by Neil Sheehan
In May, McNamara had wanted the president to try to induce Hanoi to negotiate by limiting the bombing to the 20th Parallel. Now he wanted Johnson to halt the bombing in all of North Vietnam and to do so by the end of the year. The evening of the day he handed the president this latest unpleasantness, McNamara told a secret gathering of elder statesmen and close advisers whom Johnson had convened in Washington that he was afraid everything he and Dean Rusk had done since 1961 to further the war effort might turn out to be a failure.
Lyndon Johnson was perplexed by the change in McNamara. Rusk, whom McNamara had included in his gloomy remark, certainly did not share his feelings, nor did anyone else whose opinion the president respected. The group McNamara spoke to was dubbed “the Wise Men” within the bureaucracy, because it was a constellation of American statecraft and military experience that included Dean Acheson and Omar Bradley, the surviving five-star general of the Army from World War II. (President Eisenhower was technically another, but he had surpassed the distinction by becoming a commander in chief.) They were briefed the same evening by Earle Wheeler, who addressed Westmoreland’s operations and the air war, and by George Carver, the CIA’s ranking specialist on Vietnam, who evaluated Komer’s pacification program.
Walt Rostow sent Johnson a report on the briefings just before the Wise Men arrived at the White House the following morning to give the president their counsel. “I found the briefings impressive,” Rostow said, “especially Carver who hit just the right balance between the progress we have made and the problems we still confront. … There was hardly a word spoken that could not be given directly to the press. You may wish to consider a full leadership meeting of this kind, introduced by yourself, after which you could put the whole thing on television…”
During the midmorning discussion and then lunch with the president, one of the Wise Men, George Ball, the original in-house opponent of the war who was currently chairman of the Lehman Brothers investment banking firm in New York, told Johnson he no longer favored getting out of Vietnam. The briefings had been “very reassuring,” Ball said.
The president took the precaution of soliciting written comments on McNamara’s November 1, 1967, memorandum from Rostow, Maxwell Taylor, and two of his confidants—Justice Abe Fortas, the distinguished constitutional lawyer he had placed on the Supreme Court; and Clark Clifford, prized by Harry Truman for his political insights as a youthful White House assistant, who in 1967 was perhaps the shrewdest lawyer in Washington and certainly the most influential. All urged Johnson to pay no heed to McNamara’s views.
In his “Top Secret Literally Eyes Only” comment, Rostow said they did not have to stop the bombing to induce negotiations. He noted that at a time when they were bombing the North harder than ever, their latest secret contact with the other side had opened up. The contact had been initiated in August by the head of the Party organization for the Saigon area through an emissary in Cambodia to attempt an exchange of prisoners. It was to result in the release of two American enlisted men in December 1967, and might have brought the freeing of Ramsey or others had the administration been seriously interested in prisoner exchanges. Rostow read a much larger purpose into the contact than an exchange of captives. He said he detected this purpose “in the full flow of intelligence.” Hanoi had abandoned hope of taking over South Vietnam within the foreseeable future. To try to save the Viet Cong from being destroyed, the Hanoi leaders were probing to see what sort of legal status they might be able to negotiate for the Southern Communists “in a time of peace.” He drew a parallel for the president with the Korean War negotiations at Panmunjom. “If this is right, we are already in a kind of Panmunjom stage; that is, their military operations are designed not to produce victory but to improve their position in a negotiation which is, in a sense, already under way.”
At the end of November, McNamara learned through a press leak of his appointment as the new president of the World Bank. Johnson decided that his secretary of defense, who had been at the Pentagon for the better part of seven years, had come unstrung from too many years of carrying the burden of the war. The man had deteriorated into “an emotional basket case,” the president told his press secretary, George Christian. Johnson liked McNamara. Despite his worship of the Kennedys, McNamara had served Johnson with self-effacing loyalty. But the president could not afford to keep him. The antiwar wing of the Democratic Party had started a “Dump Johnson” movement and were soon to acquire a candidate in Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota to try to unseat Johnson at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
The serious menace, from Johnson’s point of view, was Robert Kennedy, now a senator from New York, waiting to step in at the most propitious moment. If McNamara was to crack utterly and resign during the forthcoming election year, Kennedy could exploit him too. The president suspected that McNamara was, in his distress, already confiding in his friend. He was right. There were rumors in Washington, where I was now working in the New York Times bureau, that McNamara had turned against the war. I asked Robert Kennedy if they were true. He said they were and described McNamara’s feelings in detail. I was reluctant to believe him at the time. A transformed McNamara seemed to fit too conveniently into Robert Kennedy’s ambition to inherit his brother’s office.
Quietly during November, without telling McNamara, Lyndon Johnson arranged his appointment to the presidency of the bank. On a couple of occasions in the past, they had discussed the possibility of McNamara’s taking the job someday. Robert McNamara wanted to think of himself as a man who did good. When he had waged war in Vietnam in earlier years, he had thought he was doing good. The World Bank, technically called the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, worked at raising the economies of the underdeveloped countries. The President reasoned that if he gave McNamara this opportunity, McNamara would go quietly and keep his silence.
Johnson’s instinct was to prove surer than he could have known. The high moral courage that Robert McNamara could summon up within the secrecy of the American state he could not summon up outside of it to denounce what the American state was doing. In all the years of the war that lay ahead he was never to speak publicly against it. His guilt and shame may have contributed to an inability to confront what he had done. When the Pentagon Papers he commissioned were published, he declined to read them.
Vo Nguyen Giap explained how and why the Hanoi leaders had enticed the American forces to the borders of the South in an extended two-part article published in mid-September 1967 by Military People’s Daily (Quart Doi Nhan Dan), the Vietnamese Communist equivalent of the U.S. armed forces newspaper, Stars & Stripes. The article, entitled “Big Victory, Gigantic Task,” was meant as a primer for the officers and men of the Viet Cong and the NVA. Radio Hanoi broadcast the full text. The CIA translated and distributed the article through its public subsidiary, the Foreign Broadcasting Information Service. Giap cited the fighting along the DMZ and in the Central Highlands as principal examples of Hanoi’s strategy at work.
When William Westmoreland’s preconceptions were challenged, he paid as little heed to his enemies as he did to Krulak and York and other would-be helpmates. It has been a historical characteristic of generals like Westmoreland that whatever they are given—keen soldiers, innovative weapons, timely intelligence, discerning counsel, published primers on an opponent’s strategy—they will waste. They expect their enemies to behave stupidly, and they perceive their own behavior as farsighted generalship. Westmoreland had disposed of the “border battles” in his mind before the publication of Giap’s article. During a background session with the press at his Saigon headquarters in the latter half of August 1967, he claimed to have inflicted so much damage on his opponents that “major efforts” by the Viet Cong and the NVA “are now largely limited to the periphery of South Vietnam.”
A reporter took issue with him. “The enemy has pulled us to the borders and is bleeding us,” the reporter said.
“He has not pulled us to the bord
ers,” Westmoreland replied. “Rather, he can only mount large actions from the borders. … We are bleeding him a great deal more than he is bleeding us.”
The question of who was bleeding whom soon became still more definitively settled in Westmoreland’s mind. The public affairs section of his headquarters kept a record of his background briefings for the newsmen. The briefings reflect his thinking well, because he spoke informally, there was give and take, and what he had to say was no more optimistic than the content of his classified reports. He was, in fact, more cautious with the newsmen than he was with the president in announcing the approach of the all-important breakthrough, the “crossover point,” in his war of attrition. The crossover point was the moment when the machine would start to kill Viet Cong and NVA troops faster than replacements could be recruited in the South or sent down from the North, a kind of crossing of the bar toward enfeeblement and defeat for the Vietnamese Communists. When Westmoreland had flown home at the end of April for a White House meeting to present the case for his Minimum Essential and Optimum forces, he told the president that “it appears that last month we reached the crossover point in areas excluding the two northern provinces.” When a reporter asked at the end of June if the crossover point was approaching, Westmoreland said he thought it had “perhaps been reached but frankly we just don’t know.” During the background briefings in the latter half of August the general was more positive but remained careful on this issue. Communist “armed strength is falling,” he said, “not spectacularly and not mathematically provable, but every indication suggests this. … There is evidence that we may have reached the crossover point.” Three months later, in the middle of November 1967, William Westmoreland had the mathematical proof that he had sent his enemy crossing over to perdition.
These November briefings, the most elaborate of the war, were held at “Pentagon East,” the neatly laid-out complex of two-story prefabricated metal office buildings, air-conditioned for 4,000 officers and enlisted staff, that Westmoreland had recently opened as his new headquarters near Tan Son Nhut. The newsmen were briefed by Westmoreland, by his assistant chiefs of staff for intelligence and operations, and by a colonel from the intelligence section who specialized in enemy morale. What they and Westmoreland said could be attributed, as was the custom, to U.S. military officials.
The president had ordered the briefings as the overture to a public relations campaign. Domestic support for the war was being undermined by the pathos of American soldiers and Marines dying on ridges in the rain forest of nowhere and amid bomb-scarred rice fields and the ruins of thatch-and-mud-wattle hamlets in which no American would want to live, dying for no visible purpose and with no conclusion in sight. Opinion polls showed that by late October 1967, the number of voters who wanted to pull out of Vietnam had doubled from 15 to 30 percent. Johnson, who was being reminded of how quickly the public had turned against the Korean War, was seriously concerned. The minority who opposed the war on moral grounds had also grown large enough to mount fearsome protests. Fifty thousand demonstrators marched on the Pentagon on October 21, 1967. McNamara had watched from a special command post on the roof, listening to the chants of “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today!” He was not accustomed to mobs, and the experience had further frayed his nerves.
Acheson and the other Wise Men advised the president to launch the public relations campaign. They felt that if he could impart to the public the progress they had learned of in the secret briefings, he would be able to slow down the erosion of support. The president’s appointments secretary, who kept the record of the Wise Men’s meeting, summed up the advice of McGeorge Bundy, currently president of the Ford Foundation and a member of the group: “Emphasize the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ instead of battles, deaths, and danger.”
Westmoreland didn’t have to lie to help the president. In a celebrated libel case after the war, the general sued CBS for accusing him of conspiring to deceive the president on the strength of the enemy. The general did not win his libel suit, but he did not conspire either. As Vann explained to Ellsberg, “It was massive self-delusion.” In the pattern of his predecessor, Paul Harkins, Westmoreland and the military system of which he too was so representative had foreordained his conquest when Johnson told him in July 1965 that he could have his first 200,000 American troops. He presided over the same self-fulfilling process with the same freedom from doubt that Harkins exhibited, sending home or drumming into line anyone who seemed to be predicting rain for the parade. When his intelligence chief in the spring of 1967, Maj. Gen. Joseph McChristian, informed him that he was underestimating the enemy in the South by a couple of hundred thousand, he replaced McChristian with another intelligence chief who thought like Westmoreland. When the CIA’s specialist on the Viet Cong, Samuel Adams, a descendant of the Adamses of the Revolution, sought to raise an alarm that summer and fall, Westmoreland had him muffled as well. The general’s staff officers manipulated body counts and kill ratios and reports of desertion and falling morale among the enemy to gradually compile these proofs of imminent victory he now displayed to the newsmen in these November briefings.
The general was especially proud, when describing his accomplishment, of the management skill he had shown in building so many ports, airfields, POL tank farms, and arsenals throughout South Vietnam, “the physical infrastructure that was required in this underdeveloped country.” Westmoreland dwelt on the “logistic island concept” he had designed in locating his major depots in the Saigon area and at Cam Ranh Bay, Qui Nhon, and Da Nang. Although the construction program was still incomplete, in two short years “the support base … has been capitalized,” he said. His staff had prepared a billboard row of multicolored charts to assist him as he briefed. One chart he pointed to illustrated how his port capacity had sextupled from five deep-draft unloading berths in September 1965 to thirty-two by September 1967. On another chart he turned to, the bar graphs representing airfields rose from twenty-two, three of them jet-capable, to sixty-eight, including eight jet bases, over the same two years. He had fallen somewhat but not too far behind in the three-phase plan he had submitted to McNamara and the president in July 1965. He explained that only since the fall of 1966, when his force reached 350,000 Americans, had he possessed “enough troops and had the physical infrastructure and logistics … to progressively apply pressure” on the enemy.
The charts kept by Harkins’s intelligence section had proved how the strength of the Viet Cong withered once his war of attrition got going full-bore in mid-1963, the ranks of the guerrillas falling from a peak of 124,000 men in January 1963 to possibly as low as 102,000 by early that summer. The single year of pressure since the autumn of 1966 was having a similar effect on the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army of Westmoreland’s war. He pointed to other multicolored bar graphs on what he called his “attrition charts.” Viet Cong and NVA killed in action had more than doubled since 1965 and since 1966 had increased again by half. During the April-through-October monsoon season of 1966 the average monthly count of bodies had been 4,903. The average had risen to 7,315 bodies a month for the rainy season of 1967. This attainment of the crossover point was inexorably draining away the fighting power of the Vietnamese Communists. One of Westmoreland’s charts traced their decline from a pinnacle of 285,000 men in South Vietnam during the third quarter of 1966 to a total current strength of 242,000. Harkins had thought that the morale of the Viet Cong was deteriorating under the hammering he was giving them and that many of the Communist soldiers were sick and hungry. His successor had identical thoughts. Some of the Viet Cong and NVA units in the Central Highlands “are almost starving to death,” Westmoreland said, “and even just north of Saigon, the units in War Zone D are having rice problems.” Of the 163 Main Force Viet Cong and NVA battalions, almost half, fully 76, were “not combat-effective” from the combined impact of casualties, bad morale, desertion, hunger, and disease.
The pacification war was also being won as Harkin
s had won his. The Vietnamese peasant, Harkins’s “common man of the Orient,” ever respectful of the strong, had once more looked about him, observed who was winning, and was changing sides. Komer had obtained the proof this time with a computer. He had put together an elaborate procedure, called HES for Hamlet Evaluation System, that involved the filling out and filing of many thousands of computer-programmed forms every month. The computer scanned the forms and announced who controlled each hamlet.
Komer was, like Krulak, too canny a man to remain forever stupid about the war. Years later he was to write a perceptive study of what went wrong, aptly entitled Bureaucracy Does Its Thing. At this time, however, he was caught up in the hubris that McNamara had formerly personified. He sat in the briefing room lending credibility as Westmoreland informed the newsmen what this “scientifically developed” with “certain very precise criteria … and … automated” HES had discovered. The Viet Cong controlled a mere 17 percent of the population. Another 16 percent were “in the contested category.” So 67 percent of the estimated 16.9 million people in South Vietnam were living under the control of the Saigon government in the cities and in “relatively secure” hamlets in the countryside. Harkins had claimed in 1963 that 67 percent of the rural population were secured in Saigon’s strategic hamlets. When Vann described HES in a letter to a friend who was then teaching at the University of Denver, Vincent Davis, Davis wrote back that HES would undoubtedly become “the body count of pacification.”
The recurrence of this apparently magical 67 percent was and was not a coincidence. Whether the men who ran this system had at their disposal staff officers with adding machines and pencils or civilian consultants with academic pedigrees and computers, those who served them knew what they wanted, and the answer always came out as they desired. The wish-think that drove the pencil programmed the computer too.