by Conrad Black
In the off-year elections, the Republicans picked up 47 congressmen, three senators, and eight governorships, including Ronald Reagan in California, where he defeated the incumbent, Edmund G. Brown (who had ridden the Cuban Missile Crisis to victory over Nixon four years before), by over a million votes. Nelson Rockefeller became only the second person (after Thomas E. Dewey) to win three consecutive four-year terms as governor of New York. By 1967, the national atmosphere was of endless violence, demonstrations, mobs screaming obscenities at the police, the ingratitude of students and finally favored African Americans, and, overhanging everything, a war that the country seemed not to be winning and that the enemy seemed to have no interest in ending, even on favorable terms. All over the world, there were anti-American demonstrations in front of U.S. embassies and burnings of American flags. It was hard to reconcile with the long-standing American self-image of God’s own country, the envy and pride of all the world. Not knowing what to do next, Lyndon Johnson kept raising the draft calls for Vietnam.
Johnson had, with great courage and legislative skill, taken a giant step in the emancipation of the former slaves, but in doing so, he had forfeited the support of the white majorities in the South, which had voted for the Democrats since that party was founded by Jefferson and Madison 175 years before. And the white liberal majority that had been mobilized by the nonviolent protests of Martin Luther King, crystallized in the parliamentary genius of Lyndon Johnson, were wary of racial violence and rising crime rates. Johnson had been fiscally responsible and there was not a debt problem and, as always, war stimulated economic activity.
4. STRATEGIC REASSESSMENT
Robert McNamara had persuaded the president of the wisdom of his idea of simply allowing the Soviet Union to reach parity with the United States in nuclear throw weights and launch vehicles, even as America streaked ahead of Russia to the moon. The defense secretary believed that this would encourage substantive arms-control negotiations, and when he referred to the nuclear balance he proudly called America’s declining level of superiority in numbers and deliverable destructive capacity of nuclear weapons a beneficial development, even an achievement. Eisenhower’s policy of shrinking the personnel and devoting most of the military budget to the achievement of ever more sophisticated technology in delivery systems and invulnerability of retaliatory power, while capping defense spending at quite affordable levels, had been turned upside down. As if the bitter fruit of the Kennedy inaugural promises of burden-bearing and indiscriminate defense of the barricades of freedom were to send huge draftee armies into quagmires at the ends of the earth while America’s city cores burned, it all seemed to have been a terrible wrong-turning. And MacArthur’s view that draftee armies cannot be asked to give their lives for anything less than victory, in anything less than a high and direct national interest rose up like a cobra’s head over the whole harsh national public policy debate.
Despite McNamara’s generous gift of nuclear parity to the Soviet Union, there was no dividend in enhanced arms-control discussions. The Kremlin planned to blink momentarily in incredulity as it sped past the U.S. and became the world’s greatest power. Robert McNamara, like most of the Kennedy group, as the evidence poured in of their miscalculations, bailed out, leaving their president to face the discordant music in ever greater solitude. McGeorge Bundy, like McNamara himself, and the lesser claque of bright and best young men who had so dazzled the virtual frontiersman and alumnus of Southwest Texas State Teachers’ College, Lyndon Johnson, scurried out the back door of the White House into the long grass and, in many cases, into the burgeoning antiwar movement.
In June 1967, as it became clear that Egypt and Syria were about to attack Israel, Israel staged a preemptive strike. It smashed the Egyptian air force, occupied all of Sinai up to the Suez Canal, as it had in the Anglo-French scam of 1956 (Chapter 12), and pushed the Syrians back beyond the Golan Heights. As King Hussein of Jordan was persuaded by Egypt’s Nasser to fly to the aid of what was represented as Egypt’s victory (like Mussolini coming to assist in Hitler’s great victory in the west of 1940), Israel seized all the West Bank of the Jordan River and ended the division of Jerusalem, taking the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. It was a great victory, but Israel became an Alsatian goose, too full of Arabs. It occupied Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, giving Israel in its new borders a population that was only about 60 percent Jewish. Since Israel could not expel the Arabs it governed, there were obvious demographic problems. Further, since the only Palestinians the King of Jordan could now claim to represent were the majority of his own countrymen, he soon handed over (though officially only in 1971) being the spokesman of the Palestinians to the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the disheveled, bewhiskered, incomparably devious, and almost imperishably ubiquitous Yasser Arafat. For all seekers of a reasonable peace, it would prove a very poor trade, from a plucky king to an unmitigated terrorist.
It also opened up a fissure in the ranks of the West. Charles de Gaulle had exited the Algerian War in 1962 and 1963, having to make war also on the fiercest partisans of a French Algeria, led by General Raoul Salan, who went underground but was eventually captured. De Gaulle now appeased the radical Arabs and became something of a hero to Nasser and others, and stirred up resentment against the British and the Americans. He vetoed British entry into the Common Market, made France the first leading Western power to exchange embassies with Communist China, and for good measure visited Canada as an invited state visitor in July 1967, as that country celebrated the centenary of its status as an independent confederation, and urged the French Canadians to secede and set up their own country. Having failed to bring Eisenhower or Kennedy to the virtues of French equality with the Anglo-Saxons in the leadership of the West and, to be fair to him, having failed even to generate a serious, good-faith discussion about reforms to the Western Alliance, he again set out, as he had a quarter-century before, to show what chaos he could provoke. He had lost none of his talent in this regard.
In July 1967, Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin came to the United States and Canada and met with President Johnson at Glassboro, New Jersey. They had far-ranging discussions and seemed to get on well, and there was no doubt that in this first Soviet-American summit meeting since Kennedy underwhelmed Khrushchev at Vienna in 1962, Johnson was well prepared and forceful, but nothing except a brief improvement in ambiance and atmospherics resulted from the talks. Cuba was assisting in pouring drugs into the United States, Ho was prepared to sacrifice his country’s brainwashed manhood to push America out of Vietnam, America was torn by rioting and violence, and one of the leading Republicans in the Senate (George Aiken of Vermont) told Johnson to “declare victory and leave.” The domestic left said of the ambassador in Saigon, Ellsworth Bunker, that they would “blow Ellsworth out of his bunker,” and when LBJ was reported as saying he did not know how to get out of Vietnam, they helpfully replied: “By plane and by boat.”
5. THE EMBATTLED ADMINISTRATION
By the autumn of 1967, the Johnson administration, which had bestrode the world with such unchallenged authority two years before, appeared helpless. Incapable of prosecuting the war to win it or just cutting the painter and going, with no plan to alleviate draft calls and American casualties without “being the first American president to lose a war” (Madison’s War of 1812 was something less than an uncontested triumph), the Johnson administration just floundered. Johnson poured in another 100,000 draftees, as if, with America erupting in antiwar demos in every town and city every week, that would intimidate Ho to throw in the winning hand he believed (correctly if Johnson didn’t play his hand better) that he held.
McNamara, who had been an eager proponent of the war for several years, recognized that the existing policy was not working and in November 1967 recommended to Johnson freezing troop levels, ceasing the of bombing of the North, and handing over the war in as rapid stages as possible to the South Vietnamese. This was a bridge too far for Johnson, wh
o had offered a slightly less obvious victory to Ho Chi Minh a year before and been rebuffed. But McNamara was finished and had lost all faith in what he was and had been doing, and announced his retirement on November 29, 1967. The leader of the opposition within the Democrats, Senator Robert Kennedy, had followed the trajectory of most of the Kennedys: from hawk to dove as the policies they had advocated failed and could be blamed on the hapless inheritor Johnson, who had been conducted into the quagmire by the Kennedy entourage and was now left there to be reviled as an usurper and a Texan oaf. Not since Woodrow Wilson had a president descended the mountain so swiftly and uncomfortably in foreign policy matters (though on the economy, the Depression gave Hoover an even more precipitate sleigh ride).
Johnson brought in to replace McNamara the legendary Washington insider and fixer Clark Clifford. Clifford had been an aide to President Truman, and played a role in encouraging the founding of the State of Israel, probably a role much exaggerated in his memoirs (though he did attract the monumental wrath of the secretary of state, General Marshall). Clifford had well measured the temper of political opinion and was already headed for the exit when he arrived at the Pentagon. Kennedy greeted the announcement of Clifford’s appointment with a comparison of him to “Attila the Hun.” Bobby need not have been so alarmed; Clifford, McNamara, and Kennedy had all been on the same Vietnam treadmill leading from bellicosity to the virtues of placation.
Johnson sent Clifford and General Maxwell Taylor (originator of the now not so sonorous “limited war by limited means for a limited objective”) on a fact-finding mission to Vietnam. They came back still satisfied the U.S. was winning but, according to Clifford, much less convinced that there were any dominoes around to worry about. Johnson had wasted the 15 months since the failure of his Manila peace offer and just produced more of the same that put him deeper down the well. There would have been plenty of time and public support to intensify bombing of the North, dedicate the U.S. effort to closing down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and cleaning out the sanctuaries and supply depots in Cambodia, and training the South Vietnamese how to win the war and equipping them to do so. Westmoreland had effectively shouldered them (ARVN, as the South Vietnamese army was called) aside and underemphasized the Truman and Eisenhower Doctrines’ championship of local self-help.
It would also have been possible to bring in some Nationalist Chinese in noncombat roles to release some South Vietnamese to active duty and some Americans for withdrawal. And it would probably have been possible to move 50,000 more South Koreans to Vietnam and replace them at home with 50,000 Americans, whom the South Korean leadership, the tough General Park Chung Hee, would have been happy to have as insurance along the 38th parallel. With these steps, the United States would have put the North under intolerable pressure from the air, would have strangled the insurrection in the South, and would have been able to withdraw 150,000 Americans fairly quickly, reduce draft calls and casualties, and convince the majority of Americans that the war could end tolerably well and soon. But unlike Lincoln, who read a great deal about war once he was in one, and wrote dozens of insightful orders, Johnson knew nothing about it and was not a wise judge of senior officers. When he did consult General Omar Bradley, Bradley was, as he had been when second-guessing MacArthur in Korea, a pessimist and told Johnson to “lower your sights.”
It had become a strategic impasse that could not continue. As MacArthur had told the Congress 16 years before, “War by its very nature has as its object victory and not prolonged indecision; in war there is no substitute for victory.” Johnson had to produce a believable plan for affordable victory, or let it be known to Hanoi that the U.S. would leave in a cease-fire as long as its prisoners were returned, failing which it would bomb North Vietnam, as was often said in mockery of official braggadocio, “into the Stone Age.” Fight to win or leave at once; anything in between was an illusion, a desecration, and defeat made more unendurable by needless and humiliating prolongation.
In the closing months of 1967, Westmoreland made a number of much-publicized statements of great satisfaction and confidence, and American public opinion did firm up appreciably. It is now known that the battering the North had taken had created deep divisions in its high command, and that the Soviet Union was urging a return to less costly guerrilla war and a policy of agreeing to negotiations and then assuring that they didn’t accomplish anything. On the communist side, all powers, including the North Vietnamese, were happy to go on feeding the slaughter, but in fact it could not be sustained indefinitely. The Americans were closer to victory than they realized. Westmoreland discounted that the NVA-VC could launch a countrywide offensive, and had been suckered to some degree by a decoy action at the northwest outpost of Khe Sanh, where he concentrated heavy forces as the international left, on cue from Hanoi, kept likening it to Dien Bien Phu.
Hanoi proclaimed a cease-fire for the Vietnamese holiday period, which Thieu observed for only 36 hours, but the Americans gave more leave than usual. Westmoreland and his southern corps commander, General Frederick Weyand, did post extra elite forces in and around Saigon on high alert, a most valuable decision. The fabled Tet Offensive began just after midnight in the first hours of January 31, 1968, on all the corps-area military command points and later in the day, after nightfall, on Saigon and many smaller places. The communists targeted especially the Presidential Palace, the U.S. embassy, the ARVN headquarters and other senior command points, and the main radio station. The only one they even managed to enter was the radio station, and they held part of it for six hours, but the lines to the transmission tower on the outskirts were immediately cut, and transmission, under massive security, was resumed at the tower after a brief lapse. The NVA had a recording of Ho proclaiming the liberation of Saigon and calling for the whole population to rise, and they had assumed that large elements of the population would rise. The Vietnamese people had seen and felt the heavy tread of this terrible war ebbing and flowing over them for nearly 30 years, going back to the arrival of the Japanese, and they were not much interested in rising up for or against anyone.
At the national palace and the various military command centers, security quickly overwhelmed the attackers and killed all of them. In the U.S. embassy, the attackers blew a hole in the wall of the compound and 19 sappers entered but could not get into the chancery or outbuildings, and all were killed by sunrise. The initial brunt of most of the fighting outside Saigon was taken by ARVN, who fought quite respectably and were almost nowhere put to rout. The elite Allied units of all nationalities were deployed decisively to the trouble spots in order of need. The fighting continued for several weeks in the first phase, and there were guerrilla activities into the early spring. The greatest individual combat zones were at Hue, the ancient imperial capital, and at Khe Sanh. At Hue, the communists attacked with nearly 10,000 troops and took much of the old walled city, but the South Vietnamese and the Americans hung on in their command headquarters and eventually, after both sides poured in heavy reinforcements, the communists were expelled completely and the South Vietnamese flag raised over the Palace of Perfect Peace in the Citadel. The communists lost about 5,000 combat dead and the Allies about 700, over 500 of them ARVN. Mass graves of about 2,000 people who had been executed in groups were discovered and the precise composition of these grim residues of war have never been determined. There seem to have been some South Vietnamese shooting parties abroad, but most of the deaths were certainly at the hands of the communists, including some of their own agents whom, in the highest Stalinist tradition, they chose to liquidate rather than have their identity unearthed as active, talkative agents.
In the Khe Sanh area, the communists did attack a few days before the Tet Offensive but never got past the perimeter and lost 8,000 dead to about 900 Allies, more ARVN than U.S. In the entire offensive, the North and the VC lost over 45,000 dead and 60,000 wounded (few of whom could return to combat), compared with 9,000 Allied dead and 20,000 wounded, about a third of them American. It was a
great Allied victory and a deadly defeat for Hanoi, but the Americans, who had been flying blind through this whole conflict, forfeited the ability to enlist their own public and sell a coherent narrative of what they were doing and how it was going to end. Robert McNamara was checking out, patting himself on the back for sitting on his hands until the USSR had got upsides in the nuclear competition, and effectively counseling, semi-privately, throwing in the towel on Vietnam. Clifford was coming in having already come to a similar opinion. There was no one in the inner councils of the administration—and Westmoreland was too shaken by the assault, tarnished by his strategic blunders—who could see it for what it could be. Someone who understood war better and knew how to execute a ruse de guerre would have said that overconfident statements by Westmoreland and others had been tactically designed to draw the communists into a trap, that they had taken the bait and been decisively defeated, and that there would now begin a permanent and irreversible drawdown, toward the provision by South Vietnam of the manpower for its own self-defense, like other countries in the region, and toward the all-volunteer armed forces of the United States. Just before Tet, the North Koreans seized an American intelligence ship in international waters, the Pueblo, and the United States was thoroughly embarrassed by one communist puppet state as it was in mortal combat with, it was assumed to be, another.