The answer on the Nixon policies came in November. With antiwar sentiment mounting again, with larger and larger antiwar moratoriums being held, Nixon finally moved. He did not speak to the protesters, he spoke beyond them, to what had become known as Middle America or Silent America, telling them that they were the good Americans who loved their country and their flag, and he summoned them now to support him. He wanted peace, but peace with honor; all Americans would want him to honor the commitment to a great ally. In the speech he seemed to be debating Ho. What was important about the speech was its tone. The rhetoric was harsh and rigid, and there was talk about their atrocities (just a few days earlier Seymour Hersh, a free-lance writer, had uncovered the first evidence of the massive American massacre of women and children at My Lai). The rhetoric seemed more like that of the previous Administration than an Administration which intended to end the war; indeed, a few days later Dean Rusk said at a Washington dinner that he was a member of the loyal opposition, but after Nixon’s speech he was more loyal than opposed.
At the same time that Nixon invoked the support of Middle America he also unleashed his Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, to attack the media and war critics, Agnew in effect becoming Nixon’s Nixon. The idea was simple: to freeze critics of the war and the President, to put them on the defensive. Support of the President was patriotic; criticism of him and his policies was not. Eventually Agnew’s role became even clearer—to purge the Congress of dissident doves, that is, to remove from the Congress those men most opposed to a war that Nixon was supposed to be ending. By this time Nixon’s policy became clear: it would be Vietnamization, we would pull back American troops, probably to 250,000 by 1970, and perhaps to as few as 75,000 by 1972. There would be fewer and fewer Americans on the ground, and greater and greater reliance on American air power. What could be more tempting than to cut back on American troops and casualties and still get the same end result which Lyndon Johnson had sent more than 500,000 men in quest of? So he was dealing with the war without really coming to terms with it; it was the compromise of a by now embattled President who knew he had to get American troops out but who still believed in their essential mission. So now he sought peace with honor. “What President Nixon means by peace,” wrote Don Oberdorfer in the Washington Post, “is what other people mean by victory.”
About the same time Henry Kissinger, who had emerged as the top foreign policy adviser of the Administration (in part because he, like Nixon, was hard-line on Vietnam, whereas both William Rogers, the Secretary of State, and Mel Laird, the Secretary of Defense, had been ready to liquidate the war in the early months of the Administration), was asked by a group of visiting Asians if the Nixon Administration was going to repeat the mistakes of the Johnson Administration in Vietnam. “No,” answered Kissinger, who was noted in Washington for having the best sense of humor in the Administration, “we will not repeat their mistakes. We will not send 500,000 men.” He paused. “We will make our own mistakes and they will be completely our own.” There was appreciative laughter and much enjoyment of the movement. One thing though—Kissinger was wrong. To an extraordinary degree the Nixon men repeated the mistakes and miscalculations of the Johnson Administration, which prompted Russell Baker to describe it all as “the reign of President Lyndon B. Nixonger.” For step by step, they repeated the mistakes of the past.
They soon became believers in their policy, and thus began to listen only to others who were believers (they began to believe, in addition, that only they were privy to the truth in reports from Saigon, that the secret messages from the Saigon embassy, rather than being the words of committed, embattled men, were the words of cool, objective observers). Doubters were soon filtered out; the Kissinger staff soon lost most of the talented Asian experts that had come in with him at the start of the Administration. Optimistic assessments of American goals, of what the incursion into Cambodia would do, of what the invasion of Laos would do—always speeding the timetable of withdrawal and victory—were passed on to the public, always to be mocked by ARVN failure and NVA resilience. More important, Nixon saw South Vietnam as a real country with a real President and a real army, rich in political legitimacy, and most important, capable of performing the role demanded of it by American aims and rhetoric. So there was no tempering of rhetoric to the reality of failure and miscalculation in the South; Nixon himself spoke of the fact that America had never lost a war, precisely the kind of speech a President needed to avoid if he wanted to disengage. Similarly, if there was an overestimation of the South Vietnamese, there was a comparable underestimation of the capacity, resilience, determination and toughness of the other side. Even in 1972, when Hanoi launched a major offensive, Kissinger called in favored Washington correspondents to be sure that they downplayed the importance of the offensive; like so many French and American spokesmen before him he saw it as the last gasp—“One last throw of the dice,” Kissinger called it.
But the Nixon Administration, like the Johnson Administration before it, did not control events, and did not control the rate of the war; and though it could give Thieu air power, it could not give him what he really needed, which was a genuine, indigenous political legitimacy. While Thieu’s regime was as thin and frail as ever, the North Vietnamese were imbued with a total sense of confidence. Time was on their side, they were the legitimate heirs of a revolution, nothing confirmed their legitimacy more than American bombs falling on the country. Eventually, they knew, the Americans would have to leave. What was it a fully confident Pham Van Dong had told Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times in December 1966 in Hanoi: “And how long do you Americans want to fight, Mr. Salisbury . . . one year? Two years? Three years? Five years? Ten years? Twenty years? We will be glad to accommodate you.” And the war went on. American air power served its limited purpose; it could, at great cost, keep the South Vietnamese from being routed. Administration sources praised progress in pacification, but there was no real pacification; the 1972 NVA offensive ravaged any frail gains, and Nixon, in frustration, approved an even fiercer bombing campaign against the North, lifting many of the restraints which had marked the Johnson years. In world eyes the bombing, in the name of a losing cause, made the United States look, if anything, even crueler. Peace seemed nowhere near in the summer of 1972, unless the President abruptly changed his policies, and so the American dilemma remained. Time was on the side of the enemy, and we were in a position of not being able to win, not being able to get out, not being able to get our prisoners home, only being able to lash out and bomb. The inability of the Americans to impose their will on Vietnam had been answered in 1968, yet the leadership of this country had not been able to adjust our goals to that failure. And so the war went on, tearing at this country; a sense of numbness seemed to replace an earlier anger. There was, Americans were finding, no light at the end of the tunnel, only greater darkness.
Author’s Note
I began work on this book in January 1969. I had just come from covering the domestic turbulence created by the war during the 1968 campaign and I had seen the Johnson Administration and its legatee defeated largely because of the one issue. At that point I was looking for a new assignment, and my colleague at Harper’s, Midge Decter, suggested that I do a piece on McGeorge Bundy, who was after all the most glistening of the Kennedy-Johnson intellectuals. It would be a way not only of looking at him—very little was known about what he really did and stood for—but also of looking at that entire era. I thought it was a good idea, since the Kennedy intellectuals had been praised as the best and the brightest men of a generation and yet they were the architects of a war which I and many others thought the worst tragedy to befall this country since the Civil War; indeed I felt then and still feel that the real consequences of the war have not even begun to be felt. So I began the piece on Bundy, which turned out to be much broader than a profile of a man, in effect the embryonic profile of an era. The Bundy article took me three months of legwork. The subject himself was not noticeably cooperative whi
le doing it, nor particularly enthusiastic about the final product. When the article was finished I had a feeling of having just started, though it was very long for a magazine piece, 20,000 words. I realized I had only begun to scratch the surface and I wanted to find out the full reasons why it had all happened, I wanted to know the full context of the decisions, as well as how they were made. Why had they crossed the Rubicon? They were intelligent men, rational men, and seemingly intelligent, rational men would have known the obvious, how unlikely bombing was to work, and how dangerous it was to send combat troops, and that if we sent American units we would be following the French. (When I began work on the book I did not realize how pessimistic the intelligence people both at State and CIA had been about the proposed venture. At key points in 1964 and 1965 when journalistic reporting from Saigon had been particularly pessimistic, it was the argument of those in government, like Bill Bundy, that if outsiders could only see the secret cable traffic they would know how well things were going and how well they were likely to go. Quite the reverse was true; if the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the press and the public had known of the extent of the intelligence community’s doubts, there would have been a genuine uproar about going to war.)
So I set out to study the men and their decisions. What was it about the men, their attitudes, the country, its institutions and above all the era which had allowed this tragedy to take place? The question which intrigued me the most was why, why had it happened. So it became very quickly not a book about Vietnam, but a book about America, and in particular about power and success in America, what the country was, who the leadership was, how they got ahead, what their perceptions were about themselves, about the country and about their mission. The men intrigued me because they were fascinating; they had been heralded as the ablest men to serve this country in this century—certainly their biographies seemed to confirm that judgment—and yet very little had been written about them; the existing journalistic definition of them and what they represented was strikingly similar to their own definition of themselves. So I felt that if I could learn something about them, I would learn something about the country, the era and about power in America. (When I began my legwork, friends of some of the principals told me that it was a mistake to dwell too much on individuals, that the thrust of something like the pressure for this war went beyond individual men. Perhaps, perhaps, but in 1961 no group of men would have argued more vehemently against that very conception, the inability of able, rational men to control irrational events, than the group of men taking power.)
The book is largely the product of my own interviews. For more than two and a half years I worked full time interviewing people who might be knowledgeable about the men, the events, the decisions. On the decisions themselves it was people primarily in the second, third and fourth tier of government who were helpful in piecing together the play and the action, although finally several of the principals themselves began to cooperate. Gradually, as I got into the book, I began to work backward in time, trying to find out how the earliest decisions on Vietnam had been made, how the trap was set long before anyone realized it was a trap. In all I did some five hundred interviews for the book, seeing some people as many as ten times, checking and cross-checking as carefully as I could. The interviews produced about two thousand pages of single-spaced notes for the book. In addition, I carefully read the literature of the Kennedy-Johnson period (the Kennedy literature either totally admiring or bitterly hostile, the Johnson literature more critical and analytical; it was clearly easier to stand back and analyze Lyndon Johnson than it was Jack Kennedy). I went through the magazines and newspapers of the period, and I also read on the fall of China, on the earlier decisions on Vietnam, and then went back to some of the literature on the early days of the Cold War, trying to judge the decisions in the context of the era, with the perceptions which existed then. I had begun the writing on the book in the late spring of 1971; shortly afterward the Pentagon Papers were published: if anything, they confirmed the direction in which I was going and they were rich in the bureaucratic by-play of the era. They were a very real aid; they set out time and place and direction during those years. They were for me invaluable and for anyone else trying to trace the origins and the decisions on Vietnam (the clarity of John McNaughton’s insights into the American dilemma by January 1966 when he realizes that the United States is locked in a hopeless war is by itself absolutely fascinating). In addition, long before the papers were published, Dan Ellsberg himself had been extremely generous with his time in helping to analyze what had happened during the crucial years of 1964 and 1965.
Originally I had intended to list at the end of the book the names of all the people I had interviewed. However, I recently changed my mind because of circumstances: the political climate is somewhat sensitive these days, and the relationship of reporter to source is very much under attack. The right of a reporter to withhold the name of a source, and equally important, the substance of an interview, is very much under challenge, and the latest Supreme Court decision has cast considerable doubt about what were assumed to be journalistic rights. Even on this book my rights as a reporter have been diminished; I was subpoenaed by a grand jury in the Ellsberg case, although I made it clear to the government that I knew nothing of the passing of the papers. My freedom as a reporter was impaired by the very subpoena of the grand jury and the need to appear there. I will therefore list no names here.
Earlier on in the book I discussed the reporters who were in Vietnam during the 196264 period, saying that while their political and military assessments had been quite accurate (an accuracy ironically acknowledged by the Pentagon’s own analysts in the Pentagon Papers history), I felt that they too had failed in part, particularly in comparison with the young State Department China officers of an earlier period, with whom they were in some ways comparable. To a considerable degree I was writing about myself. Some of us who have been critics of the war for a long time were probably ahead of the society as a whole and our profession as a whole, but in our hearts I think we wish we had done a better job. My own attitudes on Vietnam developed over a period of time. In September 1962 I arrived in Saigon as a reporter for the New York Times, believing at first in the value of the effort, not questioning the reality of a country called South Vietnam. It was a small war then, the Americans were only advisers, and it seemed to be a test of two political systems in a political war. I thought our system the better, our values exportable, and thought perhaps with luck and skill our side might win, but events soon disabused me. The American optimism of the period was clearly mindless; the Vietcong were infinitely stronger and more subtle than the government, their sense of the people far truer. For dissenting this much from the requisite optimism we became of course prime targets of the Administration and the embassy. At first my journalistic colleagues and I traced most of the faults to the Diem regime itself; however, the more I reported, the longer I stayed and the deeper I probed, the more I felt that despite the self-evident failings of the Ngo family regime, the sickness went far deeper, that all the failings of the American-Diem side grew out of the French Indochina war, in which the other side had captured the nationalism of the country and become a genuinely revolutionary force. In coming to this conclusion I was affected primarily by two men, my colleague Neil Sheehan, then with UPI, and my friend and colleague Bernard Fall. Thus, instead of believing that there was a right way of handling our involvement in Vietnam, in the fall of 1963 I came to the conclusion that it was doomed and that we were on the wrong side of history. My first book on Vietnam, The Making of a Quagmire, written in 1964 and published in April 1965, was extremely pessimistic and cast grave doubts about escalation; the North, I wrote, was essentially invulnerable to bombing, and combat troops would bring the same political problems encountered by the French. I felt then that after the long years of supporting the Diem regime, we owed it to the Vietnamese to stay a little longer and continue the mission as long as they felt they could con
tinue the fight, that the signs would have to come first from them (when those signs did come, in late 1964, they became the justification not for withdrawal and cutting back, as George Ball was then pleading in the government, but rather for the American government to switch policies and take over the war). I watched the escalation with mounting disbelief and sadness. It seems the saddest story possible, with one more sad chapter following another. Like almost everyone else I know who has been involved in Vietnam, I am haunted by it, by the fact that somehow I was not better, that somehow it was all able to happen.
In a book like this, which took so long to write, I am indebted to many people. I am particularly grateful to my three editors then at Harper’s Magazine, Willie Morris, Bob Kotlowitz and Midge Decter. In the years I worked there they were a writer’s delight. They had the capacity to invoke the best in you; they encouraged you to reach for more and the editing was intelligent and careful; in addition, they all encouraged me to take on this book. John Cowles, the publisher of Harper’s, was particularly generous to me and the other writers on the staff. James Silberman at Random House has been strong in support of this book, and wise in his sense of conception of it. Bill Polk and Peter Diamandopoulos at the Adlai Stevenson Institute have been extremely generous; after I resigned from Harper’s in the spring of 1971 they were quick to offer me a fellowship, and in addition to enjoying the particularly warm and pleasant association of the Institute and its fellows, I am grateful on a more basic level—without their help I could not have finished the book on the projected schedule. Edmund Gullion, dean of the Fletcher School of Diplomacy and an old friend from Congo days, was also quick to offer me a place on his staff after the Harper’s bust and I taught there in the summer of 1971 mostly on the subject of Vietnam, though the dean and I could not disagree more about the subject.
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