Public protest meetings gathered members, campus demonstrations and anti-war marches swelled in stridency and violence, with waving of Hanoi’s flag and slogans shouted in favor of Ho Chi Minh. A huge rally clashed against soldiers in battle dress on the steps of the Pentagon with protesters arrested and women beaten. Because protest was associated in the public mind with drugs and long hair and the counterculture of the decade, it may have slowed rather than stimulated general dissent. By the public on the whole, anti-war demonstrations were seen, according to a poll, as “encouraging the Communists to fight all the harder.” Draft evasion and flag-burning outraged the patriots. Nevertheless, a sense of discomfort, animated by a perception of the war as cruel and immoral, was spreading. Bombing of a small rural Asian country, Communist or not, could not be seen as imperative necessity. Eyewitness reports to the New York Times by Harrison Salisbury of hits on the civilian areas of Hanoi—first denied, then admitted by the Air Force—raised an uproar. Johnson’s rating in the polls for handling of the war slid over into the negative and would never again regain a majority of support. Accounts of prisoners casually tossed from helicopters and other incidents of callous brutality showed Americans that their country too could be guilty of atrocity. Opprobrium abroad, the mistrust of our closest allies, Britain, Canada and France, made themselves felt.
War is supposed to unite a people, but a war that excites disapproval, like that in the Philippines in 1900 or Britain’s Boer War, divides a country more deeply than its normal divisions. As the New Left and other radicals became more offensive and unkempt, they deepened the rift with the respectable middle class and excited the hatred and reciprocal violence of the unions and hard hats. How long could we stand the “spiritual confusion,” asked Reischauer in 1967 in a book called Beyond Vietnam. For some, perception of their country turned negative. The National Council of Churches claimed that America “was seen as a predominantly white nation using our overwhelming strength to kill more Asians.” Martin Luther King, Jr., said he could no longer reprove acts of violence by his own people without speaking out against “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.”
His was a terrible recognition. To see ourselves newly and suddenly as the “bad guys” in the world’s polarity and to know the agent was “my own government” was a development with serious consequences. Distrust for and even disgust with government were the most serious, beginning with alienation from the vote. “You voted in ’64 and got Johnson—why bother?” read a banner at an anti-war rally in New York. Vice-President Humphrey was unmercifully heckled at Stanford University. “The deterioration of every government,” Montesquieu wrote in the 18th century in his Spirit of the Laws, “begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.”
The Administration’s war reports eroded its credibility at home, for which much of the blame rested with the military. Indoctrinated in deception for purposes of misleading the enemy, the military misleads from habit. Each of the services and major commands manipulated the news in the interests of “national security,” or to make itself look good, or to win a round in the ongoing interservice contest, or to cover up mistakes or glamorize a commander. With an angry press eager to expose, the public was not left in the usual ignorance of the often shabby deceptions lying beneath the hocus-pocus of communiqués.
Dissent spread to the establishment. Walter Lippmann spent an evening in 1966 persuading Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, hitherto firmly among the hawks, that “decent people could no longer support the war.” The alarming cost, reaching into the billions, mortgaging the future to deficit spending, causing inflation and unfavorable balance of payments, worried many in the business world. Some businessmen formed opposition groups, small in relation to the business community as a whole, but encouraged when the imposing figure of Marriner Eccles, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, spoke publicly for a group called Negotiation Now, organized by Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. An occasional ex-government voice broke silence. James Thomson, one of the internal dissenters who had left the Far East staff of the State Department in 1966, stated in a letter to the New York Times that there had always been “constructive alternatives” and, in an echo of Burke, that the United States as the greatest power on earth had “the power to lose face, the power to admit error, and the power to act with magnanimity.”
General Ridgway’s dislike of the war was well known. Reaching the independence of retirement, another of his stature, General David M. Shoup, recently retired Commandant of the Marine Corps and a hero of the Pacific war, joined him. The government’s contention that Vietnam was “vital” to United States interests was, he said, “poppycock”; the whole of Southeast Asia was not “worth a single American life.… Why can’t we let people actually determine their own lives?” Senator Robert Kennedy, the President’s nemesis, or so perceived, called for a halt to the bombing as futile and in another speech infuriating to the White House proposed that the NLF should have a voice in any negotiations. A milestone was passed when a single Senator, Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, joined the lonely pair of Morse and Gruening to vote against a new appropriation bill of $12 billion for the war. In the House, Representative George Brown of California offered a Resolution to be added to this bill stating that it be the “sense of the Congress” that none of the funds authorized should be used for “military operations in or over North Vietnam.” Though only a Resolution and not obligatory upon the Executive, it was nevertheless overwhelmingly defeated by 372 to 18.
Despite twenty years of pronouncements ever since Truman about the “vital” interest of Southeast Asia to the United States and the dire necessity of stopping Communism, the purpose of the war to the general public remained unclear. In May 1967, when a Gallup poll asked respondents if they knew why the United States was fighting in Vietnam, 48 percent answered yes and 48 percent answered no. The absent Declaration of War might have made a difference.
The purpose of the war was not gain or national defense. It would have been a simpler matter had it been either, for it is easier to finish a war by conquest of territory or by destruction of the enemy’s forces and resources than it is to establish a principle by superior force and call it victory. America’s purpose was to demonstrate her intent and her capacity to stop Communism in a framework of preserving an artificially created, inadequately motivated and not very viable state. The nature of the society we were upholding was an inherent flaw in the case, and despite all the efforts at “nation-building,” it did not essentially change.
How then to terminate the squandering of American power in this unpromising, unprofitable, potentially dangerous conflict? Confident that North Vietnam must be hurting and could be brought to bend to the American purpose, the Administration attempted repeatedly in 1966–67 to bring Hanoi to the point of talks, always on American terms. The terms were a seemingly open-minded “unconditional,” ignoring the fact that Hanoi insisted on a condition: cessation of the bombing. United States overtures carried various pledges to end the bombing, to stop the increase of United States forces “as soon as possible and not later than six months” after North Vietnam pulled back its forces from the South and ceased the use of violence. All the offers depended on reciprocal reduction of combat by Hanoi. Hanoi offered no reciprocity unless the bombing stopped first.
Foreign powers added their efforts. Pope Paul appealed to both sides for an armistice leading to negotiations. U Thant, asked by Washington to exercise his good offices, urged the United States and both Vietnams to meet on British territory for negotiations. To all the overtures from whatever quarter, through public statements by Ho Chi Minh and other officials and interviews with visiting journalists, Hanoi reiterated its insistence as prerequisite to negotiation upon an “unconditional” end to the bombing, cessation of all other acts of war by the United States, withdrawal of United States forces and acceptance of the Four Points. While modification of the other conditions was
made from time to time, the demand to cease bombing was basic and never varied.
When the Premier, Pham Van Dong, referred to the Four Points as a “basis for settlement” rather than a prerequisite condition, Americans thought they detected a signal, and again in a statement that Hanoi would “examine and study proposals” for negotiation if the United States stopped the bombing. On this occasion, American and North Vietnamese representatives from their respective embassies in Moscow actually conferred, but since no bombing pause accompanied the meeting to indicate serious American intent, it had no result.
On another occasion, two Americans acquainted with Hanoi personally carried a message drafted by the State Department which proposed secret discussions on the basis of “some reciprocal restraint.” The wording was milder, and airplanes, though not grounded, were for a time held away from the Hanoi area. Failing a response, they returned, hitting Haiphong for the first time and railroad yards and other targets in the capital. U Thant suggested the obvious test to cut through all the maneuvers. He urged the United States to “take a calculated risk” in a bombing halt, which, he believed, would lead to peace talks in “a few weeks’ time.” America did not make the test.
For domestic consumption, President Johnson described his country as ready to do “more than our part in meeting North Vietnam halfway in any possible cease-fire, truce or peace conference negotiations,” but “more than our part” did not include grounding the B-52s. A letter from Johnson addressed directly to Ho Chi Minh repeated the formula of reciprocity: bombing and augmentation of United States forces would cease “as soon as I am assured that infiltration into South Vietnam by land and sea has stopped.” Ho’s reply repeated his formula as before.
Analysis of North Vietnam’s responses indicated to Washington “a deep conviction in Hanoi that our resolves will falter because of the cost of the struggle.” The analysts were correct. Hanoi’s intransigence was indeed tied to a belief that the United States, whether from cost or from rising dissent, would tire first. When Secretary Rusk indignantly added up 28 American proposals of peace, he was half right; they did not want it until they could get it on their own terms. Since the American overtures not only met none of their required conditions but never indicated the extent and nature of the ultimate political settlement, Hanoi was not’ interested.
At one moment real movement seemed to take place when the Soviet Premier, Aleksei Kosygin, visited Prime Minister Harold Wilson in Britain. Acting as intermediaries in communication with the principals, they came close to arranging an agreed basis for talks. It was shattered when Johnson, at the last moment, as Kosygin was already leaving London, unaccountably altered the wording of the final communiqué, too late for consultation. “Peace was almost in our grasp,” Wilson ruefully said. That is doubtful. The impression is hard to avoid that Johnson was indulging in all these maneuvers in order to placate criticism at home and abroad, but that he and the advisers he listened to still aimed at negotiations imposed by superior strength.
A cloud was rising on the domestic horizon. Progressive escalation, growing like the appetite that increases by what it feeds on, with no stated limits, was not accepted without question for a war only vaguely understood. Westmoreland’s method of calling for increments of 70,000 to 80,000 at a time postponed the issue of calling up the Reserves but, as McNaughton warned his chief, only postponed it “with all its horrible baggage” to a worse time, the election year of 1968. McNaughton drew attention to mounting public dissent, fed by American casualties (there were to be 9000 killed and 60,000 wounded in 1967), by popular fear that the war might widen and by “distress at the amount of suffering being visited” on the people of both Vietnams. “A feeling is widely and strongly held that ‘the Establishment’ is out of its mind … that we are carrying the thing to absurd lengths.… Most Americans do not know how we got where we are.… All want the war ended and expect their President to end it. Successfully, or else.”
If the “or else” meant “or out he goes,” that alternative was not unimaginable. It was slowly becoming clear to Johnson that there was no way the Vietnam entanglement could end to his advantage. Military success could not end the war within the eighteen months left of his present term, and with an election ahead, he could not disengage and “lose” Vietnam. The Reserves, the casualties, the public protest would have to be faced. He was caught and, in Moyers’ judgment, “He knew it. He sensed that the war would destroy him politically and wreck his presidency. He was a miserable man.”
Johnson was under pressure too from the right and from the growing resentment of the military and their spokesmen at the restraints holding them back. The Armed Services Committee gave the resentment a public forum in August 1967 in subcommittee hearings under the chairmanship of Senator John Stennis. Even before taking testimony, Stennis stated his opinion that it was a “fatal mistake” to suspend or restrict the bombing.
Admiral Ulysses Grant Sharp, Air Force Commander at CINCPAC, carried the point further in a passionate argument for air power. He proclaimed a splendid record for the B-52s of damage inflicted on barracks, ammunition depots, power plants, railroad yards, iron, steel and cement plants, airfields, naval bases, bridges and in general a “widespread disruption of economic activity” and transportation, damaged harvests and increased food shortages. Without the bombing, he said, the North could have doubled its forces in the South, requiring the United States to bring in as many as 800,000 additional troops at a cost of $75 billion just to stay even. He condemned all suggestion of bombing pauses on the ground that they allowed the enemy to repair his supply lines, re-supply his forces in the South and build up his formidable anti-aircraft defenses. Sharp’s scorn for civilian selection of targets as slow and too far removed was outspoken. If civilian authorities, he asserted in recognizable reference to the Tuesday lunch system, heeded the advice of the military, lifted restraints on “lucrative” targets in the vital Hanoi and Haiphong areas, eliminated long delays in approving targets, the bombing would be far more effective. Its cessation would be a “disaster,” indefinitely prolonging the war.
Secretary McNamara’s testimony brought all this into question. In an impressive presentation, he cited evidence to show that the bombing program had not significantly reduced the flow of men and supplies, and he disputed the military advice to lift restraints and allow a greater target range. “We have no reason to believe that it would break the will of the North Vietnamese people or sway the purpose of their leaders … or provide any confidence that they can be bombed to the negotiating table.” Thus the whole purpose of American strategy was admitted to be futile by the Secretary of Defense. By revealing the open rift between civilian and military, the testimony created a sensation.
Senator Stennis’ report on the hearings was an unrestrained assault on civilian interference. He said the overruling of military by civilian judgment has “shackled the true potential of air power.” What was needed now was a hard decision “to take the risks that have to be taken, and apply the force that is required to see the job through.”
Johnson was determined not to take any such risks, which still so worried him that he had apologized to the Kremlin for an accidental hit on a Soviet merchant vessel in a North Vietnamese harbor. Nor could he cease or halt the bombing as a means to peace because his military advisers assured him that this was the only way to bring the North to its knees. He felt obliged to call a press conference after the Stennis hearings to deny rifts in his government and to declare his support of the bombing program, although without relinquishing authority over selection of targets. In deference to the military, General Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was thereafter invited to be a regular member of the Tuesday lunch and, with McNamara overruled, the target range gradually crept north, specifically taking in Haiphong.
With McNamara’s testimony, the Johnson Administration had cracked. The strongest prop until now, the most hardheaded of the team inherited from Kennedy, the major manager of the
war, had lost faith in it and from then on McNamara lost his influence with the President. When at a Cabinet meeting he said that the bombing, besides failing to prevent infiltration, was “destroying the countryside in the South; it’s making lasting enemies,” his colleagues stared at him in uncomfortable silence. The anti-war public waited, yearning for his disavowal of the war, but it did not come. Loyal to the government game, McNamara, like Bethmann-Hollweg in Germany in 1917, continued in the Pentagon to preside over a strategy he believed futile and wrong. To do otherwise, each would have said, would be to show disbelief, giving comfort to the enemy. The question remains where duty lies: to loyalty or to truth? Taking a position somewhere in between, McNamara did not last long. Three months after the Stennis hearings, Johnson announced, without consulting the person in question, McNamara’s nomination as president of the World Bank. The Secretary of Defense at his departure was discreet and well-behaved.
By this time the government’s pursuit of the war was domestically on the defensive. To shore up his political position and restore public confidence in him, Johnson brought home General Westmoreland, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, Lodge’s successor, and other important personages to issue optimistic predictions and declare their firm faith in the mission “to prevail over Communist aggression.” Incoming evidence not shared with the public was less encouraging. CIA estimates concluded that Hanoi would accept no level of air or naval action as “so intolerable that the war had to be stopped.” A CIA study of bombing, unkindly calculated in terms of dollar value, brought out the fact that each $1 worth of damage inflicted on North Vietnam cost the United States $9.60. Systems Analysis at the Department of Defense found that the enemy could construct alternative supply routes “faster than we could choke them off,” and estimated that more American troops would do more harm than good, especially to the economy of South Vietnam. The Institute of Defense Analysis, in a renewal of the JASON study, could find no new evidence to modify its earlier conclusions, and contrary to the claims of the Air Force, frankly stated, “We are unable to devise a bombing campaign in the North to reduce the flow of infiltrating personnel.”
The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam Page 46