The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  Yet the doubts expressed in the Ellsberg papers clearly reflected McNaughton’s own doubts. In 1964, rather early, John McNaughton had begun thinking the darkest thoughts, touching very quickly on the central problems of Vietnam, not whether it was a question of personnel, getting better people there, or better programs or more equipment, but whether we should be there at all, whether, to use an almost isolationist term, those people wanted us there. Was it worth it, shouldn’t we perhaps just get out quickly at a lower price? He had few illusions about the ability of our Vietnamese allies, and the more he studied the war, the more respect he had for the Vietcong. He was capable, in 1964, of listening to aides brief him on the quality of Vietcong leadership and motivation, and saying almost offhandedly, in a rare off-guard moment, “If what you say in that briefing is true, we’re fighting on the wrong side.” Knowing that McNamara did not yet share these doubts, he was very careful about getting some corroboration before he went head-on to his boss with them. And in this increasingly tense atmosphere, as he looked for someone to share his doubts with, someone who knew something about Vietnam and would not talk out of turn and just might be dovish, he finally decided that he might find a co-conspirator, not at State, State was too gossipy, but at the White House, there was less bureaucratic entanglement there. The White House was safer; it was somehow a more private place. Michael Forrestal was an old friend of McNaughton’s, they had worked together on the Marshall Plan, and very early in the game McNaughton had sensed Forrestal’s own growing doubts about Vietnam. Since Forrestal was a key link in the Harriman group and had spent a good deal of time in Vietnam, he was the ideal man to talk to and would be able to confirm or refute McNaughton’s suspicions.

  There was something very clandestine about their meetings, beginning in the spring of 1964. McNaughton would call Forrestal to find out if he was free for a chat, nothing formal. Then he would arrive at the White House at five-thirty, which was not easily done, the traffic was very heavy going against him but it could not be done the other way, Forrestal could not visit McNaughton at the Pentagon without causing great suspicion. People would ask, What’s Forrestal doing at the Pentagon? Isn’t he just a little bit soft? This was the cool, bureaucratic McNaughton, conspiring for the good of mankind, not about to get himself tagged as unrealistic nor for that matter his boss either, because any doubts about him would also reflect on McNamara; above all, he and McNamara would be realistic.

  Yet in these private meetings all his doubts would pour out. He had done his homework and the more he did, the more it bothered him. The lawyer’s mind asked the cutting questions: If the government in Saigon was weak and probably not viable, was it worthwhile to try and bolster it? This seemed questionable because if it was weak it would probably stay that way and you simply would become more involved without having any effect on it. Do you really want to commit yourself more to something that sick? Would it make a lasting difference if we bombed or sent troops, or would that be a gimmick with a brief positive effect, which would very quickly lose its impact upon such a fatigued and divided society? Was there really anything there to build on, was it a government, or was it something we called a government because we wanted an illusion through which to enact our policy? Were we committing ourselves to something that did not exist, and if so, wasn’t it extremely dangerous? Bombing bothered him. Everyone now was planning the bombing. But could you really bring people around, change them, by punishing them? Did we know enough about their standard of living to know whether it would really affect their daily existence? It was a vintage McNaughton performance totally without passion, performed not so much by conviction or morality as by rationality. He simply hated the proportions of it, the sense that we were totally losing perspective, and that if events took their course we would be fools in the eyes of the world, victims of our ego.

  McNaughton found in Forrestal a sympathetic listener and a man who largely confirmed his own doubts, and by the same token, the more McNaughton evoked from him, the more Forrestal found his own doubts crystallizing. But he was not yet as pessimistic as McNaughton; he did not think the dark picture he painted of the world of Saigon would necessarily entrap the United States. He was sure that it could be avoided somehow, that there were options, that good intelligent men in Washington could control decisions and avoid the great entanglement.

  McNaughton was not so sure. “The trouble with you, Forrestal,” he once said, “is that you always think we can turn this thing off, and that we can get off of it whenever we want. But I wonder. I think if it was easy to get off of it, we would already have gotten off. I think it gets harder every day, each day we lose a little control, each decision that we make wrong, or don’t make at all, makes the next decision a little harder because if we haven’t stopped it today, then the reasons for not stopping it will still exist tomorrow, and we’ll be in even deeper.” Even as he spoke, Forrestal felt chilled, for McNaughton was not just challenging what was going on in Vietnam, there were lots of people in Washington who were doing that, what he was challenging was even more basic: the illusion of control, the illusion of options, the belief that whenever Washington really wanted to, it could pull itself together and handle Vietnam. He was challenging, then, not just the shabbiness and messiness of Vietnam, but the most sacred illusion of all, the capacity of Washington to control and manage foreign events.

  Having finished with Forrestal, McNaughton would go back and pour out his doubts to one man, Robert S. McNamara, a man he was still in awe of. McNamara would override them, he would dampen them, it would be business as usual, and McNaughton, the secret dove, would emerge from the Secretary’s office and hide his doubts, because he still wanted to be a player, and he knew there was no power at the Pentagon if he differed from McNamara at all. So John McNaughton would attend meetings where some of George Ball’s people might express their doubts, the same skepticism he felt, but he would tear them apart, into little pieces, almost rudely. Later, after the war had been escalated and he had become more confident of his relationship with McNamara and more sure that the war was wrong, some of his close aides began to wonder what would happen if the President ever asked him what he, John McNaughton, thought about an escalatory move, not what the Defense Department thought, not what McNamara thought. In 1966, when the question of bombing the oil depots at Haiphong came up, and the President was going around the room trying to get a consensus, one after another they all signed on, McNamara said yes, it was time to take them out. The Chiefs and then Rostow signed on. Ball dissented. And finally Johnson turned to McNaughton, who had been arguing violently in private against this, and McNaughton said simply, “I have nothing to add, sir.”

  He fought it within himself, and fought it with his chief, but already the thrust of his own institution was so strong that he could not resist it. He would become a doubter and a pessimist who also picked bombing targets and did much of the planning and supplied much of the rationale, working very closely with McNamara. There were those who knew them both who thought that McNamara must have found it very reassuring to have this eminently civilized and rational man, the flower of Pekin, Illinois, working with him as he planned the war.

  If the thrust of the bureaucracy was becoming more obvious at Defense, then what was happening at State was more subtle. The group there which had been fighting the policies of the past on Asia, which had challenged the official estimates from Vietnam and the ability to win with Diem, always maintaining that the war was primarily a political problem, was being systematically dismantled. Although it was one of the most important developments in 1964, it went almost unnoticed; there was, for instance, no reporting about it in the country’s great national newspapers or magazines (as there had been almost no reporting on its formation). The group had jelled late in the Kennedy Administration, breaking through some of the policies of the past. Perhaps not even deliberately these men were now slowly being filtered out of the policy-making decisions, in part consciously because they had questioned the po
licies but to an even larger degree unconsciously, not so much because they were skeptical, but because they seemed too negative. Another reason was that both in their attacks on Diem and in their disdain for Rusk and Vice-President Johnson, they had made enemies, not powerful then but powerful now. Dean Rusk, no longer liaison man to the Hill, was increasingly becoming Secretary of State. Thus Harriman, Hilsman, Trueheart, Forrestal and Kattenburg very quickly became nonplayers. First Paul Kattenburg. He was the lowest-ranking of the players but he had perhaps been the most important because he knew the most about the country. He had been in Vietnam all through the fifties, fighting both from Saigon and from Washington for the group which wanted more emphasis on nationalism as opposed to the group which simply wanted to go along with the French and seek a military solution, a group which in 1950 and 1951 was headed by Dean Rusk. Kattenburg’s early doubts about the French had not helped him; he was separated from the issue in the fifties, moved to Latin America and then the Philippines, and it was only in 1962 that he was rehabilitated by Hilsman, who had known him as a fellow Yale Ph.D. candidate. Rehabilitated on Vietnam, Kattenburg in Washington had provided much of the expertise which Harriman and Hilsman had forced into the upper-level struggles, and as they gained some bureaucratic control of the issue, Kattenburg himself began to emerge as a player, coming to meetings, bright, nervous, not very subtle. When asked to speak, he spoke his mind freely, thus offending some of the powerful men in the room. In August 1963 he had reported that the Diem-Nhu regime was very bad, and he had gone further, he had expressed doubts about the cause even beyond Diem and Nhu and said that perhaps we ought to think about getting out, statements which in a different era, eight years later, when the Pentagon Papers were published, made him look like a prophet, but which at the time made him seem particularly dangerous and untrustworthy, and the military then marked him for later disposal.

  In late November, Kattenburg had gone back for a second trip to Vietnam and he was shocked by the evidence of decay. The ARVN seemed to him a defeated army, the political situation was as fragile and divided as ever and in no way coming to terms with the reality of the problems of the society. As far as he was concerned, it was all over, the Vietcong had all the muscle and dynamism, the government side seemed weak and hopeless; time, if anything, was on the side of the Vietcong. For someone who had worked through the Indochina war, as Kattenburg had, and who knew the force of the enemy, the traditional and historic weakness of the anti-Communist side, it was all too clear; the only thing ahead other than steady deterioration was for the United States to enter with combat troops and thus replace the French.

  When he returned from his trip in January 1964, he cornered Hilsman and said that the whole thing was nothing less than poison, that it would poison anybody and anything it touched, that everyone who went near it was going to be stained by future events. The war was lost, he said, had been lost for some time, in fact had always been lost. He told Hilsman that he wanted out, that there was nothing ahead but disaster. Hilsman, who felt that Kattenburg had become something of a liability, someone that the military were out to get, was ready to oblige. So Kattenburg, who was head of the Interdepartmental Working Group on Vietnam, was made a regional planning adviser, a less important job which did not entail political planning for the war itself. Before he left he said in his last report that the war was lost, that if the United States went in, it would take about 500,000 troops, five to ten years, and about 5,000 casualties a year, which was not a bad estimate, although the last figure was quite conservative. The estimate was not, however, considered conservative at the time, and at one of his last meetings he got into a furious argument with Bill Bundy, who was then Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, the job that John McNaughton would soon hold. Bundy, who was McNamara’s chief political adviser, had denounced Kattenburg and said, it was the kind of word he used, that Kattenburg was performing a disservice by his pessimism. The pessimism was unwarranted, it was not that bad, an injustice to the people working there and serving there, that they felt yes, the signs were bad, but it could be turned around. It was just as well to forget these doubts and this negative talk, Bundy said, because we were going to stand there, we were not going to let it go down the drain. Bundy had shaken Kattenburg and convinced him that the Washington direction was not good, that Defense was getting tougher and tougher, but that at least Bundy spoke for Defense, that perhaps there was some hope at State, where he was working.

  In his new job Kattenburg began to concentrate on possibilities for negotiation, what it would take, what we might ask for, and in particular a scenario using Charles de Gaulle as an aid in trying to get out. It was a job he felt at ease in, particularly since his old office, the Vietnam Working Group, rather than asking long-range questions about the policy, was instead simply supplying nuts and bolts as needed by Saigon. He was working there, somewhat contentedly, if not terribly optimistic, in early 1964 when a new Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs was appointed; it was William Bundy. Shortly afterward Kattenburg was transferred from even his new job and put at the Policy Planning Council, where he stayed for two years, eventually allowed back to State proper as long as he did not touch Vietnam, and where he would finish his career. He never became an ambassador, but was eventually moved over to the Foreign Service Institute, where he taught young foreign service officers about the pleasures of their career until, in 1972, at the age of fifty he had to retire.

  The next to go was Bill Trueheart. He had played a major part in making the estimates from Saigon more realistic, and in so doing, had angered the Saigon military command and Taylor to a point beyond recall. So had Ambassador Lodge, but Lodge was something else, a person of such prestige and independence, and with an ability to go to the press—and the opposition party—that had there been a showdown conflict between Lodge and Harkins over which of them would remain, then Harkins would have been homeward bound on the next boat, and the military realizing this, settled for Trueheart’s head. In late October 1963, Trueheart’s career had looked very good; he had taken risks, but he had powerful protectors. Hilsman was a protector who had important people working above, and he had just told Trueheart that there were good things ahead, that they would eventually like him to come back and head the Southeast Asia desk, including Vietnam, with the title of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs. It would have meant a major career promotion. Trueheart took the offer from Hilsman to Lodge and asked the ambassador what he thought. They both agreed it was a good thing for Trueheart and that he should accept it; however, since Lodge was new, Trueheart should remain in Saigon through the spring and then return to his new job at State. But it did not work out that way; in December 1963 Trueheart was told that he was wanted back in Washington immediately. It would shortly become very clear that he was wanted not so much in Washington as out of Vietnam. He had caused trouble, made enemies, angered the military, and the military wanted him out. It was McNamara who had gone to Rusk asking that he be switched; McNamara was responding to pressure from the generals because he did not like people who made trouble and cast doubt upon the assumptions.

  What happened upon Trueheart’s return was even more interesting. He had been the top political officer coming back from a country where political estimates were of the essence, and by natural events he would have moved either to an ambassadorship, or a major desk job involved with Vietnam. Instead, he was now under a shadow: he would not become a Deputy Assistant Secretary, nor an ambassador, and he would not be involved with Vietnam. He was made the desk officer for all of Southeast Asia, a marvelous job if it had not been for the fact that it specifically excluded Vietnam. One more doubter had been removed. As such he was finished as a major player, and although he was outside of the main action he continued to try to be a player, working with George Ball to some degree, and more important, trying to keep the war from spreading into other countries as the military in 1965 and 1966 pushed for raids into
Cambodian sanctuaries, raids which he felt would broaden the war.