The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  Thus the decisions on Vietnam would be made by very few men, and the players would be different from those under Kennedy. To Johnson, McNamara was not just a forceful statistician and bureaucrat, his judgment and wisdom were invoked; Rusk, who had been something of a liaison man with the Hill before, became a genuine Secretary of State, a wise, thoughtful man, a man not too quick on his horse. So rather than the previous Administration’s decision making, where a variety of opinions were sought and filtered down, this was a very structured one, a place where Rusk could feel much more at home, and headed by a man who liked to hold his decisions as close to him as possible and who had an obsession with consensus. That in itself was an illusion as far as foreign policy was concerned. Consensus was primarily the mark of the domestic politician and particularly of someone who was working in the Congress, trying to sign on as many people as possible to a policy (perhaps not the best policy, but a policy which the broadest range found acceptable and bearable; thus it could more readily be pushed through Congress, and more important men could not attack it later on if they had been part of it), but consensus in foreign affairs was likely to be different. Although such a consensus might make the various signatories feel safer and more comfortable, it would not necessarily make the policy any wiser. But to Johnson, a man of some timidity and considerable caution despite the bluster, a consensus was safer, the footprints were covered. He was not a man with a sense of history, a man who had a particular belief in the lone man dissenting, in the man going against the ostensible grain. He was trying to get everyone on board in an office where the best decisions are often the loneliest ones.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Even as the bureaucracy was gearing up its plans for bombing, the upper level of the bureaucracy and many of the principals were meeting in the Pentagon to program war games for Vietnam. It was an elaborate procedure, with the lower-ranking staff people spending two weeks before the arrival of their superiors in planning and setting up the games. The actual scenario reflected the real situation in Vietnam as accurately as possible. The situation in the South was bad, the play was now up to the United States, would it bomb, and if it did, what would be the North Vietnamese response? Though there was nothing unusual about the idea of having war games—they are constantly being programmed in the game room of the Pentagon—these games were different, and all the players knew it; it was as if this was a dry run for the real thing. The players were not the usual semi-anonymous figures from the lower floors of the government, but some of the great names of the government, men like Curtis LeMay, and General Earle Wheeler, and John McNaughton; and to let everyone know that it was not some light exercise, representing the President of the United States was none less than McGeorge Bundy, a sign somehow that although this was a war game, it was as close to reality as it could be.

  The only problem with the war games was that they did not go well. The real question was to test out what would happen if we bombed the North. It quickly became apparent that very little would happen. The Red (or Hanoi) Team had some very good players, a smart general like Buzz Wheeler, and Marshall Green of the State Department; the Blue Team had men like Bill Bundy, General LeMay and McNaughton. Hanoi had all the advantages; the bombing of the infiltration routes did not seem to bother it. The more the United States moved, the more men it could send down the trails. For every American move, there seemed to be a ready countermove for Hanoi; the blockade of Haiphong saw the North Vietnamese simply put more pressure on the U.S. military bases in the South and slip more men down the trail. We bombed and they nudged a few battalions into the South. We bombed some more of the greater military targets, and because we were bombing them we had brought in a surface-to-air (SAM) antiaircraft missile site to protect the South’s cities against North Vietnamese or Chinese bombing. So they put the SAM site under siege, and in order to protect the site, which was staffed by Americans, we had to bring in Marines, at which point they nudged a few more men down the trail. The moment the Marines landed we had more difficult logistic problems, and the Vietcong simply applied more pressure to all supply routes, blowing up railroad tracks, ambushing convoys, making the small bases held by Americans increasingly isolated, dependent upon air supply (because there was little patrolling), and moving their machine guns in closer and closer to the bases, and beginning to shoot down the resupply planes. The enemy was turning out to be very savvy, very clever, and to have just as many options at his disposal as we did at ours. Maybe even more. What was particularly disturbing, the civilians on the Blue Team were discovering, was that he could meet the U.S. escalations at surprisingly little cost of his own.

  North Vietnam had, noted a civilian player, always seemed like such a small country, until you got involved in a war game; then, programmed from their side, their army seemed very large, about 250,000 men, and it was so easy just to send a few divisions down the trails and those divisions somehow did not disturb the mass of troops left behind in the North. The bombing, they soon found out, seemed to have little effect on their military establishment; Hanoi could disassemble it, move it to rural areas, use camouflage, and run on very little logistic support in the American sense. Indeed, the more the Blue Team players pushed, the less vulnerable the North seemed to the kind of limited bombing envisioned (limited in the sense of using either the military system or the industrial system as bombing targets, and excluding cities and irrigation dikes). There was a growing sense of the elephant struggling with the gnat, and Marshall Green, who had the most experience in Asia, at one point noted that if his (the Red Team’s) airfields were bombed, he would move all his women and children to the airport and make an announcement to the world that they were there, and then dare the Americans to keep bombing.

  It was all very frustrating for the Blue Team and particularly for General LeMay, who was the classic Air Force man and who hated the restraints imposed by civilians. He sensed that a new kind of war was coming and that once again the military would be frustrated, that sanctuaries would be given, that air power would be misused. At one of the intermissions he began a running dialogue with Mac Bundy which reflected his own frustration and his belief (and later the military’s belief) that bombing should be used all-out against the North, that if we bombed we should bomb to level them, and Bundy’s view (the civilians’ belief, which would surface in 1964 and again in 1967) that there was a limited amount that bombing could do. We were, LeMay said, swatting at the flies, when we should really be going after the source, the manure piles. Bundy deflected that one, and LeMay continued: they had targets, oil depots, ports, dikes, and if they existed and we were their enemy and we were enemy enough to fight them and to die, we should tear it all down. “We should bomb them into the Stone Age.”

  “Maybe,” answered Bundy, “they’re already there.”

  But LeMay was still not satisfied, and he seemed restless and irritated. “I don’t understand it,” he said. “Here we are at the height of our power. The most powerful nation in the world. And yet we’re afraid to use that power, we lack the will. In the last thirty years we’ve lost Estonia. Latvia. Lithuania. Poland. Czechoslovakia. Hungary. Bulgaria. China . . .”

  “Some people,” said Bundy, “don’t think we ever had them.”

  LeMay, with a wave of the cigar, a quick flick of the ash: “Some people think we did.”

  The second set of war games went a little better. General Wheeler had switched sides, and though there were certain continuing problems of Asian responses (a massive air attack cut all rail links between North Vietnam and China, but a Chinese general simply released 50,000 men to replace 50,000 North Vietnamese troops who would then move into the South), there was a subtle difference now. That was a greater U.S. willingness to commit more and more of its resources to the war, and corollary change among the North Vietnamese, a downplaying of their willingness to meet the larger American commitment. Despite the more favorable outcome of this game, however, few of those who played in both of them left sanguine; the real l
esson of the games, and it was not a lesson they wanted to talk about, was not how vulnerable the North was to U.S. bombing, but rather how invulnerable it was, how much of an American input it would require to dent the North Vietnamese will, and how even that dent was not assured, and finally, for some of the more neutral observers, the fact that the basic strategy of limited bombing already split the civilians and much of the military.

  The collapse in the South, the one force which the American leaders could not control, continued unabated. The Americans had always had the illusion that something might turn it around; a new leader in South Vietnam who would understand how to get with the program; a realization on the part of the South Vietnamese that their necks were on the line, that the feared enemy (the Americans’ feared enemy, though perhaps not the feared enemy of the Vietnamese), the Communists, were about to walk into Saigon. Or magically, the right battalion commander would turn up to lead ARVN battalions into battle against the Vietcong, or the right program would emerge, blending arms and pig-fatteners together to make the peasants want to choose our side. But nothing changed, the other side continued to get stronger, the ARVN side weaker. One reason the principals were always surprised by this, and irritated by the failure of their programs, was that the truth of the war never entered the upper-level American calculations; that this was a revolutionary war, and that the other side held title to the revolution because of the colonial war which had just ended. This most simple fact, which was so important to the understanding of the political calculations (it explained why their soldiers would fight and die, and ours would not; why their leaders were skillful and brave, and ours were inept and corrupt), entered into the estimates of the American intelligence community and made them quite accurate. But it never entered into the calculations of the principals, for a variety of reasons; among other things to see the other side in terms of nationalism or as revolutionaries might mean a re-evaluation of whether the United States was even fighting on the right side. In contrast, the question of Communism and anti-Communism as opposed to revolution and antirevolution was far more convenient for American policy makers.

  For members of the intelligence community, the war was directly linked to the recent past; they saw deep-rooted reasons for Vietcong successes and Saigon government failures. As far as the intelligence community was concerned, history was alive and gaining its revenge in Indochina; as far as the principals were concerned (and it was a very American attitude that Vietnamese events and history began only after the Americans arrived and took charge), nothing had existed before because it had not been done, tended to, examined by Americans. The Americans were tempting history by ignoring it; after all, in the past they had been able to dominate events by the sheer force of their industrial capacity, which had exempted them from much of the reality of the world. Nowhere was this so openly reflected as in a report by Maxwell Taylor which he brought back to the country at Thanksgiving time in 1964. He was recommending greater escalation, and he talked at great length about the political weakness of the South:

  . . . there seems to be a national attribute which makes for factionalism and limits the development of a truly national spirit. Whether this tendency is innate or a development growing out of the conditions of political suppression under which successive generations have lived is hard to determine. But it is an inescapable fact that there is no national tendency toward team play or mutual loyalty to be found among many of the leaders and political groups within South Viet-Nam. Given time, many of these [words illegible] undoubtedly change for the better, but we are unfortunately pressed for time and unhappily perceive no short term solution for the establishment of stable and sound government.

  Then, added Taylor, still perplexed about it all:

  The ability of the Viet-Cong continuously to rebuild their units and to make good their losses is one of the mysteries of this guerrilla war. . . . Not only do Viet-Cong units have the recuperative powers of the phoenix, but they have an amazing ability to maintain morale. Only in rare cases have we found evidence of bad morale among Viet-Cong prisoners or recorded in captured Viet-Cong documents. . . .

  Thus did the Americans ignore the most basic factor of the war, and when they did stumble across it, it continued to puzzle them. McNamara’s statistics and calculations were of no value at all, because they never contained the fact that if the ratio was ten to one in favor of the government, it still meant nothing, because the one man was willing to fight and die and the ten were not.

  So the Americans ignored the real key to Vietnam, only to have successive collapses of the South Vietnamese continue to confront, astound and disturb the American planners. The inability of the South Vietnamese to behave like Americans was particularly puzzling, and chief among those puzzled was the man who had become the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam in July 1964, Maxwell Taylor, a man who was supposed to be a soldier-intellectual and to understand both the war and the enemy, but who in fact understood neither.

  In June, Henry Cabot Lodge had gone home, the call of the Eastern establishment too great upon his ears as Goldwater neared the Republican nomination, a challenge and affront far greater to Lodge than it was to Johnson; it was a challenge to the traditional Republican leadership. He had gone back ostensibly to help the belated campaign of William Scranton as the moderate Eastern challenger to Goldwater, but he was not above hoping that lightning might strike for himself, a hope that would turn a little bitter when he found out later in the year that his old friend Dwight Eisenhower had wanted Lodge to run when Lodge had interpreted it as simply the general wanting someone from the East to run against Goldwater.

  When Lodge announced his decision to come back, there had been no dearth of candidates to take his place, including Robert Kennedy, who was still trying to find mission and duty and purpose in the postassassination days (Johnson wrote him a compassionate note saying he could not risk the dangers to Kennedy’s life inherent in the Saigon job), and the Good Soldier Rusk, ready to resign and take the job of ambassador. When Taylor, who had been serving as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs for the past two years and had accomplished all that could be achieved in that career, also volunteered, willing to peel off his four stars, Johnson gladly chose him. It was a time when he wanted to move things in Vietnam without really touching them, affect events while doing nothing; thus one moves names, celebrities, and what better name than Max Taylor, citizen-soldier, a liberal, an intellectual, a quoter of Greek, a man who knew something about war and politics, and above all a friend of the Kennedys’ (thus tying up Robert Kennedy even more; indeed some three years later, when Robert Kennedy began to dissent on the war, the Administration used Taylor to bring him back a step and a half). Better still, if one wanted to keep his options open, if there was going to be a decision to cut and run, then what better name under which to cloak it than Maxwell Taylor. A cool man in a cool era, Max Taylor.

  Which was not the way he saw it. As far as American officials in Saigon were concerned, Taylor gave them their marching orders on July 9, almost immediately upon his arrival. He had summoned the mission council together, that group of a dozen Americans who ran the country, or tried to run it, and he briefed them on what he considered to be American objectives. There were, he said, four alternatives. The first was to throw in our hand and withdraw. The second was accommodation through negotiation, which he said was a sign of political weakness. The third was to take military action against the North, which could be done by the South Vietnamese air force, with or without U.S. participation, either in retaliation for specific acts of violence or as part of a general deterrent. These reprisals, he said, would threaten all that Ho Chi Minh had accomplished in his homeland in the last decade and could provide him with a strong incentive to change his mind. The fourth and final option was to improve and expand the in-country pacification program (i.e., within the South Vietnamese borders) with special emphasis on the so-called eight critical provinces. The U.S. government was, he said, following option four while preparing
for alternative three. “No consideration is being given to alternatives one and two, because they are tantamount to accepting defeat,” Taylor said. “Failure in Southeast Asia would destroy and severely damage our standing elsewhere in the world.” With that he was finished; he had in effect told the men who would be running the operations in Saigon that we were not going to lose Vietnam, that negotiation was out of the question. We would stand. Among the men listening to him, there to get guidance, was his old protégé, the new commander of the U.S. military mission in Saigon. General William C. Westmoreland, a man who was neither brilliant nor, for that matter, presumptuous, would come away from the meeting with the belief that he had been told to hold Vietnam. Which in fact he had.