The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  So it all came down to Lyndon Johnson, reluctant, uneasy, but not a man to be backed down. Lyndon would not cut and run, if it came to that; no one was going to push Lyndon Johnson around. Lyndon Johnson knew something about people like this, like the Mexicans back home, they were all right, the Mexicans, but “if you didn’t watch they’ll come right into your yard and take it over if you let them. And the next day they’ll be right there on your porch, barefoot and weighing one hundred and thirty pounds, and they’ll take that too. But if you say to ’em right at the start, 'Hold on, just wait a minute,’ they’ll know they’re dealing with someone who’ll stand up. And after that you can get along fine.” Well, no one would push Lyndon Johnson of Texas around. This was Lyndon Johnson representing the United States of America, pledged to follow in the tradition of Great Britain and Winston Churchill—Lyndon Johnson, who, unlike Jack Kennedy, was a believer, not a cynic about the big things. Honor. Force. Commitments. Who believed in the omnipotence of American power, the concept of the frontier and using force to make sure you were clearly understood, believing that white men, and in particular Americans, were just a bit superior, believing in effect all those John Wayne movies, a cliché in which real life had styled itself on image (paint the portrait of Johnson as a tall tough Texan in the saddle, he had told Pierre Salinger, although he was not a good rider). And in the Dominican crisis he sent word through McGeorge Bundy for Colonel Francisco Caamano Deno, the rebel leader: “Tell that son of a bitch that unlike the young man who came before me I am not afraid to use what’s on my hip.”

  For machismo was no small part of it. He had always been haunted by the idea that he would be judged as being insufficiently manly for the job, that he would lack courage at a crucial moment. More than a little insecure himself, he very much wanted to be seen as a man; it was a conscious thing. He was very much aware of machismo in himself and those around him, and at a moment like this he wanted the respect of men who were tough, real men, and they would turn out to be the hawks. He had always unconsciously divided the people around him between men and boys. Men were activists, doers, who conquered business empires, who acted instead of talked, who made it in the world of other men and had the respect of other men. Boys were the talkers and the writers and the intellectuals, who sat around thinking and criticizing and doubting instead of doing. There were good boys, like Horace Busby and for a time Dick Goodwin, who used their talent for him, and there were snot noses, and kids who were to be found at the State Department or in the editorial rooms of the Washington Post or the New York Times using their talents against him. Bill Moyers was a boy who was halfway to becoming a man, a writer who was moving into operational activities. Hubert Humphrey, Vice-President or no, was still a boy, better than most liberals, but too prone to talk instead of act, not a person that other men would respect in a room when it got down to the hard cutting; real men just wouldn’t turn to Hubert, he didn’t have the weight, and so when Humphrey voiced his doubts on Vietnam he was simply excluded from the action until he muffled his dissent.

  Now, as Johnson weighed the advice he was getting on Vietnam, it was the boys who were most skeptical, and the men who were most sure and confident and hawkish and who had Johnson’s respect. Hearing that one member of his Administration was becoming a dove on Vietnam, Johnson said, “Hell, he has to squat to piss.” The men had, after all, done things in their lifetimes, and they had the respect of other men. Doubt itself, he thought, was an almost feminine quality, doubts were for women; once, on another issue, when Lady Bird raised her doubts, Johnson had said of course she was doubtful, it was like a woman to be uncertain. Thus as Vietnam came to the edge of decision, the sides were unfair, given Johnson’s make-up. The doubters were not the people he respected; the men who were activists were hawks, and he took sustenance and reassurance that the real men were for going ahead. Of the doves, only George Ball really had his respect. Ball might be a dove, but there was nothing soft about him. He had made it in a tough and savage world of the big law firms, and his approach was tough and skeptical. He did not talk about doing good or put Johnson off by discussing the moral thing to do, rather he too was interested in the exercise of power and a real world that Johnson could understand. He was a doer, an activist, and Johnson would tell him again and again, even as Ball dissented, “You’re one of these can-do fellows too, George.”

  Thus the dice were loaded; the advocates of force were by the very nature of Johnson’s personality taken more seriously, the doubters were seen by their very doubts as being lesser men. So he would go ahead, despite his own inner instincts, that the rosy predictions were in fact not likely to be so rosy, that it was likely to be tougher and darker, that George Ball’s doubts had a real basis. The thrust to go forward was just too great. Everyone else seemed so convinced of America’s invincibility. Even Ball, arguing at the time that it was the right moment to cut our losses, sensed this feeling of American invincibility and will, and would write that by negotiating out, the United States could become a “wiser and more mature nation.” But those lessons would have to come the hard way; there were too few restraints. All the training of two decades had been quite the reverse. They had come to the end of one path. They were cornered by bad policies on Asia which they had not so much authored as refused to challenge, both in the fifties when out of power, and in the sixties when in power. And so now they bombed. They did this in place of combat troops, and they believed that it would not last long, perhaps a few months.

  A few days later, after the bombing campaign had begun, a White House reporter came across Bundy in the White House barbershop. Bundy was sitting there being lathered, and since he could not easily escape, the reporter thought it was a good time to ask Bundy something that had been bothering him since the incident. “Mac,” he said, “what was the difference between Pleiku and the other incidents?”

  Bundy paused and then answered, “Pleikus are like streetcars” (i.e., there’s one along every ten minutes).

  If anything, doubts about Pleiku and the bombing, doubts expressed clearly and forcefully, helped remove one other dovish voice from further participation, and that was the Vice-President of the United States, a man whom the liberals had eagerly accepted during the convention as their representative in the Administration. The Vice-President, it quickly turned out, was not his own man; no Vice-President is, but the Vice-President under Lyndon Johnson was doomed to be even less so. Lyndon Johnson had always viewed Hubert Humphrey as something of a convenience, to be used at times for his own and the country’s greater good, but the special kind of respect that Johnson held for either Dick Russell or Robert Kerr was missing. Johnson was simply too powerful, too forceful for the weaker, pleasant Humphrey, and Johnson was very aware of this. The political career of Humphrey before 1964 had a good deal of the taint of Lyndon Johnson to it. It was Johnson who had legitimized Humphrey the outsider into a Senate insider. The Humphrey presidential campaign in 1960 had more than a little Johnsonian touch, a split between the genuine pro-Humphrey people under Joe Rauh, and the stop-Kennedy Humphrey-Johnson people under Jim Rowe; and now Humphrey had finally reached national office entirely because of Lyndon Johnson’s decision.

  Those around Humphrey, and there were a good many of them, who thought the Johnson-Humphrey relationship was almost completely one-sided, Johnson using Humphrey on Johnson’s terms, would not be disabused of their notion by the new relationship; it would soon become clear that Johnson had no intention of protecting Humphrey from that special misery he had suffered as Vice-President, but rather intended to pass it on in even greater doses. Rarely would a high public official undergo the humiliation and virtual emasculation that Humphrey underwent as Vice-President, almost, it seemed, from the very start. In November 1964, two months before taking office, Humphrey had given a speech in New York on education and departed from his text, carried away by his own enthusiasm, giving the impression that perhaps Humphrey would be the architect of the Administration’s education poli
cies. Johnson was furious; this was his terrain and Humphrey was told this in no uncertain terms. Just so there would be no mistake about it, Johnson called in the White House reporters who were with him on the Ranch and told them, “Boys, I’ve just reminded Hubert that I’ve got his balls in my pocket.” There would be additional reminders to come.

  Humphrey was an old-fashioned domestic liberal and he had never been a real believer in the Cold War. He had accommodated to some degree, particularly in 1954 when he was frightened by the McCarthy sentiment in the land, and he had sponsored the Communist Control Act, but generally he had been in the Eleanor Roosevelt­ADA soft-line position, pushing disarmament and trying to limit the arms race. Those instincts, that peace was something you worked for politically, were with him in early 1965 as the Administration edged toward war. At the time of Pleiku he was called in for one of the smaller meetings, and he expressed himself forcefully, perhaps too forcefully, it would seem in retrospect, against the bombing, particularly bombing when Kosygin was in Hanoi. There was a certain candor and force to his presentation and he would soon live to regret it; from then on he was kept on extremely short rations by the President. Washington, of course, is a tough and gossipy town; everyone knows who is and who is not going to meetings, who is and who is not in on the inner-memo traffic. When a man is moved outside the flow, it is fatal, everyone else avoids him, fearing the stigma may be contagious; what starts as a partial isolation soon becomes almost total. From the time of his dissent on Pleiku, Humphrey was not invited to meetings, not informed of important memos or the drift of the policy. He was, in effect, frozen out. His staff, already small, would scurry around Washington trying to pick up the play on Vietnam for him. In April, Humphrey’s aides heard that there was a National Security Council meeting on Vietnam and wondered if their man would be invited. Humphrey told them to find out, so an aide placed a call to Bromley Smith, who ran the NSC meetings. Was Humphrey invited? A good question, said Smith, but he didn’t know, he would ask Mac Bundy, who said he didn’t know but he would ask the President, which he did. Johnson was furious and answered Bundy at his scatological best, goddamn it, couldn’t he have a secret goddamn meeting without every goddamn person in town knowing about it and wanting to get in.

  So Humphrey was stained, and it was not a good stain; every one of the other principals, wanting to keep their effectiveness and credibility with this tempestuous President, knowing his vagaries, became wary of being seen with Humphrey; he had become a cripple and everyone else knew it. When Humphrey’s people heard in the early months of 1965 that George Ball was making a major stand against the war, they had thought it might be a good idea if Ball and Humphrey got together, since they were both working in the same general area. So a staff aide of Humphrey’s named John Rielly approached George Springsteen, who was Ball’s aide, and it would shortly become clear that the Ball people did not want Humphrey involved; his assistance was not, so to speak, an asset. And Humphrey remained cut off and isolated, and in July, when they made their fateful decisions, the men would file out of the NSC room and the White House photographers would take their pictures and everyone would be there, it seemed, including Leonard Marks of USIA, Horace Busby, Dick Goodwin, Jack Valenti. Everyone but the Vice-President of the United States.

  It was not just humiliation on Vietnam which was vested upon Humphrey, but it appeared in many other forms as well. There was the time when Johnson was cruising on the Potomac in his presidential yacht, and when he saw Humphrey entertaining reporters on his yacht, Johnson had his captain call up Humphrey’s captain demanding to know who was on board. Thereafter, by a new rule, Humphrey could not take out a yacht without first clearing it with Marvin Watson, who was in charge of important matters like that. Nor could Humphrey use one of the many planes available to the White House without his air attaché first writing a memo to Johnson’s air attaché requesting the plane; Johnson’s air attaché would then pass the memo to Marvin Watson, who would write a memo for Johnson’s overnight box requesting the President’s approval. Such is the treatment of Vice-Presidents by former Vice-Presidents. All of this eventually had enormous effect on Humphrey. He was not a particularly strong person to begin with, and there was always in him a desire to please everyone around him, often at the expense of intellectual honesty, almost too much enthusiasm, and so now he would get on board. The way to come on board would be to sell the war to his liberal constituents, or failing that, at least to fend them off, to neutralize their liberal voices with his liberal voice. So in late 1965 and early 1966 he made his way back on the team.

  In 1966 he was assigned a trip to Asia (again in a particularly humiliating way. It was a two-and-a-half-week trip and he was given twenty-four hours’ notice, no chance to prepare, barely a chance to get his various vaccinations). Jack Valenti was sent along as liaison man with the White House, to keep an eye on the Vice-President, to call Johnson every day and to bring the President’s instructions to Humphrey, which were, of course, quite simple: optimism, the President wants optimism. The trip was a disaster, too long, too little staffing, too few briefing papers, too little sleep (at one point Humphrey signed an agreement with the Thai government which went way beyond the State Department’s own positions in giving the Thais an American military commitment), but the worst part was Humphrey’s final statement and report on the mission. Johnson had told Humphrey that he wanted a report which would brand China as the aggressor throughout Asia, a report which, in the President’s words, would “nail Fulbright, Mansfield and the New York Times editorial board to the wall.” The report, as Humphrey projected it in front of his staff, in one long and disastrous meeting, would say he had visited all the countries of Southeast Asia and there was only one source of aggression in Asia and it was Peking, and it was the same in Vietnam, Thailand, India, Malaysia and the Philippines. He had known Communists since he was mayor of Minneapolis and they were all alike and they didn’t change. But some of his aides were doubtful at best of the wisdom and accuracy of this particular statement, and one of them, Bowles’s disciple James Thomson, who was the son of a China missionary and a young man who had been working for a more realistic policy, strongly dissented. The statement, Thomson said, simply wasn’t true. As Thomson dissented, some of the other staff people backed him up; it was in effect the Humphrey staff, having lost their own man, now trying to stand up to the Johnson policies. But Humphrey had not slept for two days and it all came unwound; he lost control and started shouting that Thomson had organized a cabal against him; well, he knew what was going on, he knew about Communists, they came at you from many directions, and sometimes they came at you from behind, like Jim Thomson. It was not his finest moment; his staff was shocked.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The decision to mount a sustained bombing campaign was not made until February 13, 1965, two days after the Vietcong had launched yet another attack on the U.S. barracks at Qui Nhon. The significant thing about the bombing campaign, this decision which had taken so long, involved so much planning and in which the principals thought they had been so judicious, was that it had been kept completely separate from the decision on combat troops; it was to be an entity in itself. But in their hearts the military knew better, and this was a crucial lapse. As such, this differed sharply from the decision making in 1954, when the Army staff had cast doubts about U.S. aerial intervention in Indochina.

  In 1954 Army Chief of Staff Matthew Ridgway had made one thing abundantly clear to his superiors as the pressure mounted for air strikes to relieve the French garrison at Dienbienphu: that air power and ground power could not be separated. Indeed, he emphasized, and it was an important word—emphasized—that if air power was used and failed, as he felt it almost certainly would, then the stakes would be greater, and ground power would be necessitated. He noted that if air power was used, ground troops would have to take Hainan Island and keep the Chinese MIGs off the back of the Seventh Fleet (as in 1965 the use of air power would mean that air bases in the
South would be extremely vulnerable to increased and intensified retaliation). In 1965, as the pressure built up for the use of bombing, no one made the comparable case. Ridgway, it would turn out, was the exceptional man. In 1965 each branch of the service did its thing, the Air Force programmed air power, the Army ground power, the Navy wanted aircraft-carrier roles. Of the generals there was no towering figure like Ridgway, so secure in his reputation as a combat leader to stand up to a President as overpowering as Johnson and make him live with the price. Earle Wheeler was a good staff officer, intelligent, a good bureaucrat, but he was no Ridgway. The one general who might have had comparable prestige, Max Taylor, was wearing civilian clothes, and his cables during that period were careful to separate bombing from ground troops, the reverse of what Ridgway had done some ten years earlier.

  Now, in 1965, the bombing campaign was going ahead under the name of Rolling Thunder; it was, in the minds of most of the civilian principals, designed to make the other side negotiate, and thus avoid combat troops; but in the intelligence community the men most knowledgeable about Vietnam knew that it would not work even to this degree, and that the very incidents which had finally provoked it, the bombings, Pleiku and Qui Nhon, were a sure sign from the North that Hanoi would never capitulate, never negotiate in the face of bombing pressure. Thus the very acts which helped initiate the bombing were evidence from the other side that the avowed purpose of it would not work. But it would, the principals thought, stave off the use of troops. On February 22, nine days after the decision to go ahead on a bombing campaign, General William Childs Westmoreland, the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam (COMUSMACV, in military parlance, or Commander US Military Assistance Command, Vietnam), sent in a request for two U.S. Marine corps to provide security for the U.S. air base at Danang, the base from which more and more raids against the North (and the Vietcong in the South) were being launched.