The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  Chapter Nine

  So the appointment of McCone had shown the political center of the Kennedy Administration to be a good deal farther to the right than his original political supporters hoped; now as he moved on Vietnam they would again take minimal confidence. In October 1961 the President decided to send his own special representatives to Vietnam for an on-site fact-finding trip. He and he alone was responsible for the composition of the team, which would to a very real degree reflect the true outlook of the new Administration toward Vietnam and toward what were essentially political problems in that period. No senior official from State went, partly because Rusk did not want to get involved in Vietnam, partly because he did not believe it was particularly State’s responsibility. Another reason was that Kennedy himself did not push it, not having any particular respect for anyone at State other than for Averell Harriman, who was still in Geneva trying to neutralize Laos.

  The trip was first proposed as a Rostow mission—just Rostow—but Bowles, who had become extremely nervous about Rostow’s militancy (“Chester Bowles with machine guns,” Arthur Schlesinger said of him), pushed hard for a high representative from State to go along to give the nonmilitary view. It should be someone of genuine rank, perhaps Bowles himself, but if not, at least an Assistant Secretary, perhaps Harriman. But Rusk was resistant; he still saw it as a military, not a political problem. (In this he was fairly typical of a generation of public officials who had come out of World War II and who saw State serving as the lawyers for the Defense Department; if there was a military involvement of some sort, Defense had primacy.) Eventually, however, as something of a concession to the Bowles viewpoint, the President’s military adviser, Maxwell Taylor, was added to the mission. Bowles felt reassured; he remembered long talks in Korea in 1953, when Taylor had said with considerable emotion that American troops must never again fight a land war in Asia. Never again. And so Bowles and some of the others were pleased by the Taylor presence and considered it a sop, but a very important sop to them. The resulting Taylor-Rostow report would significantly deepen the American involvement in Vietnam from the low-level (and incompetent) advisory commitment of the Eisenhower years (geared up for a traditional border-crossing war that would never come) to the nearly 20,000 support and advisory troops there at the time President Kennedy was killed. It was one of the crucial turning points in the American involvement, and Kennedy, by his very choice of the two men who had the greatest vested interest in fighting some kind of limited antiguerrilla war, had loaded the dice. In Saigon the American Ambassador to Vietnam first learned the news of the Taylor-Rostow mission over the radio.

  Rostow was born in New York in 1916, one of three sons of a Russian Jewish immigrant. Even their names expressed a radical newcomer’s almost naÏve love of America. Walt Whitman Rostow, Eugene Victor Rostow, Ralph Waldo Rostow (in 1966 James Thomson, now teaching at Harvard, wrote a satire on the White House in which a figure named Herman Melville Breslau was consistently militant). Walt had always been a prodigy, always the youngest to do something. The youngest to graduate from a school, to be appointed to something. An unusually young graduate of Yale, a young Rhodes scholar. A young man picking bombing targets in World War II. A young assistant to Gunnar Myrdal; indeed, because of his postwar association he was considered something of the State Department’s opening to the left in those days. Then a friend of C. D. Jackson’s at Life, and a thin connection with the Eisenhower Administration; then MIT, part of a department which seemed eager to harness the intellectual resources of this country into the global struggle against the Communists. Rostow came in contact with Kennedy during the mid-fifties, and Kennedy had been impressed.

  Rostow was always eager, hard-working, and in contrast to Bundy, extremely considerate of others. Even during the heights of the great struggles of 1968 in the attempt to turn around the war policy, when he was one of the last total defenders of the policy, many of his critics found it hard to dislike him personally. He seemed so ingenuously open and friendly, almost angelic, “a sheep in wolf’s clothing,” Townsend Hoopes would write. The reason was simple: he was the true believer, so sure of himself, so sure of the rectitude of his ideas that he could afford to be generous to his enemies. What others mistook for magnanimity in defeat was actually, in his own mind, magnanimity in victory; he had triumphed, his policies had come out as he alone had prophesied.

  In the fifties he had been something of a star in Cambridge, a man who published and published regularly, whose books were reviewed in the New York Times, and who wrote for the Sunday Times Magazine, a man who had a reputation not only in Cambridge but in Washington and New York as well, which was not entirely surprising, for the Rostows were considered by some in Cambridge—a very traditional and somewhat stuffy town—as being quite ambitious socially, perhaps too ambitious. When they entertained, they always seemed to have the current political or literary lions among their guests. There was one party which a Cambridge lady remembered well because the Rostows gave it for Joyce Carey, the great English novelist. Everyone was impressed that the Rostows knew Carey so well, an impression which dimmed somewhat for the Cambridge lady when Carey very politely took her aside and said, “And now do tell me a little something about our charming host and hostess—I know so little about them.” Not that giving a party for a lion in order to enhance your own standing was particularly unusual or gauche in Cambridge, or, for that matter, New York or Georgetown, though getting caught at it was.

  Kennedy, on the make for an intellectual think tank of his own in the late fifties, particularly liked Rostow, liked his openness, his boundless energy, liked the fact that Rostow, unlike most academics, was realistic, seemed to understand something about how Washington really worked, liked the fact that Rostow mixed well, got on with professional politicians. (After Rostow moved to Washington it was something of a point of pride with him that he was a pluralist intellectual. He could get along with the military, play tennis with them, understand their viewpoint, did not have the knee-jerk antimilitary reaction of most Jewish intellectuals. In fact, on the night of the bombing of Pleiku years later, other aides would remember, Rostow wandered around the White House clapping Air Force officers on the back, asking about the weather, reminding them that he had once picked targets, and he knew that weather was important.) During Kennedy’s Senate days he was always helpful, a demon for work, always available when summoned by the senator, producing paper, memos, ideas, a great idea man (Open Skies for Ike, New Frontier and Let’s Get This Country Moving Again for Kennedy). He was responsive, too, which was a help; when Kennedy wanted a memo on some subject, Rostow did not, as too many academics did, refer him to some piece of paper they had already written, or some testimony before a committee they had given a year before. Instead, Kennedy would receive good, quick, tart, specific responses.

  So the early relationship between Kennedy and Rostow was good, and then Rostow went away for the academic year 1958­59 and by the time he came back, Kennedy was running hard and there was less communication between them. There were more people on Kennedy’s staff, and thus more filters between the candidate and the free-lance eggheads. There were those who felt that Kennedy was a little less comfortable with Rostow, a little pressed by him (“Walt,” Kennedy said in 1961, not entirely to flatter him, “can write faster than I can read”). Kennedy had less time, and now there seemed to be too many memos, too much energy on the part of Rostow. In addition, Kennedy himself had changed. He was no longer the young senator of the fifties who had been so dependent on the Cambridge eggheads for his special postgraduate education and briefings. Now he was beginning to move ahead of them; more and more of what they were telling him he already knew. During the 1960 campaign Rostow remained among the advisers, a willing one, though on the outer periphery, his name to be summoned forth in the pro-Kennedy literature as one more bit of proof that John Kennedy liked intellectuals and was at ease with them.

  Nevertheless, Rostow was ready to enter the new Administration w
ith considerable money in the bank with the President-elect, a genuine certified Cambridge intellectual who had done his part for the greater glory. There were, however, some Kennedy people with reservations about him and they were not, curiously enough, the professional pols in the Kennedy group, but rather some of the Cambridge intellectuals themselves. It was not a particularly strong thing and they would, of course, never voice those feelings to outsiders or blow the whistle on Walt, just as the generals would never blow the whistle to an outsider on a fellow general about whom they had doubts. But there was a sense of unease about Walt, part of it personal, part of it professional, a feeling that for all Walt’s talent, wit, brilliance, something was missing. In the personal sense it was Rostow’s ability to adapt, to change: one of them remembered Rostow, when he had just come back from Oxford, playing the guitar at a Washington party and singing a very clever doggerel. It was enchanting, witty and very British, except that it was not Rostow, not at all. That feeling would deepen as Rostow went from virtual fellow traveler to militant anti-Communist ideologue, an uneasiness at the facility with which he adapted to fashion, without perhaps even knowing that he was doing it. This sense would heighten among some of his colleagues when they noticed, in the days of the Kennedy Administration, that Rostow sounded a little too much like the President, and grew even stronger when during the subsequent Administration he began to sound like Lyndon B. Johnson, employing the rough, tough language of the Ranch. It was, finally, a sense that behind all that bounciness and enthusiasm, perhaps Rostow did not know who he was, that in the eagerness of the poor Jewish immigrant’s son to make it, in the big leagues and with the Establishment, he had lost sight of what was Rostow and what was the Establishment, or perhaps knowing what was Rostow, he wanted to forget it. (And make it with the Establishment he did, joyously, a last holdout on Vietnam when even the Establishment had changed. Thus, in 1971, after the New York Times had published the Pentagon documents, which made many in those Administrations look very foolish, not the least of them Walt Rostow, who told a Times editor yes, he would write an article for the Op-Ed page, and then almost benignly added that he was concerned about one thing. It was not the printing of the Papers [he could understand that], but the split in the Establishment. The Establishment was very small, which was necessary, and it was in charge of a country which was very young and which could not make the right decisions itself, and thus unity within the Establishment was very important. They must stick together, they must not be divided, America needed the Times in the Establishment, that was the important point, and now they must work to heal the breach, to bring the Times back.)

  If there was one other thing that bothered Walt’s colleagues on the professional level, it was the firmness of his belief in his own ideas (at a given time), a lack of healthy skepticism about them, a lack of reflectiveness and open-mindedness. His great strength was also his great weakness: a capacity to see patterns where previously none existed, to pull together diverse ideas and acts into patterns and theories. It was this which made him intellectually interesting and challenging but which made him dangerous as well because, some felt, he did not know when he had gone too far, when to stop, when the pattern was flimsier than he thought. If some doubted his wisdom, few doubted his enthusiasm, the energy of both the mind and the body, that Walt really wanted to use his mind. During the early days of his tour as head of the Policy Planning Council at State he went off to Latin America for a brief trip. On his return he announced to the startled assemblage of the Council that he now knew how you get to understand Latin Americans: you begin by understanding that in the first place they are Asians. “Oh, for God’s sake, Walt,” someone in the room told him, “why are you talking about something you know nothing about?”

  But he was a man of ideas, determined that his ideas should live. All those years he was particularly committed to the idea that the United States with its technology and its ideals could play a dominant role in the underdeveloped world and in stopping Communist revolutions, could in fact sponsor our own peaceful revolutions on our own terms. The gap between the life styles of the poor and of the Americans did not faze him. History was on our side if we did it right. Modernization was the key. To him Ho and men like Che Guevara were evil, out to oppress rather than liberate, and his staff would never forget the meeting he called the day Che Guevara was killed. Like a bit of theater, Walt very dramatic: “Gentlemen.” Pause. “I have very important news.” Everyone leaning forward. “The Bolivians have executed Che.” Another pause to let the satisfaction sink in. “They finally got the SOB. The last of the romantic guerrillas.” Rostow was, the staff noticed, excited, almost grateful for the news. This proved it was all right, that history was going according to schedule, just as his own books had predicted. History was good.

  At the end of the presidential campaign Kennedy had promised Rostow the chairmanship of the State Department’s Policy Planning Council, a job which seemed ideal for him, a good place for an idea man and not too close to the center of the action. But Rusk put his foot down; since he had already accepted too many of Kennedy’s political people and he was bothered by Rostow, who seemed verbose and ideological, he drew the line. Meanwhile, Rostow was in Cambridge waiting for the phone call from Kennedy or Rusk, but that job offer never came. Instead, Rusk wanted George McGhee, his old friend and colleague during the Truman Administration, for the job, and Rostow could be his deputy. The prospect of being deputy did not intrigue Rostow, who called Kennedy; the President-elect said not to worry, something would be worked out. Then in December 1960, when Kennedy went to Harvard to meet with the Overseers, a symbolic and moving occasion in Cambridge, he summoned Rostow alone for breakfast, a momentous occasion which sent great waves surging across Cambridge, then attuned for all bits of Kennedy gossip, showing that Rostow must be an insider, after all. Kennedy was particularly good at using the peripheral benefits of his office and position to ease people’s hurt. At the meeting he promised Rostow a job as Bundy’s deputy, which delighted Rostow, and he immediately accepted.

  Since Rostow was known in Cambridge for his enthusiasm, particularly his enthusiasm for his own ideas, there were those in the Harvard-MIT complex who regarded his appointment as something of a mixed blessing. On the day of the announcement Lucian Pye, a professor of political science at MIT, walked into a seminar, shuffled papers for a minute, looked at his class and finally said, “You know, you don’t sleep quite so well any more when you know some of the people going to Washington.” If Rostow was not known for his modesty in the Cambridge world, he soon showed up in Washington true to form, grandly defining his job to a reporter in terms worthy of his stature (he had entitled his latest book The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, to which the British publisher would modestly add: “It provides the significant links between economic and noneconomic behavior which Karl Marx failed to discern”). Pointing to Suez on a map, Rostow noted that he and Mac had divided the world, Bundy getting everything west of Suez, and Rostow everything east of it. This seemed a fair split, Bundy being totally a man of the Atlantic, a serious theater for a serious man (Robert Komer, the most articulate White House spokesman for the dark of skin, would complain, only partly in jest, that the key to the world was to get Bundy to go from Gibraltar to Tangier, that would be a breakthrough), whereas Rostow was fascinated by the underdeveloped world. He felt that this was the main new arena of confrontation, and that Eisenhower had let it all slip away.

  Rostow had arrived with a definite and decided view on Vietnam, that the United States must move, that this was the right spot. In the early days he pushed very hard for action, sponsoring General Lansdale, asking for increased commitment of troops, for more covert operations, promoting the idea of the vice-presidential trip to Saigon. He also talked about bombing the North, hitting the supply routes, and though he was combative and aggressive about it, there were jokes among the insiders about Walt’s SEATO Plan Six, and later about Air Marshal Rostow. There was a cer
tain touch of amusement about this, about Rostow being a little too zealous, perhaps a little too energetic, a little too anti-Communist; he seemed to mean what he said about the guerrillas and the Communists. Kennedy was amused by this, and by the fact that for all his enthusiastic anti-Communism, the right wing and the security people were always picking on Rostow, and there were constant problems of security clearances for him, a throwback to his leftist days. Kennedy would say, half in irritation, half in jest, “Why are they always picking on Walt as soft-headed? Hell, he’s the biggest Cold Warrior I’ve got.” In choosing Rostow for the fact-finding trip to Vietnam, Kennedy was picking the one member of the Administration genuinely enthusiastic about a guerrilla confrontation there.

  There was an additional reason why Rostow did not fear confrontation in Vietnam, and that was an almost mystic belief in air power. He was convinced, indeed he knew, that we had an unbeatable weapon, that we could always fall back, even if reluctantly, on our real might, which was the gleaming force and potential of the U.S. Air Force. Perhaps all men tend to be frozen in certain attitudes which have been shaped by important experiences in their formative years; for young Rostow, one of the crucial experiences had been picking bombing targets in Europe. It had been a stirring time, a time when he was of great service to his country. He had believed in strategic bombing, in the vital, all-important role it played in bringing victory during World War II, that it had broken the back of the German war machine. His enthusiasm for bombing and for his own role had allowed him to withstand all the subsequent intelligence of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (not by chance were two of that survey’s chief members, John Kenneth Galbraith and George Ball, among the leading doves on Vietnam), which proved conclusively that the strategic bombing had not worked; on the contrary, it had intensified the will of the German population to resist (as it would in North Vietnam, binding the population to the Hanoi regime).