The Under Secretary who stopped an airstrike on Cuba with the Pearl Harbor analogy, then alone opposed escalation in Vietnam
This coming in there, a Pearl Harbor, just frightens the hell out of me as to what goes beyond... You go in there with a surprise attack. You put out all the missiles. This isn't the end. This is the beginning, I think.
Under Secretary of State (1961–1966) serving Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, he was the exceptional figure who opposed escalation at two defining Cold War junctures: the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam. In October 1962 at EXCOMM, he called a surprise airstrike on Cuba 'a Pearl Harbor' and played the decisive role in swinging Robert Kennedy and the majority toward the naval blockade. Alone among Johnson's senior advisers, he warned in 1965 that sending combat troops would lead to hundreds of thousands more and an unwinnable war, and was proven right. After leaving government, he criticized America's pro-Israel tilt in the Middle East and, as Jean Monnet's collaborator in the 1950s, helped draft the Schuman Plan and the treaty creating the European Coal and Steel Community.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1933–1942Law practice in Chicago
- 1942–1945Lend-Lease Administration · Strategic Bombing Survey
- 1946–1961Co-founder, Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton
- 1961Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs
- 1961–1966Under Secretary of State
- 1968U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations
- 1969–1982Senior Managing Director, Lehman Brothers
Related historical events
The August 1963 Coup Cable and the Decision to Remove Diem
That Ball, remembered for opposing Vietnam escalation, helped enable regime change in South Vietnam in August 1963 complicates any simple characterization of him as a dove. That summer, as the Ngo Dinh Diem government intensified its repression of Buddhists, State Department officials W. Averell Harriman and Roger Hilsman, together with National Security Council staff member Michael Forrestal, concluded that Diem had to go. On Saturday, August 24, with most senior officials out of town, they drafted a cable to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in Saigon instructing him to encourage South Vietnamese generals to mount a coup. President Kennedy first wanted to defer the decision until he returned to the White House, but Forrestal persuaded him to have the State Department clear the cable. Harriman and Hilsman turned to Under Secretary of State Ball, who had just finished a round of golf. Ball shared their view that Diem had to go, and he called Secretary of State Dean Rusk, using the impression that Kennedy was already fine with the cable to obtain Rusk's sign-off. Ball then relayed Rusk's approval to Kennedy, who asked that several other officials be consulted. The cable, officially Cable 243, went out that night, telling Lodge that if Diem remained obdurate, 'we must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved.' Ball's involvement was impromptu yet consequential. When Kennedy's national security team reassembled on Monday, August 26, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, CIA Director John McCone and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Maxwell Taylor opposed encouraging a coup and objected to what Taylor called an 'egregious end run' around normal procedure. Yet when Kennedy asked whether he should retract the cable, none said yes. The man who in October 1962 called a surprise airstrike on Cuba 'a Pearl Harbor' had, a year later, helped set in motion the removal of South Vietnam's president, showing how his judgment shifted across distinct Cold War junctures.