George Ball: Behind the Scenes in U.S. Foreign Policy

By James A. Bill, Yale University Press, 1997, 274 pp. List: $30; AET: $25.

Reviewed by Andrew I. Killgore

In 1961 President John F. Kennedy told his friend, then-Deputy Secretary of State George Ball, "George, you're just crazier than hell. That just isn't going to happen." Kennedy's caustic response was prompted by an equally blunt warning about Vietnam. "Mr. President," Ball had said, "to commit American forces to Vietnam would, in my opinion, be a tragic error. Within five years we'll have 300,000 men in the paddies and jungles, and we'll never find them again."

Ball's only error was that he underestimated the magnitude of the mistake the United States was about to make. By 1966 there were 360,000 Americans in Vietnam.

This is just one of the revealing anecdotes in George Ball, the newest book by Professor James Bill, author of the seminal 1988 book, The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations, the best book to date, in this reviewer's opinion, on the U.S. and Iran.

Bill's newest book reflects the high standards that readers can depend upon in his work. Vietnam, of course, is not the principal focus of Middle East specialists, but readers of George Ball, and I hope there will be many, will find convincing evidence that the late Secretary Ball continued his powerful voice inside the Kennedy and Johnson administrations against America's deepening entanglement in the Vietnam tragedy.

As the only high American official both wise enough to perceive early-on the folly of America's Vietnam involvement, and courageous enough to counsel Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, in turn, against it, Ball came to be seen by many as a hero. His stature was enhanced by his willingness to swim against the political tide, and his ability to retain the confidence of Kennedy and Johnson while arguing as an insider that the policies they were pursuing were wrong.

If Ball's uniquely prescient and courageous stand on Vietnam as a top U.S. government insider made him seem a titan, his honest and fearless voice on Middle East affairs as a distinguished private citizen only buttressed his reputation.

"Given Israel's size and resources and given the size and resources of the Arab and Muslim communities," Bill writes, "Ball did not believe that the small Jewish state could survive indefinitely without peace." This reasoned view, shared overwhelmingly by Middle East specialists who know the area at first hand, earned Ball the enmity of America's most ardent supporters of Israel, few of whom have any familiarity with the Arab world's rich history and culture and virtually none of whom have lived or worked in any Middle Eastern country other than Israel. Their hostility increased as he argued publicly that unrestricted U.S. financial support of Israel only encouraged Israeli extremists to avoid making peace with the Arabs.

Dr. Bill painstakingly compares Ball with Nixon and Ford-era National Security Council director and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Despite Bill's care to treat him dispassionately, Kissinger, the first Jewish secretary of state and a deeply flawed and essentially tragic figure, comes off very badly.

A refugee from Nazi Germany who prided himself as an historian of 19th century European Realpolitik, Kissinger found himself handicapped as a practitioner by an overlarge ego and the visible lack of a moral compass when he tried to apply that system to a different age and in areas with which he was totally unfamiliar.

By contrast, Ball, whose family background and personal characteristics make up much of Bill's book, was a canny product of the American Midwest, a good listener who systematically reached out to a broad spectrum of advisers. One of these was the brilliant Frenchman Jean Monnet, "Mr. Europe," who became Ball's role model.

Beginning in 1976, Secretary Ball took on the Israel lobby in the public arena, never flinching or retreating despite violent verbal and written attacks launched against him by Israel and "Friends of Israel," the State Department's careful euphemism for the most single-minded American Zionists.

Ball publicly criticized Kissinger's step-by-step Middle East diplomacy as bound to reach a dead end, which it did even before his departure from government. Ball also accurately predicted that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat would pay dearly for breaking Arab ranks by making a separate peace with Israel. Within months of making that peace Sadat was assassinated as the result of a plot among middle-level Egyptian army officers.

Ball's foresight on the Middle East as well as on European and Asian matters was demonstrated in a series of books, speeches and articles. One of the earliest of the articles, written in 1976, was "How to Save Israel in Spite of Itself," published in Foreign Affairs. His books included Error and Betrayal in Lebanon, Diplomacy for a Crowded World, and his landmark The Passionate Attachment. In his writings Ball consistently criticized aggressive Israeli policies and the U.S. support that made them possible. Because Kissinger, who would be the first to claim that he personally had saved Israel in spite of itself, actually practiced the very policies that made Israel increasingly intransigent, Ball's relationship with him descended from wariness to permanent tension.

When Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976, the self-assured and articulate Ball was the "logical" new secretary of state. But he lost out to the more cautious and diffident Cyrus Vance in good part because of implacable opposition from the Israel lobby.

A bitter break with Kissinger followed Ball's favorable review of investigative reporter Seymour Hersh's book, The Price of Power, a revealing critique of Kissinger's role as President Richard Nixon's national security adviser. In a furious letter Kissinger informed Ball that further communication between them was impossible.

As Bill makes clear, Ball's ego was tempered by a ready sense of humor, a feel for proportion and a moral compass. Guided by these qualities, Ball ripped into Henry Kissinger on U.S. relations with Iran.

Predictably, since Bill is a leading American specialist on Iran, his account of this dispute is the liveliest part of George Ball. Ball faulted Kissinger's admiration for the megalomaniacal late Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, whose delusions of grandeur fed by Kissinger's lavish public admiration led almost inevitably to the shah's exile in the 1978-1979 political upheaval in Iran.

Bill points out, correctly, that Kissinger repeatedly had trouble keeping his bearings through crises in such places as Bangladesh, where his "tilt" toward Pakistan only prolonged an obscure but particularly bloody war, and Kurdistan, where his exploitation of the Kurds set the stage for the eight-year Iran-Iraq war a decade later. By contrast, Ball systematically cultivated the best political minds in the world. As a charter member of the foreign-policy-oriented Bilderberg group (named for a hotel in the Netherlands) who missed only one annual meeting over many years, Ball remained uniquely informed and qualified in foreign policy affairs long after he relinquished political office after serving as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during Lyndon Johnson's second term.

Ball was right on Vietnam. He foresaw as early as 1972 the collapse 18 years later of the Soviet Union, and he predicted more than a year before it happened that President Nixon would be forced from office.

Although Professor Bill lays no stress in his book on Ball's publicly expressed conviction in the 1970s that Israel cannot continue to exist without peace, the obvious conclusion that Ball was generally the first to take a public stand on most major issues and was always right will have special resonance for Middle East specialists.

George Ball should be read by all people who follow Middle East affairs. But its value is far beyond any one issue, no matter how important. In fact this former under secretary of state was one of the greatest Americans of all times. The fact that his honest public assessment of America's problems in the Middle East prevented him from reaching his full potential certainly as a truly great secretary of state or perhaps a president who could have spared the world at least one futile and bloody war, is another tragic consequence of our persistent refusal to deal effectively with the malign influence of domestic political lobbies that "tilt" American foreign policy away from our nation's own best interests and traditions.