by John McCain
Henry Kissinger once told me that whenever he suspected President Nixon’s resolve to make difficult decisions about the war was wavering, he arranged for my father to brief the President. My father’s no-nonsense determination, Dr. Kissinger claims, was infectious and served as a tonic for the President’s flagging spirits.
My father wasn’t much of a believer in fighting wars by half measures. He regarded self-restraint as an admirable human quality, but when fighting wars he believed in taking all necessary measures to bring the conflict to a swift and successful conclusion. The Vietnam War was fought neither swiftly nor successfully, and I know this frustrated him greatly. In a speech he gave after he retired, he argued that “two deplorable decisions” had doomed the United States to failure in Vietnam: “The first was the public decision to forbid U.S. troops to enter North Vietnam and beat the enemy on his home ground…. The second was…to forbid the [strategic] bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong until the last two weeks of the conflict…. These two decisions combined to allow Hanoi to adopt whatever strategy they wished, knowing that there would be virtually no reprisal, no counterattack.”
For the rest of his life, he believed that had he been allowed to wage total war against the enemy, fully employing strategic airpower, mining Vietnamese ports early on, and launching large-scale offensives in the North, he could have brought the war to a successful conclusion “in months, if not weeks.” He was exaggerating, I’m sure, to make a point. Given the resilience of the enemy, and their fierce willingness to pay a very high price and resolve to prevail over time, I doubt the war could have been wrapped up as quickly as my father envisioned even had we escalated our campaign to the extent he deemed necessary. But, given the dismal consequences of our haphazard, uncertain prosecution of the war, with its utterly illogical restraints on the use of American power, his frustration was understandable and appropriate.
Like other senior commanders, he believed the United States had squandered its best opportunity to win the war in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive, “when we had destroyed the back of the Viet Cong…. And when we had finally drawn North Vietnamese troops out into the open.”
He recalled with resentment Washington’s refusal to accede to the military’s plans for a major offensive to be launched from the old imperial capital, Hue. The plan called for an amphibious assault on Hue to spearhead a drive around the flanks of the North Vietnamese Army and across the country to the border, cutting the enemy’s supply lines from the North. “Permission for this operation was refused,” he lamented, “because Washington was afraid that the Red Chinese might then enter the war. It was a ridiculous conclusion based on no evidence. Just fear and anxiety.”
Even before he assumed command in the Pacific, when he was still the Navy chief in Europe, he had prepared and delivered a briefing to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the feasibility and necessity of mining the port of Haiphong. Like any other capable military strategist, he knew that the support the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong received from the Soviet Union and China was critical to their ability to simply outlast us. They hoped to suffer whatever losses were inflicted on them by their vastly more powerful adversary until they had exhausted America’s patience and will to see the war through to a successful conclusion. Without the massive support of their allies they would fail.
What my father didn’t share with his civilian commanders and many of his fellow military commanders was an overly acute fear that doing something about Chinese and Soviet support would involve us in a wider, perhaps global war. He doubted either country would be provoked to the point of war if we rightly decided to disrupt their efforts to aid our enemy, efforts that, after all, resulted in the deaths of many thousands of Americans. Indeed, he interpreted Soviet and Chinese actions as a far more reckless provocation of a great power than any response on our part was likely to be.
Like the men who flew missions to the North, he knew the enemy’s resolve was greatly strengthened by the material assistance their allies provided them, and he wanted to do something about it. As a submarine commander he had executed his country’s policy of total war, a policy that attacked the sources of the enemy’s material support just as vigorously as it attacked the enemy’s armed forces. He had sunk a great many merchant ships on his patrols in the Pacific. He couldn’t believe that the United States would simply leave unchallenged this clear threat to the war effort that he was now commanding.
Most of the arms and supplies used by North Vietnam’s armies entered the country through the port of Haiphong, with lesser amounts entering through the smaller ports of Cam Pha and Hong Gai. Thanks to the strategic foresight of Admiral Moorer, the Navy was well prepared to conduct mining operations in the enemy’s ports, and my father and other senior commanders repeatedly urged their civilian commanders to order the action. Washington invariably rejected their appeals on the grounds that the mining would probably result in damage to Soviet and Chinese merchant ships, and thus would seriously escalate the war by involving those countries further in the hostilities, and possibly even provoke a global war.
As early as 1966, military commanders began urging Washington to approve a mining operation, but they could not overcome Defense Secretary McNamara’s and President Johnson’s apprehension that the action entailed too great a risk of a wider war.
When the North Vietnamese launched a major offensive in December 1971, at a time when U.S. forces in Vietnam had been reduced to 69,000 men, President Nixon finally directed my father to mine Haiphong and other northern ports immediately. The Nixon administration had dispensed with much of the micromanaging of the war that had so ill served the Johnson administration, particularly the absurd target restrictions imposed on American bomber pilots. Relations between military commanders and their civilian superiors improved when President Nixon and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird entered office. The new administration was clearly more interested in and supportive of the views of the generals and admirals who were prosecuting the war. My father had a good relationship with both Nixon and Laird, as well as with the President’s National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger.
President Nixon had continued and even accelerated the drawdown of American forces in country begun by his predecessor, while seeking a negotiated end to the war. But he resolved to apply greater military pressure on the enemy while negotiations and “Vietnamization,” the name given to the strategy of preparing South Vietnam to ultimately fight the war on its own while simultaneously drawing down American forces, were under way. In the interim, Nixon intended to escalate hostilities, both to hasten his diplomacy’s successful conclusion and to strengthen the South Vietnamese regime.
In May 1970, with my father and General Abrams strongly urging it, the administration had authorized an incursion into Cambodia by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces. The enemy had used the sanctuary of the neighboring country to establish formidable military positions, especially along the border, from which they threatened much of the South, including Saigon. The incursion was of brief duration, and it was based on sound military reasoning. Nevertheless, given the considerable growth in domestic opposition to the war at the time, the decision provoked a firestorm of criticism. Neither the President nor his advisers nor his senior commanders wavered in their support for the action.
When North Vietnam launched its offensive in late 1971, Washington was very receptive to the requests of my father and his fellow commanders to respond to the North’s aggression decisively. The administration authorized the immediate use of B-52 bombers, for the first time, to strike North Vietnamese targets.
The following May, the administration ordered my father to commence mining operations in North Vietnamese harbors. The President announced to the nation his conclusion that “Hanoi must be denied the weapons and supplies it needs to continue the aggression.”
Most of the mining was conducted by carrier-based A-6 Intruders. The operation was a resounding success. Casualties were minimal. Twenty-seven foreign merchant ships
remained trapped behind the blockade for the nine months the mining campaign was in effect. Almost all other ships were prevented from entering North Vietnamese ports. The flow of foreign arms and supplies to the North was abruptly and completely halted.
Neither did the war’s escalation, so long anticipated as the unavoidable result of mining the harbors, occur. The administration’s opening to China and its policy of détente with the Soviets were by this time well established and contributed significantly to the response of the Soviets and the Chinese to the mining of their client’s harbors. Their reaction to what was once feared as a casus belli was remarkably muted.
The reaction in both the higher and lower reaches of the United States military was relief. The men charged with fighting the war believed that for the first time a rational policy to undercut the enemy’s critical lifeline was in effect. Thus, they and their civilian bosses reasoned, the war’s end would be hastened.
The reaction among the Americans held as prisoners in Hanoi, who learned of the actions from new arrivals to our ranks, was unanimous approval.
Despite their approval of the administration’s more aggressive approach to the war, General Abrams and the other commanders in the field, including my father and most of the military establishment, doubted the efficacy of the administration’s overall strategy to Vietnamize the war while seeking a negotiated conclusion in Paris. Abrams had profound misgivings that the South Vietnamese could develop the military capability the administration assumed possible. My father concurred, and strongly supported his subordinate’s concerns.
Admiral Vasey, whom my father appointed as head of strategic plans and policies for the Pacific Command, told me that my father “fired some tough messages to Washington.” His most frequent backchannel correspondents were the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense. Henry Kissinger and Secretary of State William Rogers were also recipients of my father’s appeals to rethink their strategy. However, his arguments, while fairly considered, were not successful in persuading them of the necessity of the reevaluation he and Abrams believed was necessary. The drawdown of American forces continued, while the progress of the peace talks in Paris waxed and waned, and South Vietnam reluctantly and without adequate resolve or preparation approached nearer the day when it would stand alone. The American public grew ever more impatient for the war to end. The administration, even after the President was reelected in a landslide, did not possess enough political strength to oppose the people’s will. Washington did what it could to ensure “peace with honor,” but the country’s priority was to get out of Vietnam, and get out we would.
By the time the end did come, with the signing in Paris of the peace accords, my father had retired from active duty. No longer restrained by his role as a subordinate to civilian superiors, he dismissed the agreement. “In our anxiety to get out of the war, we signed a very bad deal.” This he offered even though the “very bad deal” would bring his son home. He was an honest man, with an exacting sense of duty.
Long after the war, I once rashly remarked that the entire senior command of the armed forces had a duty, which they shirked, to resign in protest over Washington’s management of the war, knowing it as they did to be grievously flawed. Obviously, my father was implicitly included in my indictment. It was a callous remark that I probably should have refrained from offering, but I felt strongly about the obligation of military leaders to place the country’s welfare before their own careers. So did the men whom I criticized. They were honorable people, including, certainly, my father. Their opposition to the war’s course, which in many of their cases they pressed in the strongest possible terms to the politicians who designed it, almost surely led many of them to consider resigning. But their country was at war. And I am sure that their sense of duty to help see the thing through to the end, a value first embraced in a great war thirty years before, far more than any career consideration, prevailed over a conscientious contemplation of a principled resignation.
Having once served as the Navy’s liaison officer to Congress and enjoying several close friendships with members of Congress, my father was quite familiar with the character of politicians. But he was puzzled and troubled by widespread and mounting congressional opposition to the war. Likewise, he was astonished at the breadth of opposition among the American people. He was, of course, respectful of the subordinate relationship of the military to the people of a democracy and their elected representatives. But it is fair to say that he believed something had gone badly wrong in a country that did not, by his lights, stand behind the men it had sent into harm’s way to fight for it.
As CINCPAC, my father was expected to testify periodically before the committees of the House and Senate that authorized and appropriated the Defense Department’s budget. The Pacific Command’s vast expanse, including all of the Pacific and Indian oceans, from the West Coast of the United States to the Persian Gulf, encompassed a number of highly charged security situations in addition to the ongoing hostilities in Vietnam. Although our forces in Vietnam were progressively reduced during my father’s watch, tensions on the Korean peninsula and in the Taiwan Strait were always a danger, and there was fear that the Soviets might generate a major crisis in the region while we were preoccupied with the war. It was the Pacific Command’s responsibility to safeguard the shipping lanes and air traffic of half the world.
Accordingly, it was necessary for the United States, as the only military guarantor of regional stability, to maintain a large and expensive presence in Asia while executing the endgame of an unpopular war in Indochina. And my father was not one to subordinate his responsibilities to the prevailing political sentiments of the time, which assumed that our presence in the Pacific should be accorded lesser significance once the unfortunate war in Vietnam was finally ended. Even if the region’s other tinderboxes were to become unexpectedly tranquil, my father’s long-standing apprehension of the emerging Soviet naval threat was enough to persuade him that Pacific Command should retain its priority for American military planners. Thus, he could not countenance on his watch force reductions that he believed would jeopardize our supremacy in the area whether we were engaged in open hostilities or not.
In his opening statement to a Senate committee in 1971, my father gave his projection of the necessary force requirements for the Pacific, after first assessing the state of the war and the various security threats in the region confronting the United States. Many of the senators in attendance were familiar with my father and his views. Some of them he considered friends. They listened respectfully to my father’s presentation, even if one or another of them had doubts about the size of the force level my father was advocating.
One senator, an outspoken opponent of the war, was not an intimate of my father’s, nor, apparently, was he familiar with my father’s ethics. When his turn came to question my father, he immediately took issue with his central argument, that we needed to increase our presence in the Pacific, and he did so in the one manner that anyone familiar with my father’s reputation for probity knew better than to pursue. In effect, he accused him of lying.
He callously implied that my father had intentionally exaggerated his threat assessments to justify force levels that were excessively large and unnecessary. To this senator, my father was an archetype, the old military hawk used to getting his way from unquestioning legislators who had always left military decisions to the military. But times had changed. The World War II–vintage military brass were no longer accorded automatic respect by younger members of Congress, who, though they may have lacked much if any military experience themselves, prided themselves on their modern sensibility and ability to see through an old hawk’s con. To this particular senator, men like my father had gotten us into an unwinnable, unpopular, and probably immoral war. They were not to be trusted.
This was not, of course, the first time my father had testified before a congressional committee. Nor was it the first time my father had encountered a quar
relsome legislator. He had forged personal relationships with a good many politicians and over the years had had any number of spirited debates with them on all manner of military subjects. It was, however, the first time any member of Congress had challenged his honesty, and that was an injury he would accept from no one.
Once the insult was offered, my father forgot all thought of the purpose of his testimony. Neither did he particularly give a damn about disputing the senator’s view of our force requirements. All that mattered to him was that he respond to the attack on his good name, which he did instantly and forcefully.
According to Admiral Vasey, who had accompanied my father to the hearing room and was seated right behind the witness table, the moment the senator finished making the offensive remark, my father jumped to his feet. Red-faced, and jabbing his finger in the direction of his accuser, he proceeded to deliver a heated and sarcastic lecture on strategy and the responsibilities of the Commander in Chief, Pacific. “I don’t remember his specific words,” Admiral Vasey recounted in a letter to me, “but he made it crystal-clear that he was an officer of the highest integrity, as was his father before him, and he strongly objected to any insinuation that reflected on the moral character of himself or his testimony, or of the United States military.”
When it appeared that my father was not about to let up on the offending senator, Admiral Vasey discreetly grasped the bottom of my father’s coat and pulled him down into his seat, “but not before observing the sly smiles on the faces of other committee members.”
Such outbursts were rare in those days in the ostentatiously formal precincts of Capitol Hill. They are even rarer today. There were few things in his life my father valued more dearly than his career. But his good name was one of them. He would have sacrificed anything to defend it, as the errant senator found out that day.