The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  On August 4 Captain Herrick radioed back that the intercepts showed the North Vietnamese still thought this was part of a 34A mission. By 8 a.m. Washington time (8 p.m. of the same day in the Gulf) it became clear that some sort of incident was taking place; at 9:52 Washington time both destroyers signaled that they were under constant attack. Throughout the morning there were unclear and fragmentary reports of combat. By noon Johnson was lunching with Bundy, Rusk and McNamara (at the same time James Thomson, the specialist on Asian affairs on the Bundy staff, was asking White House staff member Robert Komer what they should do in moments like this. “What we do,” said Komer, “is go to lunch. In situations like this the big boys take over”). There would be retaliation this time, Johnson made clear. Bombing most likely. At lunch they continued to discuss the alternatives and gradually firmed it up. American planes would be used, and they would hit bases which harbored the patrol boats. The JCS had provided a list of six sites, but Rusk, who was always worried about the Chinese, suggested eliminating the two northernmost bases because they were too near the China border. Reconnaissance photos showed berths for forty-seven PT boats, with only thirteen of them in the two northern bases. We ought to hit the remaining thirty-four with everything we had, Rusk said, and let the other thirteen be. They would still be there in case we needed to go back, and that would give us an option for the future. Thus was the list drawn up.

  Johnson was still demanding more information on what exactly had happened out there. More and more pressure to confirm that an attack had taken place came down through military channels to the commanders on the spot. At best the reports back indicated that an ambush had taken place, although details were very vague and confusing. By 5 p.m. Johnson was summoning congressional leaders to the White House; even as the leaders were on their way there, the planning for the retaliation was going ahead. When Johnson met with the congressional leaders at 6:15 he outlined the day’s events (without, of course, mentioning the 34A activities) and told them what he intended to do. He emphasized that it would be a limited retaliation, and said he wanted a congressional resolution; he was assured of their support, for both the actions and the resolution. I’m not going in, he told them, unless the Congress goes with me. At 10 p.m., with the Pentagon still sending out urgent messages demanding details of the incident (“Who are witnesses? What is witness reliability? Most important that positive evidence substantiating type and number of attacking forces be gathered and disseminated”), the first planes were leaving the aircraft carriers Ticonderoga and Constellation. The war planes hit the four PT-boat bases and the oil depot at Vinh. The next day McNamara reported that twenty-five of the thirty boats in the bases had been either damaged or destroyed, and that 90 percent of the Vinh depot had been wiped out; indeed, at Vinh “the smoke was observed rising to 14,000 feet.” So in a way it had begun. We had shown ourselves in an act of war. We had perhaps committed ourselves more than we knew.

  The next day the President was in a relaxed mood. He was talking with a few chosen reporters, telling them how the decision had been made—everyone had been for it, no one had been soft—and then he leaned over to a reporter and smiled. “I didn’t just screw Ho Chi Minh,” he said. “I cut his pecker off.”

  About eight months later, when Johnson complained to civilians about the military handling of the war (he was also good at complaining to the military about the pressures put on him by civilians; he was always trying to show to each side that he was really with them but that there were others blocking him, so they had to trust him), he brought up the Tonkin incident, how hard it had been to get exact information on what was taking place. It was a terrible example of what he had to put up with. “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there,” he said with a grin.

  The day after all the meetings, while the impact was still just settling, McGeorge Bundy gathered the White House staff together and said that the President had decided to go for a congressional resolution calling for a general posture in Southeast Asia. Thus if anything more serious happened during the forthcoming election, he would have the resolution in his hip pocket, and he would be able to deal with both Hanoi and the Congress, one a sure adversary, the other a potential one. After Bundy finished, Douglass Cater, a White House adviser on domestic issues, was one of the first to speak up. “Isn’t this a little precipitous?” he asked. “Do we have all the information . . . ?”

  Bundy looked quickly at him and said, “The President has decided and that’s what we’re doing.”

  Cater, new in the White House, persisted: “Gee, Mac, I haven’t really thought it through.”

  Bundy, with a very small smile: “Don’t.”

  Walt Rostow, still at Policy Planning, though more an enthusiast now of the policies as they became more and more hard-line, was very pleased; a few days later friends who lunched with him at State found him almost expansive. Things, he told them, could not have gone better had they planned them exactly this way.

  Which seemed to be true at the moment for Lyndon Johnson. As long as he moved ahead toward escalation he had kept the right fairly quiet, and the left had been bothersome but not dangerous. Now a confrontation had taken place where our boys had been fired on, where national patriotism was at stake, and he could lock up both sides. Particularly the right. It would kill Goldwater. And in the Senate he could move under cover of the flag. People like Morse might try and oppose him, but after an incident like this, it would be much harder. In addition it would not be some slow, ponderous hearing where they could bog him down; there would be an element of immediacy to it, and the hearings would take place in the heat of battle. All the better for him. So he immediately decided to go for the congressional resolution; it was too good an opportunity to miss. He did not miss it, and the first person he coopted was his old friend Bill Fulbright.

  Fulbright was an odd combination of public man and private man, Arkansas and the Senate’s link to the Establishment. He was a public official, publicly elected, and yet he seemed to be an ally of the elitists, sharing their view of the private nature of national security. He had good ties to Georgetown and the Metropolitan Club, he was a disciple of Acheson’s and he agreed with most of the centrist foreign policy objectives of those years, occasionally fighting with Dulles, but generally being a key partner to the containment and postcontainment policies of the fifties. It was not just that he agreed with the objectives, but in addition, he was agreeing to a somewhat acquiescent and secondary role for the Senate, not challenging the executive branch’s assumptions or information and not building up the kind of machinery on his Foreign Relations Committee which might result in different information and thus different conclusions (the Congress, noted one assistant to a senator, was the only understaffed bureaucracy in Washington, particularly on foreign affairs; Vietnam, however, would change all of that). Fulbright preferred not to create an opposition center; indeed, even after he and his committee had emerged as the main opposition to the President’s policy on the war, Fulbright was distinctly uncomfortable with his new role. Rather, he liked to hold the committee somewhat in the background and to wield influence on a personal basis. A public man giving private consultations. He would be consulted, his advice weighed; as such he had always been a good friend of the court. Being an adversary was not a role he had sought under any conditions; it was out of character, but it was particularly out of character with a fellow Democrat and friend in the White House. He liked having his committee; he also liked playing the game.

  If he had believed in the major assumptions of the previous era, he had in 1961 begun to change, as it seemed that the world was changing. He had opposed the Bay of Pigs and privately he was increasingly unhappy with the direction of the policy in Vietnam—the United States as the anti-Communist policeman of the world. Vietnam and the Dominican Republic intervention would turn him into a major foreign policy critic, but that still lay ahead in August 1964; he was a particular favorite of the President’s, Johnson having engineere
d the coup against old Theodore Green which gave Fulbright his prized committee, and there had been reciprocal favors. Fulbright gave the Johnson operation a little class; Johnson allowed the more reserved Fulbright to rise and hold power without getting his hands dirty. Those had been good days; Johnson the Senate Majority Leader, always putting his personal imprimatur on things, had referred to Fulbright as “my Secretary of State,” and there was little doubt that Fulbright was the Johnson candidate for Secretary of State in late 1960, the Vice-President-elect lobbying hard and persuasively. Johnson was in fact somewhat annoyed that Fulbright did not work harder for the appointment, and did not push harder himself. But it had been a long and mutually beneficial friendship, Johnson, the powerhouse of the Senate, opening things up for the more cerebral Fulbright, Fulbright with soft-spoken elegance, his reputation as the resident intellectual of the Senate, giving a certain tony quality to Johnson’s operations.

  Now, facing Goldwater in the forthcoming election, and faced with the tricky issue of Vietnam, Johnson called in a due bill from Fulbright, and asked him to manage the resolution through the Senate. It was a crucial request and Fulbright accepted, not just because of the threat of Goldwater, though that was the reason he would later give, but largely because, for all his misgivings, and he had plenty of them (he knew that Johnson was not entirely to be trusted, but he also thought that Johnson might manipulate others, but not his old and dear friend Bill Fulbright), he was still part of the old partnership, a very junior partner, because he did not like an adversary role. All things being equal, he preferred to work in tandem, making his opposition in private. He always thought that if it were more serious, if Vietnam became darker, if they really did head toward war, somehow Bill Fulbright would be consulted. By that time he and the President would be in almost total opposition; besides, Johnson had others now to tone up his own reputation, the brilliant and flashing men of the Kennedy Administration, McNamara, Bundy and Rusk. He no longer needed the intellectual benefits that went with being a friend of Bill Fulbright’s, he had all his own new advisers. Later, with friends, Fulbright would be somewhat bitter about this particular point, all those flashy Harvard people had excited Johnson, he thought they were all so smart, and Fulbright, why, Fulbright was simply an Arkansas hillbilly from the Senate, and Johnson had mastered that world, he knew all their mistakes and weaknesses. He was in awe of his new advisers, but not his old one. It was a particularly bitter point for Fulbright, who had based so much of his hopes not on his constitutional relationship to the Presidency, but on his personal one.

  So Fulbright, in a move he would spend the rest of his life bitterly regretting, accepted the job of shepherding the Tonkin Gulf Resolution through the Senate. The decision reflected all the ambivalence both of Fulbright’s views on foreign affairs and on his view of his own position. He had grave doubts about the war, and he knew the dangers of the wording of the resolution he was pushing through, but he was also willing to take the risk. Having done things and played the game with Johnson in the past, he was willing to try it once more, though Fulbright was unusually independent and courageous. The stigma of going against the President on an issue of patriotism was not one that any senator sought—which of course was exactly why Johnson was sending his resolution hurtling toward the Hill. The key moment was when he pushed it through the Foreign Relations Committee. Morse, irascible, forceful, an expert both on international law and Lyndon Johnson, warned Fulbright that this was not a limited resolution, that if you knew Johnson and the way he operated, this was clearly intended as an all-purpose measure, the first and more than likely the last he would send to the Congress. Morse, who had fought lonely and successful battles against Dulles on resolutions over Quemoy and Matsu, had a particularly good reputation as a man willing to go it alone on an issue of conscience; his sources within the bureaucracy were far better than those of the average senator.

  On the night of August 4, while the second Tonkin incident was beginning to wind down and American planes were already on their mission, Morse received an anonymous phone call from someone at the Pentagon who was reasonably high up and who obviously knew a good deal about destroyers. The caller told Morse that he understood that the Oregon senator was going to oppose the forthcoming resolution. In that case he should ask the Secretary of Defense two questions. He should ask to see the Maddox’s log (which would place the ship closer to shore than the alleged site of the incident reflected), and he should ask what the real mission of the ship was. Morse, who had already smelled a rat, was now convinced that the Administration’s case was even flimsier than he had suspected, that this was perhaps a provocative incident on our part, and he even suspected that it had been deliberately initiated in order to get the resolution through Congress.

  The next day Morse begged Fulbright to hold real hearings on the resolution and warned him that the wording was far too general and far too open-ended for any President, particularly Lyndon Johnson. Fulbright answered that they didn’t have time, that it was an emergency. What emergency? Morse asked. I don’t know of any emergency. Instead Morse insisted that this was the proper time to hold real hearings on Vietnam, to ventilate the issue and to summon genuine expertise. He had in mind calling the dovish generals, Ridgway, Gavin, Shoup, Collins, and then some international-law people, and then perhaps witnesses who knew something about the political situation in the South. The sum of the hearing, he was sure, would have been to cast such doubt about any venture in Vietnam as to make any resolution a good deal more limited, if not bottling it up altogether. Morse was absolutely convinced that the instincts of his colleagues were more dovish than was apparent, and that expert testimony by former generals would give them heart. Fulbright turned him down and decided to ram the resolution through in a crisis atmosphere with patriotism a key factor; at a joint meeting of the Foreign Relations and the Armed Services committees, where both McNamara and Rusk testified for forty minutes, Fulbright was a friend of the White House. Morse alone asked unfriendly questions and cast the only dissenting vote.

  That day and the next, Fulbright continued to serve as the floor manager for the resolution. The ambivalence of Fulbright about the whole issue was reflected in seemingly contradictory answers he gave to doubting senators, John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky and Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin. Looking at the resolution, Cooper felt it was surprisingly open-ended, and raising a number of questions, finally asked Fulbright, “Then, looking ahead, if the President decided that it was necessary to use such force as could lead into war, we will give that authority by this resolution?”

  “That is the way I would interpret it,” Fulbright answered. “If a situation later developed in which we thought the approval should be withdrawn, it could be withdrawn by concurrent resolution. That is the reason for the third section.”

  But his answers to Senator Nelson were very, very different. Nelson, warned and primed by a very bright young member of his staff, Gar Alperovitz, who would later become a major revisionist historian of the Cold War, was extremely uneasy. Perhaps more than anyone else, he asked the right questions about long-range problems and difficulties. He thought the resolution gave the executive branch far too much power, in fact gave the President the power to change the American mission in Vietnam. Fulbright tried to dissuade him; this resolution was consistent with the past and rather limited mission. But Nelson persisted; this might mean a land war in Asia. Again Fulbright tried to reassure him on the basis of information from the White House. “Everyone I have heard has said that the last thing we want to do is become involved in a land war in Asia; that our power is sea and air, and that this is what we hope will deter the Chinese Communists and the North Vietnamese from spreading the war,” he said. Nelson was still not reassured; he let Fulbright know that he intended to enter an amendment which would specifically continue to limit the American role there to advisory, training and support missions. It was an amendment against a land war. Fulbright conferred with the President, and found that the
White House did not want the amendment. Johnson said that one amendment would bring countless others, the whole thing would come unraveled; it would spoil the language of the resolution, which had been very carefully chosen, and above all it would give the wrong impression, it would imply to Hanoi that the Congress was not behind its President. Besides, the President told Fulbright, the resolution was limited, no one wanted to get into a land war in Asia, that was the last thing they wanted; it was aimed not so much at Hanoi, he implied, as at Goldwater.

  So Fulbright went back and reassured Nelson that his amendment was unnecessary, though he noted that the Nelson amendment “is an accurate reflection of what I believe is the President’s policy.” (A few months later, as the war escalated, Nelson sharply attacked Fulbright on the floor of the Senate, and Fulbright in turn publicly and profusely apologized to his Wisconsin colleague.) But Nelson withdrew his amendment and the debate came to its somewhat sterile end. (Recounting the congressional enthusiasm for the Tonkin message, Johnson in his autobiography would cite with some glee the Fulbright-Cooper exchange, making no mention of the Fulbright-Nelson one.) On August 7 Morse, with Gruening the only two senators to vote against the resolution, said: “I believe that history will record that we have made a great mistake in subverting and circumventing the Constitution of the United States . . . by means of this resolution. As I argued earlier today at great length, we are in effect giving the President . . . warmaking powers in the absence of a declaration of war. I believe that to be a historic mistake.” He was right, of course. Johnson had it both ways; the Congress signed on without really declaring war. It was a great day for the private exercise of power; the most public of bodies, the Senate of the United States, had seen fit to acquiesce without any serious challenge to the manipulations of the executive branch. It was perhaps the last great political hurdle for Johnson as he faced the pressures that were mounting.