Episode 20C - George Ball: 10-Minute Profile

In this episode, we profile a little-remembered diplomat who served as a major voice of dissent against US involvement in the Vietnam War.  George Ball was born into an upper-middle class Midwestern family, and he became a prominent Chicago lawyer.  He became a political confidant of Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson during his two runs for the White House.  Ball received one of the top spots in the State Department during John F. Kennedy's presidency.  In that role, he promoted international trade and took a "dovish" view on foreign policy, recommending against US military interventions around the world.  George Ball is most famous for urging JFK to end US military involvement in Vietnam.  Kennedy remained indecisive on whether to increase or decrease the American presence in South Vietnam, up to the time of his death.  Ball gave the same antiwar advice to Kennedy's successor Lyndon B. Johnson, but the new president rejected Ball's suggestions, & he instead listened to generals who favored a heavier American military involvement in Southeast Asia.  The Vietnam War stretched into the 1970s, and the tragic conflict created millions of casualties.  Even after leaving public life, George Ball continued to publish writings questioning the conventional wisdom of US foreign policy, up until his death in 1994.

Transcript

“From Boomers to Millennials” provides a fresh look at 20th Century US history. Welcome to Episode 20C, also known as “George Ball: 10-Minute Profile.” In today’s episode, we examine a high-ranking but little-known government official, who tried his best (but failed) to convince 2 presidents to pursue a different foreign policy. If George Ball’s perspective had prevailed, it is possible that the United States would have avoided entanglement in the Vietnam War, and that the subsequent history of the 1960s could have looked very different as a result.

George Wildman Ball was born in December 1909 in Des Moines, Iowa, and he grew up in a privileged Midwestern family. His father was an oil executive, and he was raised in the wealthy Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois. He received a law degree from nearby Northwestern University in 1933. While in law school, he married a social worker named Ruth Murdoch. After graduation, he practiced law at a Chicago firm led by future Democratic Governor and presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, who became a major mentor to George and steered him toward politics.

During World War II, George W. Ball entered government service, working for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Lend Lease” program that allowed the USA to supply the UK with arms during Britain’s struggle against the Nazis before America joined the war. After the Allies successfully won the war, Ball helped implement the famous American “Marshall Plan” that helped Western Europe’s economy recover from the devastating and destructive impact of the conflict (See Episode 2 of this podcast).

During the 1950s, Ball was heavily involved with Adlai Stevenson’s two Democratic party nominations for the White House, helping to write his speeches and direct his campaign operations. Stevenson, of course, lost both of those general elections to Republican Dwight Eisenhower (see Episodes 7 & 11), yet George Ball remained well-connected within Democratic Party circles into the Sixties, and he was given an appointment to the position of Undersecretary for Economic Affairs by John F. Kennedy’s State Department in February 1961. In that capacity, he became a trusted underling of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, although the two would develop very different views on what approach the administration should take to foreign policy in Southeast Asia.

By December 1961, George Ball had ascended to Undersecretary of State, the second-highest position in the State Department. He received this promotion because Attorney General Bobby Kennedy had major policy & personality differences with Ball’s predecessor in that role, former Connecticut Governor Chester Bowles. According to JFK biographer Robert Dallek, Bobby was an enthusiastic supporter of the US using counterinsurgency forces to destabilize unfriendly regimes, while Bowles preferred a more dovish and diplomatic approach to improving relations with such countries. Ball was also generally a dove, but he was seen by rival factions as being less idealistic, and more pragmatic & willing to compromise. After several bitter clashes between Chester Bowles and the president’s brother, Dallek indicates that JFK (quote) “announced a reorganization of the State Department that made Bowles a roving ambassador and replaced him with George Ball . . . in whom [the Kennedys] had more confidence” (close quote).

                  In his new role, one of Ball’s first discussions with President Kennedy was in response to pending US military proposals to send thousands of US combat troops to South Vietnam. Ball emphatically disagreed with the idea of an escalating American military operation; according to historian Robert Dallek, he told the president, (quote) “within 5 years we’ll have 300,000 men in the [rice] paddies & jungles, and [we’ll] never find them again. That was the French experience [there]. Vietnam is the worst possible terrain both from a physical and political point of view” (close quote). Ball recalls that JFK said dismissively, (quote) “George, you’re crazier than hell. It isn’t going to happen.” Dallek writes that (quote) “Ball later wondered whether Kennedy meant that events would evolve so as not to require escalation, or that he was determined not to permit such escalation to occur” (close quote). At the time, the US military presence in the Republic of South Vietnam was still limited to around 15,000 military (quote-unquote) “advisors” who were assisting South Vietnamese troops, as we discussed back in Episode 18.

On interesting fact about Ball’s approach to international relations, given the current US political controversies about trade and tariffs, is that he strongly supported a 1962 bill that would expand free trade by negotiating lower tariffs with European countries & increasing American exports abroad. Kennedy biographer Robert Dallek reports that Ball was such an “evangelist” for this law expanding international trade that he made a point of wearing an outfit consisting of (quote) “a suit made in Britain, shoes manufactured in Hong Kong, and a silk tie made in France” (close quote). He also was a major proponent of the European Common Market, which was the economic predecessor of the European Union. Contrary to a recent 2025 statement by Pres. Trump that the EU was (quote) “created to screw the US,” in reality the American government historically encouraged this type of organization’s efforts to facilitate free trade and economic connection among the capitalist nations of Western Europe.

            As discussed in Episode 20, George Ball was a major voice of caution during the tense days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. He was a member of the “Executive Committee” that shaped the president’s decision-making during the October 1962 crisis, and he helped to persuade the Kennedy brothers that a naval blockade of further Soviet missile shipments would be a safer option than launching extensive air strikes against existing missile installations in Cuba. If, as many historians believe, John F. Kennedy deserves credit for safely steering the country through this most dangerous moment of the Cold War, George Ball deserves some credit for his role in convincing the president not to take risky actions that could have further escalated the conflict.

            Although he was a dove on US escalation in Cuba and Vietnam, George Ball was willing to support American cloak-and-dagger tactics at times. After South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem proved to be unresponsive to US requests for him to reform his corrupt government, and when he continued to oppress the country’s majority Buddhist population, Dallek reports that Ball sided with members of the administration who favored supporting a coup to remove Diem, because Ball said it was (quote) very “difficult, if not impossible” for the US government to work with the existing government of South Vietnam. The removal of Diem via a military coup on November 1, 1963, represented a turning point in US efforts to preserve the non-Communist government of the Republic of South Vietnam. On November 2nd, coup leaders in Saigon executed ex-President Diem. Unfortunately for the United States, it turned out that this violent regime change did not result in the establishment of a more stable or popular South Vietnamese government.

Due to President John F. Kennedy’s untimely death on November 22, 1963, we will never know for sure what JFK’s next moves would have been in regard to the Vietnam War. Even today, it remains in question whether Kennedy would have escalated military involvement in Vietnam during 1964, or if he would have followed George Ball’s advice and reduced US involvement in the Southeast Asian conflict. 

            George Ball remained in his role with the State Department into the administration of JFK’s successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson. When military leaders were urging LBJ to undertake a major bombing campaign against North Vietnam in 1964, Ball strongly urged against the plan. To Ball’s dismay, LBJ ignored his advice and engaged in a massive escalation of the US military commitment in Southeast Asia. The rest, as they say, is history. Throughout his time in the Johnson Administration, George Ball was often the sole voice of dissent, who continuously argued that backing away from the Vietnam conflict would not diminish America’s so-called “international credibility” to allies & opponents. To Ball, remaining involved in the war was itself causing unacceptable damage to the global reputation of the United States, in addition to the tragic loss of the lives of thousands of American soldiers. Yet the war continued into the 1970s, even after the 1968 election of Richard Nixon to the White House brought new personnel into the State Department. The Vietnam War cost the lives of millions of Vietnamese people & almost 60,000 American soldiers before it ended in 1975.

            Despite his questioning of the consensus of the US foreign policy establishment, Ball was hardly a radically anti-establishment figure. When he resigned from the State Department in 1966, he became a partner at Lehman Brothers, a top New York investment bank. He refused to go public with his criticism of the government’s position on Vietnam, and his extensive internal writings against the war only became public knowledge with Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of the government’s so-called “Pentagon Papers” to the New York Times in 1971. Since the 1950s, George Ball was a regular participant in the meetings of the Bilderberg Group, an annual off-the-record conference in Europe attended by politicians, business leaders, and academics from Western capitalist nations. Because they genuinely are secretive meetings of elites, the Bilberberg conferences have been the focus of conspiracy theories by both the Far Left & the Far Right for decades.

            After government service, George lived with his wife Ruth in Princeton, New Jersey, yet even after retirement, he continued to contribute to publications discussing foreign affairs. He had 2 sons, and in 1992, he co-wrote a book with Douglas Ball, one of his sons, arguing that the USA’s close alliance with the Government of Israel was becoming damaging to America’s national interest and to the prospects for international peace in the Middle East. But by the time of its release, the aging diplomat’s health had already gone into decline. George Wildman Ball died of abdominal cancer at age 84 in New York City on May 26, 1994.

It could be argued that Ball was a kind of modern-day Cassandra, who provided insightful warnings about US foreign policy interventions that were dismissed as overly pessimistic by other high-ranking government officials. We hope you have enjoyed our profile of this important but neglected diplomatic voice from the 1960s. You can provide feedback on this episode via email at boomertomillennial@outlook.com. To see cool historical photos related to our episodes, please follow our Instagram. Our account name there is simply “boomerstomillennials.” You can also follow us on the social media network BlueSky: @boomertomillennial.bsky.social. Thank you for your support, and as always, thank you for listening.