Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam 1945-1995

by James S. Olson

  When Taylor went to Saigon in 1964, Paul Harkins came home. He retired from the army when he realized that Wheeler was going to get the chairmanship of the joint chiefs. Johnson held a special ceremony at the White House for Harkins and decorated him, but the name “General Blimp” and the phrase “pulling a Harkins” followed him everywhere. He had proclaimed success too many times. Instead of victory, he left behind a quagmire of confusion and bitterness. Harkins’s successor was General William C. Westmoreland. Westmoreland who had punched all the right tickets—West Point graduation in 1936, World War II combat in North Africa, Sicily, France, and Germany, postwar command of the 101st Airborne Division, superintendent of West Point, and secretary to Maxwell Taylor and the joint chiefs. Coming from a distinguished family in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Westmoreland looked every bit the southern gentleman-turned-soldier. He was six feet tall, but his ramrod posture, dark eyebrows, and white hair made him seem taller. A century earlier in Confederate gray, Westmoreland would have been a perfect compatriot for Stonewall Jackson or Robert E. Lee.

  Westmoreland disagreed with proposals to bomb North Vietnam in the absence of a sizable force of American ground troops. Air bases needed protection from Vietcong attacks, and ARVN troops could not be trusted with the job. And if ARVN was tied up defending American air bases, it would not be in the field fighting the Vietcong. It was already hard enough to get South Vietnamese troops out there. The need for defensive perimeters around places like Bien Hoa and Danang would give ARVN commanders another excuse for staying put. ARVN was so laced with corruption and incompetence that it would take years of serious training before it was ready to take on the Vietcong. By that time the United States, with the application of enough firepower, could wipe out the Vietcong as a fighting force, leaving no enemy for ARVN to worry about. As for hearts and minds, Westmoreland looked with contempt on “rice paddy peasants” and believed they would gravitate naturally to whatever government exercised power. With the Vietcong gone, Saigon would be the only nationwide power to which they could turn. What Westmoreland wanted was American ground troops, as many as 200,000 of them. He planned to fight a defensive war for a year or so until he could build the infrastructure to support a major military effort. Once that infrastructure was in place, Westmoreland would unleash the American military on the communists. Through what Westmoreland called “search-and-destroy” missions, American infantry could aggressively seek out the enemy while artillery, armor, bombers, and gunships cut the foe to pieces. According to William DePuy, Westmoreland’s chief of operations, “We are going to stomp them to death.”

  A major policy decision was imminent in Washington. ARVN desertions had reached epidemic levels, exceeding 6,000 people a month in 1964. Politically the Vietcong controlled up to 40 percent of the territory of South Vietnam and more than 50 percent of the people. Early in 1963 the Vietcong had 23,000 troops organized into a hodgepodge of undermanned battalions, companies, platoons, and squads. They also had another 50,000 local self-defense militia troops. By late 1964 all that had changed. Those 23,000 soldiers became 60,000 men organized into seventy-three battalions of six hundred men each. Of those seventy-three battalions, sixty-six were full infantry units and seven were heavy weapons and antiaircraft machine gun battalions. The battalions were organized into regiments complete with communications and engineering units. And behind those 60,000 troops were 40,000 people engaged in full-time support services. Another 100,000 village self-defense forces rounded out the communist order of battle. Vietminh veterans trained the Vietcong well, creating highly motivated soldiers, real “sledge hammer battalions” in the words of Neil Sheehan. Westmoreland was convinced that ARVN would be completely unable to deal with them. “The VC,” he argued, “are destroying battalions faster than they were planned to be organized under the build-up program. . . . The only possible US response is the aggressive employment of US troops together with Vietnamese general reserve forces to react against strong VC/DRV [Vietcong and North Vietnam] attacks.” Only the vaunted American killing machine could handle the Vietcong.

  Most American policymakers believed that the revolt in South Vietnam was directly connected to its support base in North Vietnam and that the United States would have to take the war to Hanoi to achieve a complete victory. Maxwell Taylor, along with Walt Rostow, McGeorge Bundy, and Robert McNamara, called for expansion of the war north of the seventeenth parallel through strategic bombing. The idea was simple: Raise the pain level to the point at which North Vietnam could stand it no longer.

  The Johnson administration’s understanding of the connection between the war in South Vietnam and support in North Vietnam was quite accurate. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s politicians in North Vietnam had debated the question of how much assistance to send south. The debate was inextricably connected to the larger competition between Moscow and Beijing. Under Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union in the early 1960s preached the gospel of peaceful coexistence. North Vietnamese politicians who wanted to focus on building up their own country, as well as military officials worried about a confrontation with the United States, used the Soviet ideology to advocate caution. Their leader was Truong Chinh, a moderate who served as the Marxist theorist in the Lao Dong party and always favored caution and negotiation. But most of the North Vietnamese leadership lacked the prudence of the USSR. So did Mao Zedong, who called for wars of national liberation to overthrow United States influence in the Third World. The bitter anti-American posture of the Chinese encouraged General Tran Van Tra, commander of Vietcong military forces in South Vietnam, together with Le Duan and others in Hanoi’s hierarchy. They wanted a total commitment to destruction of the South Vietnamese regime, expulsion of the United States, and reunification of the country, regardless of the cost. When the Central Committee of the Lao Dong party met in Hanoi in December 1963 to evaluate the situation, the debate continued. If North Vietnam increased its support of the revolution in South Vietnam, it might alienate the Soviet Union and place itself in the Chinese camp, which no Vietnamese politician wanted to do.

  But if North Vietnam did not support the Vietcong, it might never be able to get the United States out of Indochina. The debate continued into the next year. Finally, in a meeting on March 27–28, 1964, Ho Chi Minh called for a unified effort and whatever sacrifice was necessary to bring the revolution in South Vietnam to a successful conclusion. A week later North Vietnam began training northern-born Vietnamese for deployment south.

  Robert McNamara was convinced that “current trends . . . will lead to neutralization at best and more likely to a Communist-controlled state.” He wanted a “tit-for-tat” policy in which the United States made Hanoi suffer for any damage done by the Vietcong. Privately, Johnson referred to the policy as the “titty program.” Johnson’s advisers drafted plans for attacking North Vietnam. A leading figure in the development of those plans was McGeorge Bundy’s older brother William. After graduation from Yale and the Harvard Law School and a stint with the CIA, William Bundy had become a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Kennedy administration. On March 1, 1964, he proposed bombing North Vietnam and mining Haiphong harbor both to stop infiltration of supplies to the Vietcong and to demonstrate that the United States possessed the will to win. Later in the month McGeorge Bundy produced what became known as National Security Adviser Memorandum (NSAM) 288, providing for gradually escalated bombing of military and economic targets in North Vietnam, particularly in response to Vietcong attacks in South Vietnam. NSAM 288 also committed the United States to the survival of an independent noncommunist government in Saigon. It argued that the United States would have to increase its level of military and economic assistance and South Vietnam must prepare for a full-scale war. McGeorge Bundy warned that such military measures “would normally require a declaration of war under the Constitution. But this seems a blunt instrument carrying heavy domestic overtones and above all not suited to the picture of punitive and selective action only.” Bundy urg
ed the president to consider seeking a special congressional resolution supporting limited military action.

  During April and May, the National Security Council, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and MACV in Saigon developed what became known as Operations Plan 37–64. Its objective was “to conduct graduated operations to eliminate or reduce to negligible proportions DRV [Democratic Republic of Vietnam] support of VC [Vietcong] insurgency in the Republic of Vietnam.” The plan involved three projects: military action in Cambodia and Laos to eliminate Vietcong sanctuaries; increased levels of Oplan 34-A attacks on North Vietnamese coastal installations; and South Vietnamese and American strategic bombing of ninety-eight preselected targets in North Vietnam. In his White House office, Walt Rostow, the “Air Marshall,” taped a large map of North Vietnam on the wall and, with the help of econometric models, selected targets for the bombing runs.

  Johnson decided that to deal with the problem on a political level, he would seek a joint congressional resolution “supporting United States policy in Southeast Asia.” Such a resolution would give the administration carte blanche in Indochina, allowing aerial bombardment, intervention in Cambodia and Laos, or any other “tit-for-tat” response that could bring North Vietnam to the negotiating table. It was, in effect, a preemptive declaration of war. William Bundy drafted the resolution, and the administration waited for the right time to submit it to Congress. It did not have to wait long.

  On August 1, 1964, the USS Maddox, an American destroyer, was patrolling within a range of ten to twenty miles off the North Vietnamese coast, collecting electronic data on North Vietnamese radar signals and ship movements. The ship was also monitoring four South Vietnamese gunboats, which the night before had left Danang and attacked North Vietnamese coastal sites as part of Oplan 34-A. North Vietnamese patrol boats approached the Maddox. The Maddox opened fire, and the patrol boats launched several torpedoes. Jets from the USS Ticon-deroga attacked the North Vietnamese ships, damaging all of them. The next day the Maddox was joined by another destroyer, the USS C. Turner Joy. President Johnson ordered the ships to continue their patrols.

  More South Vietnamese gunboats left Danang for Oplan 34-A attacks. On August 4 the Maddox and the C. Turner Joy picked up radio traffic from confused and enraged North Vietnamese naval vessels. Tension was running high on both the Maddox and the Turner Joy. Men on both ships saw blips on the radar they believed represented PT boats, and the sonar man on the Maddox reported underwater noises that he thought to be the sounds of incoming torpedoes. Both ships commenced evasive actions and began firing into the dark at the direction of the radar blips, although they made no visual sightings of North Vietnamese patrol boats. Several hours later, Captain John Herrick, head of the DeSoto Mission on board the Maddox, concluded that there had probably been no attack, that rough seas and atmospheric conditions could have generated spurious radar blips, and that the evasive movements of the ships had created torpedolike sonar sounds. In a cable to the Pentagon, Herrick reported that conclusion. By the time Herrick sent the cable it was too late. The Pentagon and White House became hornets' nests, and Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, Jr., the commander of American naval forces in the Pacific, confirmed to Robert McNamara that a “bona fide ambush has occurred.” The evidence at the time as to whether an attack had really occurred was contradictory, but the Johnson administration decided nonetheless to retaliate. Late that afternoon, the USS Ticonderoga and the USS Constellation sent aircraft to attack torpedo boat bases and oil storage facilities in North Vietnam. While the attack was going on, Johnson spoke live over all three television networks: “Aggression by terror against peaceful villages of South Vietnam,” he said, “has now been joined by open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America.” He reassured the country: “We know, although others appear to forget, the risks of spreading conflict. We seek no wider war.”

  August 1964—The U.S. Navy destroyer U.S.S. Maddox was attacked by torpedoes and gunfire off Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin. (Courtesy, Library of Congress.)

  The next day Johnson met with congressional leaders to explain the air strike and seek their support for the joint resolution William Bundy had drafted. At the meeting Senator Mike Mansfield reminded Johnson of his longstanding opposition to American military involvement in Indochina. Johnson asked Senator William Fulbright, an Arkansas Democrat, to serve as floor manager for the resolution. An old friend and veteran of many Senate battles, Fulbright agreed. Senator George Aiken, a Republican from Vermont, did not like the resolution and told Johnson, “By the time you send it up, there won’t be anything for us to do but support you.” He saw the measure as open-ended permission for Johnson to wage war without a formal declaration. But Johnson gave Mansfield and Aiken what other senators called the “full Johnson”—his arm tightly around their shoulders, his face nose-to-nose with theirs, and his voice pleading, cajoling, begging, whining, promising, and threatening. Before the meeting ended, they agreed to support the resolution.

  At a joint session of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, Senator Wayne Morse, the renegade Democrat from Oregon, wanted to know whether the United States had provoked the North Vietnamese patrol boat attack. Robert McNamara assured him that the “navy played absolutely no part in, was not associated with, was not aware of any South Vietnamese actions, if there were any. . . . This is the fact.” It was, of course, a bald-faced lie. On August 7 the administration submitted to Congress the resolution Bundy had written. Its wording was simple and direct, with enormous potential consequences:

  The congress . . . supports the determination of the President . . . to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the armed forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression. . . . The United States is, therefore, prepared, as the President determines, to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom.

  The House of Representatives passed the resolution by voice vote, but a debate developed in the Senate. George McGovern of South Dakota declared that he did not wish his vote for the resolution “to be interpreted as an endorsement of our long-standing and apparently growing military involvement in Vietnam.” Daniel Brewster of Maryland worried that the resolution might “authorize or recommend or approve the landing of American armies in Vietnam or in China.” The strongest opposition came from Morse and Alaska’s Ernest Gruening. Back in 1954, when John Foster Dulles tried to drum up support for the French, Morse had resisted, asking: “What is it we are going to fight for and to defend? I am a Senator and I don’t know.” Before the floor debate someone in the Pentagon tipped Morse off that DeSoto Missions and Oplan 34-A operations had probably inspired the first attack and that the report of a second attack was questionable. Morse argued that the place to settle the issue “is not by way of the proposed predated declaration of war, giving to the President the power to make war without a declaration of war.” Gruening, a liberal Democrat, called the resolution “a predated declaration of war.” In March he had warned on the Senate floor: “All Vietnam is not worth the life of a single American boy. . . . [The United States] is seeking vainly in this remote jungle to shore up self-serving corrupt dynasties or their self-imposed successors, and a people that has demonstrated that it has no will to save itself.” But a chorus of approval drowned Morse and Gruening. The Senate passed the resolution eighty-eight to two. Later that day Morse predicted, “History will record that we have made a great mistake.” When he heard of his congressional victory, Johnson laughed and told an aide that the wording of the resolution “was like Grandma’s nightshirt. It covers everything.”

  The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, in the short run at least, was a stroke of political genius. The president’s standing in public opinion polls soared. More than anything else, the president wanted to be elected that year in his own right, to occupy the White House on his own mer
its, not on John F. Kennedy's. He wanted to project the image of a wise, thoughtful, and decisive leader, a balance between toughness and moderation. To most Americans, so it seems, the bombing raids on North Vietnam, followed by the president’s stated willingness to go to the negotiating-table, so defined him. Later, when doubts mounted about what had actually happened in the Gulf of Tonkin, Johnson remarked to an associate, “Those dumb stupid sailors were probably shooting at flying fish.”

  Three weeks before the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Republicans had nominated Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona for president. In his acceptance speech, Goldwater announced that the nation should no longer “cringe before the bullying of Communism. . . . Failures cement the wall of shame in Berlin. Failures blot the sands of shame at the Bay of Pigs. Failures mark the slow death of freedom in Laos. Failures infest the jungles of Vietnam.” Johnson’s decision to bomb North Vietnam stole Gold-water’s thunder, transforming a foreign policy liability for Johnson into a political asset.

  Goldwater was a man of strong opinions and brutal honesty. Convinced that the United States was soft on communism abroad and drifting down the road to socialism at home, he preached against the welfare state, Social Security, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the Laotian settlement of 1962, and any rapprochement with the Soviet Union and China. Johnson understood that Americans had vivid memories of the Great Depression and the New Deal and resented neither the welfare state nor Social Security. He also realized that most Americans feared nuclear weapons and that Goldwater’s saber rattling scared them. In the presidential campaign, Johnson went after Goldwater’s most vulnerable points. Proclaiming the coming of the “Great Society,” the president campaigned for expansion of Social Security and Medicare, creation of job-training programs, a “War on Poverty,” and civil rights legislation. Johnson’s message had wide appeal: Every American deserved to be treated equally and to enjoy basic economic opportunity. Goldwater criticized government spending, large deficits, high taxes, and bureaucratic waste, but most Americans were not interested. On foreign policy, the Democrats ruthlessly attacked Goldwater, portraying Johnson as a wise, temperate leader and Goldwater as an extremist, an “unguided missile.” In a late September rally in Eufaula, Oklahoma, Johnson on Vietnam struck what sounded like just the right course: “We don’t want our American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys. . . . But we are not about to start another war and we’re not about to run away from where we are.” The Johnson campaign produced several nasty television commercials. The “Daisy Girl” spot showed a little girl plucking flower petals and counting them until a deep male voice smothers hers with a missile countdown, followed by detonation and the nuclear mushroom cloud, all of this with a promise that President Lyndon Johnson would not get the country involved in a nuclear war. Goldwater’s slogan “In your heart you know he’s right” the Democrats transformed to “In your heart you know he might.”