The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  In the country and in the government, however, there was no clear sense of going to war. Each person working around the President saw Johnson through his own special prism, and had his own impressions of Vietnam confirmed. Thus the domestic political people assumed that Johnson was committed to the programs that they were preparing, and thus what was peaceful in his rhetoric was the real thing. The national security people did not talk to the domestic people; no one walked both sides of the street. The national security people were above politics (except for their desire to protect their President and keep him in office, which would also keep them in office as national security people), and if they thought about the dark consequences of the road ahead, they were somehow sure that a confrontation could be avoided. They were, in particular, believers in the idea that the threat of force would make the use of force unnecessary. So if they played their roles properly—and they were all crisis veterans now; they wore the battle ribbons of the Cuban missile crisis and knew how to negotiate through danger, to show the willingness to use force, to convince the other side of the seriousness of their intent, to pass their messages as civilized gentlemen—they could prevent both war and aggression. As 1964 progressed and ended, it became apparent that the Cuban missile crisis had been the test run for Vietnam, that the Vietnam planning was derivative from the missile-crisis planning: enough force but not too much force, plenty of options, careful communication to the other side to let him know what you were doing, allowing him to back down. They were very confident of themselves and their capacity to wield power. The dry runs were behind them. They could handle events. They had confidence in themselves and in each other.

  Perhaps if the people who knew a good deal about Vietnam (the fact that the weakness in the South would continue and grow worse, that the other side would react to force with the patient, dogged determination which had marked the French war, that there was no way to bluff Asian Communist peasants) had gotten together with the domestic political people who knew something about Lyndon Johnson, which way he would react to certain pressures, then they probably could have plotted the course of the future. But the national security people did not know Johnson, which would be part of the problem. They were all new to him, and they had little sense of his real instincts and subtleties. To foretell what would happen in Vietnam, what Johnson’s reaction would be and what the enemy’s reaction would be to Johnson’s moves required a combination of expertise which no one had. Therefore, in 1964 each man saw his own estimates as the deciding ones, pulling from the contradictions of Administration rhetoric what he wanted to believe. If a person was dovish, then he was dovish for forceful reasons, and he assumed that the principals were probably dovish too; and if he was hawkish, he assumed that he could control events. It was a time when the play became more and more closely held by the principals, and that as doubts about the future grew, the willingness to discuss them and share them diminished; as they grew more serious, the doubts became more private than public, as in the case of John McNaughton.

  Chapter Nineteen

  In the White House, Lyndon Johnson was in the first stage of becoming a President; he wanted to keep not just Vietnam at arm’s length but all foreign problems. In the first months of 1964 he wanted to play from strength, not from weakness; domestic policy was strength, foreign policy was weakness. If one had to deal with foreign policy, then it was best to deal at the very top, to personalize it (as he did during the Panama Canal Zone crisis, picking up the phone and calling the President of Panama). He was not at ease with the general class of people who made diplomacy their profession, particularly ambassadors. They were, after all, the worst of two worlds, being both State Department people and foreigners. As a result, he almost refused to see the members of the diplomatic corps. “Who are these people?” he would say. “Why do I have to see them? Have Rusk see them. They’re his clients, not mine.”

  The list of ambassadors waiting to see the President grew and grew. Some could not assume their responsibilities and make the official Washington diplomatic circuit until they had first paid a call on the President. In desperation, groups of envoys were run through, one group including the British ambassador. On another occasion it was decided to run the French and the Vietnamese ambassadors through together, the idea being that since they both spoke French, it would make things easier. At the last minute this idea was vetoed.

  Those visitors who were granted what were supposed to be important private audiences often found that Johnson had invited some member of the press or friend visiting the White House to come along for the meeting. When Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands showed up for a private meeting he found himself being photographed with a dozen or so White House tourists who had been selected by Johnson with the invitation “Come on, have your picture taken with a real prince.” Eventually, under pressure from his staff and from Rusk, it got a little better. More than most men, Johnson could put himself in the other politician’s position and see his problem (he once told Harold Wilson, facing a difficult re-election, not to come and do his campaigning on the White House steps). But he did not like problems in the abstract; he was a politician and he preferred dealing with other politicians at the moment of crisis—that was reality and he felt more at ease in that kind of pressurized atmosphere.

  A strategy for 1964 slowly began to evolve: fend off the outside world, particularly Vietnam. Keep Vietnam quiet, do not explore its problems, and do not reflect upon them, but keep them papered over. Make it a functional, factual issue, send more aid, more weapons, a few more men to Saigon. The doubters were to be cleared out. The man in charge of keeping the commitment running as smoothly as possible was McNamara. Above all, it was not to surface as an issue in 1964; it was to be controlled, and managed, and kept away from the reaches of Barry Goldwater; it was not to be an issue for the right. Goldwater would be the candidate against Johnson, and he appeared to be a particularly easy mark; he would drive Americans back to political divisions answered years earlier. If anything, Goldwater would serve a convenient purpose, he might propel Lyndon Johnson into his own Presidency with a momentum which Johnson would be hard put to create himself. Anything that diminished the possibility not just of a victorious election but of a real landslide, which would allow him to take the Congress by storm in 1965, was to be avoided. Vietnam was the most identifiable trouble spot.

  Thus if he could keep his people together, the liberals and the Democrats, then he was confident the issue would be Goldwater, and by early 1964 it was clear to him that his real problems—in that they could create serious factional rifts—were, first, his relationship with Robert Kennedy, which was particularly touchy, and second, the broader aspect of handling the Congress, using it in effect as an umbrella, on the question of Vietnam. The matter of the Congress was made all the more difficult because while Johnson wanted it as a weapon to fend off a potential challenge from the right, his problem at the moment was not with the right wing in the Senate, but with the left wing, where Senate liberals were beginning to mount increasing numbers of attacks on the American presence in Vietnam. Thus he faced the problem of going to the Congress to stop the right and becoming involved in a Pyrrhic battle with people from his own party.

  The problem of Robert Kennedy was a special one. The relationship between him and Johnson had always been marked by coldness, suspicion and barely concealed dislike. Now both men were jockeying for the right to be John Kennedy’s legatee. Robert Kennedy had the right to it by blood and by emotion, but not by law; Lyndon Johnson had no emotional base at all, but he had it by constitutional right. The last thing he needed or wanted was a split between himself and the Kennedy people; he could understand a passive opposition from Kennedy loyalists, but an open one would have dire consequences. It would divide his party, severely limit his capacity to govern and sustain the image of Johnson as the usurper. What he wanted, and what he eventually achieved, was to take hold of the Kennedy legacy in 1964, carry out Kennedy programs with Kennedy men, at the
same time diminishing the role of Robert Kennedy; then run for President and win on his own, and thus shed the Kennedy mantle. But in order to get rid of the Kennedy mantle he first had to gain control of it. All of this required deft handling. Johnson was partially aided in the business of neutralizing Robert Kennedy by the fact that all the key men of the previous Administration now worked for him, so the Attorney General could not make an outright challenge against his late brother’s closest advisers. Yet at the same time Robert Kennedy had ambitions of his own, and by the spring of 1964 he was openly campaigning for the Vice-Presidency, precisely the position Lyndon Johnson did not have in mind for him (a landslide victory against Goldwater would become less of a personal triumph if there was a Kennedy on the ticket. The press, which was Eastern and pro-Kennedy, would give Robert Kennedy considerable credit for the victory). So Robert Kennedy was a serious potential problem in 1964, unlike Barry Goldwater, who was regarded as something of an asset.

  The Congress was a more complicated problem: if an issue as fragile and volatile as Vietnam became a major part of the upcoming political campaign, then Johnson wanted some kind of congressional support, for protection. He was very much a creature of Congress: to him the Congress was the country and he wanted the Congress on board, partly as a way of keeping the country on board. As early as May 1964 Dean Acheson stopped a White House friend at a cocktail party and said that he thought Vietnam was going to turn out much worse than they expected, that it was all much weaker than the reports coming in—Acheson assumed that if the official reporting was beginning to be a little pessimistic, then it was surely far worse—and that it might be very tricky in the middle of the campaign. He thought the President ought to know this and ought to try and protect himself. Acheson’s warnings paralleled the President’s own suspicions, and he asked the people around him to start thinking in terms of a congressional resolution. This would protect him from the pressures on the right, and would force Goldwater to support whatever the President was doing on Vietnam, or isolate him even further. Bill Bundy drafted the first copy of the resolution, a document of purposely vague intent and proportions, signifying that all good Americans were behind their President against the invidious enemy.

  For a time it was debated within the inner councils whether or not to send the Bundy resolution to the Congress, but Johnson was lying low for the moment. Ernest Gruening of Alaska and Wayne Morse of Oregon were already making waves in the Senate, and Morse in particular was prickly, with that compelling sense of international law and an almost faultless sense of where the weak spot in an issue resided. Morse, Johnson told friends, was a tough one, the kind of man who could hurt you and expose your weaknesses even when he was standing alone. A formidable opponent. “My lawyer,” Lyndon Johnson sometimes called him, hoping that a little flattery would rub him the right way. An able and abrasive man. And Johnson knew too that if Gruening and Morse had surfaced, then there were others hiding in the cloakrooms who might spring at him, more covert in their doubts, but ready to jump if they smelled blood. Even Fulbright, who was an old friend, was showing signs of independence. And Johnson knew that his own case for a vote of confidence was a thin one, that the more prolonged scrutiny Vietnam received, the more difficult it would be for him. The whole point of the resolution was to paper over tensions, not to increase them. Johnson always believed that his problems in the Congress lay in committee rooms, not on the floor, that once a bill or a motion came out of a committee, the President could get it through the Congress. (If the committee was the problem, then the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was potentially a center of opposition.) So in June his own intuitive sense of the Congress told him that the time was not right, that he could not just spring the resolution on the Congress, but rather he must mold it to events, and if possible tie it to an issue of patriotism. Something would have to come along.

  So he would bide his time on the Congress. In the meantime it was McNamara’s job to keep Vietnam in hand to tidy it up. Within the government the discussion of it became more and more limited; it became more closely held. Only the very top people were involved on the decisions and the drift of it; the others, the second- and third-echelon people who had been playing some part, were moved out. Letting McNamara be the front man for Vietnam was handy in a number of ways. He generated confidence not only to the President himself but to much of the Washington community; he was at the height of his reputation with liberals, and he was a Kennedy figure in a way that Rusk was not; thus he neutralized potential opposition. Liberal Democrats, by now co-opted by the Kennedys, could not effectively protest the drift of the Vietnam policy without criticizing at least by implication their own people. McNamara was the star of the Administration; he was able to continue his close personal relationship with the Kennedys, his regular visits with Jackie Kennedy, and at the same time receive praise such as Lyndon Johnson had never accorded mortals in the past. He was the ablest man that Lyndon Johnson had ever dealt with, the President told people; there was no one like him for service to his country. “He wields that computer and those figures like King Arthur wielded Excalibur,” Jack Valenti told the President.

  “Like what?” the President asked.

  “Like King Arthur wielded Excalibur,” Valenti repeated.

  “More like Sam Rayburn with a gavel, I think,” the President said.

  “Same thing, Mr. President,” Valenti answered.

  If McNamara was regarded with awe in Washington, there were those in Saigon who had watched his trips to Vietnam with mounting disbelief. They thought that his glib press conferences, the statistics rolling off, were hopefully put-ons, that at least McNamara himself did not believe in what he was doing. Nothing fazed him, he showed no uncertainty, he plunged straight ahead. If he was learning, he was learning too little too late. Indeed, even as he became somewhat more knowledgeable in 1964 and 1965, it was not entirely a blessing. The very process of learning was achieved at the expense of his becoming more deeply involved, more attached to and identified with the problem, and thus more committed to finding a solution. Having helped bring us that far, he felt himself under extra pressure to see it through.

  He had learned in late December 1963 and early 1964 that Harkins had seriously misled him and he was furious, and Harkins was in effect finished; the only reason he would be allowed to stay on a few months longer in Saigon was to save face. Not Harkins’ face, but the face of the people in Washington who had put him there, not the least of them Robert McNamara. If he were pulled back under the mounting evidence that the war had been going poorly all along, it would be an admission that the Administration had been either taken in by faulty reporting, or worse, had itself been lying. If its past estimates were not to be believed, then how could one fend off critics of present estimates? In addition, when Harkins was finally brought home, the attitude in Washington was again simplistic: a bad general was going to be replaced by a good general; it was not the whole system, the bad war, which had produced such fraud, it was simply the wrong general. Thus one replaced him with the best general around. Individuals could make a difference.

  In June 1964 General William C. Westmoreland became the commander of American forces. On June 22 Lyndon Johnson held a ceremony for Harkins at the White House, where he presented him with an oak-leaf cluster for his Distinguished Service Medal. As was the President’s wont, particularly in cases where he did not believe what he was saying, he resorted to considerable flattery in his description of Harkins, noting that though the general would soon retire, “I have asked Secretary McNamara, who has such great and unlimited confidence in this great soldier, to have the general remain in the Washington area so that we may benefit from his broad knowledge of and his experience in the various theaters of the world, and particularly Southeast Asia.” (McNamara had of course lost confidence in Harkins, in fact was very bitter about him, telling interviewers such as Professor Henry Graff of Columbia that Harkins had failed in Vietnam.)

  At this point Harkins utte
red one of the most revealing statements ever made by an American commander. He was an optimist, he said. “I guess I was born one, and I continue to be an optimist about Vietnam.” As such, he was very encouraged by recent reports. The way would be difficult, it would require time and patience. “I am reminded of our own Revolution,” the general continued. “It took eight years to get through our Revolution, and then we ran into some of the toughest guerrillas that we ever want to run into any place—the American Indians. We started what we call in Vietnam today an oil spot moving across the country. The last Indian war was 1892, over a hundred years after we started our Revolution. There is a social revolution going on now in Vietnam. They are not at the stage to say 'We the people,’ but when they do get to that stage, then things will be fine . . .” The general’s view of revolution was nothing short of remarkable; if an SDS member had formulated it for him, it could not have been more perfect for the radical left.