The Chairman

by Kai Bird

  These were sound instincts. And yet, as the war unfolded over the summer of 1965, McCloy’s characteristic willingness to reconsider his views—combined with his natural deference to presidential authority—led him astray. The visits of administration spokesmen to Council meetings in 1964–65 were like missions of seduction. In this period, for instance, Henry Cabot Lodge, General Maxwell Taylor, and McGeorge Bundy all gave the Council long briefings on the reasons behind the U.S. intervention. William Bundy (Mac’s elder brother) became a director of the Council at the same time he was appointed assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs.16

  McCloy, of course, had known the Bundy brothers for a quarter-century. He had hosted a breakfast reception when William Bundy had married Dean Acheson’s daughter. These were men he regarded as friends, and if they now had become the chief architects of a policy of gradual escalation, they had also made it painfully clear that they believed this course was the least objectionable path to the achievement of U.S. goals. In the policy debate that spring, the Bundys had positioned themselves, as McCloy might have if he had been in their shoes, right in the center. While George Ball and Lew Douglas argued for disengagement, General Westmoreland was asking for 150,000 troops, which he said were needed immediately to stave off the Viet Cong’s monsoon offensive. Bob McNamara favored the mining of Haiphong harbor, a complete naval quarantine of North Vietnam, virtually unlimited bombing, and the introduction of whatever force levels were necessary to demonstrate to Hanoi that the Viet Cong could not hope to win.17

  McNamara and Westmoreland thus made the Bundys look quite cautious. William Bundy favored trying to hold on with no more than eighty-five thousand troops, and then seeing how the situation looked in two months. Mac Bundy was prepared to send more troops sooner than that.18 But in their conversations with McCloy, both Bundys left an impression of the gravity of the situation. They told him that the administration was fully aware of all the risks associated with Vietnam. These were risks, however, that men of sound judgment had to face. In February 1965, upon returning from an inspection trip to Saigon, Mac Bundy wrote Johnson, “To be an American in Saigon today is to have a gnawing feeling that time is against us. . . . At its very best the struggle in Vietnam will be long. It seems to us important that this fundamental fact be made clear and our understanding of it be made clear to our own people and to the people of Vietnam.”19

  But as the bombing escalated, and as more combat troops were introduced, Johnson ordered his officials to “minimize any appearance of sudden changes in policy.”20 The war would escalate, but Johnson wanted to hide this fact from the American people as long as possible. With time, he thought, each step in the escalation would appear to be a natural and reasonable response to the enemy’s actions. The politician who was so successful at coaxing cooperation from his constituency on contentious domestic issues was sure that he could do the same on Vietnam. In late April, this belief was reinforced when his popularity ratings rose after he sent twenty-one thousand troops to suppress an alleged communist rebellion in the Dominican Republic.21 Johnson chose to dismiss the rising number of antiwar demonstrations on university campuses as the expressions of a noisy minority.

  McCloy, however, found these student demonstrations—one had recently taken place outside his office at Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza—both gratifying and disturbing. He thought they were evidence that the students cared about matters of public policy. But he had to wince at the extreme rhetoric used in some of the protests. In early June 1965, he gave the commencement address at Haverford College, in Pennsylvania. In preparation for the speech, he spent a few days on the campus, talking to members of the Class of ’65. It was a sobering experience, for he was challenged to defend the U.S. interventions in both Vietnam and the Dominican Republic. He was shocked to see that many of the students who pressed him vigorously on these issues were brimming with cynicism about the fundamental motivations of postwar U.S. policy.

  In his address a few days later, he tried to answer these critics. “I am troubled,” he said, “as are a great many, as to where our actions may lead us and I do not yet see clearly, in either case [Vietnam or the Dominican Republic], light through the tunnel. . . .” This was a significant admission. But he went on to say that he could not accept “the thesis so vigorously put forward by some that in each case what we have done is only the expression of outright imperialism. . . .” The sending of the Marines, he said, was an honest attempt to defend ordinary liberties. The effort might be “beyond our means” or even “maladroit.” He didn’t really know enough to say. But he did know that recent history was full of examples in which tough decisions had to be made to preserve our liberties. Munich was again the unspoken theme. The determination of the Soviet Union to take over Western Europe after World War II “was no myth.” Nor was the Cuban missile crisis, when he had had to “look down the gun barrel of nuclear disaster.” At such critical moments of history, he said, our leaders sometimes have to make a “leap in the dark . . . where no amount of education nor doctrine [can] fully bridge the gap to sound decision.”

  He then tried to explain why he thought the youthful critics of the war should place their trust in men like Johnson, Rusk, the Bundy brothers, and, by implication, himself. “The Romans would have understood what I am trying to say. They had a word for it—’gravitas’—and the one who possessed it had the respect and regard of his countrymen, whether he was in the forum or on the farm. ‘Gravitas’ did not imply age nor brilliance, and, least of all, a style or school of thought. It means a core, a weight of judgment and honest appraisal.”

  Gravitas. This word explains much about how McCloy saw himself on the stage of public service. Certain men had it, that “weight of judgment,” that ability of honest, objective appraisal. They need not be brilliant, and they must not be the creatures of any ideological doctrine. Both brilliance and ideology got in the way of objectivity. They needed to be men who knew how—as Paul Cravath had taught him so many years ago—to break a problem down into all its pieces and put it back together again. These few men of gravitas were entitled to the public’s trust, for only they were capable of dealing with the “imponderables” of public policy.

  McCloy cited his late mentor, his “hero statesman,” Henry L. Stimson, as one such man. And then, in the same breath, he suggested that similar men were making the hard decisions on Vietnam. “President Johnson and Secretary Rusk,” he told his Haverford audience, “are faced with similar tests today and they deserve our understanding.”22

  The speech was a hit with all of his friends. Arthur Krock devoted a column in The New York Times to it. Dean Rusk congratulated him for a “masterful handling of a controversial subject.” Averell Harriman “thoroughly approved” of it and wrote his friend, “The assumption nowadays that when we try to stop communism we are imperialists ‘interfering with the course of social justice’ should be hit as you did.”23

  Shortly after this speech, the men of gravitas were called to Washington to consult with the president. Vietnam was at a turning point. Should Washington accede to Westmoreland’s request for a major commitment of combat troops to save the Saigon regime? Or should George Ball’s proposal for a political solution be accepted, knowing that it probably meant an eventual communist takeover of the South? Johnson now asked Mac Bundy to assemble his “Wise Men”—the members of his foreign-policy consultants’ panel. On July 8, 1965, nearly twenty of these consultants gathered on the seventh floor of the State Department for a series of briefings. Only a few—McCloy, General Omar Bradley, Roswell Gilpatric, George B. Kistiakowsky, and Arthur Larson—were assigned to a special panel to discuss Vietnam. After several hours of briefings by Rusk, McNamara, Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson, and William Bundy, the Vietnam Panel emerged ready to endorse a policy of controlled escalation.

  That afternoon, the Vietnam panelists met with the rest of the consultants in a plenary session. McCloy spoke at some length, telling his colleagues that he was now impress
ed with “the toughness of the situation.” Merely blunting the Viet Cong’s current monsoon offensive, he thought, would not persuade Hanoi to negotiate.24 The war would probably go on for a long time, but he nevertheless told Rusk and McNamara, “You’ve got to do it. You’ve got to go in.”25 He and the other panelists thought the “stakes were very high indeed.” South Vietnam was a “crucial test” in the Cold War; if the free world could not cope with the “Communist tactic” of wars of national liberation, then U.S. commitments everywhere would be questioned. If South Vietnam fell, Thailand could not be held, and the loss of Southeast Asia would have dire consequences for India and even Japan. Worse, from McCloy’s perspective, was that “de Gaulle would find many takers for his argument that the US could not now be counted on to defend Europe.”26

  It was true that Germany’s new chancellor, Christian Democrat Ludwig Erhard had recently told the administration that the people of West Berlin would be concerned if the United States opted for a “compromise” out of its commitment to Saigon. McCloy was such a Germanophile that he took Erhard literally. By contrast, George Ball, a man just as devoted to the Atlantic alliance as McCloy, suggested the chancellor was probably “telling us what he believed we wanted to hear.” The principal anxiety of our NATO allies, Ball argued, was “that we have become too preoccupied with an area which seems to them an irrelevance. . . . Moreover, they have a vested interest in an easier relationship between Washington and Moscow. By and large, therefore, they will be inclined to regard a compromise solution in South Vietnam more as new evidence of American maturity and judgment than of American loss of face. . . .”27 In just a few years, McCloy would take the same position and publicly complain that the administration had lost sight of the “primacy of Europe.”28 But in the summer of 1965, he convinced himself that disengagement from Vietnam would be misinterpreted by the European allies.

  In the general discussion that followed, most of the “Wise Men” endorsed whatever combat-force increases McNamara wanted. They also generally approved of the bombing campaign in the North. It was not as if these hard-line positions were arrived at without some argument. Arthur Larson, a university professor who had served in the Kennedy administration, argued the merits of taking the whole issue to the United Nations; Dean Acheson quickly shot down this idea by harshly interrupting to say that this was no time to “turn over our Far East policy to the UN.” McCloy and others thought there would be time for negotiations later, after the United States had taken control of the military situation. But at the present time, UN talks would only be a “dangerous sign of weakness.”

  McCloy’s concern with the appearances of looking tough, of being fully prepared militarily, goes a long way toward explaining his hard-line positions in this crucial meeting. His old instincts were too deep-rooted to be overwhelmed by doubts concerning the viability of fighting a war on the Asian mainland. American prestige was already on the line: he knew that, as he spoke, nearly ninety thousand American soldiers were already stationed in Vietnam, and some of them were dying. For him, this fact weighed heavily, and arguing the merits of the original commitment to the Saigon regime was pointless. As he later told Arthur Dean, “We are committed in Vietnam because we are there and there is nothing to be gained and considerably [sic] to be lost in rearguing the commitment or dragging in the actions of former Presidents.”29

  Only one man in the room, Arthur Larson, provided any coherent dissent. He said he had “grave doubts that we would get a truly viable and democratic Vietnam even by causing Hanoi to pull out. . . .” This argument only momentarily caused the “Wise Men” to pause and wonder whether what the United States could achieve in Vietnam would be much improved after years of combat. No one suggested that the Viet Cong might be tapping into a nationalism or a collectivist cultural tradition so virulent as to make the U.S. goal of a “democratic” society irrelevant. No one asked why Americans should now succeed in a venture where the French had so recently failed. Lew Douglas would have forcefully raised these arguments, but he had not been invited. Instead, as William Bundy reported to the president, “. . . it was clear that the group thought we needed to look hard at just what we did expect to come out in South Vietnam—and equally clear that none of the other members of the group were prepared to buy Larson’s basic thesis.”30

  The “Wise Men” sanctioned “whatever amounts of military power may be needed, perhaps as much as [was] brought to bear in Korea fifteen years ago.”31 But they admittedly had no idea what political outcome could be expected of such an effort in a country of which they had no personal knowledge. As if to underscore their confusion, Robert Lovett said it was “not useful to talk about ‘victory,’ that what was really involved was preventing the expansion of Communism by force; in a sense, avoiding defeat.”32

  There was something of a staged quality to the exercise the “Wise Men” were put through at the State Department that day. True, they were being “consulted.” But by virtue of the assumptions presented by Rusk, McNamara, and the Bundy brothers, the decision to escalate had already been made. The only questions now were how many combat troops would be sent and how would the intervention be explained to the American people. Arthur Dean and most of the others favored a massive, decisive intervention, believing that “there was a great deal of sentiment in the country for doing whatever it took, if we were going to go on at all.”33 All or nothing. “They were for bombing the be-Jesus out of them [North Vietnam],” recalled one official.34

  At the end of the day, a select group, including McCloy, were ushered into the White House to see Johnson himself. If the meetings during the day had been slightly staged, the conversation in the Cabinet Room was positively surreal. After everyone settled in with a cocktail in hand, Johnson subjected them all to a performance they found quite disturbing. As he complained about everything—fate, the press, Congress, the intellectuals—it became clear that the real purpose of their “consultation” was to assuage the president’s insecurities. Johnson had gone on for some time, complaining that no one was supporting him on Vietnam and that no course of action seemed right, when Acheson finally exploded. “I blew my top,” he wrote Harry Truman, “and told him he was wholly right on Vietnam, that he had no choice except to press on, that explanations were not as important as successful action.”

  Acheson, in fact, only a month earlier had worked with George Ball on his proposal for a political settlement, and, like McCloy, hadn’t ever really thought Vietnam itself was critical to U.S. national security. But, as with McCloy, the appearance of strength was important to him. McCloy and others in the room now echoed Acheson’s sentiments: “With this lead my colleagues came thundering in like the charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo. They were fine; old Bob Lovett, usually cautious, was all out.. . . I think . . . we scored.” The next day, Mac Bundy reported to his aides, “The mustache was voluble.”35

  Despite this shot in the arm, Johnson was still agonizing over the impending escalation. He acted as if he knew the war would destroy his administration. A week after seeing the “Wise Men,” he walked into a staff meeting and, when he had listened to the discussion for a few minutes, said, “Don’t let me interrupt you. But there’s one thing you ought to know. 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. That’s what it is.” With that he abruptly stood up and walked out of the room.36

  The “Wise Men” too began to ponder the implications of their advice. McCloy and Arthur Dean were invited back to Washington for a second meeting on July 22, 1965. In the interim, they had not had second thoughts, but they wondered why, if the country was going to war, it could not do so without any restrictions. “The country is looking,” McCloy told Johnson, Rusk, McNamara, and the other officials assembled in the Cabinet Room, “to getting on with the war.” He wanted to know why Hanoi and Haiphong couldn’t be bombed, why the North Vietnamese were being left a “sanct
uary.” When Rusk explained they thought the Soviets would intervene if Hanoi was bombed, Arthur Dean pointedly asked, “What do you do if the war drags on—with mounting casualties—where do we go? The people say if we are not doing what is necessary to end it, why don’t we do what is necessary?” McNamara replied that bombing Haiphong wouldn’t win the war. This led to a poignant discussion on the ultimate direction of the war:

  DEAN:

  “If this carries on for some years, we’ll get in the same fix we were in Korea and the Yalu.”

  RUSK:

  “We were under no pressures to make it [Korea] a larger war until the war was practically over.”

  MCCLOY:

  “If we could define our objectives specifically, what are our objectives in a discussion [peace negotiations]? What do we have to negotiate?”

  RUSK:

  “1. Infiltration from the North must stop.

  “2. We have no interests in a permanent military base there.

  “3. 1954–1962 agreements ought to be solved by peaceful means and not . . .” [Rusk is interrupted.]

  MCCLOY:

  “When do the troops get withdrawn?”

  RUSK:

  “When proof of infiltration—stopping.”

  BUNDY:

  “If we really were the ones for free elections, it would be good. It is difficult for Saigon to sign on.”

  MCCLOY:

  “Would we be willing to take a Tito government or a VC victory [at the polls]?”

  BUNDY:

  “That’s where our plan begins to unravel.”37

  Obviously, Bundy was not prepared for any compromise short of an American victory. This conversation, remarkable for what it should have revealed about Bundy’s thinking, did not dissuade McCloy from signing on to the war effort. A few days later, just minutes before Johnson went before a press conference, Bundy called McCloy to inform him of the president’s final decision: Westmoreland would be allowed to have a total of 125,000 troops immediately (an addition of thirty-five thousand), and it was recognized that this would not be the end. Bundy reported to the president that McCloy “understood and approved of the international reasons for not blowing the thing way up to the level of option 4.”38 Option 4 was an all-out bombing campaign of Hanoi and the critical harbor facilities at Haiphong. That, thought Johnson, “would be rape rather than seduction. . . .”39 Instead, the nation was going to wage a calibrated war, a reasonable war, a war of gradual escalation accompanied at each step by peace proposals. As he explained it to McCloy, “It’s like a prize fight. Our right is our military power, but our left must be our peace proposals. Every time you move troops forward, you move diplomats forward.”40