The Working Group’s corollary, that the fall of South Vietnam would bring many other dominoes down, made no sense to these critics. Each of the neighbors had unique interests. Communism was not a monolith. The Soviet Union and China had sharp differences; China and Vietnam were historic enemies. North Vietnam, an extremely poor and war-torn nation, lacked the power to engage in imperial conquests. Finally, a guerrilla war cannot be exported.
Despite the fact that the Working Group urged U.S. entry into an important and dangerous war, its report, amazingly, failed to address military questions except for a cursory treatment of bombing. There was no discussion of the ground forces needed, none of how to deal with guerrilla warfare, none of the potential costs in lives and dollars, none of the duration of the conflict. Ball and Mansfield, neither a military expert, addressed these questions as best they could.
Ball had been on the Strategic Bombing Survey which evaluated U.S. and RAF bombing of Germany during World War II. The study nurtured a healthy skepticism of the capacity of saturation bombing to destroy an industrialized nation’s economy and its will to fight. Skepticism turned to cynicism in the case of a basically peasant society. Bombing the Vietcong in South Vietnam was virtually useless because they could not be located in the jungle. Very heavy bombing of the North could cause severe damage, but essentially to civilians and the buildings they occupied. The military and its supporting infrastructure was diffused and the Soviet Union and China would quickly replace losses. Since Ho was determined to unite Vietnam, there was no chance that bombing would compel him to sue for peace. The most important result of bombing the North, Ball argued, would be the shift of veteran North Vietnamese combat divisions to the South, which would much stiffen the Vietcong. The U.S. would then be compelled to build up its ground forces in the South. This would prolong a guerrilla war of stalemate, hardly an attractive prospect for the U.S. A major worry: “If we do expand the deployment of United States forces in South Viet-Nam and find that this does not do the trick, we shall be under enormous pressures to extend the territorial scope of the bombing offensive and widen the war.” Does anyone in his right mind want a war with China?
Mansfield, who made a similar analysis, was deeply worried about expanding the war. “If a significant extension of the conflict beyond South Vietnam should occur then the prospects are appalling. Even short of nuclear war, an extension of the war may well saddle us with enormous burdens and costs in Cambodia, Laos and elsewhere in Asia, along with those in Vietnam.” When the military asked for authorization to bomb the Hanoi-Haiphong area in early June 1965, Mansfield opposed strenuously, not least because he expected it would lead to greater Chinese involvement.5
Since Johnson respected both Ball and Mansfield for their experience, intelligence, loyalty, and integrity, he was deeply troubled by their opposition. Nor were they alone. The President’s old friend and mentor, Dick Russell, according to Halberstam, warned him “not to go ahead, that it would never work; Russell had an intuitive sense that it was all going to be more difficult and complicated than the experts were saying.” Johnson’s trusted adviser Clark Clifford wrote him, “This could be a quagmire. It could turn into an open end commitment on our part that would take more and more ground troops, without a realistic hope of ultimate victory.”
Johnson, Halberstam wrote, became “restless, irritable, frustrated, more and more frenetic, and more difficult to work with.” Richard Goodwin and Bill Moyers went further; they questioned his mental stability. The President was trapped in the guns or butter dilemma. He was pushing the Great Society and the Vietnam War at the same time. “He knew,” Halberstam wrote, “he would not have the resources for both the domestic programs and a real war.”
In December 1964 the President invited three newsmen, including David Wise of the Herald Tribune, to a three-hour backgrounder in which he talked about Vietnam. Wise wrote:
He likened his situation to standing on a copy of a newspaper in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. “If I go this way,” he said, tilting his hand to the right, “I’ll topple over, and if I go this way”—he tilted his hand to the left—“I’ll topple over, and if I stay where I am, the paper will be soaked up and I’ll sink slowly to the bottom of the sea.” As he said this, he lowered his hand slowly to the floor.
Johnson liked this kind of image. In July 1965, as he was making the ground force commitment in Vietnam, he interrupted a meeting at the White House to say, “Vietnam is like being in a plane without a parachute when all the engines go out. If you jump, you’ll probably be killed, and if you stay in you’ll crash and probably burn.”
Johnson, obsessed, talked incessantly about Vietnam. In June 1965 Moyers and Goodwin held a dinner for task force chairmen, and Charles Haar of the Harvard Law School, who had headed the beautification group, was a guest in the mess hall in the west wing of the White House.
About 10:30 the President walked in. Having missed dinner, he put away “huge portions” of steak and lobster tails capped by “enormous gobs” of vanilla ice cream. After 11:00 Humphrey entered and Johnson left. Around midnight when everyone was a “little tired and sleepy” Johnson returned and launched into a monologue on Vietnam, a subject Haar knew nothing about. He cited the prominent people who urged him to send in ground forces, spoke movingly of the mothers who would lose their sons, and talked of Wilson and FDR forfeiting the New Freedom and the New Deal to wars. “I don’t want that to happen to the Great Society. … I don’t want to get involved in a war.” It was, Haar said, a “virtuoso performance.”
About 2:00 Moyers said to the President that they ought to call it a night. A number of the chairmen were so shaken that they repaired to an all-night hamburger stand and talked till 4:00. Later Haar returned to work on model cities and he wondered about guns or butter. He remembered LBJ saying Vietnam would not stop him. “He would not let it happen to the Great Society. Of course, it sure as hell happened.”
Despite his doubts and fears, Johnson agreed with the Working Group analysis and the pressure from Bundy and McNamara was unrelenting. “Both of us,” Bundy wrote on January 27, 1965, “are now pretty well convinced that our current policy can lead only to disastrous defeat.” The U.S. was waiting vainly for “a stable government” in South Vietnam. Our Vietnamese friends were becoming convinced that the Vietcong would win and were “covering their flanks.” This mood was evident among some Americans. “The worst course of action is to continue in this essentially passive role which can only lead to eventual defeat and an invitation to get out in humiliating circumstances.”
Bundy, who had never been to Vietnam, went out in early February for an assessment. By coincidence, Aleksei Kosygin, the new Soviet premier, was in Hanoi at the same time to persuade the North Vietnamese to discuss peace. They angrily denounced his proposal and instead demanded more arms, which they got.
American special forces and advisers were billeted at Camp Holloway, three miles from Pleiku in the central highlands. A large fleet of airplanes and helicopters was parked on a nearby airstrip. In the darkness of February 6–7, 1965, the Vietcong carried out a massive surprise attack. Eight Americans were killed, a hundred were wounded, and ten aircraft were destroyed. Virtually all the Vietcong escaped. In the clothing of one of the few who were shot was an accurate map of the camp.
Bundy was packing to leave when he learned of the attack. He met immediately with Taylor and Westmoreland. They agreed that the “streetcar” had arrived and Bundy phoned the White House to urge strongly immediate retaliatory air raids against North Vietnam. Westmoreland thought Bundy behaved like a civilian field marshal who had smelled gunpowder for the first time.
That same day Bundy wrote a chilling memo to the President on “The Situation in Viet Nam.” “Defeat appears inevitable.” There was just enough time to turn it around, “but not much.” The “prestige” and “influence” of the U.S. were at stake. “The energy and persistence of the Viet Cong are astonishing.” The attack on Pleiku demanded “sustained
reprisal.”
Johnson reacted strongly to the taking of American lives. After easily obtaining the approval of the National Security Council, he launched Flaming Dart, which soon became a program of gradually broadened air attacks against North Vietnam with certain areas, including Hanoi-Haiphong and the Chinese border, out of bounds. In March the air attacks were significantly expanded into Rolling Thunder, that is, massive raids on infiltration routes and military installations in the North, including for the first time the use of B-52s with carpet bombing and napalm.
In his February 7 memo Bundy made a suggestion that the President rejected at once:
At its best the struggle in Vietnam will be long. … This fundamental fact [must] be made clear … to our own people and to the people of Vietnam. … No early solution is possible. … The people of the United States have the necessary will to accept and to execute a policy that rests upon the reality that there is no short cut to success in South Vietnam.
While he was unable wholly to co.iceal the fact that he was taking the U.S. into war, Johnson made every effort to carry it off in secrecy. As the truth filtered out, of course, his credibility gap widened and deepened. In February 1965 James Reston of the New York Times wrote, “It is time to call a spade a bloody shovel. This country is in an undeclared and unexplained war in Vietnam.” By February 9, the telegrams reaching the White House on the air strikes were running almost 12 to 1 against.
But the bombing created its own irresistible momentum. The American airfield at coastal Danang was vulnerable to Vietcong guerrilla attack. On February 22 Westmoreland asked Johnson for two marine battalions, 3500 men, to protect the base. On March 8 they splashed ashore in full battle dress on the beach at Danang, cheered on by pretty Vietnamese girls.
Early returns on the bombing were not encouraging. Between February 7 and April 4, 1965, the U.S. had conducted 34 strikes and the South Vietnamese 10 more on military installations in North Vietnam using bombs up to 1000 pounds and napalm. The U.S. had lost 25 planes, the South Vietnamese 6. Until almost the end of the period all had been shot down by antiaircraft guns; now, ominously, MIGs were also bringing them down. The North Vietnamese were taking many measures to minimize the damage. “The air strikes,” General Wheeler wrote, “have not reduced in any major way the over-all military capabilities of the DRV.” The economic effects seemed “minimal.” “Outwardly, the North Vietnamese government appears to be uninfluenced by our air strikes.” Director John McCone of the CIA was worried. “The strikes to date have not caused a change in the North Vietnamese policy of directing Viet Cong insurgency, infiltrating cadres and supplying materiel. In anything, the strikes … have hardened their attitude.” This meant inevitably that there would be pressure on the U.S. to commit ground troops. “We will find ourselves mired down in combat in a military effort that we cannot win, and from which we will have extreme difficulty in extracting ourselves.” Neither Johnson nor his advisers seem to have paid any attention to this warning.
On April 6,1965, the President signed the critically important National Security Action Memorandum No. 328. He approved a wide range of stepped-up military decisions: 12 covert actions by the CIA; 21 actions by the Army; an 18,000 to 20,000 man increase in support troops; deployment of two marine battalions and one marine air squadron; a broadening of the mission of all marine battalions; “urgent exploration” with the governments of South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand of their deployment of “significant combat elements” to South Vietnam; an “ascending tempo” of Rolling Thunder strikes; and the bombing of Laos.
The extraordinary concluding paragraph of No. 328 read as follows:
The President desires that with respect to the actions in paragraphs 5 through 7 [increases in ground forces], premature publicity be avoided by all possible precautions. The actions themselves should be taken as rapidly as practicable, but in ways that should minimize any appearance of sudden changes in policy, and official statements on these troop movements will be made only with the direct approval of the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Secretary of State. The President’s desire is that these movements and changes should be understood as being gradual and wholly consistent with existing policy.
No. 328, David Wise pointed out, “ordered that the commitment of American combat troops in Vietnam be kept secret.” This was “not designed to fool Hanoi or the Viet Cong, who would find out quickly enough who was shooting at them; it was designed to conceal the facts from the American electorate.” Westmoreland agreed. “To my mind the American people had a right to know forthrightly … what we were calling on their sons to do.” No. 328, Wise concluded, “must surely be one of the most shameful official documents of a shameful time in American history.”
In May the Vietcong attacked the South Vietnamese army. They overran Songbe, the capital of Phuoc Long province north of Saigon. They destroyed two South Vietnamese battalions near Quangngai in central Vietnam. They then returned to Phuoc Long to raid government headquarters at Dong Xoai and struck at U.S. special forces nearby. Several South Vietnamese units disintegrated and their officers fled. In June Catholic militants overthrew the government. General Nguyen Van Thieu became chief of state and Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky became prime minister. Westmoreland was appalled by these events and informed Johnson that only U.S. combat troops could prevent the collapse of South Vietnam.
On July 20, 1965, McNamara sent the President a key memorandum entitled “Recommendations of Additional Deployments to Vietnam.” He was joined by Westmoreland, the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Sharp, and the embassy in Saigon.
“The situation in South Vietnam,” he wrote, “is worse than a year ago (when it was worse than the year before that).” The Vietcong was mauling the South Vietnamese army, which had been forced to abandon five district capitals. “The government is able to provide security to fewer and fewer people in less and less territory as terrorism increases.” Roads, railroads, power lines, and communications links had been knocked out. The economy was breaking down; peasants were displaced; and inflation was rampant. The odds were against the Ky government surviving for a year. At the same time, the Vietcong was receiving a steady flow of supplies. The bombing of the North had no visible impact on Hanoi.
The only option McNamara could see was to “expand promptly and substantially … U.S. military pressure,” which should come in stages. The present 75,000 men would increase to 200,000 by October. He would call up another 235,000 by the end of the year from the Reserve and the National Guard. In the first half of 1966 Lnother 375,000 would follow, making a total of 600,000. He urged a request to Congress for an appropriation to finance these massive troop levies. If his recommendations were adopted, McNamara observed with very guarded optimism, the U.S. could expect an “acceptable outcome within a reasonable time.”
McNamara offered a vague and conventional plan for victory. “The strategy for winning this stage of the war will be to take the offensive—to take and hold the initiative.” This would be accomplished by “aggressive exploitation of superior military forces,” by “pressing the fight against VC/DRV main force units in South Vietnam to run them to ground and destroy them.” It did not seem to occur to McNamara or to the others who signed on that they were dealing with guerrilla warfare.
Bundy recommended that only the proposals for the period until the fall of 1965 should be approved now. Johnson strongly agreed; he opposed calling out the Reserves and the Guard and would not make an appeal to Congress. On July 27 the President approved the short-term McNamara troop recommendations. This was a momentous step: a decisive U.S. military ground commitment to Vietnam. Now there would be no turning back.
The next day, July 28, at noon, when the TV audience was very small, President Johnson in a press conference sort of informed the American people that their nation was at war. He justified his action with a barebones summary of the Working Group’s reasoning: the great stake in Vietnam in the contest between Communism and the free world and the d
omino theory. He argued that his policy flowed from that of Eisenhower and Kennedy.
This was, in Arthur Schlesinger’s phrase, the “imperial presidency” run wild. Here Lyndon Johnson acted alone to put the nation into a major war. He did not seek the approval of Congress or of the American people, which, in any case, could not have given it because the public was almost totally uninformed.
The President said that he had asked Westmoreland what he needed, had been told, and gave it to him:
I have today ordered to Viet-Nam the Air Mobile Division and certain other forces which will raise our fighting strength from 75,000 to 125,000 men almost immediately. Additional forces will be needed later, and they will be sent as requested.
This will make it necessary to increase our active fighting forces by raising the monthly draft call from 17,000 over a period of time to 35,000 per month, and for us to step up our campaign for voluntary enlistments.
This was an opportunity for the President to announce the nation’s war aims, to give the American people and the troops the justifications for the war. He did nothing of the sort. His brief allusions to the struggle with Communism and the domino theory had little or no meaning to Americans. His claim that Eisenhower and Kennedy had made “most solemn pledges” to defend South Vietnam was untrue. Neither Eisenhower nor Kennedy had pledged, solemnly or otherwise, to go to war to preserve South Vietnam. Johnson said nothing about a strategy for victory because he had none.
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