by Lewis Sorley
Westmoreland commented on the response to that message in a later White Paper: "According to General Wheeler, the group [Rusk, McNamara, Helms, Taylor, Clifford, Rostow, and Wheeler, meeting at the White House on 12 February] interpreted my message as expressing the following thoughts: 'You could use additional U.S. troop units, but you are not expressing a firm demand for them; in sum, you do not fear defeat if you are not reinforced.'"7
On that same date Westmoreland fired back his most urgent depiction of the situation yet: "I desperately need" reinforcements. "Time is of the essence."8
Subsequently Wheeler scheduled a trip to Vietnam to discuss troop augmentation at first hand. General Chaisson of course wrote home about it: "Westy seemed kind of blue tonight," he told his wife. "Wheeler is coming out tomorrow and his visit is not causing much glee. He is here on a fact-finding deal I guess and Westy is miffed. He had me cross 'Warm Regards' off the bottom of a couple of messages I wrote for him today to Wheeler!"
The Chairman arrived in Saigon on 23 February 1968. It was the eleventh time he had made the long haul to visit the war, and Westmoreland saw in him an "exhausted and ill man." Wheeler and Westmoreland almost immediately plunged into a series of conferences in which it was ultimately agreed that they would seek a large number of additional troops, some 206,000 in all. It was in many ways a rehash of the request for 200,000 troops that Westmoreland had submitted, without success, in March 1967.
Westmoreland characterized the proposal as not a request but merely a "contingency plan" premised on a major change in the overall strategy for conduct of the war. This additional force increment (not all necessarily for deployment to Vietnam, at least initially) would, maintained Westmoreland, enable him to go into Laos and Cambodia to clear out the enemy sanctuaries there and possibly to make some forays into North Vietnam as well.
The remainder of the forces sought could be used to reconstitute the strategic reserve—the active forces available to respond to contingencies anywhere in the world. These had been severely depleted to meet Vietnam requirements and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were very uneasy about the resultant strategic vulnerability. Of course additional forces of this magnitude could not possibly be provided without mobilizing the reserves. It is clear that Wheeler saw in the cataclysmic events of the Tet Offensive a new and possibly better opportunity to convince, or perhaps coerce, the President to take that long-avoided step.
"General Wheeler came over there and he was actually begging me to ask for more troops," Westmoreland told historian Mark Perry. "Really, just begging me. And he told me the president was ready to call up the reserves, and if that were to happen how many men would I need, how many men would I use. And that was when I said well, we could use another 200,000."9
Brigadier General Douglas Kinnard wrote of this visit that, "with Wheeler's encouragement, Westmoreland developed a plan for approximately 206,000 additional troops. Of this total, Wheeler would recommend that 100,000 go to Vietnam and the remainder be held in strategic reserve."10 On 26 February 1968 McNamara discussed the Wheeler report with the Joint Chiefs: "They are stunned by the 206,000 request." McNamara later revealed that, "in my last official act on Vietnam, on February 27, 1968, I opposed Westy's renewed appeal for 200,000 additional troops on economic, political, and moral grounds."11
STOPPING IN HONOLULU on his return to Washington, on 26 February Wheeler cabled ahead with the results of his meetings in Saigon, along with the request for 206,000 troops. No mention was made of any change in strategy. Rather the request was presented as an essential measure necessitated by battlefield developments in Vietnam. Two days later, just off the plane and having gone directly to the White House for a breakfast meeting with the President and his advisors, Wheeler repeated the briefing, and the troop request, in person.
If indeed "Washington panicked," Wheeler had most assuredly helped them do so. Again he made no mention of any contingencies such as changes in strategy, but instead stressed the parlous situation of the forces in Vietnam. Incoming Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford and others understood that he was stating a firm and unqualified requirement for 206,000 more troops. The White House presentation, Clifford remembered, was "so somber, so discouraging, to the point where it was really shocking." And it had an impact on the President, although perhaps not the one Wheeler had intended. LBJ was, said Clifford, "as worried as I have ever seen him."12
Westmoreland was comfortable with this Wheeler ploy, then and later. General Wheeler, said Westmoreland in his memoirs, "saw no possibility at the moment of selling reinforcements in terms of future operations." Thus, dealing with the "civilians," it was "better to exploit their belief in crisis to get the troops, then argue new strategy later."13 Of course that was a belief induced by Wheeler.
Robert Komer confirmed that no longer-term issues, such as calling up reserves and using the additional troops to go into the sanctuaries, were "ever mentioned by Wheeler to either the President or McNamara. By God they would have thrown him out on his ear." Komer was bitter about it: "The Chiefs never tell anybody anything. The goddamn Chiefs of Staff. Wheeler's the evil genius of the Vietnam war in my judgment."14
As this drama was playing out, Clark Clifford arrived at some clear judgments of the respective roles of Westmoreland and Wheeler. Clifford recalled Westmoreland's blaming Wheeler "for presenting his request for reinforcements in a tone so pessimistic" as to exploit the sense of crisis in Washington.15 Clifford, a highly regarded attorney, understood the implications. "Westmoreland's charge was a serious one," he wrote. "If true, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was guilty of deliberately misleading the President in order to get additional troops authorized for Vietnam." Added Clifford, of Wheeler: "He was an honorable man, though, and I do not believe the accusation."16
ON SUNDAY, 10 March 1968, the New York Times front-page headline read: "Westmoreland Requests 206,000 More Men." That was sensational but not determinative. Two days earlier Wheeler had cabled Westmoreland to alert him to "strong resistance in all quarters to putting more ground force units in South Vietnam.... You should not count on an affirmative decision for such additional forces."17 And a McNamara chronology of the period included this entry for 8 March: "LBJ nixes the 206,000 troop request."18 The request was dead even before it became known publicly.
Westmoreland had in fact helped to undermine his own request by describing a venturesome plan to take the war north. LBJ recalled that report, rendered in early March 1968, in his memoirs. "I had just received a message from Westmoreland describing his plan for a major offensive against the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong in northern I Corps on or about April 1," he wrote. "I thought that if Westmoreland had enough confidence to launch an offensive with the forces he had in Vietnam, it would be wise to limit additional commitments."19
IN MID-MARCH LBJ met with Dwight Eisenhower in Palm Springs, where he "asked the general how long a President should back a military commander. Eisenhower replied that a President must back his general as long as he had confidence in him—if he lost this confidence, he should replace him."20 Ten days later the President announced his decision to appoint Westmoreland Army Chief of Staff.
SOON WESTMORELAND AND Wheeler met again, at Clark Air Base in the Philippines on 24 March 1968. Said Westmoreland, Wheeler "told me that a significant change in our military strategy for the Vietnam War was extremely remote, and that the administration had decided against a large call-up of reserves."21 What happened instead was an emergency deployment of 11,000 men, plus another 13,500 to support and sustain them, for a total of 24,500, far short of the 206,000 requested. That brought the overall authorization to 549,500, the high-water mark for the war (and even that was never fully achieved, deployments eventually peaking at 543,400).
The deliberations leading to that decision had been agonizing. Robert McNamara, who for months (or years, as was later revealed) had been disenchanted with the war and had belatedly let LBJ know it, was leaving to head the World Bank and Clifford was replacing him
, effective 1 March 1968. LBJ thought that in his longtime friend Clifford he would again have in the post of Defense Secretary a strong supporter of the war and his policies there. Perhaps Clifford approached the job from such a position, although as long ago as the previous August, when Westmoreland's first request for some 200,000 troops was still under consideration, he had predicted in a conversation with the President that "a year from now we again will be taking stock. We may be no closer a year from now than we are now."
Now the arrival of the 206,000 request sent a jolt through everyone, and it wasn't going to be a year before they took stock again. On the same day Wheeler told LBJ in person about the troop request, the President asked Clifford to head up a task force to examine the request, specifying that he report back by 4 March. Clifford began his task that same afternoon, then spent three full days huddled with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. Those three days permanently changed his outlook on the war and on U.S. policy for the prosecution of it.
Clifford remembered: "How long will it take? They didn't know. How many more troops would it take? They didn't know. Would 206,000 answer the demand? They didn't know. Might there be more? Yes, there might be more. So when it was all over, I said, 'What is the plan to win the war in Vietnam?' Well, the only plan is that ultimately the attrition will wear down the North Vietnamese and they will have had enough. Is there any indication that we have reached that point? No, there isn't." By the end of this extended interview, said Clifford, now just days into his tenure as Secretary of Defense, "I had turned against the war."22
On 26 March 1968, in a meeting at the White House, LBJ told Rusk, Wheeler, and Abrams how damaging he thought the request had been: "We have no support for the war. This is caused by the 206,000 troop request, leaks, Ted Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy."23
Later, in a book review of Westmoreland's memoirs, noted military affairs commentator Hanson Baldwin scoffed at any such prospects for additional forces and a wider war as postulated by Westmoreland. "In the wake of Tet and the battle of Khe Sanh which followed," he wrote, "it would have been politically and psychologically impossible to follow up the abortive enemy offensive with still another major escalation of troop strength."24 Stanley Karnow wrote that "the chances of Johnson endorsing all or any of these moves were remote, but the gullible Westmoreland took Wheeler at his word."25
Many years later, at a Vietnam roundtable held by the LBJ Library, Westmoreland assigned the blame to Wheeler. "The 206,000-man troop request was after the Tet offensive, when 'Bus' Wheeler came over," he said. "We had long discussions, and I went along." But, he added, taking a legalistic approach, "There's no paper you can find signed by me requesting 200,000 troops."26
Les Gelb wrote that Westmoreland later said privately he had been "conned" by Wheeler into making the request and, added Gelb, after he came up with the figure of 206,000 "Westmoreland was shocked and bitter when he later discovered that Wheeler had portrayed his request" as based on battlefield necessities.27 Whatever their respective shares of blame, it is depressing to think that Wheeler and Westmoreland colluded in seeking to manipulate and deceive the President. As soon became clear, the results of their machinations would be catastrophically different than what they had sought.
PERHAPS BOLSTERED BY Wheeler's visit, Westmoreland now showed a new outlook, at least as perceived by General Chaisson: "Westy is getting tougher with the Washington crowd," he wrote on 26 February 1968, just after Wheeler had left for Washington. "His attitude is that he is holding things together with minimum assets. The enemy is making major efforts and cannot be defeated with patchwork. He (Westy) wants what he thinks he needs; no more discount jobs."28
Westmoreland had discussed his troop aspirations with Ambassador Bunker, but not fully. "At that time he asked for a moderate increase... amounting to about twenty or twenty-five thousand troops," recalled Bunker, "and I did support that. I did not support his later request for a much larger increment of troops." Westmoreland later maintained that he "had the close support of the ambassador" for his post-Tet troop requests, but Bunker's account contradicts that assertion. In fact, when Secretary of State Rusk asked Bunker to comment on the larger troop request, Bunker replied that "an increase of the size contemplated might well nullify the purposes that had brought the United States into the war in the first place by destroying what was left of South Vietnamese initiative."29
CLARK CLIFFORD RECALLED in his memoirs the effects in Washington when Wheeler returned from Vietnam and reported the need for more troops, many more. "Wheeler's report contained an assessment of the situation so bleak, and a request for additional troops so large," he said, "that it had a profound effect on the course of the war and American politics." Clifford also said of Wheeler's report: "It was clear that, although he avoided criticizing Westmoreland directly, he had lost some degree of confidence in his theater commander and no longer fully accepted Westmoreland's judgment of the war." And, he went on: "His [Wheeler's] report damaged Westmoreland because in a disagreement between the two men, President Johnson and his advisers would unquestionably give far greater weight to the views of Wheeler." Finally, and decisively: "The request was never presented as a 'contingency' [plan]."30
Perhaps even more significant at this time, again as described by Clifford, was that in a 4 March 1968 White House meeting with the President and others Wheeler "surprised me by backing away from the Wheeler-Westmoreland request in order to keep alive his primary objective, a call-up of the Reserves." Thus "Wheeler disassociated himself from the request, referring to it throughout as 'Westmoreland's request': 'If we could provide Westy the troops he wants, I would recommend they be sent—but they clearly cannot be provided.'"31
General Maxwell Taylor, who knew both Westmoreland and his approach to conduct of the war intimately, was a member of the working group convened at the President's direction and under Clifford's chairmanship to consider how to proceed. "In fairness to him [Westmoreland]," Taylor wrote, "I thought he should be told that, in this phase of the conflict, remote terrain along the frontiers of South Vietnam meant nothing in itself insofar as Washington was concerned, that the President and his advisers looked with favor on the avoidance of combat close to the cross-border sanctuaries of the enemy where he had the advantage of short lines of communications, and that they saw no advantage in paying a high price to hold exposed outposts like Khe Sanh." That was a pretty thorough indictment of Westmoreland's way of war, one to which Taylor added this: "Apart from other disadvantages, such border operations offered the enemy the opportunity of gaining cheap, minor successes which propaganda and our own media would then blow up into a major victory for them and a disaster for us."32
In the Pentagon there was little doubt a request had been made. Lieutenant General Elmer Almquist, then the Southeast Asia program coordinator in Army DCSOPS, remembered it well. "All I know is that I was working my ass off on a message requesting 206,000 troops," he said. "I never thought Westy knew what the hell was going on over there. Then I was told to recover the copies of the message. They denied there was ever a request. They had to get all the copies of the messages."33
LBJ, RUSK, CLIFFORD, McNamara, Ambassador Bunker, Admiral Sharp, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the JCS and OSD historians, CIA Director Helms, General Bruce Palmer Jr., even Wheeler, so he said—all viewed the 206,000 as a request for more troops. Only Westmoreland argued—in vain—that it was merely a "contingency" plan.34 Finally even he admitted the obvious, telling reporter Sam Donaldson in 1985 that "General Wheeler persuaded me to ask for 200,000 reinforcements."35
Charles MacDonald wrote that the Westmoreland-Wheeler request, "which would require a large-scale call-up of reserves and major additional appropriations, stunned the president's civilian advisers and convinced many that a time had come for a change in policy."36 And, as Graham Cosmas put it in an official Army history: "The troop request all but nullified General Westmoreland's claims of victory."37
"The Vietnam War was not unwinnable," said
General Fred Weyand. "It was just not winnable Westmoreland's way."
20. Heading Home
HAVING SERVED FIFTY-FOUR months in Vietnam, in addition to thirty-nine months abroad during World War II and another sixteen in the Korean War, Westmoreland had in the aggregate spent more than nine years overseas, over a quarter of his thirty-two years' service. Now he headed home for the final time.
Immediately there was much press speculation that Westmoreland was being relieved because of the Tet Offensive, viewed by many in the United States as a victory for the enemy, at least in terms of achieving surprise and disruption on a grand scale. Westmoreland argued strenuously that he was not being relieved for cause, that his reassignment had been in the works for some time, and that it was in fact a promotion. He had stated during an April 1968 visit to Washington that the President revealed to him as far back as January 1967 that he wished to make him Chief of Staff. When the new appointment was announced, he told Brigadier General Chaisson that he had hoped to be given one of two other posts, CINCPAC or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and would have preferred CINCPAC, "but supposed that the Navy fought it."1 General Phillip Davidson scoffed at even the possibility of such an appointment, saying that Westmoreland had "no chance" of becoming CINCPAC and that for General Wheeler to have broached such a prospect was "exploitation of Westmoreland's naiveté."2
There is confirmatory evidence for Westmoreland's contention that his reassignment from Vietnam had been in the works for some time, although (had he been aware of it) Westmoreland would not have been pleased with the underlying premise. In 1967 Dr. Edwin Deagle, then a captain, was studying at Harvard under Army auspices when McGeorge Bundy came to deliver a series of lectures. Richard Neustadt of the Harvard faculty told Deagle to be sure he attended Bundy's talks and instructed him to wear his uniform. It was then arranged for Deagle and Bundy to meet privately during one of the receptions. Bundy began by saying, "Captain Deagle, some of my former colleagues here at Harvard tell me you can help me. We must soon bring General Westmoreland back from Vietnam and replace him with someone with a more agile, creative mind. What should we do with him and who should be his replacement?"