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Death of the Statesman as Tragic Hero: Hans Morgenthau on the Vietnam War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 March 2016

Douglas B. Klusmeyer
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In Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (1946), Hans Morgenthau celebrated the noble role of the statesman, whose tragic destiny entailed accepting the agonizing moral burden of committing lesser evils as the inescapable price for securing the greater good. In this elitist vision, the statesman is primarily accountable to personal conscience rather than to the poorly informed, undisciplined judgment of any democratic electorate. In focusing on the statesman's pivotal role, Morgenthau glossed over the ways the New Deal and the Second World War had transformed the institutional context within which American presidents made foreign policy. As he shifted his attention to American policy toward Vietnam in the late 1950s and the 1960s, however, his view of presidential leadership and the executive branch changed significantly. Morgenthau came to see the growth of the national security state and the unaccountable exercise of executive power as a twin threat to the foundations of republican government. His critique emphasized the pathologies of policymaking insulated within this state apparatus. He learned that one problem with the lesser-evil approach is that the moral distinctions on which it is predicated are relative and contingent in practice: that which was once proscribed from the policymaker's toolbox can readily become the prescribed instrument after the justifying precedent has been established.

Type
Roundtable: Morgenthau in America
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , Spring 2016 , pp. 63 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2016 

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References

NOTES

1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil, Walter Kaufman, trans. (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), p. 68.

2 Hannah Arendt, “Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration Camps,” in Jerome Kohn, ed., Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994), p. 242.

3 Hans J. Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1946), pp. 219–23.

4 For an incisive critique of this approach to political ethics, see Daniel Warner, An Ethic of Responsibility in International Relations (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991), pp. 9–60.

5 This neglect is especially noteworthy when one recalls that Harold Lasswell had been publishing influential studies analyzing the increasing clash between the “civilian state” and “garrison state” models since 1937. Lasswell, Harold D., “Sino-Japanese Crisis: The Garrison State versus the Civilian State,” China Quarterly 11 (1937), pp. 643–49Google Scholar; Lasswell, Harold D., “The Garrison State,” American Journal of Sociology 46, no. 4 (1941), pp. 455–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 For a fuller examination of Morgenthau's changing views, see Klusmeyer, Douglas B., “The American Republic, Executive Power and the National Security State: Hannah Arendt's and Hans Morgenthau's Critiques of the Vietnam War,” Journal of International Political Theory 7, no. 1 (2011), pp. 63–94 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Alan Gilbert, Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy? Great-Power Realism, Democratic Peace, and Democratic Internationalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 66–87; William E. Scheuerman, Morgenthau: Realism and Beyond (Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2009), pp. 176–95.

8 Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Rosenberg, Emily S., “The Cold War and the Discourse of National Security,” Diplomatic History 17, no. 2 (1993), pp. 277–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Douglas T. Stuart, Creating the National Security State: A History of the Law that Transformed America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 119–21.

9 See, generally, Daniel P. Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Louis Fisher, In the Name of National Security: Unchecked Presidential Power and the Reynolds Case (Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 2006); Robert M. Pallitto and William G. Weaver, Presidential Secrecy and the Law (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

10 Morgenthau, Hans J., “The Immaturity of Our Asian Policy II: Military Illusions,” New Republic 134, no. 12 (1956), pp. 14–16 Google Scholar; Hans J. Morgenthau, Vietnam and the United States (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1965), p. 55; Hans J. Morgenthau, Truth and Power: Essays of a Decade, 1960–1970 (New York: Praeger, 1970), p. 420.

11 Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), pp. 50–60; Hans J. Morgenthau, In Defense of the National Interest (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), pp. 117–21, 208; Morgenthau, Vietnam and the United States, p. 29.

12 Morgenthau, Vietnam and the United States, pp. 20, 39, 91.

13 Morgenthau, Truth and Power, p. 5.

14 Morgenthau, Vietnam and the United States, p. 18.

15 Ibid., p. 17; Morgenthau, Hans J., “The National Interest and the Pentagon Papers,” Partisan Review 39, no. 3 (1972), pp. 354–57, 359, 362, 364Google Scholar; Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, 5th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), p. 7.

16 Morgenthau, “The National Interest and the Pentagon Papers,” p. 354.

17 Morgenthau's analysis here closely parallels that of his friend Hannah Arendt. See her essay, “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1972), pp. 1–47; see also Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), pp. 48–49, 51–53. For a comparison of both on these issues, see, generally, Klusmeyer, “The American Republic,” pp. 63–94.

18 Hans J. Morgenthau, The Purpose of American Politics (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), p. 266; Morgenthau, Vietnam and the United States, p. 17.

19 Morgenthau, Truth and Power, p. 18.

20 See, Jennifer W., “A Prophet Without Honor: Hans Morgenthau and the War in Vietnam, 1955–1965,” Pacific Historical Review 70, no. 3 (2001), p. 440 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Morgenthau, Truth and Power, pp. 20, 23–24; 40–44.

22 Ibid., p. 30.

23 Ibid., p. 54.

24 Ibid., p. 6.

25 Ibid., pp. 25–26, 54.

26 Ibid., pp. 232–33; 271–73.

27 Morgenthau, Purpose of American Politics, pp. 197–215; Hans J. Morgenthau, “Power and Powerlessness: Decline of Democratic Government,” New Republic 171, no. 19 (November 9, 1974), pp. 13–18.

28 Morgenthau, “Power and Powerlessness,” pp. 15–16; see also Morgenthau, Truth and Power, p. 409.

29 John J. Mearsheimer, Why Leaders Lie: The Truth about Lying in International Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

30 He also ignores Arendt's contributions to it.

31 “There is the possibility, of course,” he acknowledges, “that a person who thinks that he is telling a lie has his facts wrong and is inadvertently telling the truth. The reverse might also be true as well: a person who believes he is telling the truth might have his facts wrong. This problem, however, is irrelevant for my purposes.” Mearsheimer, Why Leaders Lie, p. 16.

32 In contrast to both Morgenthau and Arendt, Mearsheimer never considers here how the institutional framework and ideological culture of the national security state may shape perceptions and analysis of policymakers as well as their incentives and opportunities to manipulate public opinion.

33 Morgenthau's dismay at the unwillingness of American leaders to accept responsibility for their mistakes during the Vietnam War is reminiscent of Max Weber's reaction to the German High Command's conduct at the end of the First World War. Weber's ideal type of exemplary political leader, one who is guided by a stern ethics of responsibility, had been an inspiration for Morgenthau's vision of the tragic statesman. Given the unprecedented sacrifice of blood and treasure the High Command had required of the German people in a war that ended in defeat, Weber expected military leaders to take public responsibility for the consequences of their failure in their conduct of the war. As it became clear that the High Command would blame defeat on failures on the home front, Weber turned bitterly against the military brass, suggesting that they belonged in jail. He complained about their rushing to write memoirs about their wartime service rather than demonstrating—even symbolically—their readiness to make the kind of personal sacrifices that they had demanded for so long of those under their command. See Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills, ed. and trans., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 115–28; Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, Harry Zohn, trans. and ed. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975), pp. 652–54, 689; Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 1890–1920, Michael Steinberg, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 323–26; Joachim Radkau, Max Weber: A Biography, Patrick Camiller, trans. (Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2009), pp. 542–43.

34 For a discussion of the anti-republican uses of this ideal and its utopianism in practical application, see Daniel H. Deudney, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 67–70, 85–88.

35 Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, pp. 183, 191–201.