Speaking at Johns Hopkins University on April 7, the President declared that the United States was ready for “unconditional discussions” leading toward a negotiated peace. The address was carried around the world by the U.S. Information Agency, and many of its details sounded new and exciting. He proposed that the nations of Southeast Asia, including North Vietnam, join in a crash Marshall Plan, and he said, “For our part, I will ask Congress to join in a billion-dollar American investment in this effort as soon as it is under way.” U.S. farm surpluses would be sent to hungry Asians. He would “shortly name a special team of outstanding, patriotic, distinguished Americans” to guide the United States in all this. An end to the Vietnam War would, of course, be “necessary for final success. But we cannot and must not wait for peace to begin this job.” It was all very sensible. It made-Asia sound like central Texas.
David Wise’s suspicious article was written in the aftermath of this speech, when many flaws in the President’s proposition had become apparent. His proposal for truce discussions did have a condition, after all; he ruled out participation by the Viet Cong, which guaranteed Hanoi’s rejection of it. Nothing more was heard about the billion-dollar commitment by the United States or the offer of U.S. surplus crops, and the panel of distinguished Americans was never chosen. Within a month what had appeared to be an imaginative approach to the problems of Southeast Asia had taken on the aspect of a publicity stunt. Not only had the President failed to follow through on any part of it; he was showing his real Asian policy in ever more vigorous prosecution of what was fast becoming a major American war.
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The first six weeks of Rolling Thunder had been a total failure. Bombing hadn’t brought the enemy to his knees, to the negotiating table, or even to what the Johnson administration conceived to be his senses. The Viet Cong were as disrespectful of the American flag as ever. The President decided to raise the ante again. In the third week of April he flew to Honolulu for a two-day conference with Ky and Thieu. Afterward McNamara announced that U.S. aid to Saigon in 1965 would jump from 207 million dollars to 330 million. Another 40,000 American soldiers—“grunts,” as they had begun calling themselves—were ordered to Vietnam. Senator Gruening asked Johnson how long winning the war would take, and the President’s answer was six months. Hanoi wouldn’t be able to stand the bombing longer than that, he said; the Viet Cong would be begging MACV for terms before Christmas.
George Ball was deeply troubled. Intelligence, he knew, pointed toward a very different conclusion. John McCone reported that the CIA concluded the bombs were neither crippling Hanoi nor frightening it. Instead the raids were strengthening the hand of the hard-liners there. One North Vietnamese regiment had already been identified in South Vietnam, and a second was forming at the border. McCone told the National Security Council that a higher American troop level would be met by increased infiltration from the North; the U.S. troop transports on their way to Saigon would be neutralized before the grunts could even be landed. The Pentagon replied that the Air Force was preparing to commit its eight-engine B-52s, designed for nuclear weapons, and that nobody could stand up to B-52s, Phantoms, and F-111s.
But the air war was no longer the only event, nor even the main event, for the Americans in Vietnam. The U.S. military role there was subtly changing. The objective of the American troops was not limited to the protection of airfields now. The grunts were going to intimidate the guerrillas, persuading them that Uncle Sam meant business. Americans at home were unaware of the shift. Afterward James Reston would comment that the President had escalated the war by stealth. Under Johnson, David Halberstam would write years later, the decision makers in Washington “inched their way across the Rubicon without even admitting it” while the task of their press officers became “to misinform the public rather than inform it.”
The next quantum jump in Washington’s MACV commitment came in July. McNamara returned from his sixth fact-finding tour of Vietnam to report “deterioration” and recommend pledges of more men and more money. Johnson summoned his generals and advisers to Camp David for the weekend of July 17 to find a consensus, though the word, as he used it, had lost its original meaning; for him it had come to mean a ritual of agreement with a decision he had already made—to raise the number of U.S. troops in Vietnam by 50,000. The Joint Chiefs concurred reluctantly. They had hoped for much more; their greatest fear was involvement in partial war. Some of the men at Camp David refused to go along. “Whatever we do,” Clark Clifford said prophetically of the Communists, “they will match it.” Mike Mansfield also objected, telling the President that he was opposed to sending any more troops, that he thought the war would divide the country. The others approved of the President’s judgment; the domino theory, mutual security, containment, and the lesson of Munich still outweighed their misgivings.
After locking up the decision Johnson became furtive. He wanted no further debate. McNamara proposed a reserve call-up of 235,000 men. Instead the President doubled draft calls administratively, raising them from 17,000 to 35,000 a month, on the ground that it would attract less notice than a call-up. He also decided against asking Congress for more money. The new costs could be hidden in the Defense Department’s huge budget. He said he didn’t want to scare anyone, and for a time he considered making public only part of the increase in troops for Vietnam. Douglas Kiker of the Herald Tribune asked him about reports of the expansion. Rumors, Johnson assured him, nothing but rumors; he was just filling out a few units, and accounts predicting that U.S. troops in Vietnam would pursue the Viet Cong aggressively were also untrue. On July 28 he changed his mind and announced the full figure, together with the new, forceful nature of MACV’s mission, thereby alienating Kiker and widening the credibility gap. “We did not choose to be the guardians at the gate,” the President told an estimated 28 million Americans on noonday television, “but there is no one else.”
Distrust was one evil crop he sowed that summer; another was eventual misunderstandings among those he was herding into consensus. The Joint Chiefs thought he was keeping the figures low until he could persuade the civilians that he must go higher; they were counting on an eventual force of a million men. Westmoreland, watching Hanoi reinforce at a faster rate than anyone dreamed possible and sending Washington reports of it, planned on between 640,000 and 648,000 Americans ultimately under his command, confident that when he needed them they would be there. His staff had a contingency plan under which the MACV force level could reach 750,000, a figure which it thought was both sensible and justifiable. But the assumption of the Secretary of Defense was the strangest of all. Years afterward it would still be comprehensible only to those who understood Robert McNamara’s very orderly mind and his belief that disorderly events could be made to conform to it. McNamara arbitrarily decided in 1965 that the war would be over by June 30, 1967, the end of that fiscal year. It would be a perfect time for him, making his budget come out even, and he clung to it even after Westmoreland told him that it was impossible.
In one respect, however, McNamara and the Pentagon were more realistic than the White House. The Joint Chiefs urged the President to raise taxes. Their reasoning had nothing to do with economics. They wanted to see the country on a total war footing, and their textbook solution to civilian apathy was higher taxes. As it happened, the economists in the administration wholeheartedly agreed with them. Gardner Ackley, the Michigan professor who headed Johnson’s Council of Economic Advisers, told the President that the administration could not have three things—prosecution of the war, continuance of his Great Society programs, and the absence of inflation—unless taxes were raised.
But this was the period in which Johnson was passing huge amounts of social legislation through Congress. If the true cost of the war were known, he feared, that process would come to a shuddering stop. “I don’t know much about economics,” he said to those around him, a confession that some of them later thought should be engraved on his tomb, “but I do know the Congres
s. And I can get the Great Society through right now—this is a golden time. We’ve got a good Congress and I’m the right President and I can do it. But if I talk about the cost of the war, the Great Society won’t go through and the tax bill won’t go through. Old Wilbur Mills will sit down there and he’ll thank me kindly and send me back my Great Society, and then he’ll tell me that they’ll be glad to spend whatever we need for the war.”
At this point he made the ultimate blunder. He fooled himself. Everything would come out all right, he reckoned, if victory could be bought cheap. Maybe that would happen; maybe Hanoi and the Viet Cong guerrillas would collapse. In that event, the estimates from the Pentagon would be overestimates. The wish became father to the thought, and when Ackley and his colleagues became insistent about the need for a 3 to 4 percent tax increase, the President responded by staging an extraordinary charade. Key Congressmen and leaders of the business community were invited to the White House and asked for their opinion about higher taxes. They in turn inquired about the cost of the war. He gave them phony figures. There upon they rejected the idea of a tax increase. Johnson then told the Council of Economic Advisers that a tax hike was impossible; he couldn’t get it through Congress. Later Edwin Dale Jr., economic correspondent of the New York Times, called this the most single irresponsible presidential act in his fifteen years of covering Washington.
Johnson’s decision against a tax raise, made in early 1966, was a stupendous blow to fiscal sanity. The federal deficit that year was 9.8 billion dollars. Even deeper vats of red ink lay ahead, for by then the war was costing between two and three billion dollars a month. The estimate the White House was putting out was 800 million dollars, and when Ralph Lazarus of the Business Council said the government’s figure was much too low, he received an indignant call from Abe Fortas, who told him that his calculations were wrong and were upsetting the President. Actually Lazarus was right on target. The war cost 27 billion dollars that year, and the deficit was a catastrophic 23 billion dollars. Johnson’s legerdemain had brought the beginnings of runaway inflation.
Of all the war’s aspects, perhaps the most incomprehensible was the lack of real planning. David Halberstam would later find that “the principals never defined either the mission or the number of troops. It seems incredible in retrospect, but it is true. There was never a clear figure and clear demonstration of what the strategy would be.” All that was apparent in 1965 was that the numbers were going ever higher. U.S. soldiers were pouring into Vietnam in August, and by September it was obvious that the troop level was going to top 200,000.
Checking reports of a battle near Saigon, Peter Arnett of the Associated Press drove out of the capital to find clouds of smoke in three colors, South Vietnamese troops in action—and no enemy. He was told that the soldiers were making a color movie for the United States Information Service, “to show how things really are here.” Arguments over how things really were there were going full blast on all fronts, including the home front. Lyndon Johnson talked at times as though he were responding to a personal challenge from Ho Chi Minh, the two of them striding toward one another in a High Noon confrontation. Terrorist bombings seemed closer to the truth in Saigon, where the list of atrocities lengthened; at dawn on December 4 another truck loaded with 250 pounds of explosives went off, this time outside the Metropole, a hotel for American servicemen; eight were killed and 137 wounded.
Westmoreland’s spokesmen often sounded preoccupied with the daily “body count,” a singularly insensate phrase which was used to describe Viet Cong casualties. To correspondent Neil Sheehan the war was typified by the enormous casualties among innocent civilians resulting from indiscriminate shelling and bombing. Sheehan asked Westmoreland if it didn’t bother him, and the general replied, “Yes, but it does deprive the enemy of the population, doesn’t it?”
In 1965 Americans demonstrating against the war were still a relative oddity in most of the country. Few people wished to be counted in favor of immediate, unconditional U.S. withdrawal from Indochina. Even college faculties, one of the most dovish groups in the country, were to be evenly divided as late as 1967 on the issue. Nevertheless, the vigor of the peace movement was already phenomenal. On the weekend of October 15–16 a crowd estimated at 14,000 paraded down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. Simultaneously another 10,000 marched on the Oakland Army Base—they were turned back at the city line by police—and 2,000 demonstrated in Berkeley. Elsewhere during this “weekend of protest,” as it was heralded, fifty students from the University of Wisconsin tried to arrest the commanding officer at Truax Air Force Base as a “war criminal,” and protesters staged a “lie-in” at a draft board office in Ann Arbor.
The Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade Committee declared:
We demand that no more American youth be sent to fight in a war that is helping neither them nor the Vietnamese people. We have learned lessons from Nazi Germany, and will not go along with the aggressive war-making policies of any government, even if it happens to be our own.
That was reasonable, but elsewhere the rhetoric of the demonstrators, like the war itself, was becoming hateful. It was in Washington the Saturday after Thanksgiving that 20,000 of them first chanted, “Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?” Members of the May 2nd Movement (M2M), named for May 2, 1964, when they first took to the streets to protest American involvement in the war, trooped around the White House carrying Viet Cong flags and advertised “bleed-ins” at which blood was collected for North Vietnamese soldiers. In Berkeley the Free Speech Movement had been succeeded by the Vietnam Day Committee, which twice tried to halt troop trains by occupying cars and sitting on the tracks.
On October 15, 1965, a new feature was introduced in demonstrations when David J. Miller, a twenty-two-year-old volunteer in a relief program, mounted a sound truck in New York, announced, “Instead of the speech I prepared I’ll let this action speak for itself”—and held a match to his draft card. Miller was arrested a few weeks later, but burning Selective Service cards enjoyed a brief vogue, despite congressional action on August 31 making it a federal offense punishable by a $10,000 fine or five years in jail. Acts of self-immolation continued to be the ultimate protest; a Quaker outside the Pentagon and a Catholic relief worker outside the United Nations turned themselves into human torches.
Counterpickets from the American Nazi Party carried jerricans and placards reading, “Free Gas for Peace Creeps.” As usual, nobody wanted any part of them. The tone of most antiprotest protests was relatively mild. A girl in New York carried a sign reading, “I Wish I Had a Draft Card.” Earnest demonstrations were organized by the Young Americans for Freedom, the American Legion, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “Bomb Hanoi” was the most belligerent sentiment on signs of most of them. Placards at a typical march in Florida read, “We Love America,” “Love Our Country,” “My Country—Right or Wrong,” “Will We Let Them Bury U.S.?” and “No Glory Like Old Glory.” Bob Hope told one audience that “If we ever let the Communists win this war, we are in great danger of fighting for the rest of our lives and losing a million kids.” That was an extravagant statement, but it was hardly in the same category with accusing the President of murdering children.
The gravest charges lodged by those favoring the war were suggestions that the other side was disloyal. “We won’t creep around in the dark with candles like these traitors do,” said the police chief of Charlestown, West Virginia. “We’ll march at high noon and let free people fall right in and march behind us.” Some newspaper accounts of peace vigils in 1965 were inclined to hint broadly at Communist participation, and the FBI, which like Hope was shedding its nonpartisan reputation, virtually credited all such protests to the Kremlin. A government report said: “Control of the anti-Viet Nam movement has clearly passed from the hands of the moderate elements who may have controlled it at one time into the hands of the Communists and extremist elements who are openly sympathetic to the Viet Cong and openly hostile to the United States.”
In fact the reverse was true. Despite the inflammatory language and provocative behavior of individual antiwar militants, each demonstration tended to be more respectable than the last. Middle-class conservative housewives and even servicemen in uniform were joining the movement. So, increasingly, were celebrities who felt a pull opposite to Bob Hope’s. When stop-the-bombing marchers formed under cloudless skies in Washington on November 27, their number included, in addition to Norman Thomas and James Farmer, such strangers to political action as Dr. Benjamin Spock, cartoonist Jules Feiffer, novelist Saul Bellow, sculptor Alexander Calder, and author Michael Harrington.
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That autumn dispatches from Vietnam reported that famous American military units were being mauled in Vietnam. It was the 101st Airborne Brigade at An Khe in September, the Green Berets at Plei Me in October, and, in November, the 1st Cavalry Division in the Ia Drang Valley. The encounter at Ia Drang, a week before the stop-the-bombing march in Washington, was of special significance; like the Viet Cong offensive the previous spring and the Tet offensive of early 1968, it was a turning point in the war. Troopers of the 1st Cav, pursuing enemy detachments in the aftermath of the Plei Me engagement, met stiff resistance in the valley, near Chupong Mountain, seven miles from the Cambodian border and two hundred miles north of Saigon in Vietnam’s central highlands. This time the Americans faced not Viet Cong guerrillas, but the North Vietnamese 66th Regiment.
The 66th, an elite unit of the North Vietnamese army, faced a severe test. The 1st Cav was something new in military history, a heliborne division, equipped to take maximum advantage of superior American firepower. The tactics of the Communists, who knew all about the battlefield weapons designed by inventive Americans, called for grappling with the grunts at the closest range, hand to hand if possible, but at most within thirty-four yards, thus nullifying U.S. artillery and tactical air support.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 158