The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  But if a Robert Kennedy challenge frightened Johnson, one by Gene McCarthy did not; he did not seem a formidable candidate, he had a reputation for being a little lazy. Johnson saw McCarthy enter the race and viewed it as one more way of demonstrating how frail the left really was.

  But even as McCarthy was making his lonely way through the small towns of New Hampshire, General Vo Nguyen Giap was moving his men down the trails for what would be called the Tet offensive. It began on January 31, 1968; day after day as the battle continued it became clear that the optimism from Saigon had been premature, that the enemy was tough and durable, that journalistic critics had been more correct in their estimates about the war than the government spokesmen. The Tet offensive destroyed Westmoreland’s credibility; what crumbled in Saigon now crumbled in Washington and crumbled in New Hampshire. The people of this country were already sick of the war and dubious of the estimates of the government; reading as they did in early March that the generals in Saigon wanted to send an additional 200,000 men, it seemed to symbolize the hopelessness and endlessness of the war. American politics and the war were finally coming together. In New Hampshire, Gene McCarthy took more than 42 percent of the vote, pushed Robert Kennedy into the race, and a race by Kennedy was no longer a joke to the President. It was a serious threat.

  Nor was the President entirely in control of his own house. He had purged McNamara because he was no longer on the team and because he was a walking reminder of failure, but McNamara’s successor, Clark Clifford, was turning out to be even more difficult. Clifford was the prototype of the rich man’s Washington lobbyist, the supersmooth, urbane lawyer who knows where every body is buried, the former high official who works for the government just long enough to know where the weak spots are; to Johnson he seemed a reassuring replacement for the idealistic, tormented McNamara. But Clifford was proving to be a new kind of high official for Lyndon Johnson; whatever else, he was not the corporate man. Instead he had a great sense of his own value, and did not believe that anyone hired Clark Clifford except to gain the full benefit of Clark Clifford’s services. A great lawyer is paid for telling a rich and powerful client the truth, no matter how unpalatable. (The story is told of Clifford’s being called by a company president who explained a complicated problem and then asked for Clifford’s advice. Clifford told him not to say or do anything. Then he sent a bill for $10,000. A few days later the president called back protesting the size of the bill, and also asked why he should keep quiet. “Because I told you to,” Clifford answered and sent him another bill, for an additional $5,000.) He knew that if he went to work for the President he would be making a considerable financial sacrifice, so he fully intended to weigh in with the best of his wisdom, not simply to lend his name to a dying cause for the sake of being congenial. Earlier he had edged away from being the head of CIA under Kennedy and had rejected tentative offers by Johnson to become Attorney General and Undersecretary of State. When he took office at Defense he was already bothered by the growing domestic turbulence over the war and his own feeling that perhaps it was indeed hopeless. Also, he had just finished a tour of Asia for the President during which he and Max Taylor worked to drum up additional troops for the war from Asian allies. Their report at the end of the trip had been properly supportive, but Clifford was bothered by the fact that the other Asian nations showed no great interest in sending additional men. Oh yes, they thought standing in Vietnam was a marvelous idea, and they certainly gave us their blessing, but it just so happened that they had very little in the way of resources. The threatened dominoes, Clifford discovered, did not seem to take the threat as seriously as we did. Since he was a man of compelling common sense, this offended his sense of reality and proportion.

  In addition, he was privy to the forces that McNamara had unleashed at Defense in the last year and a half, the dovishness now prevalent there. John McNaughton was dead, in an airplane crash, but his replacement, Paul Warnke, was a Washington lawyer with no previous experience in foreign affairs, and thus marvelously irreverent and iconoclastic toward all the myths of the period. He was, in fact, a heretic by the era’s standards. (Once asked by a reporter when his own doubts about Vietnam had begun, Warnke said, “At the beginning, in 1961. I could never understand why a smart politician like Jack Kennedy was always talking about being against insurgencies when we should obviously have tried to be for them.”) Warnke was more open in dealing with his subordinates than McNaughton had been, and the young civilian defense intellectuals therefore felt themselves encouraged in their doubts. These were unlikely doves; they were all men who had entered the Defense Department convinced that the world hinged on the great struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. They had been among the most militant Cold Warriors of the period, but now the evidence in the decade was going the other way, and they were for tempering the arms race and limiting the Pentagon’s power. Nor were they professional bureaucrats; most were men with Ph.D.s who could go back to universities and thus did not feel that their careers depended upon subservience to existing myths. So a curious struggle developed as the battle began over the limits of war: State, which was supposed to set the political limits, had no doubts because of Rusk and neither did the military under the Chiefs, and they became allies against the civilians at Defense. (Daniel Ellsberg symbolized the conversion—or reconversion—of the Defense intellectuals, though of course there were others. But Ellsberg seemed to dramatize the great currents of an era. At Harvard he had seemed at first the normal humanist student; serving as president of the literary magazine, more humanist and aesthete than warrior. But he had gone from Harvard to the Marine Corps and had drifted, during the years of the fifties, into the world of defense studies and theories, believing that the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union was the key to the survival of all values. He had ended up in Washington in the Kennedy years, one of the bright stars in John McNaughton’s constellation of young intellectuals, and he had done some of the early planning on the war. In 1965 he went on assignment to Vietnam and gradually turned against the war; year by year both his doubts and his outspokenness had grown. In 1969 he publicly criticized President Nixon’s policies on Vietnam, statements which expedited his departure from Rand, and which were picked up in the New York Times. An old friend named John Smail read in the Times of Ellsberg’s statements and wrote asking: “Are you the Dan Ellsberg I used to know in college?” Ellsberg answered back, in what was an epitaph for many in that era, “I haven’t been for a long time, but I am again.”)

  The Defense civilians had in the past year turned up increasing evidence on the futility of our commitment. Studies made by Systems Analysis showed that the bombing did not work, that for much of the war, North Vietnam’s GNP had risen at the prewar rate of 6 percent. If the bombing was failing, so, too, claimed the civilians at Defense, was the strategy of attrition. We had, despite three years of ferocious fighting, barely touched their manpower pool. Defense estimates showed that no more than 40 percent of the males between seventeen and thirty-five had served in the Army, that more than 200,000 North Vietnamese became of draft age every year, and that only about 100,000 had been sent off to the war. Indeed, their main-force army had grown during the war from 250,000 to about 475,000. The war of attrition had barely touched them; we were not keeping up with their birth rate.

  All of this had a profound effect on Clifford. Being a good politician and a Democratic party loyalist (he was the principal architect of Harry Truman’s election in 1948, which was one additional reason why Johnson had now chosen him), he also knew the political limits of what was going on. He wanted, friends thought, to turn Johnson around on the war; perhaps, separated from the war, Johnson could run again. But whatever else, Clark Clifford did not intend to see his own reputation destroyed by either Lyndon Johnson or Vietnam. So in the months of February and March 1968 as the Tet battle raged, as the Joint Chiefs reopened the old Westmoreland request for 206,000 more troops, Clifford fought feroc
iously to turn the tide, to limit the number of troops and to reduce the bombing. In that battle he was usually alone. Rusk, Taylor, Bill Bundy, Rostow were no help. Nick Katzenbach, Undersecretary of State, worked quietly to help him, but he was limited with Rusk as his superior. Nor did Clifford find the President receptive or pleased by this lonely struggle. Their relationship, once so warm and easy, turned cool and distant. The President did not seek his advice, and Clifford’s phone did not ring. He was even cut off from important cable traffic by the White House in ensuing months. But he posed a special problem: when McNamara had gone soft on the war, that could be ascribed to McNamara’s idealism, his distaste for blood, his friendship for the Kennedys. But none of this could be said of Clark Clifford; he was no Kennedy enthusiast, no kook, there was nothing soft about him. Slowly, cautiously, painfully, Clifford forced Johnson to turn and look honestly at the war; it was an act of friendship for which Johnson could never forgive him.

  And slowly Clifford found allies. Not men in government so much as men outside it, men who had Johnson’s respect. In late March, Johnson summoned his Senior Advisory Group on Vietnam, a blue-chip Establishment group. These were the great names of the Cold War: McCloy, Acheson, Arthur Dean, Mac Bundy, Douglas Dillon, Robert Murphy. And over a period of two days they quietly let him know that the Establishment—yes, Wall Street—had turned on the war; it was hurting us more than it was helping us, it had all gotten out of hand, and it was time to bring it back to proportion. It was hurting the economy, dividing the country, turning the youth against the country’s best traditions. Great universities, their universities, were being destroyed. It was time to turn it around, to restore some balance. At one of the briefings of the Wise Men it was Arthur Goldberg, much mocked by some of the others, who almost single-handedly destroyed the military demand for 205,000 more troops. The briefing began with the military officer saying that the other side had suffered 45,000 deaths during the Tet offensive.

  Goldberg then asked what our own killed-to-wounded ratios were.

  Seven to one, the officer answered, because we save a lot of men with helicopters.

  What, asked Goldberg, was the enemy strength as of February 1, when Tet started?

  Between 160,000 and 175,000, the briefer answered.

  What is their killed-to-wounded ratio? Goldberg asked.

  We use a figure of three and a half to one, the officer said.

  Well, if that’s true, then they have no effective forces left in the field, Goldberg said. What followed was a long and very devastating silence.

  Acheson had told the President earlier that the Joint Chiefs did not know what they were talking about, and the switch in this group, which was saying in effect that the war had to be de-escalated, had a profound effect on the President. Did they know things he didn’t know? He demanded to be briefed by the same three officials who had briefed them on the war. Events, and pressure, it was clear, were closing in. He was cornered now. Even in the last days he had fought off those who wanted to stop the bombing, telling Arthur Goldberg angrily, “Let’s get one thing clear. I am not going to stop the bombing. I have heard every argument on the subject and I am not interested in further discussion. I have made up my mind, I am not going to do it.” He had in late March given particularly belligerent speeches, but now he was caught and he knew it. The Wise Men, as they were called, were telling him what the polls and the newspapers had told him: that the country had turned on the war.

  New Hampshire had not been an isolated test. The next primary was in Wisconsin, and the President was entered there as well. The early reports from Wisconsin were very bad. No workers, no volunteers, no enthusiasm. Cabinet members went to Wisconsin in the President’s behalf, and drew small crowds. The President himself could not speak in his own behalf—it was too much of a security problem. The polls were bad and getting worse. One night in mid-March there was a sign which the President, hoping against hope, noticed and which he thought might mean there was some change—an upswing. A meeting in one town seemed jammed and enthusiastic. It was actually a small room, but the way the television camera flashed around it made the hall seem like the Roman Coliseum. The President, watching the meeting, called Larry O’Brien, his political operative, to congratulate him and say that it all looked very good. O’Brien, hearing the enthusiasm and excitement in the President’s voice, tones and emotions missing now almost four years, thought Johnson was being a little carried away, so O’Brien cautioned him. “Mr. President, it was a good meeting and we had a few hundred people here, but it was in Clem Zablocki’s area and he worked hard and the union people worked hard, but it doesn’t mean much. To tell you the truth, we’re in real trouble here.” Later he would tell Johnson not to expect more than 35 percent of the Wisconsin vote, and that it might even be below 30. Lyndon Johnson knew then that he was beaten. He knew he was locked in; he could not do what he wanted on Vietnam and run for re-election. Rather than absorb one more defeat, he withdrew from the race on the eve of the Wisconsin primary and announced that he was pulling back on the bombing. The war was finally turning around; it was time for de-escalation. For Lyndon Johnson it was all over.

  In November 1968, after the election, a group of executives from a New York publishing firm went to the White House to talk with Walt Rostow about publishing his memoirs. The three were important men from the house and the prospect of Rostow’s book was tempting—big figures were in the air. The meeting was pleasant, and Rostow was very friendly. There was some small talk, some reminiscence about the war and the past, and at one point Rostow mentioned that he did not think that the war had been a factor in the 1968 campaign, and he turned and asked his visitors what they thought. One of them, James Silberman, said that he could not vouch for other states, but in the state he lived in, New York, it most certainly had been an issue, most likely the decisive issue. Silberman noticed that Rostow immediately changed the subject, and also that he did not direct any more questions his way. In fact, when the meeting broke up a few minutes later the editors noticed that Rostow shook hands pleasantly with two of them and completely ignored Silberman.

  Lyndon Johnson had lost it all, and so had the rest of them; they had, for all their brilliance and hubris and sense of themselves, been unwilling to look to and learn from the past and they had been swept forward by their belief in the importance of anti-Communism (and the dangers of not paying sufficient homage to it) and by the sense of power and glory, omnipotence and omniscience of America in this century. They were America, and they had been ready for what the world offered, the challenges posed. In a way Lyndon Johnson had known better, he had entertained no small amount of doubt about the course he was taking, but he saw, given his own instincts, his own reading of American politics, his own belief in how he had to look to others, no way of getting off. He and the men around him wanted to be defined as being strong and tough; but strength and toughness and courage were exterior qualities which would be demonstrated by going to a clean and hopefully antiseptic war with a small nation, rather than the interior and more lonely kind of strength and courage of telling the truth to America and perhaps incurring a good deal of domestic political risk. What was it Jack Kennedy had said about Adlai Stevenson during the Cuban missile crisis when he had mocked Stevenson’s softness—that you had to admire the way Stevenson was willing to fight for his convictions when everyone else in the room was against him. The irony of that statement was missing for Kennedy and it was missing for Johnson as well.

  Nor had they, leaders of a democracy, bothered to involve the people of their country in the course they had chosen: they knew the right path and they knew how much could be revealed, step by step along the way. They had manipulated the public, the Congress and the press from the start, told half truths, about why we were going in, how deeply we were going in, how much we were spending, and how long we were in for. When their predictions turned out to be hopelessly inaccurate, and when the public and the Congress, annoyed at being manipulated, soured on
the war, then the architects had been aggrieved. They had turned on those very symbols of the democratic society they had once manipulated, criticizing them for their lack of fiber, stamina and lack of belief. Why weren’t the journalists more supportive? How could you make public policy with television cameras everywhere? The day after he withdrew from re-election in 1968 Lyndon Johnson flew to Chicago for a convention of broadcasters and he had placed the blame for the failure squarely on their shoulders, their fault being that the cameras had revealed just how empty it all was. A good war televises well; a bad war televises poorly. Maxwell Taylor was the key military figure in all the estimates, and his projections—that the war would be short, that the bombing would be a major asset—had proven to be false, but he had never adjusted his views to those failures; there was no sense of remorse, nor concern on why they had failed to estimate correctly. Rather, even in his memoirs, the blame was placed on those elements of the society which had undermined support for the war; when his book was finished, friends, looking at the galleys, cautioned him to tone down criticism of the press. What was singularly missing from all the memoirs of the period—save from a brief interview with Dean Rusk after the publication of the Pentagon Papers—was an iota of public admission that they had miscalculated. The faults, it seemed, were not theirs, the fault was with this country which was not worthy of them.