Introduction
Do advisers have an ethical obligation to dissuade students from pursuing once-in-a-lifetime internships in countries where the United States is engaged militarily? Fortunately, most internship advisers will never confront this ethical quandary, but due diligence requires that they at least contemplate its eventuality. The lack of self-evident criteria for resolving the dilemma further compounds its intractability. An instructive exercise for internship advisers may therefore be to simulate a scenario in which they formulate criteria to properly counsel students who are considering such internships. This essay is a modest attempt to identify four criteria and apply them to a fascinating case study from the Vietnam War. Particular emphasis is placed on the fourth criterion, regarding the susceptibility of internship placements to political exploitation, i.e., to propagandize the government's rationale for waging war.
The four criteria are presented in the form of questions that conscientious advisers are duty-bound to consider before facilitating internship placements in theaters of war. The criteria should be understood as representing a sequentially ordered, deliberative process. Accordingly, each criterion must be fully addressed before subsequent criteria are considered. Moreover, unless the questions contained therein can be answered in the negative, an internship adviser has an ethical obligation to proceed no further with the placement. After outlining the four criteria, the remainder of the essay focuses on insights that can be drawn from the experience of nineteen American students who undertook summer internships in South Vietnam in 1965. Upon their return to the United States, they were subjected to a secret media campaign orchestrated by the Johnson White House to counteract the growing anti-war sentiment on college campuses.
The Four Criteria
First Criterion: Does the internship pose a serious risk to an intern's personal safety? The first criterion is undoubtedly the most important, yet perhaps the easiest to dispense. The central question is whether internship placements in areas with ongoing military engagements pose an unacceptably high risk to a student's personal safety. If the vast majority of war deaths are comprised of civilians, the idea that noncombatants do not constitute a legitimate military target is an insufficient deterrent against civilian deaths and injury (Maguire, 2007). Advisers should therefore treat internship placements in or near combat zones as presumptively dangerous and thereby constituting an unacceptably high risk to the personal safety of interns.
Second Criterion: Does the internship impose an unacceptable level of institutional liability? The answer to this question is necessarily predicated on how the previous criterion is satisfied. Internships that place students in harm's way also potentially jeopardize the home institution's reputation and significantly increase its exposure to legal liability. Application processes for internship placements typically require the official approval of a student's home institution. While this is generally handled at the discretion of internship advisers, they are well advised to consult their institution's legal staff before approving an internship placement in theaters of war.
Third Criterion: Does the internship assignment entail ongoing interactions with military personnel? The third criterion is admittedly complicated because it is a matter of degree. However, as the interactions between an intern and military personnel become more extensive, the issues of personal safety and institutional liability become increasingly problematic. From an ethical standpoint, placements with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that focus on humanitarian as well as social and economic development projects are categorically distinct from internships with the political and military institutions that prosecute war. But the distinction can be easily blurred, as is evident from the gripping chronicle of an Oxford undergraduate's summer internship with a public relations firm in Iraq (the Lincoln Group). The intern's seemingly innocuous assignment of coordinating press releases with local media outlets could not shield him from a dangerously close proximity to war-induced violence and destruction (Marx, 2006). This criterion is not adequately satisfied if internship placements involve ongoing interactions with military personnel or occasion the necessity for interns to be armed for self-protection. Both of these conditions were violated in the public relations summer internship with the Lincoln Group.
Fourth Criterion: Is the internship susceptible to political exploitation? Perhaps the most vexing of the four criteria is whether explicitly humanitarian, social welfare, or economic development internships in a country at war are susceptible to political exploitation by the government. Typically, this is a category of question that can only be answered in hindsight. Moreover, if the war is profoundly unpopular (as in Vietnam and Iraq), or if it fails to meet the strictures of Just War Theory, a greater propensity may exist for the government to exploit internships to bolster the underlying rationale for waging war. There are, however, insights that can be drawn from the case study below that may mitigate the possibility of placing students in internships that are susceptible to political exploitation.
Summer Interns in Vietnam 1965
The case study is borne of a serendipitous discovery of a White House file at the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas. The file's first memorandum—declassified in the late 1970s—is curiously titled “Exploitation of the 19 student interns returning from Vietnam” (Cooper, 1965a). The confidential White House memo to key presidential advisers McGeorge Bundy and Jack Valenti outlined a secretive propaganda campaign to counteract the political damage from anti-war teach-ins. The coordinated effort was primarily spearheaded by the White House, but it also included the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the American Friends of Vietnam (AFV)—a pro-Vietnam War advocacy group—and the Institute for International Education (IEE). The White House pursued its objective of influencing public opinion on the Vietnam War by making the interns available for speaking engagements at college campuses and interviews with national and local media outlets. The memo further noted that as a result of their internship experiences in Vietnam the students had become “avid supporters of the broad purposes of administration policies” (Cooper, 1965a). There is certainly no indication in the White House memo that students were coerced to participate in the propaganda campaign.
However, the threshold for characterizing an internship as susceptible to political exploitation is not merely whether students are coerced to participate in activity they otherwise find objectionable. The central issue is whether internships are established to serve primarily the political aims of the sponsoring agency or the strictly educational and paraprofessional goals of the students. Even a cursory review of the White House memo clearly suggests that it was the former, not the latter, that shaped the development of the internship program in Vietnam.
The memo is extraordinarily candid about the underlying purpose of the government-sponsored internship in a theater of war. It reminds Johnson's presidential aides that the “rationale for sending the students to Vietnam was to expose them to the necessity of our effort there and to have them available on the campuses this fall to counteract the teach-ins ...” and that their “... experiences and views can be exploited throughout the academic year” [italics added] (Cooper, 1965a). In referring to the nineteen student interns, the memo cautions the White House to:
... exercise some care in not overwhelming them with requests for their services immediately after their return in order to avoid conclusions on their part that they were recruited, as some initially suspected for this very purpose. (Cooper, 1965a)
President Johnson was not unaware of the internship program, or its political value to his Vietnam policy. In another memo, Jack Valenti outlined for the President the internship program and explicitly requested Johnson's approval to proceed, which he granted by checking the “Yes” option on the memo (Valenti, 1965b). In a postscript, Valenti signaled to the President that the interns would serve the administration's goals in Vietnam during the following academic year. The President was also quite cognizant of how the internship program was a key component of the broader propaganda campaign to influence public opinion on the Vietnam conflict, particularly on college campuses. In an earlier memo, Valenti informed the President that he and McGeorge Bundy were forming a “counter-offensive to combat the 'get out of Viet Nam beatniks'” (Valenti, 1965a). This secret public relations campaign was code-named “Target: College Campus,” and as early as April 1965 Jack Valenti conveyed the President's approval of the operation to McGeorge Bundy (Valenti, 1965c; Egan, 2007; Preston, 2006).
The internship program in Vietnam may well have served the national security priorities of the Johnson administration. But from the standpoint of the student interns and the ethical responsibilities of their advisers, the program was fundamentally problematic, according to the four criteria outlined earlier. As initially envisioned, the internship program was to accommodate up to fifty students. However, the “security situation” necessitated a substantially less ambitious program (Cooper, 1965b). The memo's author did not specify the nature of the security situation, but a reasonable assumption is that it was related to the Johnson administration's directive to evacuate the dependents of USAID personnel from Vietnam.
If South Vietnam posed serious risks to the personal safety of USAID dependents—and therefore justified their evacuation—the same risks presumably applied to the nineteen student interns. Because the evacuation policy was in effect, the internship program failed to adequately satisfy the first criterion's requirement that internship placements should not constitute undue risks to the personal safety of students. Accordingly, the advisers to the Vietnam summer interns were duty-bound to dissuade them from venturing into a country where military conflict was underway. Another indication that the internship was problematic from the standpoint of the first criterion is that the USAID specifically requested young, single males for the program.
The evacuation directive highlights another troubling dimension of the internship program. Whereas the White House had a clear political (i.e., propagandistic) interest in sponsoring the internship program, USAID was also motivated by factors other than the program's educational benefit for the student interns. The evacuation of AID dependents from Vietnam created a personnel shortage that the agency sought to ameliorate through the summer internships. It also viewed the program as a pool from which it could draw prospective employees who were “field-tested” (Bell, 1965). Even the most prescient of internship advisers could not have foreseen that the key sponsoring agencies were not singularly motivated by the educational interests of the students. The prism of hindsight, however, suggests an important lesson that current internship advisers should heed. Among the various sponsoring organizations of the Vietnam internship program, at least three (the White House, AID, and the AFV) pursed objectives that diverged from the purely educational motives that presumably underlay the participation by the interns' own educational institutions.
A “red flag” should be immediately raised when internship advisers facilitate internship placements with multiple sponsors, especially in theaters of war. In these circumstances, advisers should presume that a strong possibility exists that the sponsoring organizations may be operating from divergent, disparate, and even incompatible motivations. The educational interests of the interns and their home institutions may be easily eclipsed by the countervailing priorities of the other sponsors. Consequently, the risks to a student's personal safety in theaters of war may be unnecessarily exacerbated.
As noted earlier, the Vietnam internship program did not adequately satisfy the first criterion, regarding an intern's personal safety. On that basis alone, the interns' advisers were ethically bound to proceed no further with the placements. Disregarding such an imperative and proceeding with the internship placements clearly violated the duty implicit in the second criterion against assuming an acceptable level of institutional liability. The violation was further compounded by the multiplicity of objectives that competed with, and seemingly eclipsed, the purely educational and paraprofessional interests of the interns.
In terms of the third criterion, regarding ongoing interactions with military personnel, there is no indication from the White House file that the internship placements in Vietnam did not blur the distinction between combatants and noncombatants. Unlike the public relations intern with the Lincoln Group, evidence does not exist that the nineteen students worked directly with American military personnel in Vietnam. Nor did they have to arm themselves in order to perform their internship responsibilities. The interns were assigned to USAID provincial representatives and worked on economic and social improvement projects in rural areas of South Vietnam. Although the internship program is not ethically problematic from the standpoint of the third criterion, the stipulation herein is that all four criteria must be satisfied in order for an internship adviser to proceed with a placement in a theater of war.
The fourth criterion, regarding the susceptibility of internships to political exploitation, is indeed the most vexing. The questions in the first three criteria can be answered by undertaking a careful inquiry of the conditions under which a prospective interns will be operating. For instance, a reasonably informed determination can be made, before an internship commences, about the possibility of placing interns in close proximity to armed conflict, insurgent activity, or civilian populations where anti-American sentiment may be high. However much due diligence is exercised, it may be unreasonable to expect internship advisers to make a priori determinations about the possibility that their interns will be exploited politically. Unfortunately, the fourth criterion is seemingly more amenable to post facto clarity. Nonetheless, this case study of the Vietnam internship program underscores some insights that can inform an adviser's deliberations on whether to approve, and facilitate, an internship placement in a theater of war.
Conclusion
First, internships may be particularly susceptible to political exploitation if one of the program's sponsors represents, directly or indirectly, the highest levels of government. In the Vietnam internship program, senior White House officials were intimately involved since its inception. The administration's explicitly political motivation for establishing the program raised suspicions among some interns that they might be susceptible to political exploitation. Internship advisers are ethically bound to ensure that such suspicions have no basis in fact.
Second, in unpopular military conflicts that generate substantial anti-war activism, a propensity exists for interns to be recruited to advance a war's political aims. This insight begs the question of whether interns are exploited politically if they agree with the rationale for waging war. As noted earlier, coercion is not the linchpin of political exploitation. The relevant consideration is whether interns are utilized for purposes other than their own educational and paraprofessional development.
Generally, internships are potentially transformative experiences for students. It is not uncommon to encounter prominent individuals who trace the trajectory of their career development to an undergraduate internship. A categorical distinction exists between conventional internships with prominent politicians or business firms, on the one hand, and war-time internships, on the other. The latter can carry undue risks to the personal safety of interns, impose an unacceptable level of legal liability on a student's home institution, and may be susceptible to political exploitation. The Vietnam internship program offered once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to nineteen summer interns, but it failed to satisfy three of the four criteria proposed herein. Due diligence requires that internship advisers undertake a substantive inquiry to ensure that the ethical imperatives inscribed in these criteria are satisfied.