The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  Rostow remained uniquely oblivious to counterarguments about bombing; if anything, he believed that we had not used enough of it against the German oil depots and electric grid, and he would later seek to remedy that omission in Vietnam. Only the Air Force itself was more fervent than Rostow in the belief that in this weapon we had a panacea for military problems. Where others might have been hesitant about a real confrontation with Hanoi, Rostow had fewer fears and more confidence; the idea of being able to use bombing as a fall-back weapon was particularly comforting. His faith in bombing persisted through 1967, despite the mounting evidence against its effectiveness. In fact, after one confrontation with Undersecretary of State Nicholas deB. Katzenbach in 1967 over the failure of bombing, Katzenbach walked out shaking his head. He turned to a friend and said, “I finally understand the difference between Walt and me. I was the navigator who was shot down and spent two years in a German prison camp, and Walt was the guy picking my targets.” But all this came later, even the failure. It was his confidence about bombing and its magic that gave him a special fervor; almost alone among the Kennedy people, he was a believer.

  The other member was Maxwell Taylor, the Kennedy-type general. He was articulate, he was presentable. (You would, said one member of the Administration years later, be impressed with Max even if he were in civies.) Between 1955 and 1959 he had struggled with the Eisenhower Administration as Chief of Staff of the United States Army, during the years when the doctrine was massive retaliation, a doctrine which severely reduced the size and role of the U.S. Army (the Kennedy people, who were always sloppy in their homework, all thought he had resigned in protest. Quite the opposite was true; though he had presented radically different strategies, he had walked the narrow path, thus managing to coexist for four years; then he retired. After his tour was up, he wrote his dissenting book, which was so critical of the Republicans that it left the impression that Taylor had, in fact, resigned).

  He was a man of considerable stature, the linear descendant of the greatest American general of that era, Matt Ridgway; he was a man with a good combat record who was a hero to civilians and soldiers alike, and people seemed to think of him as the next Ridgway. In 1960 Taylor left his job as president of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York, a position which had added to his laurels—the cultured war hero. He was also more than a little vain, not just about his hearing, which was bad, and for which he did not want a hearing aid, but about his title as well. At the beginning of the Administration there had been some trouble over it: should it be The Military Representative of the President, a title which he wanted, or Kennedy’s choice, Special Military Representative? Kennedy, being President, won.

  The general seemed almost invented for the Kennedy years; he was cool, correct, handsome and athletic. As an airborne general, he was more modern in outlook than other generals; he spoke several languages and had written a book. And he was imposing, always in control. Once, while he was Superintendent of West Point, he had attended an assembly of college presidents at which he spoke forcefully and eloquently, all without a note. Afterward another educator congratulated him on such a good impromptu speech. “I never do anything impromptu,” he answered. Most important of all, his strategic views coincided exactly with Kennedy’s. He thought nuclear weapons an unthinkable instrument of American policy, and he did not think a U.S. President would initiate a nuclear war. Classic conventional war seemed increasingly outmoded; thus he had written that the next generation of wars would be brush-fire wars which the United States, as keeper of world stability and honor, must extinguish. He seemed to be talking about guerrilla wars, though it would turn out that he was the most conventional of men in terms of the new kind of warfare; what he was really talking about was apparently limited use of highly mobile conventional forces in very limited wars. This was, of course, a fine point which might develop later but which was not discernible in the early days of the Administration, a time when there was more excitement about guerrilla warfare and small wars than there was knowledge about them.

  To the Kennedy people, then, he was a good general, different from the Eisenhower generals, who were simply typical of the military establishment. (Kennedy also assumed that all good generals liked one another, and thus that General James Gavin, similarly a good general, a romantic, Airborne figure who had written books and also shortened a brilliant career in protest over Ike’s policies, and who had also supported Kennedy against Nixon—a prime test for a good general—must be a friend of Taylor’s. “Jim, Jim,” Kennedy had once yelled to a departing Gavin in the White House, “Max is here! Max is here!,” imagining that the two were close friends, but drawing from Gavin the coldest look imaginable. The truth was that the two disliked each other, had long been rivals, had even skirmished over which airborne division would lead the post­World War II parade through Manhattan, and would end up bitterly divided on the Vietnam war.) In addition, the new Administration people believed that Taylor could and would be a Kennedy general, at least as loyal to them as to his uniform and institution—a very real splitting of loyalties, as it would turn out. He had served Kennedy well during the Bay of Pigs, though his reports had been curiously technical in nature and not very astute politically. But Kennedy was inclined to think of Taylor as being dispassionate and rational, indeed more like himself than anyone else in the new Administration, with the possible exception of Bundy. As if that were not enough, Robert Kennedy was enamored of him and constantly promoted him.

  So now here was Taylor, chosen for this mission, not necessarily a man of the JCS, but in the Kennedy eyes more independent than that, more modern, less bureaucratic; he was, above all, a man who had been warning for nearly a decade that the great military problem in the world was not nuclear war, but brush-fire wars, and now he was going to a country which contained, if nothing else, the world’s most intense brush-fire war.

  So they went, Rostow and Taylor; they got on well together. They were both activists, and those who wondered whether America had been taken over by soft, weak men would be reassured by the many photographs sent back from Saigon showing Taylor and Rostow playing vigorous tennis with various Vietnamese. Kennedy had also asked Lansdale to make a special trip to Vietnam, and he had accepted, learning only later that he would be a part of the Taylor mission. Before they left, Taylor had asked each member of the group to make a list of what he would like to look into once they arrived in Vietnam. Lansdale, who was the most professional member of the group, made a fairly long list of things: he wanted to find out more about the relationship of the government to the people, he wanted to know if the government was reaching the people, what the feeling was of people getting drafted, who could become an officer in the South Vietnamese army (ARVN) and who could not, what the local feeling was toward tax officials, how valid the case of the Vietcong was in rural areas. Lansdale was not a particular admirer of Taylor’s in the first place; in the 1955­56 period, when Taylor was the Chief of Staff, Lansdale had wanted more emphasis on the development of Special Forces and irregular-warfare units, and had found Taylor unreceptive to the idea, ready, if anything, to cut back the number of men on irregular duty. Now he again found Taylor unreceptive to his list, which was accepted without comment. The two men never discussed it on the trip, and Taylor never asked Lansdale why he wanted to look into these matters.

  Thus it came as no surprise to Lansdale that when the protocol list for official functions for the trip was drawn, Taylor drew the cutoff line immediately above Lansdale’s name, Lansdale, of course, being well known and popular in Vietnam. What came as a greater surprise was Taylor’s view of what this war was all about. He assigned Lansdale the task of looking into the possibility and cost of erecting a huge fence which would run the length of the country and stop infiltration. For years, Lansdale, along with other knowledgeable Americans in Vietnam, had mocked the French Expeditionary Forces for their preoccupation with static outposts, what the Americans considered a Maginot Line mentality; now
as he took the assignment from Taylor he thought to himself, Here we are, trying to create our own Maginot Line. It was, he thought as the mission progressed, all like that, trying to refit conventional ideas for an unconventional war. What it would amount to, he thought, was taking an army that was dubious in battle and making it more mobile, avoiding the real social and political causes for its military failures. But he was below the cutoff line in more than protocol, and his feelings would not be reflected in the mission’s findings.

  They were not alone in making the trip to Vietnam. Also going was one of Washington’s most influential columnists (then he was still influential; the war would severely damage his credibility and systematically lessen his influence), a man with an enormous vested interest in Asian anti-Communism, Joseph Alsop. He had never quite forgiven the State Department for allowing the United States to stand idly by while China went Communist. China had fallen despite his warnings, but he was still a forceful advocate of the domino theory, a man skilled in the ways of Washington, well connected politically and socially, and while he would not stoop to the kind of tactics which had marked McCarthyism, he nevertheless could make the case for holding the line in a way which implied that manhood was at stake; this he now did, and what he wrote from Honolulu on October 18 was symbolic of the kind of writing and pressure a President faced in those days:

  Is there any real foundation for all the talk about the Kennedy administration “lack of firmness”? The talk disturbs the President so much that he came to within an ace of making his recent North Carolina speech a major answer to his critics. But is there anything to it but political hot air? On the way to troubled South Vietnam where the administration’s firmness is once again being tested, the foregoing question looms very large indeed. This reporter’s “yes, but” answer begins oddly enough with a typical specimen of modern American academic politics. . . .

  All week Alsop encouraged a troop commitment. First at a time when the guerrilla war was at a markedly low level, with the Vietcong rarely striking in company units, never in battalion, and with perhaps no more than an estimated 17,000 Vietcong in the country, Alsop found not one but two North Vietnamese regular regiments, one in the country, the other on the border preparing to enter (some four and a half years before they actually entered the country and battle):

  For many months the massive infiltration into South Vietnam, by guerrilla cadres and bands, has been a known fact. But the appearance of regular units of the regular army of Communist North Vietnam is something else again. In plain terms it is an invasion.

  He also realized that while this was an “Asian version of Berlin,” to be met with steadfastness, the Communists were ill prepared for the kind of long-term struggle the Americans would demand. “This in turn clearly suggests that the Communist high command is now playing a short term game. They are calling in all their assets without regard to the more remote future because they hope to bring the war to a climax in the near future.” (Eleven years later, undaunted by the tenacity of the other side, when Hanoi launched a major offensive in 1972, Alsop wrote that it was their “last hurrah.” If the enemy proved to be resilient, rising from the ashes, then so did Alsop.)

  Earlier in the year, as the insurgency in South Vietnam intensified and as the Vietcong moved steadily to larger units and began more and more to join battle (successfully) with the ARVN, there had been talk of combat troops besides Rostow’s suggestion about sending a SEATO force of about 25,000 men to guard the border around Laos. The Joint Chiefs wanted to put some troops into South Vietnam, not so much to engage in combat as to show American firmness (not realizing, of course, that in the particular rhythm of the war, if the Americans upped the ante, so would Hanoi and the Vietcong). Presumably the number would be low, though it was not specified. There was surprisingly little discussion of whether or not the troops would go into combat, though the impression was given that they would not, that they would be there to prevent combat rather than join it, to show our intent to Hanoi and to the Communists, thus automatically de-escalating the other side’s intentions in the area.

  As much as anything else, this proposal reflected JCS needs elsewhere. At that point it wanted to build up forces, particularly in the depleted strategic reserve, and if troops were ticketed, being used, in fact, in Southeast Asia, that fact would be a powerful bit of evidence for more troops needed at home. In addition, the JCS liked the idea of the precedent involved. It wanted to have a foot in the door in Vietnam; just in case the war grew larger, it would be ready. There would be a logistic base in Saigon, and the legal rights would be cleared for more. You could start with a small commitment; it was always easy to increase it. It was a case of an institution automatically wanting to expand and to feed itself. All institutions do their thing; in the case of the military and generals, wanting troops is their thing.

  Now in the fall the Chiefs were pushing again; Admiral Felt of CINCPAC had recently toured Vietnam and had been appalled by the deterioration in the countryside. The Vietcong were stepping up their activities in area after area; where they challenged the government forces, the latter were unequal. The Vietcong troops were well led, and believed deeply in their cause; in contrast, the government troops were made of the same raw material but their leadership was bad. They were commanded by division, regimental and even battalion officers who had never heard shots fired in anger, who held their posts only because of loyalty to Diem, and who were under orders not to allow casualties because this would be considered a reflection against Diem himself, a sign that he was not as beloved and respected as he believed. Since the Vietcong leadership was perfectly willing to accept very high casualties for each individual political gain (“It is,” wrote one Vietcong soldier in his diary, “the duty of my generation to die for our country”), the outcome again and again was almost predetermined. As in China, it was a modern army against a feudal one, though this was not perceived by Western eyes, particularly Western military eyes, which saw that the ARVN was well equipped, with radios, airplanes, artillery and fighter planes, and that the Vietcong had virtually nothing, except light infantry pieces. Western observers believed the reverse, believed that the ARVN was a legitimate and real army, and that the Vietcong, more often than not wearing only black pajamas, not even uniformed, were the fake army, the unreal one—why, they did not even seem to have a chain of command. It was ironic; the United States had created an army in its own image, an army which existed primarily on paper, and which was linked to U.S. aims and ambitions and in no way reflected its own society. We believed in the army, the South Vietnamese did not. We saw it as a real army which needed only a little prodding, an adviser or two, a few people to help the soldiers with map reading; a more vigorous leadership by the better officers, trained by Americans. This illusion about a dynamic new leadership would persist relentlessly through the years, so that in early 1967 Walt Rostow, still upbeat despite the darkening reports from Saigon, confronted an increasingly pessimistic Daniel Ellsberg, just back from a year and a half in Vietnam, and began to expound his new theories. We had to get away from our American liberal distaste for military regimes, Rostow said. The military was the hope in the underdeveloped world, well-educated, idealistic young officers taking over the nationalism, not those tired old civilians who were part of the colonial era, but bright (crew-cut, English-speaking, Fort Bragg­trained) men who knew the modern world. That’s what was happening in Vietnam, these young officers taking over. People like Ky. Terrific fellow.

  “Well, that may be true elsewhere in the world, Walt,” answered Ellsberg, “but there are very few countries in the world where the bright young officer class has the unique distinction of having fought against its own country’s independence and alongside the colonial army.”

  To the demands by the Joint Chiefs had been added a new pressure for more troops, this time from the South Vietnamese, who had been growing ever more nervous by the fall of 1961, and who also sensed a chance to sink the hook of commitment deeper into th
e Americans. A year earlier Diem had not even deigned to recognize the Vietcong as a military force. They were bandits and outlaws (the same words Chiang Kai-shek had used to describe the Red Chinese armies, and for the same reasons of vanity and of wanting to have unchallenged legitimacy). As late as May 1961 he had told Johnson he did not want American troops, but by September, as the Vietcong muscle became more obvious, Diem had called in Ambassador Nolting and asked for a bilateral defense treaty, since he felt that SEATO was not an adequate umbrella; he doubted British and French willingness to come to his aid.

  Although the question of Laos’ neutrality was still being discussed in Geneva, Diem was, significantly, already using it as a weapon against the Americans. He claimed that a neutral Laos would expose him to greater enemy infiltration (which was not really true; the enemy could infiltrate at will, and if anything was incapable of stopping infiltration, it was the Royal Laotian Army). The fact that American visitors had repeatedly been talking to Diem, pushing their own desires, which in this case was combat troops, was bound to have an effect on him, and he now saw an opportunity to tie the Americans more directly to his regime. Besides, he had distrusted American firmness for some time. By October the pressure increased: Nguyen Dinh Thuan, who was the Acting Defense Minister and probably, except for the Ngo family itself, the most important senior official in the government, called Nolting in to ask for combat troops. They would be “combat trainer units,” Nolting reported to Washington. There would be a symbolic U.S. strength near the 17th parallel, and U.S. troops also positioned at key provincial capitals in the Central Highlands. Time, Thuan had emphasized, was of the essence.