Guns or Butter

by Bernstein, Irving;

  Thus, the Kennedy policy was a failure. Ho Chi Minh would not stop the war until Vietnam was unified under his control. Diem, counting on American support, refused to fight seriously or give up his tyranny. But Kennedy held back on committing U.S. combat forces. Doubtless, as he told O’Donnell, he hoped to get through the 1964 election before confronting that issue. But he was assassinated only three weeks after Diem met the same fate.1

  Clark Clifford, who knew both well, wrote that John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson viewed Vietnam through entirely different eyes. Kennedy considered it “an international problem—not something aimed at him personally.” Johnson, by contrast, would “personalize the actions of the Vietcong, interpreting them as somehow aimed personally at him.” Thus, the sources of Johnson’s decisions to commit U.S. forces in Vietnam and to refuse to pull them out are found in his personality and in his personal history.

  Johnson’s greatest fear, Doris Kearns wrote, was that he should display “unmanliness” publicly. He proudly thought of himself as a “patriot” and he bestowed that honorable title upon those who shared his love for country and his pride in its great military strength. He came from the South, the region with the strongest military tradition, and from Texas, with its own special memory, the Battle of the Alamo. In a super-patriotic speech to the troops in Korea in 1966 he said, “My great-great-grandfather died at the Alamo.” While a lie, it certainly demonstrated his need to identify with the past military glory of Texas. In an emotional speech to senior officers at Cam Ranh Bay on October 26, 1966, Johnson said, “Go out there and nail that coonskin to the wall.” He took pride in his naval air service during World War II and wore a rosette in his buttonhole for the Silver Star he received. He had been a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and had voted to build up the armed forces. He had worked to locate military installations and defense plants in Texas. He was not about to allow North Vietnam, which he sometimes called “that damn little pissant country” or “that raggety-ass little fourth-rate country,” to push the United States of America around.

  But Johnson and his military advisers did not seem to understand that Vietnam posed formidable military problems. Anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of the country could see that Ho Chi Minh enjoyed great advantages. Thomas Powers, a recent Yale graduate, was inducted into the Army as the bombing of the North began in 1965 and was sent to Fort Gordon, Georgia, to train as a switchboard operator. Curious, he read books in the base library on guerilla warfare and quickly became convinced that the U.S. was in trouble because it was “breaking all the rules.”

  The essential conditions were these: Much of Vietnam was covered with jungle, an ideal terrain for guerillas. Ho’s army was skilled in guerilla warfare and U.S. troops were not. The North Vietnamese had endless patience and the Americans had very little. Ho could count on large troop levies. His soldiers were willing to die in a war they saw as national liberation against a colonial western power. The South Vietnamese had almost no stomach for combat. North Vietnam had little industry to destroy from the air and the Chinese and Soviets would supply arms. The U.S. would be reluctant to attack along the Chinese border for fear of dragging China into the war, as had happened in Korea. It was impossible to use atomic weapons for fear of retaliation.

  George Ball wrote that Vietnam constricted the American government’s vision, like a camera focussed on a near object with little depth of field. “I knew from experience with my French friends, there was something about Vietnam that seduced the toughest military minds into fantasy.” DeGaulle told Ball that France had learned to her sorrow that Vietnam was “rotten country.” He strongly urged the U.S. not to repeat his nation’s mistake, but his warning fell on deaf ears.2

  During 1965 America began to divide sharply between doves and hawks. Like the birds themselves, the groups shared some characteristics but differed in others. This may be visualized by placing a neutral on the war at zero, with doves ranging in intensity of their dovishness from –1 to –10, and hawks spreading out in commitment from +1 to +10.

  At one extreme Jeannette Rankin was a –10, a pure-as-driven-snow pacifist. In the House she had voted against declarations of war in both 1917 and 1941. Now she led the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, 5000 women, in a march on Congress to protest the Vietnam War. Other doves may be ranked as follows: Mike Mansfield –6, George Ball –5, Clark Clifford –2.

  At the other extreme as + 10s were Barry Goldwater and General Curtis LeMay. During his 1964 presidential campaign the senator seemed to favor dropping nuclear bombs on North Vietnam and the head of the Strategic Air Command appeared to want to nuke anyone he did not like. Bellicose Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp, who commanded the Pacific fleet, was a +9. The Joint Chiefs of Staff came in at +8. Secretary of State Dean Rusk was a wavering +6. The three critically important people were President Johnson, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. The President, his macho-Alamo streak much outweighing his doubts, was a solid +6. Bundy, who seemed to suffer doubts about nothing, including Vietnam, but who had not lost his senses like Sharp, LeMay, and Goldwater, came in at +8. McNamara, whose mind was more open than Bundy’s though less clouded than Johnson’s, was a +7.

  Since Bundy was a paradigm of the American Establishment, one must explain that very important, though ill-defined, institution in order to understand him. The core of the Establishment consisted of gentlemen of breeding, privileged education, wealth, and power, who concentrated at the foot of Manhattan Island in investment banking and corporate law with tentacles reaching out to Washington and Boston. Overwhelmingly Republican, they included several notable Democrats and they willingly served Democratic Presidents, usually at substantial financial cost to themselves.

  The mission of the Establishment was to shape and execute American foreign and defense policy to fit the goals of peace and international stability as well as the free flow of capital and trade between nations. During the nineteenth century Britain had maintained a balance of power in Europe and the Royal Navy had kept the seas open. With the decline of Britain in the twentieth century, the Establishment saw America as heir to these policies by maintaining peace in Europe and by resisting aggression, notably by Germany in both World Wars, by Imperial Japan in the second, and by Soviet and Chinese Communism after World War II. Such a role required massive military forces.

  Throughout its history the Establishment had been led by men of unusual ability and character. This started with Elihu Root, the foremost corporate lawyer of his time, who served as Secretary of War for McKinley and Secretary of State for Theodore Roosevelt. His heir and the most notable of them all was another distinguished New York lawyer, Henry L. Stimson, who was Taft’s Secretary of War, Hoover’s Secretary of State, and Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of War. Stimson was followed by two men—the Wall Street banker Robert A. Lovett and the Wall Street lawyer John J. McCloy—both of whom had held prominent positions under Stimson in the War Department during World War II. Another important Stimson associate both at State and at War was the noted Boston lawyer Harvey Bundy.

  Bundy had not been born into the Establishment; rather, he came from Grand Rapids. But aside from his close association with Stimson, he had attended Yale and the Harvard Law School (first in his class followed by a clerkship with Justice Holmes). More important, he married Katherine Lawrence Putnam, who was both a Putnam, which was important, and a Lowell, which was extremely important. The first member of the family arrived in Massachusetts in 1639. In the nineteenth century the Lowells became extremely wealthy in textiles. John Amory Lowell selected six presidents of Harvard. His son, Augustus, increased the family fortune dramatically and fathered Amy Lowell, the poetess, A. Lawrence Lowell, the educator, Percival Lowell, the astronomer, and Elizabeth, who married William Putnam and gave birth to Katherine, who married Harvey Bundy.

  McGeorge, “Mac,” born in 1919, was a Wunderkind. When David Halberstam wrote a book called The Best and the Brightest, he could ha
ve stopped after finishing the chapter on Bundy. At Groton he was first in everything except athletics, though Halberstam wrote that “he could have been a good second-team quarterback—excellent play calling—but he thought athletics took too much time.” He won the Franklin D. Roosevelt Debating Trophy three times. The novelist Louis Auchincloss, who was at Groton with him, said that Bundy was fit to be dean at age 12. Richard Irons, the top history teacher, said Bundy’s essays were better than the books he based them on. He graduated at 16,summa cum laude. Yale was more of the same. He was the first applicant to receive three perfect scores on the entrance exams. As a freshman he wrote an essay entitled “Is Lenin a Marxist?” The historian David Owen said there were not two members of the Yale faculty who could have written it. He was, of course, Phi Beta Kappa. The yearbook called him “Mahatma” Bundy.

  He was then selected as a Junior Fellow at Harvard. The Society of Fellows had been established by a large gift from his great uncle, A. Lawrence Lowell. It allowed individuals of extraordinary intellectual talent to exercise their own curiosity outside the rigorous discipline of a doctoral program. Bundy used his time to write Stimson’s memoirs. The title page of On Active Service in Peace and War cited two authors—Stimson and Bundy. But “the writing of the book,” the great man noted in the introduction, “has been the work of Mr. McGeorge Bundy.”

  During the war Bundy’s draft board rejected him for bad eyes. He memorized the eye charts and made it into the Army on the second try. He became an aide to Admiral Alan Kirk, a friend of the family, and he helped General Omar Bradley plan the D-Day landings on Kirk’s flagship Augusta. Characteristically, Captain Bundy corrected the general on several matters.

  After the war he taught in the government department at Harvard and gave an extremely popular course, “The U.S. in World Affairs.” He stressed the virtue of force in the conduct of international relations and argued the point with J. K. Galbraith, who was deeply attached to peaceful means. He did a little discreet recruiting for the CIA. Director Allen Dulles was a fellow Establishmentarian as well as a family friend, and his brother, Bill Bundy, worked for the agency.

  When President Conant left Harvard to become U.S. High Commissioner to Germany in 1953, there was talk of Bundy, at 34, as his successor. But Nathan Pusey was chosen as president and Bundy became dean of the college. A cautious leader, Pusey soon lost the respect of the faculty. By contrast, Halberstam wrote, “Bundy was dashing, bright, brittle, the antibureaucratic man, the unconventional man,” who was “enormously sure of himself.” He filled the vacuum that Pusey left. Despite departmental opposition, he made several spectacular appointments—David Riesman (social sciences), Erik Eriksen (psychiatry), Laurence Wylie (French civilization), Lillian Hellman (English).

  Though a Republican (his brother was a Democrat), Bundy through Arthur Schlesinger got to know John Kennedy and they soon grew to like and respect each other. Bundy studied important people carefully. As Halberstam wrote, he soon came to “sense Kennedy’s moves, his whims, his nuances.” He, of course, shared the “Establishment’s conviction that it knew what was right and what was wrong for the country.” Thus, Bundy took a “hard-line attitude which was very much a product of the fifties and the Cold War, the ultrarealist view,” which he had been teaching Harvard students. The Communists used force; the free world must respond with force.

  Kennedy invited Bundy to become Special Assistant for National Security Affairs and he accepted enthusiastically. He recruited a brilliant staff—Walt Rostow, Carl Kaysen, Robert Komer, Michael Forrestal, and Bromley Smith. Kennedy, Schlesinger wrote, “saw the White House and the Department [of State] as intimate partners in the enterprise of foreign policy.” Bundy provided the link. “Bundy saw his function as that of the clarification of alternatives set before the President and the recording and follow-up of presidential decisions.”

  When Johnson took over there was a certain tension. He distrusted fancy Establishment types and he bridled to learn that Bundy had mocked him. But McNamara, whom Johnson held in awe, spoke well of Bundy and the President soon realized that he could not operate without him. While the relationship never became easy, it worked and Johnson listened closely to Bundy on Vietnam.

  Robert McNamara came from an entirely different background. He was born, raised, and educated at the other end of the continent. His family was lower middle class (his father sold shoes) and enjoyed neither wealth nor connections. With help only from public educational institutions, including the University of California, he was entirely self-made.

  McNamara was born in San Francisco in 1916 and spent his youth across the Bay in Oakland. His mother soon realized that she had a gifted child and arranged for him to get a quality education in nearby suburban Piedmont High School. He then moved a few miles north to Berkeley. There McNamara learned that he was obsessed with quantification, studied mathematics, and learned to think and speak in the language of numbers. Because of the Depression, like many others, he majored in economics. Upon graduating in 1937 and eager for a good job, he moved on to the Harvard Business School. He made an outstanding record and found his specialization, control accounting. He then returned to San Francisco to a drudge accounting job with Price Waterhouse. He married Margy Craig and they seemed ideally suited to each other.

  In 1940 he was invited to join the faculty of the Harvard Business School to teach accounting. But the war soon interrupted his academic career. In 1942 he was introduced to the American Establishment.

  Henry Stimson had installed Robert Lovett as Assistant Secretary of War for Air. Lovett and Army Air Force chief General H. H. Arnold needed a system of statistical control for a service that was growing exponentially and would soon operate around the globe. They wanted to track planes, engines, crews, and spare parts to manage the Air Force in an orderly manner. Lovett placed Charles Bates “Tex” Thornton in charge and he went to the Business School for help, acquiring several instructors, including McNamara. This group became known as Lovett’s Whiz Kids, and McNamara had the most whiz. Once the system was established they could tell, for example, whether the B-17 was a more efficient fighting machine than a B-24. It was. The operation became legendary in business operations annals.

  When the war was over McNamara wanted to go back to teaching in Cambridge. But Margy came down with severe polio and the medical bills were staggering. Tex Thornton, a great hustler, had the idea of selling the Stat Control group as a unit to a large corporation. Henry Ford II had just taken over his grandfather’s almost bankrupt car company and desperately needed help. He hired three top executives from General Motors headed by Ernie Breech and the Stat Control unit. McNamara worked in finance and introduced many efficiencies. He rose quickly and by by 1960 became president of the Ford Motor Company.

  But the McNamaras were uncomfortable in the auto culture of Detroit and the Ford Motor Company. He did not like to play golf, get drunk, and talk cars, especially fast cars. The auto executives were Republicans. While McNamara was not a Democrat, he had voted for FDR in 1940 and JFK in 1960. Neither he nor his wife wanted to live in a Detroit suburb with auto executives. Rather, they settled in Ann Arbor to hobnob with the University of Michigan faculty. While the wives of other Ford big shots liked style shows featuring mink coats, Margy showed them the University of Michigan cyclotron. Most important, McNamara did not believe in fashionable and profitable frills on cars. He wanted to provide basic utilitarian transportation like Henry’s Model T and his pet project was the Ford Falcon. He also tried to keep prices low. Thus, he alienated other Ford executives, to say nothing of dealers. As Halberstam put it, “It is not easy being a puritan in Babylon.”

  When Kennedy was getting together a cabinet in late 1960 he talked to Lovett. He was so taken with the Republican banker that he offered him his choice of State, Defense, or Treasury. Lovett said his ulcers made federal service impossible. Was there anyone else? Kennedy asked. Lovett mentioned the fellow out at Ford who had worked for him during the war and had b
een outstanding. Kennedy invited McNamara to take either Defense or Treasury. He did not know what the Secretary of the Treasury did, and, furthermore, finance was boring. McNamara became Secretary of Defense.

  In a cabinet of stars McNamara’s shone brightest. Defense was notorious for its waste, inefficiency, politicization, and service rivalries. McNamara brought in a team of exceptionally talented people—Cyrus Vance, John McNaughton, and Roswell Gilpatric on policy, Charles Hitch on budgeting, Alain Enthoven in systems control, and the administrative whiz kid Joe Califano, among others. He studied the operations intensively and quantified everything possible. He then introduced a great many efficiencies, which reduced costs significantly. They also led to a wholesale loss of jobs and much annoyance to the brass. But they impressed both Kennedy and Johnson. Further, he was a formidable witness before congressional committees and enjoyed a great press.

  McNamara had become a cold warrior in 1949 when he read an article in Foreign Affairs that laid out Stalin’s imperial acquisitions. In 1961 he sided with the Joint Chiefs in a memorandum to Kennedy arguing that South Vietnam was crucial to the U.S. in its conflict with Communism and that its fall would have a domino impact in Southeast Asia along with worldwide effects. He urged a limited military commitment to defend South Vietnam. He told Kennedy that he would “look after” a war in Vietnam. Also in 1961 he and James Webb, administrator of NASA, supported Vice President Johnson’s recommendation to the President for a program to place a man on the moon before the USSR did so. It would, they wrote, enhance “national prestige” and become “part of the battle along the fluid front of the cold war.” Thus, as early as 1961 Robert McNamara was a very cold warrior.3