Leslie H. Gelb, 82, Former Diplomat and New York Times Journalist, Dies

Until about 1966, Mr. Gelb said he supported the Vietnam War — “the Munich analogy, domino theory, they’re very real to me,” he told WGBH in 1982.

But while working for Mr. Javits, he received a letter from a friend, an Army officer commanding a battalion, who said he had never seen an adversary fight as fervently as the North Vietnamese, “and he believed that it could only spring from the deepest sense of nationalism, and if that were the case, we could never beat it.”

Mr. Gelb also said he was originally opposed to the publication of the Pentagon Papers by The Times because “while the Papers show some lies, the main message is that our leaders, from Truman onwards, didn’t know hardly anything about Vietnam and Indochina.”

“They were ignorant,” he said. “And it also shows that the foreign policy community believed that if we lost Vietnam, the rest of Asia would fall.”

In a 2017 interview with WNYC’s “On the Media,” Mr. Gelb added: “These are wars that depend on knowledge of who the people are, what the culture is like. And we jumped into them without knowing. That’s the damned essential message of the Pentagon Papers.”

Mr. Gelb originally endorsed the Iraq War, too, for reasons that, perhaps, suggested that not much had changed since Vietnam.

His initial support for the war, he said, “was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives of supporting wars to retain political and professional credibility.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/31/us/leslie-gelb-dead.html?emc=rss&partner=rss