As the decay in Saigon became more evident, McNamara was also charged with looking into the possibilities of bombing as a means of bringing more pressure to bear on Hanoi. Would it have to be done, and if so, should it be done immediately? Or could we wait? These were questions which the government was pushing at the President; if Vietnam was falling apart, perhaps the bombing could hold it together. It would rally Saigon and at the same time it might make Hanoi ease off on the pressure. Thus it was a card to be played perhaps without committing the President, to be played and then pulled back. It could even help protect the President. So even as McNamara was striding through the streets of Hué, the bureaucracy in Washington began to intensify its study of the bombing possibilities, and also started working on pinpointing targets. McNamara himself returned from Vietnam in mid-March with a pessimistic appraisal of the situation in Vietnam, reporting that the situation in the countryside had deteriorated, the Vietcong had up to 90 percent control in key provinces in the Delta, and neutralist sentiment was rising. Not surprisingly, he focused most of his attention on what could be done to affect the war by pressuring Hanoi. He did not recommend bombing; he had checked first with the President, and the President was not ready for it. But he did not want to be in conflict with the Chiefs; so he recommended that they go ahead with the planning of what they wanted, concentrating on two particular types of bombing. The first would be a quick strike, to be launched within seventy-two hours, primarily in retaliation for specific guerrilla incidents. The second part was the real bombing program. This, unlike the other, would not be tit for tat; it would be ready to go on thirty days’ notice, and it would be a major strike against the North’s military and industrial centers. These would be sustained raids, in effect what Rostow had been talking about for more than three years. A real bombing program, the use of the threat of bombing to coerce Ho Chi Minh to de-escalate the war rather than lose his precious industrial base.
McNamara made these recommendations officially on March 16, after checking how far the President wanted to go on the subject (which was that he wanted the study in the works, that and nothing more; he wanted his options open). On March 17 the National Security Council met, and Johnson and McNamara played out their charade, using the National Security Council as a forum to inform the rest of the Administration of their intentions. The President told the NSC that he wanted the planning on the bombing to go ahead energetically, which gave the military what they wanted. The generals had not really expected a bombing program this early; as this was an election year, they knew that the President, as Bundy told the principals and McNamara relayed to them, had “his problems.” It was not something they talked about, but there was an awareness of his difficulties. The main thing was that they were permitted to go ahead with the planning.
In addition, the McNamara report (written by John McNaughton), was by itself a particularly significant document. In its preamble it set out the aims of American policy, and the rationale for the objectives. It was significant because these aims had not been so clearly stated before, nor would they be subsequently. In fact, another version of them would become the critical inner governmental paper on American objectives; years later, in looking back over the papers which had determined the goals of the war, the staff which compiled the Pentagon Papers came up with Nassam 288 (National Security paper 288). It was based on the McNamara paper and was almost word for word identical. Nassam 288 said:
We seek an independent non-Communist South Vietnam. We do not require that it serve as a Western base or as a member of a Western Alliance. South Vietnam must be free, however, to accept outside assistance as required to maintain its security. This assistance should be able to take the form not only of economic and social measures but also police and military help to root out and control insurgent elements.
Unless we can achieve this objective in South Vietnam, almost all of Southeast Asia will probably fall under Communist dominance (all of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), accommodate to Communism so as to remove effective U.S. and anti-Communist influence (Burma), or fall under the domination of forces not now explicitly Communist, but likely then to become so (Indonesia taking over Malaysia). Thailand might hold for a period with our help, but would be under grave pressure. Even the Philippines would become shaky, and the threat to India to the west, Australia and New Zealand to the south, and Taiwan, Korea, and Japan to the north and east would be greatly increased.
All these consequences would probably have been true even if the U.S. had not since 1954, and especially since 1961, become so heavily engaged in South Vietnam. However, that fact accentuates the impact of a Communist South Vietnam not only in Asia, but in the rest of the world, where the South Vietnam conflict is regarded as a test case of U.S. capacity to help a nation meet a Communist “war of liberation.”
It was, in fact, the Secretary of Defense playing the role of Secretary of State, and going ahead with the straight domino theory, though the CIA and the other intelligence agencies were reporting, quite the opposite, that the dominoes were not all the same size, shape and color, that the loss of South Vietnam might have less impact outside the immediate Indochinese peninsula, that the other countries reacted to very different political pressures, and that Vietnamese nationalism, left over from the colonial war, which was the principal force aiding the Vietcong in Vietnam, might have no effect in a country which had not undergone a colonial experience. But the McNamara position did not take into account the aftereffects of the French war which might make Vietnamese Communism different; instead, Communism was some great force which was sweeping right across a wide area.
It was an important moment, even though immediate action was postponed. The given, which was that there was a country called South Vietnam, that it wanted to be free and had to be denied to the Communists, hardened within the bureaucracy, as did the ostensible reason for holding it, the domino theory. (Johnson himself did not take the domino theory seriously; he was far more worried about the loss of a country to the Communists and what this would do to him in terms of domestic politics, though this could not be expressed so bluntly in an official paper.) These assumptions became realities, became the given. Since McNamara had noticed the increase of neutralist sentiment in Vietnam, the kind of sentiment which might lead to a neutralist coup, a coalition government which would ask the Americans to leave, he warned the President there was a real danger of this, that U.S. policy must be aimed against this threat. Three days later Johnson cabled Lodge that he was intent on “knocking down the neutralization wherever it rears its ugly head, and on this point I think nothing is more important than to stop neutralist talk wherever we can by whatever means we can.” At the very time that they were talking about keeping their options open, they were closing them off. They were not questioning the given or the assumption of Vietnam; they were determining that the country would stand, like it or not, able to stand or not. They were not distinguishing between Communism in Vietnam and why it was successful and the exterior Communist threat to other countries in the region. And they were not analyzing to what degree the people of South Vietnam did or did not sustain the Vietcong. McNamara made his assessments in a vacuum, and the kind of challenge to them that might have taken place was absent. State made no rejoinder, there was no debate over the assumptions of the facts, no discussion of possibilities of negotiation. The man who was in charge of the counterassessments at State, William Bundy, had just come from McNamara’s shop and he was entirely agreeable to the goals. Thus, without seeming to make a decision, while on the contrary seeming to avoid a decision, the bureaucracy both at Defense and at State had been given the go-ahead, and told in effect to start planning for war. It was not so much that Defense was strong; it was that State was both weak and amenable.
While McNamara was in Vietnam, the State Department had been preparing a major study on the bombing at the Policy Planning Council under Robert Johnson. The study had been ordered at the beginning of the year but little had been done abou
t it then; suddenly McNamara went to Vietnam and the timetable was speeded up, the answers were to coincide with his return. There was enormous pressure for an answer to the question: Would the bombing work? Perhaps there was going to be a decision to bomb, after all.
Robert Johnson himself had not been eager to take on the job of preparing the study. As Rostow’s deputy, he knew how strongly his boss felt on the subject of bombing, that it was above all the answer, the vital card, and though he liked Rostow personally, he disagreed strongly. His own impression was that Vietnam was coming apart and would continue to do so, and he thought it would be difficult to do an honest paper with Rostow in charge. Nonetheless, he finally accepted the job. He put together a staff of about six people, all intergovernmental men, all pure intelligence people. The study dealt solely with the bombing and they had to identify the main questions. First: Would it work? Would Hanoi drop its support of the Vietcong if we pressured by bombing? Then: What were the upper levels of the U.S. commitment? What would bombing do in the way of bringing about meaningful negotiation? What would be the problems of exiting, in case of failure? What would be the problems of justifying the U.S. action in legal and moral terms? What was the problem of defining American objectives and Communist possible reactions? And finally: What would the effects be on the Sino-Soviet split?
It was, in the classic sense, a pure study. It reflected the genuine expertise of the government from deep within its bowels, not its operational functions, not its ambitions, not its success drives. None of the staffers represented vested interests, and none really saw his future being affected by either a positive or negative study. They considered all kinds of bombing, quick tit-for-tat retaliations and massive, prolonged saturation bombing. They worked under intense pressure for about two weeks, eight hours a day, six days a week. When they finished they had a stack of papers about a foot high and the essential answer, which was no, bombing the North would not work.
Basically the study showed that the bombing would fail because the North was motivated by factors which were not affected by physical change and physical damage. The North Vietnamese were not hooked on the idea of economic growth determination (which was one of the great hang-ups of Rostow), but were determined to extend their regime’s control to the entire country rather than maintain their industrialization. That was what motivated them, and that was what they considered their unfinished business. They had invested a great deal in it and they would continue to invest in it; no North Vietnamese government could afford to do less. Hanoi, the study said, enjoyed the nationalist component of unity and the Communist component of control, which made for an organized, unified modern state. Given their standard of living, their determination, bombing would not affect them, other than produce a tendency perhaps to strengthen the regime’s control. There was also a consensus on one key point: if you threatened the North with escalation you would soon know whether or not it would work because they would have to respond before you started (that is, they would never fold their hand under duress and go to the bargaining table, because once there, all the United States would have to do was threaten once more to start bombing and they would have to concede more).
Nor was anyone particularly optimistic the bombing would improve South Vietnamese morale. The study implied that escalation would not bring negotiation, that it would place at least as much pressure on the United States as on Hanoi, and that the subsequent problems of deescalation would be even more difficult to deal with. Bombing would have raised the stakes, South Vietnam would have become much more important as an issue, a South Vietnamese regime would have become even more dependent upon the United States (which had just bombed the North, partly to improve Southern morale). So the position, in terms of extrication, would be even more complicated.
In addition, the study showed that there would be a considerable international outcry if the United States bombed the North, that this would seem a disproportionate response to what the North was doing in the South (which reflected a feeling that few Americans had, about how repugnant bombing was to the rest of the world, since much of it had been bombed, while America had done some of the bombing but had never been bombed itself), and that while this would not pose a serious problem if quick success was achieved, it would become sticky if the war became drawn out, as it was likely to be.
It was an important study because it not only predicted that the bombing would not work, and predicted Hanoi’s reaction to the pressure, which was to apply counterpressure, but it forecast that the bombing would affect (and imprison) the American government. That was particularly prophetic because America did eventually bomb with a view to bringing the North to the conference table. It would find that it was, instead of changing the North, sticking itself to a tar baby, and that nothing could take place in the way of talks or negotiations, no word of peace exchanged as long as the bombing continued, thus forcing an American President to change and undo his own fragile political balance and give up hopes of a second term in order to get back a card for the purposes of negotiation, a card which had been played in the first place to bring negotiations.
The Johnson study had very little impact, for a variety of reasons. The first was that Policy Planning is not an operative area, it is not a place for doers, and over a prolonged period of time in the State Department its influence had steadily decreased. As the Cold War had advanced and hardened, there was less and less need for it; what the United States wanted to do, the internal and domestic implications of a policy, became more important. So Policy Planning was off the beaten path. Rostow, the current head of it, had been sent there by Kennedy in a moment of Kennedy’s disenchantment. For all its talented people, it did not enter into policy making, it was not a serious place. The elephant was great and powerful and preferred being blind. That was one problem. The second problem was timing; though the study had been rushed through with the idea of coinciding with the McNamara report on bombing, the President had let McNamara know that he did not want to make any major decisions for the present, and so the bombing was put on hold, and the decision delayed. Similarly, the massive and significant study was pushed aside because it had come out at the wrong time. A study has to be published at the right moment, when people are debating an issue and about to make a decision; then and only then will they read a major paper, otherwise they are too pressed for time. Therefore, when the long-delayed decisions on the bombing were made a year later, the principals did not go back to the old Bob Johnson paper, because new things had happened, one did not go back to an old paper.
Finally and perhaps most important, there was no one to fight for it, to force it into the play, to make the other principals come to terms with it. Rostow himself could not have disagreed more with the paper; it challenged every one of his main theses, his almost singular and simplistic belief in bombing and what it would accomplish. He did not censor the study, but he worked to suppress it and as a result its distribution was quite limited; neither Rusk nor Bill Bundy was enthused by it (in other days Harriman might have forced it upon everyone), and it was very closely held. Later in the year, however, parts of the report were bootlegged through the government, and one part of it played a major role in confirming the doubts of George Ball and provided much of the raw material for his dissenting papers. So the government was able to weed out its own caution, and keep it out of the mainstream; if it is kept out of the mainstream, it does not exist. And so it did not exist.
Even so, the slate had to be wiped clean. Not only was there a need to negate and remove the Policy Planning study, but there was a need to have a piece of paper which would be intellectually reassuring. In April a special intelligence study was ordered, which meant that though many of the same experts would participate, the results would be radically different, because the military intelligence people were brought in. A Special Intelligence Estimate is a very formal procedure, with very definite patterns. CIA, for instance, chairs it, which means that the Agency’s role shifts dramatically. Inst
ead of giving pure intelligence, the Agency people become bureaucratic. They are told to come up with a piece of paper and they want to provide that piece of paper; thus they seek a consensus. In addition, they are working against a deadline, which means the softening of their own estimates in order to get the military to come along. Thus the State Department experts, the Intelligence and Research people, lose an ally (CIA), which has become bureaucratic, and gain an enemy, the military.
The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library) Page 56