My father never spoke to me of his sense of failure, but for years after the war, as he sank through hellish circles of depression into senility, I saw it plain. What I did not imagine at the time was that his own failure could have consisted not in a myopia he shared with the brass, but in a newly developed inability to stake out influential positions that were different from the other generals. Had they finally intimidated him? It seems clear that my father influenced McNamara, whose confidence he had. But the generals were something else. If my father disagreed with them, why hadn't he argued his case with a clarity and force that had an effect? And then, after he and McNamara each left the Pentagon, each refused—wasn't this the gravest failure?—to try to influence the public. Knowing full well, by the time of his retirement in 1969, that the war was futile, my father, like McNamara, said nothing to challenge Nixon, Laird, and Kissinger as they continued to send boys to kill and die.
From various sources, such as the Pentagon Papers, the revelations of the Westmoreland-CBS libel trial, which was an argument about counting the enemy, and from numerous other accounts, particularly McNamara's memoir, I have come to some appreciation, if not full knowledge, of the frustrations of my father's position. It should not have surprised me, but it did, when I learned from McNamara's testimony what had never been authoritatively stated before—on the contrary, it had always been denied—that the generals were actively contemplating the use of nuclear weapons.
The Bomb. Referring to secret planning sessions held in November 1964, while Curtis LeMay was still Air Force chief and not long after LBJ's campaign ads depicted Barry Goldwater as dying to use the Bomb, McNamara writes, "The president and I were shocked by the almost cavalier way in which the Chiefs and their associates, on this and other occasions, referred to, and accepted the risk of, the possible use of nuclear weapons."
McNamara reports that in 1966 and again in 1967, the Joint Chiefs made proposals that involved "utilizing the nation's full military capability, including the possible use of nuclear weapons." If China entered the war, the Chiefs were ready to use the Bomb against it. McNamara claims to have regarded the consideration of such strategies with abhorrence, and I believe him. And I also believe that my father, whom I knew to lack even an ounce of cavalier swagger on this question, would have been equally appalled. Kooks? On this subject I am sure that, to him, Curtis LeMay was the kook. But could he say so?
As I stepped gingerly into the ever expanding circle of the antiwar movement, I was surrounded by people who thought they knew all there was to know about the generals running the war. But my constant experience, as I heard generals first chastised for stupidity and then condemned as baby burners, was that such critics knew nothing about them. I was wrong. Now I would say, more simply, they knew nothing about my father. What kept me paralyzed long after the immoral savagery of the war became clear to me was the mystery of my father's commitment to it. How could the war be what William Sloane Coffin, Abraham J. Heschel, Martin Luther King, Daniel Berrigan, and even the pope said it was—what I thought it was—if Dad thought otherwise? What I couldn't know was that all the conflicts then surfacing in our society about the war were conflicts deeply buried inside certain individuals charged with managing it, one of whom, I see now, was surely my father.
For example, from his early days at the Office of Special Investigations, Dad had opposed the mentally enslaving effect of the military's sacrosanct chain of command. He had succeeded in creating one agency, OSI, that defied it, and he tried but failed to do the same thing at DIA. The problem seems obvious. Since a military man's success depends solely on the good opinion of his immediate superior, the system punishes any impulse to displease that superior by telling him what he does not want to hear. The prescribed military answer to the question "Can you?" is "Can do."
General Bruce Palmer Jr. served as a corps commander in Vietnam in 1967 and went on to become Army vice chief of staff. He wrote, "Not once during the war did the JCS advise the Commander-in-Chief or the Secretary of Defense that the strategy being pursued most probably would fail and that the U.S. would be unable to achieve its objectives...[The Chiefs] were imbued with the 'can do' spirit and could not bring themselves to make a negative statement or to appear to be disloyal."
To men like that, my father had often appeared to be negative and disloyal. After McNamara's memoir appeared in 1995, Louis G. Sarris, a former State Department analyst, wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times in which he listed critics of early military involvement in Vietnam, including "even the Defense Intelligence Agency." For a controversial 1963 report in which Sarris challenged the generals, he drew on DIA assessments, among others. This report, in the words of David Halberstam, writing in The Best and the Brightest, "showed that the war effort was slipping away."
McNamara's position in those early years remains in dispute, but I confess the relief it was to read in his memoir of an early and direct DIA intervention, which was in effect a first shoe falling. As a summary of American prospects following Diem's assassination, it was a flat contradiction of reports from the U.S. mission in Saigon, which had touted up to then our "progress in Vietnam." McNamara goes on, "But on December 13, 1963, I received a memorandum from the Defense Intelligence Agency stating that, while the Vietcong had not scored spectacular gains over the past year, they had sustained and even improved their combat capabilities. The report added that unless the South Vietnamese Army improved its operations, Vietcong activities would probably increase." This "new and gloomy assessment," as McNamara calls it, was later confirmed by the CIA's John McCone, who told the president, "It is abundantly clear that statistics received over the past year ... on which we gauged the trend of the war were grossly in error."
Grossly in error: for the next ten years, that would be the one consistent characteristic of Vietnam assessments and reports reaching the top echelons of Washington. "Wars generate their own momentum and follow the law of unanticipated consequences," McNamara writes. "Vietnam proved no exception." The miserable, cursed, futile, impossible effort to find out what was happening in the jungles, along the supply routes, on the bomb-cratered plateaus, in the alleys of teeming cities, along the electrified demilitarized zone, and in the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people eventually drove American decision makers, including my father, past distraction and into a kind of madness. My father's fellow Air Force generals should have been able to count on him to support their cause by reporting that the bombing of the North was working, but according to the Pentagon Papers, the DIA consistently offered up analysis—data, not argument—that the bombing was having no significant effect on Hanoi's capacity to wage war.
By August 1967, before executive sessions of the Senate Armed Services Committee, McNamara was in a feud with the Joint Chiefs over the winnability of the war. At that point, there were more than 525,000 GIs in Vietnam. General Westmoreland was asking for another 200,000, and the Chiefs wanted another 400 bombers for a massive expansion of the air war, which until then had focused on supply lines. They wanted harbors mined and dikes destroyed and the flow of traffic on the Red River stopped. They wanted $10 billion more per year, above the $30 billion already being spent. They wanted, as Curtis LeMay had put it two years before, "to stop swatting at flies and go after the manure pile." McNamara, in his testimony before the subcommittee chaired by Senator John Stennis, opposed all of this. He rebutted the generals and admirals by citing the monthly DIA report, "An Appraisal of the Bombing of North Vietnam," which "invariably concluded"—here was the second shoe falling—that the air campaign was not working.
McNamara had come to the conclusion—and in this as well as other secret councils was arguing for it—that the war could not be won and should not be expanded. A suspension of the bombing and earnest negotiations to end the war were what was needed. "Mr. Secretary, I am terribly disappointed with your statement," Senator Strom Thurmond replied. "I think it is a statement of placating the Communists. It is a statement of appeasing the Communi
sts. It is a statement of no-win."
McNamara denied Thurmond's charge, but it was true. Many Americans hated McNamara then, and when his memoir appeared on the twentieth anniversary of the end of the war, accompanied by his tears on camera, many felt a fresh bolt of rage toward him. At a Harvard lecture, when an angry questioner demanded to know how McNamara could have maintained his public silence about a war he'd concluded could not be won, he responded by evading the question. When pressed, he replied sharply, "Shut up!"—an efficient reminder to everyone of why they'd despised him.
McNamara's memoir generated other feelings in me. We thought that the main argument going on in America in those years was between hawks and doves. But among the hawks themselves, the argument was far more deadly. However much liberals and aging peaceniks continue to hate him, it was the right wing that truly threatened McNamara in the 1960s, not the left. It was the right wing that broke him. To hawks, both at the time and when his memoir appeared, McNamara represented the failure of the government to pursue the war "manfully." His crime was not the violence he unleashed, but his unwillingness to ride it all the way. In a memo to the president dated May 19, 1967, he warned again that nuclear weapons "would probably be suggested ... if U.S. losses were running high while conventional efforts were not producing desired results." He concluded that memo, "The picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one."
McNamara's lack of enthusiasm for the war led to the announcement of his resignation on November 29, 1967. Although McNamara coyly says that he remains unsure whether he re-signed or was fired, it seems clear that LBJ forced him out. To all appearances, Johnson was prepared to give Westmoreland and the other generals what they wanted. At stake was the very survival of civilization in the northeast corner of Southeast Asia. At stake was the possibility, readily acknowledged by the Joint Chiefs, that an expanded war could draw in China and even the Soviet Union. At stake—the generals admitted this—was World War III.
McNamara's "collapse of will" came at just the worst time for Lyndon Johnson. To support his decision to tough it out in Vietnam, the president had just established that fall a White House "psychological strategy committee" under Walt Rostow to nurture support among the American people. The New Deal's Wise Men were all on board. That season's selling of the war to the public included General Westmoreland's statement "I have never been more encouraged," and his promise to the House Armed Services Committee that victory would come in two years.
Opponents of "McNamara's war" brought their efforts to a climax too. On September 14, in a famous letter to his constituents, Congressman Tip O'Neill broke with the war, one of the first establishment pols to do so. On October 21, 100,000 people marched on Washington. Of that number, 20,000 went on to the Pentagon itself, Norman Mailer's "Armies of the Night." In the same month, Father Philip Berrigan and others committed the first of the acts of Catholic war protest, pouring blood on draft files in Baltimore. Also in that month, Tom Hayden and others visited Hanoi. Taken alone, these acts of so-called radicals and the mass demonstrations by ordinary citizens could have strengthened the hawk position, but in the convoluted politics of the day, they had the effect of making more moderate acts of dissent all the more powerful. The day after McNamara announced his resignation, Senator Eugene McCarthy declared his candidacy against Johnson on an antiwar platform. Long-time opponents of the war must disparage McNamara, but we must also see how his decision led to McCarthy's.
In Vietnam itself, the Communists launched the January Tet Offensive, which, by the numbers, they lost. Far more important, however, Tet laid bare as an illusion every hope for an eventual American victory. In February, during a regular evening newscast, Walter Cronkite rejected the war, predicting it would "end in stalemate." LBJ told an aide, "If I've lost Walter, I've lost the support of Mr. Average Citizen." On March 12, 1968, Mr. and Mrs. Average Citizen voted for Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary. By the numbers—like the Communists of Tet—he lost, but by polling 42 percent to LBJ's 48 percent—a surprise showing against a sitting president, like the North Vietnamese Army's showing against the U.S. war machine—McCarthy transformed loss into victory. Thus, on March 30 Johnson announced his rejection of the escalation plans of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He said no to Westmoreland's wish to "clobber the enemy once and for all." He said no to any possible use of nuclear weapons. He suspended the air war over the North. He asked for an immediate start to negotiations with Hanoi and the Vietcong. And he renounced plans to seek reelection. Remembering my slight encounters with him years before, and thinking of his earlier alliance with Martin Luther King, I reacted with an overwhelming gratitude and affection. I thought his decision meant now the war would end and I could get my father back. I wrote the president to thank him. In due time, I received from the White House a printed acknowledgment.
In these crucial months, the war at home was waged for the "hearts and minds" of "average citizens." Nixon would defy them by endlessly prolonging the war. Two months after McNamara resigned, the U.S. high command reported 16,459 American dead; Nixon, Kissinger, and Laird would add 41,676 to that number. Under McNamara, U.S. forces had dropped one and a half million tons of bombs; six million more tons would fall. Nevertheless, a cold stop was put right here to the generals' inexorable escalation. That had been the goal of the march on the Pentagon in October. No one who participated in that demonstration had counted it a success. Yet it was.
"I watched the whole thing from the roof of the building," McNamara writes. "Years later a reporter asked if I had been scared. Of course I was scared."
So was I. It was a Saturday. I had slipped away from the seminary without permission and alone. By now some Paulists were as vociferous in opposing the war as I was silent about it.
But it was unthinkable to me, at last, that I not attend the demonstration. I arranged to meet up with the only other person who could understand the complicated feelings I had: my brother Dennis, the vegetarian. He was then attending George Washington University, a few blocks from the White House. His hair was yet longer. He was tall and lanky. With his wire-rimmed glasses he looked like John Lennon. We hardly ever saw each other except in the house on Generals' Row, but, alone among our brothers, we had learned to find each other's eyes in the terrible awkwardness of family gatherings.
On that Saturday, we met near the Washington Monument and then hovered at the margins of the demonstration while it was centered at the Lincoln Memorial. There were speeches, we were told, by Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell and Dr. Spock and William Sloane Coffin, but we did not get close enough to hear them. Small groups formed around signs reading "CORE," "SNCC," "RESIST," "The Catholic Peace Fellowship," and dozens more. But Dennis and I stayed clear of every group.
When a sizable part of the crowd began to move from the Lincoln Memorial into Virginia and toward the Pentagon, we folded ourselves into it. In the front lines were the small number of defiant protesters who challenged the soldiers ringing the Pentagon. Arrests were made, and for a few moments it seemed the demonstration would become a riot—a prospect that horrified Dennis and me. At one point, we heard that some of the crowd got into the building, but what we saw was troops in battle gear filing steadily out. We didn't get close to the building, and we never stood apart from the crowd. We knew exactly which window was his, and we stood there staring at it for a long time. Mute. Ashamed.
It has long been my conviction, widely shared, that the antiwar movement stopped the escalation by making it politically untenable for Johnson. That is not the whole story. Like all peaceniks, I was ignorant of the conflict going on inside the Pentagon—which we took to be the ultimate monolith. In fact, it was as sorely divided an institution as the nation itself. Now I realize that of all the events that made a Johnson choice in favor of the generals untenable, none can be ranked above Robert McNamara
's loss of faith in the military solution. One week after this demonstration, on November i, 1967, he sent a secret memo to Johnson proposing a halt to the bombing for the sake of negotiations. McNamara's loss of faith in bombing resulted not from the protests, even though members of McNamara's own family participated in them, but from his conclusion, based on evidence, that the enemy we were fighting in Vietnam was simply not going to be defeated. No matter what we did to them, short of reducing their part of the subcontinent to a radioactive graveyard, the Vietnamese Communists would not surrender. And of all that went into that conviction of McNamara's—his critics on the right still regard it as the true moral collapse of the war—my father's analysis is duly credited as a factor, early and late, by McNamara himself. "A factor" to them, but something more than that to me.
The fact that McNamara, my father, and others like them did not go public with their conclusions about the war when Nixon and company continued it with a considerable, if secret, escalation of bombing, in Cambodia especially, means they bear an additional, horrible responsibility. They thought, as McNamara puts it in his book, that their highest duty was to the commander in chief. Perhaps they thought they "wouldn't have had much influence," which seems dubious at best. My father remained in his position at DIA through the rest of Johnson's term and long enough into Nixon's to have an independent falling out with the new administration. Whatever his convictions had become, he forever maintained his silence, which, given everything I know about him, was the only thing he could do. As events would show, Dad had more capacity for a public break with his superiors than I'd have expected, but he was entirely unable to say aloud that the boys he'd helped send off to die had died for a mistake. Alas, his silence helped send off even more. Silence. By October 21, 1967, his silence toward me and Dennis was already deafening.
An American Requiem Page 19