policy establishment, most memorably for me meeting with Vice-President Hubert Humphrey and Secretary of State Dean Rusk.
It seems to me that even the interns of the 1960's ( a group which included today's Senators Hillary Clinton, then a Republican, Joe Lieberman, and Chuck Schumer, none of whom I knew or knew of at the time) did a better job of exercising legislative oversight than today's Republican Congress does.
But whatever contribution 1960's interns made to the Congressional oversight process (note to graduate students: there may be a scholarly paper or dissertation topic here), it paled beside the vigorous although inadequate oversight done by members of the Democratic Congress.
The chief director of oversight was the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, led by Senator J. William Fulbright, aided by a very competent staff (including Georgetown University student William J. Clinton). Fulbright held extensive hearings on the Vietnam War. After one of them, I heard Senator Eugene McCarthy express outrage at a statement made by Secretary Rusk and fume, "There's only one thing to do. Take it to the people."
The House also engaged in oversight, although it was far less concentrated that the Senate oversight was. The Chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, Doc Morgan of Western Pennsylvania, was a supporter of the war, but even he held public hearings at which dissident voices were sometimes heard.
As a result of the oversight, it became increasingly clear that the White House was acting on the basis of inadequate and incorrect information. That is what led Defense Secretary Robert McNamara (today a critic of the war in Iraq) to commission a detailed study of the history of American involvement in Vietnam, and led Daniel Ellsberg, who had access to the study, to release it, and Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska to read it into the Congressional record, making it public in its entirety. (Ellsberg had orginally leaked parts of it to various newspapers.)
Without the role of legislative oversight, the War in Vietnam could have dragged on even longer than it did. The vast majority of the media bought the presumption that the Johnson and Nixon White Houses knew what they were doing, and that presumption was largely erroneous.
Even historical research critical of the North Vietnamese government emphasizes the folly of Johnson's and Nixon's strategies in dealing with them: some of their leaders were apparently much more personally fanatical and less interested in the welfare of their constituency than Johnson and Nixon believed them to be, making them less receptive to offers of American aid than Johnson and Nixon thought they would be.
One Democratic line in Congress has been that Bush should develop an exit strategy, not Congress. There is a certain tactical advantage to this approach. It avoids harsh media scrutiny of the Democrats, for instance. But it displays far less analytical vigor and political courage than the Democrats of the 1960's showed.
I will be very surprised if the Democrats do not regain control of Congress--at least the House, quite likely both the House and the Senate--this year. Hopefully, those who exercise this control will read or reread accounts of the Fulbright investigations, and transcripts of oversight of the Vietnam war conducted by other committees in the House and the Senate.
Much more could have been done in the 1960's and 1970's than actually was done, but what was done was often done quite well and had positive and lasting results for building a solid base of knowledge about American foreign policy--at the State Department and the Defense Department no less than among the American people.