The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  In Washington almost everyone concerned had seen the coup against Diem as somewhat inevitable. Taylor, reflecting the position he and Harkins had created, had been the most reluctant. But there was one other figure strongly opposed to it, who had rumbled about it, disliked it and would have fought it, had he exercised the power. He did not exercise the power, and neither his opinion nor his opposition was taken very seriously; perhaps had the issue involved legislation on the Hill or a conflict in Texas politics the others might have paid serious attention to his dissent, but not in the field of foreign affairs, where he was considered particularly inept. His name was Lyndon B. Johnson. He had hated the coup against Diem from the very beginning. All this talk about coups. Cops-and-robbers stuff, he said, coups and assassinations. Why, he and Ralph Yarborough had their differences down in Texas but they didn’t go around plotting against each other, murdering each other. “Otto Passman and I, we have our differences, God knows he can slow up a lot of God’s good work for mankind,” he said, “but I don’t plan his overthrow.” In the summer, as others challenged the regime, Johnson had occasionally attended meetings and had defended it. The important thing, he had said, was to get on with winning the war. He felt genuine admiration for Diem as a man. Oh, he had his problems, but “in Texas we say that it’s better to deal with the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.” When Johnson went to Vietnam in 1961, he had personally symbolized an American commitment to Diem, and part of his allegiance stemmed from this, that he had been the conduit of a promise, so arguing against Diem was arguing against Johnson; but some of it was broader, a somewhat more simplistic view of the world, and of who was a friend and who was an enemy. Friends were real friends, they signed on with you. Ayub Khan of Pakistan, for instance, was a friend. He spoke our kind of language, committed himself to our side, was willing to fight; Johnson would complain to those he suspected of having pro-Indian sympathies “of what your Indians are doing now.” Arguments that Ayub was an American friend because he was using American aid against India rather than against Communists, and that India had five times as many people as Pakistan and thus deserved a certain amount more consideration, did not move him. Ayub was a friend, but these Indians, they never committed themselves. A contract was a contract, a deal was a deal, you held out your hand and they held out theirs and that was the way it was done. Even Tshombe—Johnson was a not-so-secret admirer of Tshombe, who, after all, alone among all those Africans, was willing to say he liked us and disliked the Communists.

  The talk about the overthrow of Diem hit a very negative chord; he didn’t like these young amateurs running around causing problems (often the people who were most against Diem seemed also to be the people who were against him, those people in the White House, not the seasoned professionals like Rusk, and this did not help his attitude). So he came to dislike and distrust the men who he thought were engineering the pressure against Diem, the young White House types, the brash know-it-all Hilsman, the young reporters out there who were, he said, traitors to their country—all these young people who had not even been through World War II, challenging senior people. Though he usually exempted John Kennedy from all criticism, on this subject he did not; he felt that Kennedy had played too great a role in the whole affair, and a few months later, after Kennedy had been assassinated, Johnson would turn to a friend and say, in an almost mystical way, that the assassination of Kennedy was retribution for the assassination of Diem. So in the months of 1963 when Kennedy was so carefully moving the bureaucracy over, the President, who was usually very careful about Johnson, had not worked on his Vice-President; he had been preoccupied with other matters, with moving more central players, and he had simply neglected to work on Johnson. No other word. Neglect. It did not, however, seem important at the time.

  The months of September and October were very good ones for John Kennedy, rich in themselves, full of promise for the future. Above all the beginning, perhaps just the beginning of an end to a particularly rigid era of the Cold War. Not the end of the Cold War, the problems were too great and too deep on both sides. Some of the competition was very real and would always remain so; but perhaps turning back the paralyzing effects of it, the almost neurotic quality which had provoked a country to reach beyond its own real interests because of domestic fears which had been set up at home. The opportunity had come first in the post-Cuban missile thaw, and Kennedy had explored it, cautiously, again not too quickly.

  There had been the speech at the American University about a reappraisal of attitudes toward the Communists, and he had encouraged and dispatched Averell Harriman to work out a limited test-ban treaty, which was the first break in the almost glacial quality of the Cold War. It had not come easily; the bureaucracy itself was not really prepared for a change and there was considerable resistance within the government. The Chiefs were opponents (though they finally went along with a limited test-ban treaty in order to kill off pressure for a comprehensive one). Taylor was helpful here, in part because he thought nuclear war impossible for a democracy. McNamara was dubious at first and then a genuine ally (in large part because of the pressure and reasoning from his aide John McNaughton, one of the two or three most important men in the government in the fight to limit the arms race; but McNamara by the very act of appointing McNaughton had in effect created a disarmament lobby in Defense, something which Rusk had not done at State). Mac Bundy was neither a help nor an opponent. He did not push it, and he did not use his position to expedite it, but he made sure that the advocates had all the access to the President they needed.

  Rusk was the least enthusiastic. In fact, one White House aide had first sensed that Rusk might be innately more conservative than the other Kennedy people, even before the inauguration, when Rusk had taken him aside and asked, “What’s all this talk about disarmament, they aren’t really serious about it, are they?” It was not so much that Rusk was against test-ban treaties as that he was a status quo man. The world was a static place, it changed very little, and then, very slowly. These differences, these divisions existed for very real and valid reasons and they would always exist and one did not push; pushing meant risks, on the Hill, with NATO allies, with the traditionalists in the foreign service; one moved slowly and was grateful for very small changes. Things like disarmament were for the Stevenson people and should be debated at the UN, and were for American domestic consideration by the liberals, but were not serious things (though later, when Johnson made it clear that he wanted a nonproliferation treaty, and when an issue like this was no longer groundbreaking, no one worked harder or more effectively for it than Rusk).

  So with these Administration differences, based upon institutional and personal viewpoints, the outlook on the test-ban treaty was surprisingly similar to attitudes on Vietnam, with the President particularly interested in securing a test-ban treaty, and with Harriman far ahead of Rusk in willingness to take what was deemed political risk in accomplishing it. Harriman had wrestled it out with the Russians; he, more than anyone else in the government, believed that the time was ripe and that it could be pulled off, although there were a few, like Wiesner, who felt that in the previous negotiations with the Russians a treaty had been possible, but the U.S. negotiators had been too conservative. This did not mean that the bureaucracy and the Hill were ready by a long shot for change on the arms race. The Hill seemed to be dubious, particularly the Armed Services Committee, and the bureaucracy itself was filled with potential opponents. In the spring of 1963, for example, when there was no real idea that a test-ban treaty was coming, the word slipped out that Senator John Stennis was going to hold hearings on the state of the nation’s preparedness. The preceding negotiations with the Russians had come surprisingly close to a treaty, and there was a feeling that things might be moving in that direction. But the threat of Stennis’ hearings was a serious one. In the hearings the conservatives would summon the generals, who always call for more preparedness and lament America’s present weakness, they create a more
antagonistic climate, they worry the Senate and they worry the President; in all, they create a record which opponents of the treaty can work off. Some White House representatives went to see McNamara and warned him what was coming. McNamara was rather casual about it at first. He did not think that they were that close to a treaty. Anyway, if he made his case too soon, it would be easy for the opposition to counter it. Let Stennis have his hearings, he said, and we’ll wait. The White House people bowed to his superior judgment.

  A few weeks later they heard that John McCone had lent CIA specialists on nuclear weapons to Stennis, to help him make the case against the treaty—McCone had always opposed the treaty—and the White House people sensed that things might be more serious than they had imagined, and that this was in effect a confirmation that Stennis and McCone thought the treaty might be close. So Mac Bundy’s deputy, Carl Kaysen, got together with Abe Chayes, the State Department’s legal adviser, and with McNaughton, who was an expert on arms control, and decided that their instincts about being worried were good ones. They went back to McNamara and spelled out their doubts; he listened for a few moments and then said—I agree, you’re right and I was wrong; it is more serious, and you’re now the committee to oversee the executive branch’s argument. McNaughton is the chief, and you’re to put together our case, check out who the witnesses are, and balance the record.

  Thus were the Stennis hearings negated. As summer ended and it became a question of going before the Senate with the treaty, the Administration was far from confident about congressional support (later the 80­19 vote would imply that it had been a piece of cake all along; the truth was that the balance had seemed quite fragile at the start, and a vote near the two thirds needed for ratification was really no victory; it was almost an incitement to enemies as much as a change in the Cold War). With a Senate vote looming ahead, the Administration decided to test the waters in its own party. It sent an emissary to Dean Acheson to find out how Acheson felt on the treaty. It was a delicate mission, for Acheson, though a Democrat, was a good deal more hard-line than most of the young men running the government, and his opposition at this point might be critical, might just divide the Democrats in the Senate and encourage opposition to the treaty. They found, however, that Acheson was surprisingly sympathetic, but he did say there was something he objected to, and that was the way Averell Harriman was using the treaty negotiations to promote himself to Secretary of State. Couldn’t they do something about Averell, make him act his age? And so the message was brought back to the White House, and slowly they put together their forces on the Hill. It had not always been a sure thing, but the vote was very good, better than they expected, and the President was pleased. It was a highly personal victory; it had not been some force loose in the country which had pushed him forward, with the Administration harnessing it at the last minute (as civil rights would be), but rather something that his Administration had committed itself to and pushed through. He told friends that he had made the test ban the keystone of his foreign policy; if he lost in 1964 because of it he would be willing to pay that price.

  In the fall the President had been scheduled to go on a tour of Western states that Mike Mansfield had promoted, a conservation tour in essence, where he would praise wide open spaces and high mountains and clean rivers. It was not a subject which particularly interested him (conservation was not yet ecology), but Kennedy was glad to be leaving Washington. The trip did not start well. He made two poor appearances, and then in Billings, Montana, he was scheduled to give another boring speech, boring himself and his audience, and in the middle of it he mentioned the test-ban treaty, and as he did, the crowd responded with force and immediacy. It was a real rapport, not the carefully calculated applause lines which often mark a political speech, hackneyed calls to party or national fidelity written into a speech, the audience responding faithfully if listlessly on cue. Kennedy, who was above all a good politician, whose ear was fine and always tuned, and who sensed his audience well, adjusted immediately and continued on the peace theme, accelerating the tempo and the intensity, and the crowd responded. He talked of the nuclear confrontations of the last two years, first Berlin and then Cuba, and he said: “What we hope to do is lessen the chance of a military collision between these two great nuclear powers which together have the power to kill three hundred million people in the short space of a day. That is what we are seeking to avoid. That is why we support the test-ban treaty. Not because things are going to be easier in our lives, but because we have a chance to avoid being burned.”

  From then on through the Far West, the trip was the same; he strayed more and more from conservation and into the test-ban treaty, and everywhere the crowds were very good, and very responsive. The last night he went to Salt Lake City, where the crowds along the route were the best yet, and when he entered the Mormon Tabernacle, allegedly the enemy camp, he received a five-minute standing ovation as he walked in. Here again, in what was alleged to be Birch country, Goldwater territory, he challenged the theses of the far right and talked of the problems of living in a complicated world. He had long suspected that the right in America was overrated as a political force, that there was an element of blackmail to its power, and now he was convinced that the country was going past old and rigid fears of the Communists, that it was probably ahead of Washington in its comprehension of the world and its willingness to accept it (and if not ahead of Washington, at least far ahead of where Washington thought it was). He sensed that there was a deep longing for a sane peace and sane world. He knew that Goldwater would be his opponent in 1964 and now he felt that he could beat Goldwater badly and end some of the fears which had haunted American politics since the hardening of the Cold War. That and his own popularity, the fact that he was no longer considered too young. The 100,000 margin was a thing of the past.

  The following evening both Tom Wicker and Sander Vanocur, the New York Times and the NBC White House correspondents, respectively, sought out Press Secretary Pierre Salinger and suggested that the Western trip had uncovered a new and powerful issue. “Yes,” said Salinger, “you’re right. We’ve found that peace is an issue.” So it had come that in the last months of his life his Presidency had turned, and not by chance, it had coincided with the first major step away from the barren path of the Cold War. It was perhaps not surprising that the first step away from the glacial quality of the Cold War would take place with the Soviet Union on something like a test-ban treaty. It was an area of less political risk; there were checks, on-site inspections against violation, and these were part of the treaty. The burden of proof in a domestic political confrontation would be on the opposition to a treaty: Why do you oppose it, what proof have you against it? But on the question of whether or not a country would go Communist, the risk was higher, the burden of proof would be on the Administration rather than on the right-wing opposition. The question would be, Why did you lose that particular country? rather than, Was the loss of that country worth a nuclear confrontation? Was it worth a major American land war? So the first break had taken place here, and though it was historically a small break, it was a beginning, and it belonged to both Kennedy and Khrushchev. By that special irony the problems which had haunted him in his meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961 were past him now, he had come to terms with them, with his own sense of himself, with Khrushchev’s estimate of him, and above all, with his country’s estimate of him. But Vietnam, which he had conceived of as part of the price of making American power and determination credible to the Communists, was coming apart even as the U.S.-Soviet balance seemed to be stabilizing.

  For a brief moment after Diem’s death, Vietnamese officers were able to report honestly about what had happened in the war, what the situation was. The embassy was staggered under the impact of what was coming in from the field; the situation was far worse than it had expected, even in some of the more pessimistic quarters. There was, it turned out, no strategic hamlet program in the Delta to speak of; in many areas where th
e embassy had been reasonably confident, it turned out there had been few incidents precisely because the Vietcong totally controlled an area and did not need to launch any attacks. (As the reports came in, the Harkins-MACV line would immediately change to accept negative aspects of the reporting and claim that it had been going very well until the coup, but since then, the government had completely fallen apart and the war had started to go badly.) One brief example will suffice; about two weeks after the coup I went to the 7th Division area just below Saigon in the Mekong Delta; there a new general, Pham Van Dong, was conducting an operation. General Dong was talking about the misreporting and pointed to a district chief, said that the district chief had been an old aide of his and would tell the truth. “How many villages are there in your district?” the general asked him.

  “Twenty-four,” answered the official.

  “And how many do you control?” asked Dong.

  “Eight,” answered the official.

  “And how many,” said Dong with a grin, “did you tell Saigon you controlled?”

  “Twenty-four,” said the official, looking somewhat sheepish.

  On November 21 Henry Cabot Lodge flew to Honolulu on the first leg of a trip to Washington, where he planned to tell the President that the situation was much worse than they thought; even Lodge, who had been pushing the idea that the war was going badly, was shocked at just how discouraging it really was, and he planned to tell Kennedy that there was serious doubt as to whether any government could make it any more. He never delivered the report; in San Francisco he heard the news of the assassination in Dallas, and that Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Lodge asked the new President if he should simply return to Saigon; no, said Johnson, they ought to talk anyway. And so they met, and the message, that it was all bad in Vietnam, that hard decisions were ahead and not very far ahead, was delivered to a brand-new President, unsure of himself, unsure of the men around him, unsure of his relationship to the country, and the country’s acceptance of him. He was above all unsure of himself in foreign affairs, more suspicious of the world around him and of enemies than his predecessors. (A few weeks later a group of reporters gathered to have dinner with Johnson at the home of Phil Potter of the Baltimore Sun, an old Johnson friend. The reporters asked various questions. Russell Baker, one of them, asked what the first thing was that had gone through Johnson’s mind as the shots were fired and Rufus Youngblood threw himself on Johnson. “That the Communists had done it,” Johnson said, and Baker would remember being shocked by the reply, it had seemed so primitive.)