Ball was the
Under Secretary of State for the administrations of
John F. Kennedy and
Lyndon B. Johnson. He is known for his opposition to escalation of the
Vietnam War. After Kennedy decided to send 16,000 "trainers" to Vietnam, Ball, the one dissenter in Kennedy’s entourage, pleaded with JFK to recall France’s
devastating defeat in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu and throughout Indochina. Ball raised the question with President Kennedy. (November 7, 1961) "Within five years we'll have 300,000 men in the paddies and jungles and never find them again. That was the French experience. Vietnam is the worst possible terrain both from a physical and political point of view." In response to this prediction, the President seemed unwilling to discuss the matter, responding with an overtone of asperity: "George, you're just crazier than hell. That just isn't going happen." As Ball later wrote, Kennedy's "statement could be interpreted in two ways: either he was convinced that events would so evolve as not to require escalation, or he was determined not to permit such escalation to occur." Ball was one of the endorsers of the
1963 coup which resulted in the death of South Vietnamese President
Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother. As President Johnson was urged by his closest foreign policy and defense advisors to initiate a sustained bombing campaign against
North Vietnam during the winter of 1964–1965, Ball forcefully warned Johnson against such an action. In a February 24, 1965, memorandum he passed to the President through his aide
Bill Moyers, Ball provided an accurate analysis of the situation in South Vietnam, and of the U.S. stake in it, as well as a startlingly prescient description of the disaster any escalation of American involvement would entail. Urging Johnson to re-examine all the assumptions inherent in the arguments for increasing U.S. involvement, Ball stood alone among the upper echelons of Johnson's policymakers when he attacked the prevailing notion, virtually unquestioned at the time in Washington, that America's fundamental strategic interest in escalating the conflict was in protecting U.S. international prestige and the reliability of its commitments to allies. He observed that other international actors, including both allies and enemies, were concerned not whether the U.S. could live up to its promise but rather whether the U.S. could avert a disaster in time instead of squandering strategic capital in a struggle to assist a failed regime. If the U.S. continued in its course, Ball argued, U.S. loyalty would be less questioned than U.S. strategic judgement would. Although Johnson considered the memorandum seriously, Ball had waited too long to deliver it. The decision had already been made, and
sustained U.S. bombing operations against North Vietnam commenced on March 2, 1965. Six days after Rolling Thunder began, the U.S. began deploying substantial combat troops to South Vietnam, beginning with 3,500 troops arriving in Da Nang. Again, Ball sent Johnson a memorandum urgently pleading with him to change course, and once again, he used language that time would prove to be highly prescient: Ball also served as
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations from June 26 to September 25, 1968. During August 1968 at the UN Security Council, he endorsed the Czechoslovaks' struggle against the Soviet invasion and their right to live without dictatorship. During the
Nixon administration, Ball helped draft American policy proposals on the
Persian Gulf. In late November 1978, President
Carter commissioned Ball to prepare an independent assessment of the events in Iran and a set of policy recommendations. ==Arguments==