Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam 1945-1995

by James S. Olson

  On 1946 Kennedy ran for Congress from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Running as a “fighting conservative,” he was easily elected. In 1952 he won a Senate seat from Massachusetts and set his sight on the presidency, the ultimate prize. Between 1952 and 1960, he attacked tasks that enhanced his national reputation. Most important was that in an era suspicious of ideology, Kennedy had a voting record that was certainly not liberal and not exactly conservative. He did not want to alienate potential presidential support with an unwise Senate vote.

  If any philosophy guided Kennedy’s actions, it was a belief in the need to demonstrate courage. He lived in pain. Addison’s disease struck him in the late 1940s, and this adrenal deficiency made him susceptible to infections. In 1954 and again in 1955 he underwent serious spinal operations. There were also bouts with anemia, allergies, and various other illnesses. “At least one-half of the days that he spent on this earth were days of intense physical pain,” according to his brother Bobby. But Jack seldom complained and tried not to allow a fragile body to circumscribe his life. In fact, he reacted to physical limitations by emphasizing the need to live a physically challenging life. To impress Kennedy, one associate learned, you had to “show raw guts, fall on your face now and then. Smash into the house once in a while going after a pass. Laugh off twisted ankles or a big hole torn in your best suit.” As president, Kennedy was determined to show raw guts. Robert Frost, the poet, described Kennedy as “young ambition eager to be tried.”

  Along with courage, Kennedy adopted a locker-room sense of manliness. He enjoyed the company of men, the talk of politics, power, and women. Women—like wars—were things to be won. Like his father, Kennedy regarded sexual conquests as a sign of manhood. During his Washington years he moved from one affair to the next. He did not even bother to learn the names of his one-night stands, referring to them by the generic names of “Kiddo” or “Sweetie.” One woman found him to be “as compulsive as Mussolini. Up against the wall, Signora, if you have five minutes, that sort of thing. He was not a cozy, touching sort of man. In fact he’d been sick for so long that he was sort of touch-me-not.” Another woman recalled that for Kennedy, “Sex was something to have done, not to be doing.”

  Walt W. Rostow, a member of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, was one of the “best and brightest” who led the United States into the Vietnam War. (Courtesy, Library of Congress)

  The people who came to Washington to join the administration personified the Kennedy mystique: money, power, courage, sensuality, and brains. The first American Kennedys were lace-curtain Irish who despised the origins of the Brahmin elite but in later generations aped its trappings. Critics quipped that if you cut them, the Kennedys would bleed “Irish green.” What Joe Kennedy struggled for all his life was acceptance, and, with John in the White House, the family had it. The Kennedys surrounded themselves with glamorous, talented people— athletes and astronauts, Silver Star and Congressional Medal of Honor winners, Rhodes scholars, Nobel laureates, all-stars, and prizewinning writers. The Kennedys made winning—in bed, in battle, and in boardrooms—a way of life.

  For secretary of state, Kennedy turned to David Dean Rusk. Cherokee County, Georgia, was a world away from the rocky beaches of Cape Cod. The Rusks were redneck dirt farmers. Dean was, in their own words, “quick”—smart but not a “smart-aleck,” soft-spoken but blessed with the tenacity of a pit bull. They wanted him to go to school, perhaps to be a teacher or a country lawyer. Fate rescued Rusk. During his senior year at Davidson College in North Carolina he won a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford University. From the vantage point of the State Department, Rusk watched Hitler run over Europe and he vowed never to commit the sin of “appeasement.” Rusk joined the army in 1942 and served under “Vinegar” Joe Stillwell in the China-Burma theater. With his combat experience in Asia and the prestige of the Rhodes scholarship, Rusk was named an assistant secretary of state in 1950, a post he kept until 1952, when he became president of the Rockefeller Foundation. Bearing names like Rhodes, Stillwell, and Rockefeller on his resume, Rusk attracted the attention of the Kennedys.

  From the very beginning Rusk had no doubts about Ho Chi Minh or the war. It was part of a global communist conspiracy, not a civil war. Known as “Buddha” because of his reticence to speak out in general meetings, Rusk was the hardest of the hard-liners, and even in retirement he was unrepentant. The American commitment in Vietnam had been “honorable and necessary. Our only mistake was withdrawing when we did.”

  Equally hard-line was Walt W. Rostow. A renowned economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rostow began advising Kennedy on foreign affairs in 1958. Two years later his book The Stages of Economic Growth made him the premier expert on Third World modernization. The Kennedys doted on intellectuals with well-received books, and in 1961 the new president appointed Rostow as deputy special assistant for national security affairs. Rostow believed that modernization creates economic and social dislocations that can render a developing country vulnerable to communist insurgency. He suggested for South Vietnam a dual strategy. The United States should use military force to cut off the Vietcong from their supply sources in North Vietnam, China, and the Soviet Union. Rostow was an early advocate of large-scale bombing of North Vietnam. And at the same time the United States should help accelerate modernization, to push South Vietnam through the stages of development until a modern economy emerged. Communism would then have no appeal.

  Six years later Rostow was still in his ivory tower. At a 1967 briefing with John Paul Vann, a retired lieutenant colonel and Vietnam veteran who was heading up the army’s pacification program, Rostow asked Vann whether he agreed that the “war would be over in six months.” Privately a critic of Rostow, Vann laughingly replied, “Oh hell no, Mr. Rostow. I’m a born optimist. I think we can hold out longer than that.” Rostow was not amused. The briefing ended. For the rest of his life Rostow remained convinced that the United States had failed in Vietnam only because not enough firepower was applied.

  No less confident was Robert S. McNamara, Kennedy’s secretary of defense. With a degree from Berkeley and a Harvard MBA, McNamara was one of the famous “whiz kids,” moving rapidly through management ranks at Ford Motor Company, where he became president in 1960 at the age of forty-four. Possessing a keen, analytical mind and unbounded faith in technology, computers, and systems management, McNamara thought there was no way that a fourth-rate country like North Vietnam could stand up against the American miracle. On his first trip to South Vietnam in 1961, McNamara made up his mind quickly when he could not find a cold drink. Vietnam was a primitive, place. “North Vietnam will never beat us,” he said. “They can’t even make ice cubes.”

  McNamara assumed both logistical and operational control over the war, establishing strategic goals and objectives, selecting technologies, and, with an army of programmers, accountants, and statisticians measuring progress. Death and victory were matters of calculus. McNamara did not have the ideological fervor of Rusk or the intellectual paraphernalia of Rostow, but he had their faith in American power—it was only a matter of time before the “superior system prevails.” During that 1961 visit to Saigon, McNamara revealed his faith to Frederick Nolting, the American ambassador to South Vietnam. “Fred,” he said, “anything you want in the way of instruments, gadgets, or material, we can provide... Don’t hesitate to ask for it.”

  General Maxwell Taylor, another hawk in the administration, was a Missouri native who had graduated from West Point in 1922. Taylor was the father of airborne warfare. He was with the 82nd Airborne Division in North Africa and Sicily and parachuted into France in command of the 101st Airborne Division on D-Day. Between 1945 and 1949 Taylor was the commandant of West Point, and when the Korean War broke out he took over the Eighth Army. He became chief of staff of the army and remained there until his retirement in 1959. But he was a frustrated chief of staff. The New Look military was good for the air force and navy, which could deliver nuclear warheads, but
bad for the army, which became a military stepchild. The New Look, for Taylor at least, was pure folly, forcing the United States to resort to nuclear terror every time a political or military crisis developed somewhere in the world. Instead, Taylor pushed a military policy he defined as “flexible-response.” Nuclear weapons should be available for reacting to a nuclear attack, but a strong, well-equipped army and Marine Corps should be available for conventional threats. The president should also have a counterinsurgency option to respond to guerrilla wars and political uprisings where conventional forces were inappropriate.

  Taylor’s theory became a best-seller in his 1959 book The Uncertain Trumpet. Here was a general with a well-received book—perfect for the Kennedys. The president in 1961 appointed Taylor as his military adviser and in 1962 named him chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. The Kennedys found Taylor brilliant and reassuring, a fount of military wisdom who could be trusted to make wise, tough decisions. Attorney General Robert Kennedy named his second son Robert Maxwell Taylor Kennedy.

  Finally, there was McGeorge Bundy. A descendant of the aristocratic Lowell family of Massachusetts on his mother’s side, Bundy was born in Boston in 1919. Brilliant, caustic, and intolerant of lesser minds, Bundy graduated from Yale in 1940, and the Yale yearbook commented, “This week passed without Mahatma Bundy making a speech.” After spending World War II in the army as a planner, Bundy returned to Harvard as a Junior Fellow. Without a Ph.D. or ever having taken a graduatelevel political science course, Bundy was given tenure as a Harvard government professor. In 1953, at the age of thirty-four, he became the dean of arts and sciences at Harvard. Bundy was the lone Republican in his family, but he had earned Kennedy’s respect in the late 1950s for his sheer brilliance. Of Bundy, Kennedy once said, “You can’t beat brains.” When Kennedy offered him the position of deputy undersecretary of state for administration, Bundy turned it down, refusing, he said, to leave Cambridge where he was a dean to go to Washington to be a dean. Bundy then turned down the appointment of assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. Thereupon the president asked Bundy to come to the White House as special assistant to the president for national security affairs. Bundy accepted.

  The Kennedy administration was caught up in a postwar assertiveness that intoxicated American culture. Kennedy’s advisers represented the essence of American power: the foundations, universities, corporations, and military. They had gotten their first taste of leadership in World War II—the great triumph of American money, technology, organization, and will. They remembered the malaise of the Great Depression and contrasted it to the euphoria of the war, with its missionary zeal, national unity, unprecedented prosperity, and overpowering sense of virtue. During World War II the good guys fought the bad guys and the good guys won. The United States became the leading economic and military force in the world. There seemed nothing that American power could not achieve. Communists, not fascists, were the new embodiment of evil. The United States would provide the money, the leadership, and the technology to defeat the threat.

  Back in the late 1940s and early 1950s the United States had been drawn to Indochina by the fear of monolithic communism as well as by a concrete economic need to preserve Southeast Asia as a capitalist bastion. But during the Kennedy presidency those concrete economic and strategic interests acquired a new ideology of tough optimism. There was one answer for world problems: Let American virtue define the moral issues and let American power resolve them. The United States should invest resources and apply power until the Vietnamese communists reached their breaking point, just as Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo had reached theirs.

  Yet confidence of this kind was not universal within the administration. Debate over Vietnam started soon after the inauguration. Hardliners wanted victory. General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1961, urged Kennedy to “grind up the Vietcong with 40,000 American ground troops... grab‘em by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow.” McGeorge Bundy was just as adamant. He urged Kennedy to attack the Vietcong—and if necessary North Vietnam—with an array of conventional weapons, including ground troops and strategic bombing. Rostow believed in Taylor’s concept of flexible response and wanted to try it out: “It is somehow wrong to be developing these capabilities but not applying them in a crucial theater,” he told Kennedy, “in Knute Rockne’s old phrase, we are not saving them for the junior prom.” George Ball, on the other hand, counseled caution. The new undersecretary of state for economic affairs, Ball had undergraduate and law degrees from Northwestern. After spending World War II in the Lend-Lease Program, he had become director of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey in London. Ball concluded that massive bombing of Germany had only marginally affected economic production while stiffening German resistance. In the early 1950s Ball was counsel to the French embassy in Washington, and he listened to the French debate about Indochina. From the beginning of his tenure at the State Department, Ball argued that the Diem regime was corrupt, that a land war in Asia was not in the interests of the United States, and that the objective of creating a viable, democratic South Vietnam was impossible. Bundy could barely tolerate Ball, referring to him as the “Theologian.” At a 1961 meeting with Kennedy, Ball predicted that the introduction of American troops would create its own momentum; within “five years there will be 300,000 American soldiers fighting in Vietnam.” Kennedy laughed, “George, you’re crazier than hell.”

  The deliberations over the introduction of United States combat troops in Vietnam took place within the context of a major strategic debate on the joint chiefs of staff. Curtis LeMay, air force chief of staff, believed in air power as the most effective military asset in the modern world. Like Admiral Arthur Radford, who chaired the joint chiefs during the early 1950s, and promoted the “New Look” defense policy, LeMay remained convinced that strategic air power had played the key role in defeating the Axis powers during World War II. He ridiculed the findings of George Ball and the United States Strategic Bombing Survey and insisted that an effective strategic bombing campaign in Vietnam would bring Ho to his knees. Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the joint chiefs, disagreed. During the 1950s, Taylor had opposed Radford’s single-minded faith in air power and accepted the conclusions of the Bombing Survey and believed instead in “flexible response.” According to Ball, Radford and LeMay missed the point. They disagreed on how to employ military assets in Vietnam, but both believed in the merits of a military solution there— that American technology and military power would inevitably prevail. It was inconceivable to them that Vietnam could succeed against the same American military machine that had crushed Germany and Japan. Ball correctly perceived that the complex political problems in Vietnam transcended a military solution. The United States, he feared, would funnel its military resources into a political black hole.

  The president was caught in the middle. In McGeorge Bundy’s description of the first few months of the Kennedy administration, “At this point we were like the Harlem Globetrotters, passing forward, behind, sidewise, and underneath. But nobody has made a basket yet.” In April the CIA invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs ended in disaster. Fidel Castro easily captured the exile army and enjoyed a propaganda orgy. The incident sent Kennedy into a depression, even though the invasion plan had been put together in the Eisenhower years. Great presidents deal toughly with crises like wars and depressions; they do not conduct botched invasions. Kennedy was also afraid that the Soviet Union would misread the Bay of Pigs and decide that he could be bluffed. He needed more information about South Vietnam, but in the meantime Kennedy decided in May 1961 to send another five hundred American advisers. That brought the American contingent to 1,400 men. But Kennedy also knew that five hundred more Americans in South Vietnam were not going to resolve the crisis. He decided to send Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson on a fact-finding mission.

  Johnson arrived in Saigon on May 10, 1961. Tall, loud, and gregarious, Johnson could not have been more diffe
rent from the short, reserved, and soft-spoken Ngo Dinh Diem. Johnson was raised in the democracy of central Texas, where politicians sold their souls for votes; Diem was a mandarin who expected deference from constituents. But the two men hit it off. Johnson stayed in Saigon four days and treated it like a Texas political campaign, full of official breakfasts, lunches, dinners, press conferences, meetings, speeches, and “pressing the flesh” events. The Vietnamese did not know what to make of Johnson. At six feet, four inches, he towered over them, and the muggy heat turned him into a fountain of sweat. In the back seat of the limousine, Johnson had three dozen pressed white shirts. He would come to a stop and plunge into the crowd, grabbing the “praying palms” of onlookers, who were using the traditional greeting of pressed palms and a bow. Johnson kept wanting to know, “Who the hell are they praying to?” By the time he finished shaking hands, he was drenched in sweat and would jump back into the limousine and change shirts, only to start all over again at the next stop.

  The crowds warmed to this sweaty American giant; they laughed when he hovered over them, dripping sweat and shaking their hands. Spectators who had managed to shake his hand formed Shake the Hand of Lyndon Johnson Clubs. Johnson liked the Vietnamese, too, even though he had a hard time pronouncing their names. At a luncheon where Vietnamese guests were wearing name tags, Johnson kept mispronouncing the most common surname “Nguyen,” calling people Mr. or Mrs. “Nu-guyen.” When an aide told him the name was pronounced “Win,” Johnson remarked, “We’ll never lose the war. Everyone in the whole goddamn country is named ‘win.’” At a farewell banquet, Johnson reiterated American support and remarked to Diem, “Your people, Mr. President, returned you to office for a second term with 91 percent of the votes. You are not only the George Washington, the Father of your country, but the Franklin D. Roosevelt as well.” Privately, Johnson was much more pragmatic. To the journalist Stanley Karnow he remarked, “Shit, man, he’s the only boy we got out there.” He told Kennedy that the United States should continue its military support and launch a “New Deal for South Vietnam” so that economic development could undercut the appeal of the Vietcong.