The following statement was made by James C. Thomson Jr., lecturer on History and former Far East-aide at the Department of State and National Security Council Staff, 1961-66, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday.

I AM GRATEFUL FOR THE opportunity to testify before this distinguished Committee on the origins and lessons of the Indochina War.

I must add, however, that I am astounded to be doing so while that war continues in yet a new phase of escalated American involvement in this fifth month of the year 1972. Had I been told, as a State Department official ten years ago or as a National Security Council staff member seven years ago, that the United States would still be a Vietnam war participant in 1972, I would have been utterly incredulous. Most of my colleagues would have been equally disbelieving.

All of us--policy-makers, legislators, and citizens alike--have been exposed by now to more data, documents, exhortations, and preachments about this war than any other unresolved crisis in our history. Let me try, therefore, to summarize very briefly my own views on the matter:

1. American participation in Vietnam hostilities is a step that could have and should have been avoided. Once begun, it should have and could have been ended at several junctures. Today, this week, is only the most recent of such junctures.

2. The Vietnam region, an Asian colonial appendage, was a region governed so badly by its French colonial rulers from the later 19th century through 1940 that Vietnamese nationalism and Vietnamese communism largely coalesced during the struggle against first France, then Japan, and then France again. As a result of such coalescence, such fusion, the leadership of the Vietnamese revolution for independence and nationhood had largely fallen under the control of long indigenous Vietnamese Communists by the mid and late 1940s. Ho Chi Minh was the George Washington of Vietnam, whatever we may think of his politics, though like George Washington he had to struggle against "loyalist" pro-French elements within the bureaucracy, army and intelligentsia.

3. Vietnam was, further, a colonial region in which the French so delayed and bungled the opportunities for post-1945 graceful withdrawal that they were eventually forced out by Ho and General Giap in 1954 under fairly ignominious circumstances. Moreover--a sadly important point for us--they were forced out at a time when the United States had been suddenly traumatized by the Cold War in Europe, the so-called "loss of China," and then the Korean War.

4. Against this backdrop, America's progressive involvement went through several very separate stages. First Washington acquiesced in the French return to Indochina and then financed the French war there largely for reasons that had nothing to do with Asia but rather, as Mr. Acheson and others have revealed, as the price required to win French participation in West European defense arrangements. (By 1954 that price totalled $4 billion.) But with the Communist victory in China. Washington developed a second rationale, namely, resistance to what was wrongly perceived as monolithic international communism: Peking and Hanoi as mere creations and puppets of Moscow. Such a false perception was intensified by the outbreak of the Korean War and China's eventual entry into that war as MacArthur marched to the Yalu. From this point on, Washington saw Chinese-directed communism "spilling out" all over Asia, and Vietnam became merely one break in the dike.

5. Hence, Washington's further blunder of disassociating the U.S. from the 1954 Geneva Accords and gradually moving in to replace the French and help upset those Accords--all on the false assumption of Communism's monolithic special nature and force of Vietnamese national-communism--a gradually escalating commitment to a historical, political, and logistical swamp that any great power should have known enough to avoid.

6. And ahence, further, the compounding of these initial blunders through escalatory intervention by two Administrations in an unfinished Vietnamese civil war from 1961 onward while pretending that it was not a civil war. In conjunction with these moves, policy-makers sought to explain such involvement to the American people by developing a public description of what was at stake in Vietnam that bore little relevance to reality but created, de facto, a new reality through rhetorical escalation; in other words, Vietnam became of supreme importance largely because we said it was of supreme importance.

7. None of this, I would add, was the result of criminal or malevolent men, either in Washington or necessarily in Southeast Asia. Most of it was the result of ignorance, shortsightedness, fear, frustration, and fatigue--though ignorance, short-sightedness, fear frustration, and fatigue can, in fact, lead to and have led to criminal consequences.

Let me deal at once with one obvious rejoinder to the preceding capsulized account. Vietnam obviously confronted American policy-makers with a situation where, if Washington had not intervened, a good many innocent anti-communists would have suffered in the course of civil war and revolution. But even if it were argued that we should be in the business of rescuing oppressed peoples from their compatriots on a worldwide basis (a dubious proposition), I would suggest that infinitely more suffering has been inflicted--and continues to be inflicted today--on people in both Vietnams and in Laos and Cambodia by our intervention than would have occurred if we hadn't interveneo. Those who have warned for years of the impending "bloodbath" must face the grim reality of the daily bloodbath we have imposed on Indochina. Here, indeed, is one of the most striking cases in modern history of a cure far worse than the disease.

As for that other recurrent rejoinder, the so-called "domino theory," such simplistic formulations are a cover for sloppy thinking. As anyone who knows that nation's tortured history must see, Vietnam is a special and peculiar mix of ingredients--unique, not general, or a "test case." What happens there tells us nothing very useful about the future anywhere else. Moreover, the consequences of Communist success there must therefore be examined with special care and precision; and such examination indicates that it would not have ramifications of real significance beyond the three Indochina states already affected--except, of course, for the commonplace of a "ripple" effect which is a far cry from the vision of falling dominoes.

I AM CONVINCED, HOWEVER, that "dominoism" does contain one important kernel of reality. For as I review the record of our Indochina involvement. I detect--as Daniel Ellsberg has put it--one crucial domino that seems to have obsessed each American President since Mr. Truman: namely, the Administration in power in Washington. By this I mean that each President has sensed a "lesson" from the Democrats' so-called "loss of China" in 1949 and their defeat at the polls in 1952--and has concluded that the "loss" of South Vietnam to communism will bring about his own Administration's downfall at the next general election.

One has heard from men in high positions at each stage of this convulsive tragedy that "no constructive alternative" to escalation was offered or available. The fact of the matter, however, is that at every stage alternatives have been offered, both from inside and outside the government. All of them were allegedly unpalatable at the time since they all ran the risk of a Communist take-over in South Vietnam. Yet all of them were proved progressively more palatable in retrospect once the opportunity was missed. There were thingswe could, and should, have done a year ago, two years ago, three, five, ten years ago, that are substantially harder to do today--except that the American people may at last be learning. They were proposed at the time; and they were rejected at each stage because the short-term price of not doing them and continuing, instead, on the same course. But the long-term price of not doing them turns out to be compounded daily and hourly.