by Kai Bird
Johnson thus made his July 1965 decision to escalate the war appear to be a moderate, cautious step. It was certainly a reluctant step. Watching him announce the decision at his press conference, Joe Alsop observed, “It must be said there is a genuine element of pathos (and pray God, the pathos does not turn into tragedy) in the spectacle of this extraordinary man in the White House wrestling with the Vietnamese problem, which is so distasteful to him, and all the while visibly longing to go back to the domestic miracle-working he so much enjoys.”41 Johnson had every reason to know that he was embarking on a tragic endeavor. The same day he saw McCloy, his old friend and adviser Clark Clifford repeated the warnings he had written him on May 17: “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.”42
Over the next three years, thirty thousand young American soldiers, most of them draftees from blue-collar and lower-middle-class families, would die fighting the “limited” war. Throughout these early years of the war, McCloy stubbornly maintained that, once American soldiers were fighting and dying, one couldn’t just renounce the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam. It would be too much like Munich. True, the situation inside Vietnam was murky, and maybe in a free election the Vietnamese people would vote for the Viet Cong. But the president would just have to see this one through to some kind of honorable resolution. McCloy’s attitude was reinforced each time he heard an exposition of the administration’s case. After listening to Dean Rusk explain Vietnam to a group of his peers at a Bohemian Grove retreat in late July, McCloy reported to the White House that Rusk had been an “outstanding success.”43
But he still had doubts. One day soon after Johnson’s press conference, McCloy found himself seated on the Washington-New York air shuttle next to Marcus Raskin, a former NSC aide with whom he had worked on disarmament issues during 1961. Inevitably, they got to talking about Vietnam, and Raskin criticized the escalation decision. McCloy listened as Raskin outlined his views and then said, yes, it was a difficult problem and “it looks as if we’re going to get our nose bloodied.”44 But what had to be done had to be done.
McCloy had counseled Johnson to use whatever force was necessary, to go in decisively with the intention of quickly bringing Ho Chi Minh to the negotiating table. But when Johnson chose a middle course, McCloy did not try to warn him against half-measures. If this was what the president had decided, he would support him. Among other things, he agreed to associate himself publicly with the war by lending his name to a public-relations campaign organized out of the White House. He did so reluctantly, telling Mac Bundy that the formation of a Committee for an Effective and Durable Peace in Asia might only “stimulate the formation of an opposing group.”45 (He had been talking to Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of Foreign Affairs, who feared that such tactics would attract criticism “against the control of government policy by reactionaries, Wall Street, the East, the Establishment or whatever critics of the policy choose to call it.”46) He also questioned whether the administration really needed to drum up support: “The people have now faced the fact that this is a very messy situation but the country has determined that what has to be done will be done in spite of intermittent opposition from irresponsible groups.”47 But these arguments did not convince Bundy or the president whom he served. Johnson had a desperate craving for any approbation, particularly if it came from the Eastern Establishment. So, in the end, McCloy agreed to join the Committee. Together with such friends as Arthur Dean, David Rockefeller, Dean Acheson, James Conant, and Eugene Black, he signed a full-page newspaper advertisement endorsing “the President’s policy of doing no more and no less than what is necessary militarily in Vietnam to bring about a viable peace.”48
Between July and the end of 1965, the American public slowly came to realize that an enormous military expedition was required just to keep the Saigon regime in place. By December, there were nearly two hundred thousand U.S. troops committed on the ground. “In the South,” reported Malcolm Browne in The New York Times, “huge sectors of the nation have been declared ‘free bombing zones,’ in which anything that moves is a legitimate target.. . . If only by the laws of chance, bloodshed is believed to be heavy in these raids.”49 And in the North, the air war had also greatly accelerated, with the number of sorties tripling to some seventy-nine thousand flights in 1966.50 The bombing took its toll on Hanoi’s infrastructure, but it also led to rising civilian casualties. This in turn fueled antiwar sentiments at home. In October and November 1965, critics of the war organized mass demonstrations in Washington. About the same time, McCloy sounded out Mac Bundy about leaving his job as national-security adviser in the White House to become president of the Ford Foundation. He knew that the younger man was tiring in his White House job. Both Bundy brothers were still just as committed to prosecuting the war as they had been in the summer. But now it was becoming a daily, gruesome grind, so when McCloy mentioned the Ford job, Mac Bundy jumped at the opportunity.
Johnson hated it when any man left his employ, but the departure of Bundy, just as the war was getting nasty, was a particular blow. The president had always felt that the Eastern Establishment would invariably give Bundy credit for any foreign-policy victories—and blame him for any failures. Vietnam was not exactly a failure yet, but it looked as if it was becoming a tar baby. In December, the same month Bundy announced that he would leave his post in the near future, Johnson decided to announce a trial pause in the bombing campaign. This would demonstrate, Johnson thought, once and for all whether Hanoi was willing to respond to Washington’s peace feelers. If nothing happened, Bundy and the president’s other advisers on the war hoped that at least the administration’s critics would be silenced.
More than a month passed, during which emissaries were sent all over the world in a relentless search for “signals” that Hanoi might be prepared for peace talks. It quickly became apparent that this whirlwind of diplomatic activity was quite pointless. It was already widely known that Hanoi had only one precondition for comprehensive negotiations: the bombing had to stop for good. After that, Hanoi said it wished to negotiate the withdrawal of all foreign troops and the establishment of a coalition government in the South that would include both the National Liberation Front and the Saigon junta. Peace talks could begin prior to the withdrawal of any U.S. troops—but first the bombing had to stop. Washington, however, was opposed to the establishment of a coalition government, since this was seen by all as a sure formula for an eventual takeover of the South by the NLF. So the Johnson emissaries were instructed to say that Washington would stop the bombing permanently only if Hanoi would halt its infiltration of troops and supplies into the South. This effectively sabotaged any hopes for real negotiations, because it rejected Hanoi’s only condition to the commencement of peace talks—the unconditional cessation of the bombing.51
As the bombing pause entered its fifth week, pressures from the Pentagon mounted on Johnson to resume the air war. In a meeting on January 24, 1966, with his principal advisers, the president was basically told he had to get on with it. So first Johnson called in the congressional leaders, who, with the exception of Fulbright and Mike Mansfield, argued that the administration had to “do what is necessary to win.”52
The next afternoon, Bundy sounded out McCloy and Lovett over the phone. They both favored a “prompt resumption” of the bombing. Citing his “painful memories of Korea,” Lovett told Bundy that he was a “charter member of the Never Again Club.” He wished Washington had never gotten involved, but now that it was, he favored not only a resumption of the bombing, but the imposition of a “friendly blockade” of North Vietnamese ports. Unlike Lovett, McCloy thought the pause had done some good on both political and military grounds. But since Hanoi had not responded to Washington’s peace feelers, “it makes no sense now to let the highways and bridges be repaired and put in use again after we spent so much time bombing them.” The ri
sks of escalation, he said, were low.53
Needing more reassurance, Johnson wanted to hear this in person, and so he instructed Bundy to call another session of the “Wise Men.” Lovett declined, believing he had nothing more to add to what he had told Bundy over the phone. He always seemed to recognize that these little gatherings were a bit staged and usually held only when the president wished the “Wise Men” to ratify a decision that had already been made. Once, when the White House sent him a photo of himself and McCloy sitting in on one of these meetings, looking particularly sleepy-eyed, Lovett sent it on to McCloy with the caption “Bored of Advisers.”54
But McCloy invariably answered these presidential summonses, and so, two days later, he found himself once again in the White House Cabinet Room facing Johnson and his men. Vice-President Hubert Humphrey was present, in addition to Rusk, McNamara, Harriman, the Bundy brothers, Ball, Allen Dulles, Arthur Dean, and Clark Clifford. The agenda was clear from the beginning: the bombing would be resumed, even though everyone present voiced various reasons not to escalate. Read today, the transcript seems to portray a remarkable degree of cynicism; at the very least, these were men resigned to a course of action that they knew to be of doubtful wisdom, domestically unpopular, and certainly bloody. But Hanoi had called their bluff, and now they were trapped. Mac Bundy set the tone early on when he stated, “. . . we did not expect any serious response to the pause. . . .” McCloy himself admitted to being “puzzled” that “Hanoi hasn’t thrown us off balance with some phony probe.”
Instead, the North Vietnamese were continuing to reinforce their troops in the South. McNamara admitted that Hanoi was now capable of infiltrating forty-five hundred men per month—three times the rate of last year. When Arthur Dean asked whether stepped-up bombing could deter the enemy’s supply operations, McNamara flatly stated that not even the mining of Haiphong harbor would markedly cut down on the supplies reaching the South. “[I] Don’t think we can affect their will through bombing.. . . No matter what bombing we do we need more men [on the ground].” McCloy then asked the same question in a different way: “What can we accomplish by doubling [bombing] sorties? Would this bring us victory?” To this, McNamara responded that “doubling our force over a period of six months might be sufficient to break their will.” But when McCloy asked whether the current ground offensive could bring about a pacification of the countryside, McNamara said, “No.”
In short, McCloy was being told that the bombing should be resumed even though in the past it had not stopped infiltration into the South, that more ground troops would be needed, but that they would not pacify the countryside. But neither he nor anyone else in the room questioned the logic of the escalation they were being asked to approve. Instead, McCloy’s questions tended to be of a technical or factual nature. He asked General Wheeler whether the army had developed anything “in the way of tactics or weapons that give you hope?” Wheeler responded by boasting of the army’s tactical mobility.
McCloy summed up their sentiments toward the end of the meeting when he suggested that the administration’s peace offensive and the bombing pause had made Washington appear too eager for negotiations. “We’ve been too excited,” he said, “too panicky—an indication of weakness to the enemy. [The] general impression abroad is we overdid it. But I’m not criticizing it. It helped us here at home. I think I would resume the bombing after having made these efforts—and saying we would if we didn’t get [a] response—talks would be diminished if we don’t resume. Insofar as Hanoi is concerned, they are confirmed in their estimate that we are weak and feeling the pressures at home.”
Arthur Dean, Clark Clifford, and Allen Dulles agreed with these sentiments, leaving only Arthur Goldberg to make a case for prolonging the bombing pause. Even Vice President Humphrey favored a resumption. A moment later, the president ended the meeting with the words: “I am not happy about Vietnam but we cannot run out—we have to resume bombing.”55
The same day, Senator J. William Fulbright—whom Johnson was now derisively calling “Senator Halfbright”—began holding hearings on the war. By early February, some of the television networks were broadcasting the hearings live, which so infuriated Johnson that he allegedly used his friendship with CBS President Frank Stanton to have that network cancel live coverage. George Kennan’s critique of administration policy was replaced by reruns of the “I Love Lucy” show.56 Fulbright nevertheless succeeded in showing that opposition to the war was no longer confined to a vocal minority of “longhair” students and leftist professors on elite university campuses. At the hearings’ conclusion, Lew Douglas congratulated Fulbright for his “great courage.”57
As the war continued—five thousand American soldiers would be killed in 1966—the debate entered the confines of Pratt House, where McCloy still presided over the Council on Foreign Relations. Professor Hans J. Morgenthau, a known critic of the war who had testified with Kennan at the Fulbright hearings, was invited that year to be a senior fellow at the Council. McCloy regularly debated the merits of the war at the Council’s off-the-record dinner meetings with Morgenthau, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Averell Harriman, George Ball, Asian specialist A. Doak Barnett, Francis Plimpton, and many others. If there was some room for critics like Morgenthau at Pratt House, McCloy also made sure that the administration was allowed to make its case. Dean Rusk, Henry Kissinger—who was a hawk on the war—and Walt W. Rostow, who had replaced Mac Bundy as the president’s NSC adviser, all spoke at the Council in 1965–66.58
The Council’s house organ, Foreign Affairs, similarly opened its pages to such administration spokesmen as Mac Bundy and the CIA’s George Carver. Ten months after leaving the White House, Bundy was still an unabashed defender of the war: “. . . the argument on Viet Nam turns on tactics, not fundamentals,” although he warned, “. . . there are wild men in the wings.” The president and his advisers, wrote Bundy, deserve the “understanding support of those who want restraint,” in part because it was these men who were responsible for the fact that “the bombing of the North has been the most accurate and the most restrained in modern warfare.”59 The journal’s editor, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, did not let such administration spokesmen go unanswered. In the autumn of 1966, Armstrong published a long piece by veteran French reporter Bernard B. Fall which effectively destroyed many of the arguments used by Washington to justify the war. After Lew Douglas read the piece, he wrote his friend Thomas Lamont at Morgan Guaranty Trust that in his opinion Fall had made an “unimpeachable argument” against the escalating war.60
By then, Douglas firmly believed that “the position that we have been driven into is a dangerous one—dangerous to us and to the whole world. I hope with great urgency that we will escalate no further. . . .”61 McCloy was used to his brother-in-law’s strong opinions—and tended to dismiss them. The two old friends, in fact, were arguing quite a bit in the mid-sixties, and not only about Vietnam. Ever suspicious of the Germans, the Anglophile in Douglas thought Washington was allowing Bonn to “dictate [American] foreign policy.”62 He knew McCloy to be notoriously soft on the Germans; he was aghast that McCloy supported giving West Germany some kind of control over the nuclear weapons stationed on her soil. He just refused to believe that “the leopard has changed its spots.” The Germans should not be trusted with the ultimate weapon.63
McCloy was having similar disagreements with Harriman. In late January 1966, he had what Harriman described as a “hot argument” over breakfast at his Georgetown home. The Germans were indeed asking for some control over NATO nuclear weaponry, and McCloy thought they should get it, even though Washington was then trying to negotiate a Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) with the Soviets. He knew the Germans believed the proposed NPT was primarily aimed at them; indeed, former Chancellor Adenauer soon created a political rumble by calling the NPT “a Morgenthau plan raised to the 2nd power.” Adenauer thought that, if West Germany signed the treaty, it would be signing its own death warrant.64 McCloy “deplored such emotional statements�
� but as he now told Harriman, he just didn’t think such a treaty was important enough to sacrifice “NATO for the benefit of the Russians.”65 He bluntly criticized the administration, saying that it was letting “NATO go to hell in a hack.” Echoing Douglas’s sentiments, Harriman said McCloy was allowing Germany to “dictate” U.S. foreign policy. “We can’t take a corporals’ guard out of Germany without a crisis,” he complained. He joshingly told his old friend that he ought to “get up to date and not live in the past when Germany was his ward.”66
It was true, McCloy was soft on the Germans; he always thought them to be “our best ally.”67 He had also begun to think that “the general acceptance of the desirability of non-proliferation may be more instinctive than analytical.” Perhaps Washington, inclined to give up too much in pursuit of absolute nonproliferation, might have to resign itself to the emergence of new nuclear powers in certain regional settings.68 In order to preserve the credibility of NATO’s deterrence, West Germany, the fulcrum state in the Atlantic alliance, might someday have to be given control over the bomb.