The Chairman

by Kai Bird

  The U.S. press hailed the agreement as “a near-miracle,” and McCloy was complimented for having “somehow brought tripartite agreement out of tripartite chaos.”104 But in the end, the arrangement turned out to be a stopgap measure; Bonn could not forever accept U.S. dollars without doing something with them. Only two months later, McCloy had to fly back to Germany for secret talks with a group of German bankers—including Hermann Abs—to persuade them to agree to the formation of a new monetary reserve designed to support the dollar.105 Eventually, either the U.S. military presence in Germany would have to be cut, or the Germans would have to pay for their defense. McCloy had merely engineered a lawyer’s postponement of the inevitable.

  Over the next few years, largely due to the requirements of Vietnam, more American troops were brought home from Europe. Gradually, the Germans were persuaded to replace these troops and further ease Washington’s foreign-exchange costs. With considerable reluctance, the British too kept more than a “trip-wire” force stationed in Germany. By 1971, the actual balance-of-payments costs of maintaining the Seventh U.S. Army in Germany was lower than it had been in 1967. But even if this had not been the case, McCloy would have continued to argue that NATO was worth any price.106

  NATO was not an end in itself—though McCloy’s constant arguments sometimes made it seem so. He was not in principle opposed to what would later be known as the Ostpolitik of the West German Social Democrats. But he believed that whatever hopes existed for improved East-West relations “must rest on a firm NATO foundation—not one which was seen to be unraveling.”107 In 1966–67, the unfortunate coincidence of four events—a U.S. balance-of-payments crisis, the collapse of the British pound, a budget crisis in Germany, and the introduction of the Mansfield Amendment in the U.S. Congress—converged to threaten the unraveling of the Atlantic alliance. McCloy would not let it happen.

  The fate of the Atlantic alliance, of course, did not make for frontpage headlines in these years. The Vietnam War squeezed these issues off to the back pages, which explains McCloy’s growing annoyance with the war. He and other Europeanists had initially signed on to the war precisely because it was presented as symbolic of America’s commitments elsewhere—specifically in Western Europe. Now the war in Southeast Asia was contributing to the United States’ foreign-exchange drain problems and causing domestic inflation. And despite the heavy commitment of more than four hundred thousand troops, there seemed no end in sight.108

  By 1967, the war had settled into a dreadful quagmire. Washington was spending $2 billion a month to support a half-million American soldiers in South Vietnam. More than thirteen thousand Americans had died. Draft calls in the summer of 1967 were running at thirty thousand per month. More bombs had been dropped on the country than in all the theaters of World War II, and civilian casualties in the North were as high as a thousand per month. And yet, according to American estimates, the North Vietnamese had still been able to raise their rate of infiltration into the South from thirty-five thousand men in 1965 to some ninety thousand in 1967.109 Washington had miscalculated the endurance and determination of the North Vietnamese to outlast the Americans.

  To make matters worse, it was becoming clear that, as the Americans took over the ground war, the South Vietnamese were fighting less. The following year, when the U.S. commitment rose to 525,000 troops, more soldiers of the South Vietnamese 25 th Division died in traffic accidents than in combat.110 The Vietnamese had handed the war over to the Americans.

  The men running the war from Washington were not blind to the facts. As early as the summer of 1966, Robert McNamara had expressed his doubts privately. These doubts had grown in part as a result of his argument with McCloy over force levels in Europe. He had to acknowledge that the war had gotten out of hand and its further expansion threatened America’s ability to maintain its war-fighting capabilities in Europe.111 By the autumn of 1967,40 percent of America’s combat-ready divisions, half of its tactical air power, and a third of its navy was bogged down in Southeast Asia.112

  In a candid series of conversations with Averell Harriman, the straitlaced Defense Secretary McNamara confessed his deepest worries. In October 1966, he asked Harriman why he hadn’t been able to “open up channels of communication with Hanoi.” Harriman responded that opening up channels of communication was not the problem: “It is what we say that closes them down. We have nothing of any interest to Hanoi to tell them.” Johnson still wanted what amounted to a victory. But as Harriman told McNamara that day, “Ho Chi Minh had been fighting for a quarter of a century for the independence and unification of his country. He thought that he had been cheated by the ‘54 agreements, and didn’t want to give up now.” The North Vietnamese leader, he said, “still thinks that we will get tired. . . .”113 A month later, McNamara confided to Harriman that he believed Johnson would be beaten in the ‘68 election unless the war was settled soon. “It must be settled this year,” McNamara said. “Well,” Harriman replied, “early next year.”114

  McNamara and Harriman, however, were exceptions. Most of the president’s advisers were stubbornly insisting that the war was being won. Harriman thought that men like Walt Rostow, who had replaced Bundy as national-security adviser, were “reckless” and downright “maniacal” in their determination to escalate the war.115

  McCloy knew from his own occasional conversations with Harriman that the war was not going well. But he stayed away from Vietnam. Unlike Harriman or McNamara, he did not try to immerse himself in the subject, so he never really gave himself the opportunity to reconsider his earlier views. McCloy’s natural deference to professional military opinion made it unlikely that he would question the tactics or strategy of the military commander in the field. So, even as casualties mounted, he refused to second-guess General Westmoreland’s “search-and-destroy” strategy. In committing his forces to fight a ground war in Asia, Westmoreland assumed that his highly mobile forces could inflict intolerable losses on the enemy while sustaining a level of U.S. casualties acceptable to the American public. Even as the Vietnamese communists demonstrated that they were prepared to match the U.S. escalation step by step, Westmoreland assured the civilians in Washington that American firepower would ultimately prevail.116

  McCloy’s position on the war remained essentially unchanged from what it had been in 1965–66. Once the commitment of American prestige had been made, the country and the president had to await an honorable resolution.117 He sometimes even encouraged Johnson to think that things would get better. In the spring of 1967, when the president sent his old friend Ellsworth Bunker as ambassador to Saigon, McCloy wrote that he was “delighted” with the appointment. Bunker, he thought, was a man with “a habit of success,” so perhaps he could find a solution to the war: “I believe this augurs very well.”118

  Lyndon Johnson was a deeply troubled man, exhausted emotionally and physically by the strain of the war. He was beginning to feel abandoned by his closest advisers. Also in the spring of 1967, McNamara proposed not only a halt to most bombing, but a recognition that a settlement could not be achieved without the inclusion of the Viet Cong in some kind of coalition government. The Joint Chiefs threatened to resign en masse if the president accepted this advice. Johnson soon began complaining that “that military genius, McNamara, has gone dovish on me.”119 But he could not stomach the Joint Chiefs’ proposal for a greatly expanded war either. “Bomb, bomb, bomb, that’s all you know,” he complained. In the end, he again chose a “middle” course, approving an increase of only fifty-five thousand troops—instead of the two hundred thousand Westmoreland had requested.120

  McNamara was thoroughly disillusioned. He told Harriman that the president’s advisers were terribly unrealistic. Dean Rusk, in particular, was “much too optimistic over what could be achieved, much too rigid. . . . Rusk didn’t seem to understand that his position was asking for unconditional surrender of North Vietnam and the VC. . . .” McNamara now unequivocally thought that “it is impossible for us to w
in the war militarily,” and that Saigon would just have to negotiate with the National Liberation Front.121 (The defense secretary would admit this only in private; in public he said quite a different thing.122)

  That summer, McCloy was well aware of the intensity of the divisions within the administration. But from his position on the outside he was often more upset by the harsh rhetoric of the war’s critics. The cynicism and generational distrust he had seen among a minority of students in 1965 now seemed pervasive.123 McCloy had firsthand experience with some of the student protests at Amherst College, where he served as chairman of the board of trustees. In June 1966, for instance, he had been greatly embarrassed when a group of Amherst students protesting the war staged a walkout at commencement ceremonies. Sitting next to him that day on the podium as the students walked out was McNamara, whom he had invited to give the commencement address.124 The defense secretary was pained to note that the brightest students—those graduating summa and magna—were all wearing antiwar arm bands.125

  McCloy was offended by the tenor of the public debate over the war and feared that the demonstrators were giving succor to the enemy. He told Bob Lovett that he was worried about Dean Rusk, whom the antiwar demonstrators were vilifying as a war criminal. Why didn’t Rusk fight back and respond to his critics?126 Later in 1967, he was at a Council on Foreign Relations meeting when his frequent tennis partner Cass Canfield complained that the war was alienating American youth. McCloy shot back that the British had put up with dissent during the long Boer War and so could we.127

  He was also taken aback by criticism from intellectuals like Richard Falk of Princeton University and Arthur Schlesinger.128 Late in 1966, Schlesinger had published a widely read pamphlet entitled The Bitter Heritage in which he suggested that the “so-called Establishment” in general and McCloy in particular had not done all they could to keep the United States out of the war. Schlesinger argued that the architects of the war, men such as the Bundy brothers and Dean Rusk, had all been heavily influenced by Henry Stimson’s “powerful advocacy” of the doctrine of collective security. But in Vietnam they had expanded this “Stimsonianism” to what was essentially a civil war in a country of tenuous strategic importance. He accused this Establishment of “cowardice for its fear of acting as an Establishment should.” Unlike the “original Establishment in Great Britain,” wrote Schlesinger, the American version could not be relied on “to provide support for the established values and institutions of society.” As an example, Schlesinger reminded his readers that the American Establishment had “crumpled up before McCarthy.” Specifically, the reputed chairman of the Establishment (he did not actually name McCloy) had once “suggested in a public speech that the inquiries of the McCarthy committee were no worse than Senator Black’s investigations into the public utility holding companies in 1935.” Schlesinger then snidely concluded: “No doubt such leaders of respectable opinion became anti-McCarthy once the crisis was over; but whatever the retrospective courage, let us avoid the illusion that the American Establishment will be much braver the next time around.”129

  McCloy let this personal attack go unanswered. He thought such polemics unseemly, and it pained him to see the war so undermine the country’s bipartisan consensus on foreign policy. He was immobilized by the fact that American soldiers were fighting and dying on a foreign battlefield. One could not walk away from such a commitment. And yet he did not wish to join in the public fray over the war either. Late in the spring of 1967, James Rowe, a Washington lawyer and an old friend of Johnson’s, wrote a memo to the president suggesting the formation of an independent citizens’ committee “to answer the Galbraiths, the Schlesingers, the Percys, the Fulbrights and the McGoverns.” In addition to some “tough-minded liberals” like Thurman Arnold and Dean Acheson, Rowe suggested it would be “helpful to have some of the ‘Establishment,’ such as John McCloy, McGeorge Bundy and a few others. Lots of people are still influenced by the ‘Establishment.’ In this particular battle of public opinion, it has been silent. It has not joined the intellectuals but it certainly is not breaking its back for the Administration.”130 Rowe said it would take the president’s tacit support to sign up the kind of people who should head the committee, but he warned that the operation should not appear to have been instigated by the White House.

  An ardent White House aide, John Roche, thought this a wonderful idea. A former head of Americans for Democratic Action, Roche believed that too many liberals in the 1960s had lost their anticommunist fervor. He took Rowe’s proposal to Johnson, who quickly approved the project with the caveat: “But don’t get surfaced.”131 Because both Roche and Johnson realized that the committee would lack any credibility if it appeared to be run out of the White House, they had former Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois front the operation. Douglas approached Eisenhower, Truman, George Meany, and eventually McCloy to sign on as officers of the new organization, to be called the Citizens Committee for Peace with Freedom in Vietnam.

  Initially, McCloy indicated support for the idea. He even passed on to Douglas his suggestions for other members of the Committee: Acheson, Lovett, and Dillon.132 But soon afterward, perhaps after speaking with Lovett, he had a change of heart. Throughout that summer, he procrastinated, refusing to commit himself. He was torn. Old friends like Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, Dean Acheson, and James Conant had agreed to join the new organization. But Lovett and Mac Bundy were dragging their feet. By October, the White House knew that McCloy was “something of a problem along with Mac Bundy.”133

  Shortly before the Committee was scheduled to surface, Cabot Lodge and James Conant tried one more time to get McCloy and Mac Bundy on board. But their arguments left McCloy unconvinced.134 Afterward, McCloy wrote Lodge to remind him that he had already lent his name to one such citizens’ committee on Vietnam in 1965. To do so again now would be “rather redundant.” Moreover, he said, “I am always reluctant to have my name spread around on broadsides in any event. It is something you may be justified in doing two or three times in a lifetime, but not intermittently.” He reassured Lodge that he was, of course, always ready to help the president “bring this Vietnam affair to a constructive conclusion,” but adding his name to another committee was not going to help matters.135

  Nor did Mac Bundy, Robert Lovett, or Arthur Dean join the Committee. As Jim Rowe had observed that spring, the Establishment was not siding with the war’s intellectual critics, but now it was no longer prepared to associate itself publicly with the war effort. On November 1, 1967, Johnson convened another meeting of the “Wise Men,” but McCloy and Bob Lovett declined to attend. Of those who showed up, Acheson, Bundy, and others conveyed to the president their doubts about the bombing campaign.136 It was clearly unrealistic, they said, to expect the North Vietnamese to negotiate on Washington’s terms simply because of the bombing. They were convinced by McNamara’s arguments that the bombing, if anything, hardened the enemy’s resolve. On the other hand, evidence presented to them by General Wheeler and the CIA’s Richard Helms and George Carver led them to hope that the war was finally being won on the ground. General Westmoreland was insisting that the “crossover point” had been reached in this war of attrition. The enemy, he claimed, was losing men faster than they could be replaced. The weekly body counts were up, and the Saigon regime controlled more territory and a higher percentage of the population than ever before. Given these optimistic statistics, the “Wise Men” encouraged the president to carry on the struggle, though they urged him to find a ground strategy that would give the South Vietnamese a larger role in actual combat operations.137 Acheson and Mac Bundy urged Johnson to mount a new public relations campaign to sell the war to the American people: “Emphasize the ‘light at the end of the tunnel,’ ” Bundy advised, “instead of battles, deaths and danger.”138 Only George Ball spoke for a sharp disengagement. At the end of one of their briefings, Ball could not restrain himself from bursting out, “I’ve been watching you across the table. You’re like a flo
ck of buzzards sitting on a fence, sending the young men off to be killed. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”139 These were strong words, but men like Ball and Acheson could argue vehemently and at the end of the day go to Acheson’s townhouse in Georgetown to sip whiskey sodas.

  If he had been there, McCloy would have gone along with Acheson, Rusk, and the other hard-liners. Only a few days after this “Wise Men” meeting, he found himself sitting next to Endicott Peabody on the New York-Boston air shuttle. The former governor of Massachusetts turned the conversation to Vietnam. McCloy surprised Peabody with his tone of resignation. Johnson had no choice, he said, but to press ahead. He blamed President Kennedy for the initial decision to send troops to Vietnam. Kennedy, he said, had thought he could do this “without making an irretrievable commitment.” But, looking back, McCloy thought “the die was cast at that point.” Once they were committed, there could be no turning back.140

  This did not mean that McCloy thought the war a good or even a necessary thing in his scheme of national-security priorities. On the contrary, he emphatically agreed with George Ball’s premise that America’s most important interests lay in Europe. But as the war dragged on, he found it difficult to accept the obvious import of Ball’s position: a defeat in Vietnam would advertise to all that there were indeed limits on the ability of the United States to exercise its will. To McCloy’s mind, this was a dangerous proposition, particularly at a time when the whole framework of a collective defense in Western Europe seemed to be unraveling. How could Washington rejuvenate the kind of foreign policy of a “heroic scale” that had emerged from the rubble of World War II? What were the limits of U.S. power and the minimum needs of U.S. national security?