The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  On April 15 Taylor learned of the move and was shocked; it was clear now that his influence was waning and the pressure was too great (the decision to send the brigade, he cabled back to Rusk, “shows a far greater willingness to get into a ground war than I had discerned in Washington during my recent trip”). Now there would always be too many needs, too many generals demanding troops, pushing contingency plans. The line would be harder and harder to hold, the President more and more uneasy in what was becoming his new and as yet unannounced role, war President, more and more having to meet the demands of his generals, dealing with their requirements, rather than those of his civilians. The generals would have his ear more, simply because he would be more and more responsible to the boys out there. For the military pressures were mounting, and mounting quickly. Taylor thought that he had held the line against the three divisions during his visit to Washington, but not everyone thought so. One of the decisions had called for an increase in the deployment of logistical troops for Westmoreland’s command. Taylor had interpreted this as a beefing up of the logistical base for the troops already in the country. But the Chiefs were shrewder; when they did not get the three-division force, they had been told by McNamara to go ahead and start the planning for three divisions, and now they decided to use the increase in logistical troops as a way of initiating the three-division force. The logistical troops, by their interpretation, were to be the advance party of the three-division force. They asked McNamara if they were correct in this interpretation of the logistical troops. He answered that they were, and told them to go ahead with the planning. Thus on April 6 Admiral Sharp was informed by the JCS that after meeting with McNamara they had received the following directive: “This will confirm my understanding that the Joint Staff is preparing a detailed plan and time schedule for the actions necessary to introduce a two-to-three division force into South Vietnam at the earliest practicable date.” This was the first signal of what was to come soon; Admiral Sharp, already anxious to get moving and get troops into the country, responded quickly. He called a meeting in Honolulu for April 9 and 10 to do the definitive planning for the logistical troops which would soon form the base for the three divisions at Qui Nhon and Nha Trang. Taylor cabled back that it was not his understanding that the logistical troops were an advance guard for the three divisions, but no one was paying much attention to him; he was in fact already complaining to Washington about being cut out of important cable traffic. So even here Taylor’s ability to hold the line was only partial.

  There was a momentum to the military and it was carrying everything along with it; Admiral Sharp was becoming increasingly irritated with Taylor’s hesitance, and was beginning to push harder in his own cables to undermine Taylor. Taylor, for instance, had been very uneasy about the Marines coming ashore. He had been reporting back the Saigon government’s sensitivity to a greater American presence, and he now centered his reservations on the question of how much armament the Marines would bring with them. He mentioned specifically the 8-inch howitzers; the government of Saigon did not like them, and there was, he reported, the danger that these howitzers could deliver an atomic warhead. This was too much for the already irritated Sharp, and on April 14 he cabled Westmoreland:

  How anyone can get excited about an eight inch howitzer delivering an atomic warhead I fail to understand. The F-100 can deliver an atomic warhead, the B-57, the F-4 can deliver them . . . All these have been in the country for a long time. So it is really rather ludicrous to make anything of an eight inch howitzer being able to deliver an atomic warhead.

  Sharp was also telling Westmoreland, still somewhat uncertain what his instructions were regarding the troops he was getting, that as far as Sharp could determine from the JCS, Westy’s job was to get on “with killing Cong.”

  At almost the same time the President began to meet with some members of the Congress to explain his problems and let them know that he might have to send some American boys to Vietnam. A small number, it seemed. At one meeting the figure sounded like 40,000 or 50,000, but for Gaylord Nelson, one of the senators present, it was nonetheless disquieting. He had not liked the drift at all, and that night as he drove home with his old friend Hubert Humphrey, he told Humphrey that it looked bad, the nation was being pulled into a big war.

  “You know, Gaylord,” said Humphrey, “there are people at State and the Pentagon who want to send three hundred thousand men out there.” Humphrey paused. “But the President will never get sucked into anything like that.”

  The forces pushing against Lyndon Johnson as he came closer and closer to a decision seemed terribly imbalanced. On the one side were the Chiefs and the Saigon generals, wanting troops, sure of themselves, speaking for the Cold War, for patriotism, and joined with them were his principal national security advisers, all believers in the use of force. Those committed to peace were not as well organized, not as impressive, and seemingly not as potent politically; if anything, in making their case to him, they seemed to unveil their weaknesses more than their strengths. One incident revealed how frail the peace people seemed to Johnson. On the first weekend in April the Americans for Democratic Action were holding their annual convention, and a group of the leadership asked to see the President, specifically to protest the bombing. The meeting was granted and about a dozen ADA officials went over to see the President. Some of the ADA people were quite impassioned; the bombing of the North, they said, simply had to stop. It was wrong, it was against everything America stood for. Johnson himself tried as best he could to deflect the criticism. He was under great pressure from the military to use more force, he said; he had tried to negotiate, but Hanoi continued to be the aggressor. He read at great length from a speech that he intended to give on the Mekong River development project; he was, he said, trying to do there what he was doing here at home. But he was not able to assuage their feeling. It was a sharp and tough exchange. The ADA people were particularly worried about McNamara’s role, and several of them criticized the growing power of the Secretary of Defense, whom they visualized as being a major hawk. Johnson moved to set them at ease. “Why are you people always complaining about McNamara?” he asked. “Why, Mac Bundy here”—pointing to Bundy—“is a much bigger hawk than McNamara.” But even the ADA people did not seem to be particularly unified; there were divisions within the group, and John Roche, a Brandeis professor who was the outgoing chairman, seemed quite sympathetic to the Johnson position. As the group was leaving, it passed through the White House press room, and Joe Rauh, one of the ADA officials, told the waiting reporters that the exchanges had been sharp ones, that the ADA had expressed its opposition to the bombing in very strong terms. At that point Roche tried to soften Rauh’s statement, and the two clashed over the wording, Roche wanting a more subdued description.

  The whole incident immediately convinced Johnson that he could handle the liberals, that they had no real muscle, that they were divided among themselves. Even as he said good-bye to the ADA representatives, he showed in the Joint Chiefs, plus McNamara and Rusk, for one of the pressing meetings on the use of ground troops. Because he liked to begin each meeting by referring to the one which preceded it, the President now reached into the wastebasket and scooped up the notes which the ADA people had brought to the meeting and written to each other during it. Then, mimicking his previous guests to perfection, he began to read the notes to the assembled Chiefs, pausing, showing great relish in ridiculing each, adjusting his voice as necessary, taking particular pleasure in one that Rauh had written: “Why doesn’t he take the issue of Vietnam to the United Nations?” That one in particular broke them up. Then, the liberals dispensed with, they got down to more serious things, such as the forthcoming decisions on ground troops.

  Nor was Johnson’s instinct to use force tempered in April by the experience in the Dominican Republic. When the frail political legitimacy of the Dominican government began to fall apart, and when leftist rebels began to make a challenge, Johnson moved quickly to stop an
other Cuba. Presidents in the past had been soft on Cuba and had paid for it. No one would accuse Lyndon Johnson of that. So despite the fact that the reports from the Dominican were remarkably unclear, with the American ambassador filing wildly exaggerated estimates on the amount of violence taking place, and totally unconfirmed reports on the extent of Communist subversion, Johnson moved swiftly. He would use force. No one at a high level in the Administration dissented, or suggested that the United States had no legal justification for moving in with force, or indeed that it did not even know what was happening. Force it was, overkill, not just the Marines, but the Airborne as well, 22,000 troops, and they went in, and whatever the uprising was—the Administration seemed unclear about that—it was put down. American muscle had determined the outcome. Oh, there had been protests from the left, and from people nervous about things like this, but Johnson had paid no attention and it had worked out—or seemed to work out. So if the same liberals were making the same soft sounds on Vietnam, why pay attention? People forgot about these things if they worked out, and there was no doubt what would happen when real men walked into one of these fourth-rate countries and set things right. So there was, out of the Dominican, an impression confirmed that if you just stood tall, why, things would come your way, though of course the difference between the depth and root of the insurgency in Vietnam and the sheer political frustration and chaos of the Dominican was very, very great. But the Dominican, whatever else, did not discourage Lyndon Johnson from the use of force. Nor, of course, the men around him.

  The President was increasingly concerned about the situation in Vietnam, but he was less wary of the French experience than Taylor or Ball; he was more confident of what Americans could do. In addition, and this was to be important later as the question of enclave strategy versus search-and-destroy strategy arose, he was not a man to sponsor a defensive strategy, to send American boys overseas, to see American boys killed, and then yet be involved in a long, unrewarding war. He was not a man for that kind of war, a man to be charged with a no-win policy. The political trap of the Korean War was real to him: he knew what it was like to be attacked for failing to win a war, for getting in with a no-win policy. If Americans were going to be there, they had better be aggressive. Clean it all up and get home. Show Ho what Americans could do, and get him to the table. Consequently, when Taylor appeared almost querulous about Westmoreland’s April 10 request, McNaughton immediately explained that “highest authority” thought the situation was deteriorating, that something new was needed in the South, which included using the 173rd for security and for combat operations, as Westmoreland wanted. Taylor still thought it precipitous; he had cabled earlier saying that it went ahead of the planning agreed upon during his visit to Washington; then on April 17 he moved to block the deployment, which he could do by not clearing it with the Vietnamese government; he said he would not move to clear it with the government until he got further and more specific instructions from Washington. What he wanted, he said, was a sixty-day experimental period with forces already in the country; he was wary of what he called “hasty and ill-conceived proposals for deployment of more forces.” He was still trying to hold them off, but the pressure was building, and his position was preserved only by greater and greater concessions.

  Which became very clear within a week as many of the principals gathered in Honolulu to go over strategy and troop commitments for the immediate future. Time was running out on them. They had in the past done everything to prevent sending ground troops to Vietnam; since 1954 that had been a primary objective; now, eleven years later, it was all coming to an end. They had bombed in order not to send troops, in order to make Hanoi talk, but it was clear that the bombing was having very little effect (McCone of the CIA was reporting that it wasn’t really hurting Hanoi at all). Rather the result might be the opposite; there were now reports of at least one North Vietnamese regiment in the country and a second poised on the border. There were indications that more might be coming down the trails. The bombing had failed, just as the counterinsurgency commitment had failed. The erosion of the anti-ground-troops position could be seen through the changes in Taylor; he was at once committed to winning the war (or saving South Vietnam), remaining a player in good standing with the other players, loyalty to the traditions of the U.S. Army, and at the same time keeping the U.S. ground forces out and preventing a repeat of the French experience. As the pressure increased, his position would change degree by degree, his resistance to U.S. troops diminishing.

  Honolulu marked the end of an outlook on Vietnam. In the last four weeks Johnson had been slipping from being a peacetime President to a wartime one; more and more under the influence and pressure of the JCS; the civilians more and more on the defensive, trying to halve the requests of the JCS (which simply meant that the military would double whatever it really wanted), trying to limit the missions. Now at Honolulu this would become ever more clear. It was the crucial meeting to decide needs and strategies. It was attended by McNamara, Bill Bundy, McNaughton, Earle Wheeler, Admiral Sharp, Taylor and Westmoreland, and the military was now numerically beginning to dominate.

  Now, for the first time, Westmoreland was the dominating figure. He was no longer the number-two man from Saigon, there to sit behind Taylor looking strong and supportive, there to say that the military situation wasn’t quite as bad as the political, there to say that the ARVN reserve forces were depleted. The bombing, which he had always doubted, had failed (although they were all too polite to say so; they said instead that it would not work within the proper time limit). Now it was his turn to play, and they would find that he was a forceful player who knew what he wanted, how much to ask for and how much not to ask for. At this meeting he would ask for troops and give in on strategy. It was in that sense Westmoreland’s conference. It was as if the change in President Johnson’s mind, the realization that more dramatic and aggressive measures were needed, had turned it to him. Since Westmoreland had in the past argued that the war was really in the South, that the North was a peripheral part, they had not turned to him, because if they had, it would have meant troops. Now that the bombing had failed, they had to listen to him. If Hanoi was to give up the war, he claimed, it would have to be beaten in the South; if Hanoi thought that victory was close in the South, it would be more than willing to bear the bombing. Thus the problem was on the ground, and success would only come on the ground. Otherwise it was an endless, open-ended war, which would see, despite the greater American role and input, an eventual South Vietnamese collapse and loss, or at best a long and bitter conflict which would barely stave off defeat.

  Westmoreland did not specify how many ground troops were needed; he was not eager to scare off the civilians, and he did not talk at length about what the North Vietnamese reaction would be (that was not his job, to forecast Hanoi’s intentions. He knew it had the capability, but the discussion of intentions, that was for the intelligence community). He was pleased to find that McNamara was now more sympathetic to the use of troops, and this was what the President seemed to want. As for the bombing, it was helpful and we should continue to keep the pressure up; but it would not do the job alone. Taylor in particular said that it was important not to attack the North Vietnamese assets within what was now called the Hanoi-Haiphong doughnut. This, he said, would be killing the hostage. There would, however, have to be more ground troops; Westmoreland said it was basic to any kind of success, and there was complete agreement on this, that the ARVN could not do it; it was having a hard time filling up depleted units rather than creating new ones. The strategy, they agreed, was the Taylor enclave strategy. Essentially experimental. Sharp, Wheeler and Westmoreland wanted a grander, more aggressive strategy, but this was not the time to argue that. The thing to do was to get the troops in-country first, and then worry about strategy and use later.

  So Westmoreland got almost all he wanted in terms of numbers. He had gone into the Honolulu meeting with 33,500 Americans in the country. At Honolulu,
40,000 more were committed, with others discussed and put on the preparation list. Westmoreland would get his Army brigade for Bien Hoa by May 1, his first Army troops. He would get three more Marine battalions, plus three tactical fighter squadrons, for Chu Lai, where an airstrip was being built. He would get an Army brigade for the Qui Nhon­Nha Trang area by June 15, and he would get all the necessary logistical complement necessary. In addition, the United States would go ahead with plans for an Australian battalion to Vung Tau, and a Korean regimental combat team for Quang Ngai. This meant that the United States would have thirteen maneuver battalions and 82,000 men in-country, plus four Third Country battalions and 7,250 men. The men at Honolulu also discussed the need for, but did not yet recommend, further troop commitments. This included an Army airmobile division (nine battalions), which Westmoreland had always wanted and which despite the general agreement on the enclave strategy would go to the Central Highlands, as well as the remainder of the Marine expeditionary force, which was two battalions, and an Army corps headquarters; further, the Koreans would come up with a full division, consisting of six battalions. All this amounted to seventeen additional maneuver battalions, which would have brought the total for Westmoreland to thirty-four battalions. The planning and logistical problems of getting the divisions ready and pointed toward Vietnam had been taken care of. It was going Westy’s way.