The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  Even as Taylor was recommending bombing, he knew that this in itself was not enough, that if you bombed you would need troops. But he was bothered about sending combat troops, and he did not want to cross that bridge if necessary, partly because of the problems of Americans fighting in a political war and turning the population toward the Vietcong, but even more because he felt there was a crossover point at which, as the Americans put in men, the South Vietnamese would let down even more on the job, and the process of Americanizing the war would be accelerated. It was a question which bothered him a great deal in the fall of 1964. What was the Plimsoll line, as he called it, was it 75,000 or 100,000, or was it 150,000? At which point did they quit and turn it over to us, requiring more Americans? But if it bothered him, he was still convinced that whatever happened, he could influence American decisions, that he could apply the brake if necessary, that he was at the crucial spot, the ambassador, with Westmoreland somewhat under his wing and thus under his control. This illusion tempted him, as it would eventually tempt other principals, to believe that they could control events and decisions, determine and check the flow. Which would not turn out to be entirely true: as ambassador he was the senior American only as long as there were no American troops; the moment the troops arrived the play would go to Westmoreland.

  But if the question of troop levels bothered Taylor, he was sure of his ability to keep it down. So it was in late November 1964, right before Thanksgiving, before his crucial trip back to Washington, where they would, now that the President was elected in his own right, make some critical decisions, that Taylor gathered his senior staff together in Saigon. It was, thought one witness, a momentous occasion, Max aware of it, somehow more aloof than other men. Standing there, handsome, reserved—somehow those four stars seemed visible even when he was in civies—he had turned to them, this man who had been a charter member of the Never Again Club, and said, “I am going to see the President and I am going to advise him that the way things are going we will need American troops here. I intend to tell him this anyway, but I think it will help, it will make my position stronger, if I could tell the President that all of you here agree as well. I think I should warn you, however, that we may ultimately need as many as one hundred thousand.”

  The election on November 3, 1964, had gone just the way Johnson wanted, perhaps more so. He had received 43 million votes and Goldwater 27 million; he had 61 percent of the vote, the greatest percentage any American President had ever received. He had the Congress, a gain of thirty-seven seats in the House and with an enormous Democratic majority of sixty-eight Senators in the upper chamber. He had carefully camouflaged the question of Vietnam, removing it from debate, from the public eye and from the journalistic eye (Theodore White’s coverage of the 1964 campaign, The Making of the President, a series known for its thoroughness in backgrounding major issues as well as men, is quite revealing: there are eighteen references to Bill Moyers and fourteen to Kenny O’Donnell, both of whom worked in Johnson’s political process during that period, and no references to Bill Bundy or John McNaughton, who were carrying the burden of the preparations for war. Max Taylor, who as U.S. ambassador was the central figure in Saigon, was mentioned only twice, a reflection not on White’s journalistic ability, but on Johnson’s ability to separate the issue of the war from the political process and to hide the decision making). Yet Vietnam had not gone away; even while the President was in the final, hectic, joyous weeks on the campaign, receiving a kind of adulation rarely accorded a political figure, the bureaucracy was grinding away methodically, coming to its positions. The principals had been ready to bomb at the time of the Bien Hoa attack; the pressure to do something, almost anything, was growing. Almost immediately after the election they moved toward the decision on bombing, and on November 8 Dean Rusk sent a crucial cable to Max Taylor in Saigon saying that the working group was intensively preparing alternatives to the present policy:

  Our present tendency is to adopt a tougher program both privately and publicly against them. We propose to decide very soon that if there is no change in Hanoi’s position we would start in January a slowly graduating military action on Hanoi, in conjunction with negotiating moves. Such course of action would be less drastic than a course of full attacks. The working group is going to get everything in order.

  Rusk asked Taylor to comment on the Saigon side, the idea being that it would be in order when the bombing took place, and he had also urged that Taylor impress the South Vietnamese with the importance of holding together. On November 10 Taylor answered Rusk, beginning with a rhetorical question:

  What is the minimal level of government stability before we go in? I would describe it as maintaining law and order in the cities, securing vital areas from Vietcong attacks, and working effectively with the U.S. We don’t expect such a government for three or four months. It is highly desirable to have this kind of minimum government before accepting the risk inherent in any escalation programs.

  But, Taylor pointed out, if the government faltered we would still consider attacking the North “to give Pulmotor treatment for a government in extremis.” As for the instability, Taylor reported:

  I know of no words of eloquence or persuasion that have not been tried in the past. At the moment the problem is not with the government, but with major outside groups such as Buddhists, Catholics and politicians . . .

  For the Joint Chiefs of Staff it was an unsettling time, just as it was at the other extreme, for the intelligence community. If the intelligence community had a sense that events were getting out of control and that the restraints were being lifted, the Chiefs had something of a similar feeling from an entirely different viewpoint. They thought it was all moving toward their business, their profession, and yet, even as events progressed, as the inevitability of combat neared, they had too little sense of play, too little sense of control. They had assumed that they would move into a larger role, their advice, their professionalism summoned; the civilians around the President moved aside, the Chiefs moved to center stage.

  But it did not happen that way; instead they found the President, if anything, more nervous than ever about being with them, as if somehow afraid of giving the impression that he was getting into a shooting war, and thus listening to the military, and influenced by the military (they would learn about Lyndon Johnson that he was far more willing to be seen with them and photographed with them later when he was de-escalating the war and when he needed their coloration to protect him from the right; whereas in 1964 and 1965 the last thing he wanted was the impression that he was under their spell and influence). They found themselves moving closer and closer to a real war, and yet more and more separated from the President, and among some of them grew a sense that this would again be another frustrating bitter war, a civilians’ war, and that they would be isolated once more. They did not feel at ease with the President, largely because they were sure he felt uncomfortable with them; they sensed his distrust, the fact that he wanted to keep them at arm’s length, and his desire to use both McNamara and Taylor to filter them out.

  They neither liked nor trusted McNamara (nor McNaughton, McNamara’s chief aide in working with them, who made even less effort to conceal his contempt for them) and they felt that the Secretary was constantly manipulating them, that he did not really represent their position to the President, although he claimed he did. They were sure that he denigrated them, that somehow when he talked with the President they were the enemy, people to be fended off, and that he tried to keep them from seeing the President. (“It’s your constitutional right,” he would tell them, “but if I were you I wouldn’t do it. He doesn’t like you to come over and I can do it better for you.”) So they saw the President only twice in the months right before the President made the decision to escalate. Many of them would come to despise McNamara; as the war progressed and the problems mounted he would symbolize their frustrations, the embodiment of all evil. (In August 1966, at Lynda Johnson and Chuck Robb’s weddi
ng, McNamara approached General Wally Greene, Commandant of the Marine Corps, a man who loathed him, and said that he was puzzled, he was losing his influence with the President and he wondered why. Did General Greene know why? Greene thought to himself, You’re losing your influence because you’ve lied to him and misled him all these years. Greene would feel somewhat the same way about Lyndon Johnson by the end of his tour. Asked by a historian to consent to an interview for the Lyndon Johnson Library, he said yes, if they had asbestos tape in the recorder.) The only general that McNamara had trusted as late as mid-1964 was Max Taylor, a man the other Chiefs did not necessarily trust, feeling that Taylor was not one of them and that he represented Taylor, not them, to the politicians. Earle Wheeler, who had replaced Taylor as Chairman of the JCS, they liked better; he was, they felt, more honest, but they also thought Wheeler was overwhelmed by the problems of the civilians who were always playing politics.

  So there was a strong feeling, even as events were moving ahead toward escalation, that they were on the outside looking in. They were General Curtis LeMay of the Air Force, Admiral David McDonald of the Navy, and Wally Greene of the Marine Corps (not a statutory member of the JCS, but an important figure within the group because of his forceful views and because of the fact that the Marines would be the first troops to go), and they were all very hawkish. The Air Force believed in air power and bombing, old-fashioned, unrelieved bombing; the Navy, anxious to show that the carrier still worked and to get its share of roles and missions in what had been largely an Army show up to now, was hawkish; and Greene was hawkish. They were simple men, products of their training, environment and era, and they believed in the old maxims of war. If you had to go to war you used force, and if you used force, you used maximum force. If we were going to bomb, then it had to be saturation bombing of every conceivable target, and they would pick the targets. Obliteration of the enemy.

  The closer they got to a decision, however, the more they sensed that it was going to be nervous, inadequate, half-hearted bombing, starting slowly and working their way up. It was exactly the reverse of everything they believed, it signaled the enemy that more was coming, it allowed him to move his resources around and protect himself from bombing, to decrease his losses and increase American ones. All the Chiefs were signed on to a heavy bombing campaign, but LeMay and Greene were the most aggressive; they wanted to hit the irrigation dikes as well. Hit everything there. If it wasn’t worth hitting it wasn’t worth going to war. If you sent troops in, you sent in enough to do the job, 600,000, 700,000 perhaps, and not spaced out over a couple of years, allowing him time to build up his own logistical base, you did it immediately; and you went on a wartime footing, you called up the reserves and you let the nation know it was into something. War, they felt, was a serious thing, and not just the Marines and a few Air Force pilots should have to pay for it. They were in that sense old-fashioned men. Not every one of the Chiefs was quite so hawkish; General Harold K. Johnson, the Army Chief of Staff, was dubious about the whole thing, including the bombing, and to all intents and purposes he had voted against the bombing, raising such doubts for so long that it was in effect a negative vote. Wheeler himself was more modest in what he felt could be done; his own views were probably closer to those of the more hawkish generals, but he also considered himself a representative of the President and committed by the Constitution to understand the President’s problems, even if deep in the recesses of his own heart he did not really sympathize with them.

  So at the end of 1964 the Chiefs felt they were left out, that the civilians were making the decisions. The military moved the civilians over in the play—because of the military, the civilians were more hawkish. But they were still civilians, and they held the levers of power, and deep down they were contemptuous of the Chiefs. It was years later, when the decision making on this war was analyzed, that the names and faces of the civilians came easily to mind, but the names and faces of the Chiefs remained a mystery. Was it Earle Wheeler or Harold Johnson at Army? Curtis LeMay or John McConnell at the Air Force? David McDonald or Thomas Moorer at Navy? When General Harold Johnson, Chief of Staff of the Army, was having lunch in February 1965 with two New York Times reporters, he said that he had no great desire to go to war in Vietnam. He knew too well what it would be, Korea all over again, only worse, an enemy using sanctuaries, the United States unable and unwilling to use its full power, all the old frustrations again. He was not anxious for it. Not at all.

  If General Johnson was not hawkish, and was worried about another ground war in Asia, his colleague Wally Greene was far more hawkish. In late 1964 Greene was going around to the various service schools, Army and Marine Corps, and talked to the officers, giving a very militant lecture, saying that we should go in there and get the job done, use everything we had. This was the job to do and we ought to do it. It was all very upbeat and at the end he would turn to his audience and ask who was with him, and there would be a roar. A show of hands, he would say, let’s have a show of hands of those who want to go. Lots of hands up. And those who don’t want to go? Always fewer hands. And always, it turned out, the hands of men who had served there recently as advisers.

  What was most striking about this period as events closed in on the principals was how little exploration there was of the consequences of their route, what might happen if the more pessimistic appraisals were accurate (which were the appraisals of the intelligence community) and what it might do to the country. And in the same sense, there was a refusal to consider what the alternatives to escalation really were. A question that was almost never raised was whether the Vietnamese might or might not be better off under Ho, and to what degree the success of the Vietcong was a reflection of this. The kind of men who might have the doubts, who might at the top level of players have the insight and knowledge of some of the men in the intelligence community had long since been winnowed out. The men who had been politically inclined in their view of the war had also been filtered out. Only one man was left at the top level who had open doubts on Vietnam, and that was George Ball. He had not been a participant in the earlier bureaucratic struggles; he was something of an outsider as far as the Kennedy circle was concerned; he was a man of Europe and he had not considered Vietnam that important. Now, starting in 1964 and through the crucial months of 1965, he argued compellingly, forcefully and prophetically against the escalation, so prophetically that someone reading his papers five years later would have a chilling feeling that they had been written after the fact, not before. Later it would be said of Ball that he was a devil’s advocate, the house dove, a safe dove trotted out by a shrewd President for the record, so that later when the historians came to dissect the record they would find that Johnson had been careful, thoughtful and had listened to all sides. (The devil’s advocate story originated with Jack Valenti in 1964 when word started getting out that Ball was fighting against the policy. It was a deliberate attempt to show that there was no opposition, that it was all one big happy consensus within the government, when in fact Ball was making a strong dissent.)

  In arguing against the escalation, Ball was saying that it was doomed. He was alone among the foreign policy people saying this, which did not bother him; he felt he needed only one of Johnson’s domestic people to argue for the domestic side, to say that the American people didn’t want war, that anti-Communism was ebbing as an issue. If only one more voice . . . If. If. He had spent the year working it out on paper, writing long memos, twenty pages or more, giving them to Johnson, feeling this was the best way to approach him rather than seem to debate him in small meetings, and each time he did, Johnson would study the memo all night and then question him very carefully. Johnson would show up the next morning without the memo, but able to cite page and paragraph without looking at it: “George, you say on page fourteen . . .” and “George, here on page eighteen . . .” George Ball had the strong opinion that in late 1964 and early 1965, Lyndon Johnson was a very troubled man.

  George Ball se
emed an unlikely man to make a case for the doves and against the Establishment. He was first and foremost a Europeanist; perhaps more than any man in that government, even more than McGeorge Bundy, he was a man of Europe. His career had always been involved in Europe and in economic matters; he was an American disciple of Jean Monnet. He possessed a singular lack of concern, some of his colleagues in State thought in the early days of the Kennedy Administration, for the problems of Africans and Asians. Those in State who in 1961 and 1962 wanted to move American policy away from the old Europe-oriented colonial-power view of the underdeveloped world felt that Ball was the main antagonist in the Department, the man most likely, for instance, to take the French­Belgian­British­Union Minière view of sustaining the Katanga secession rather than the new-forces people’s view of ending it, thus gaining love and affection elsewhere on the African continent. It was one more irony of the war that George Ball would make his first national reputation—something he had always wanted and had been somewhat denied—as a man who had been prophetic on Asia, since he had been concerned about Vietnam in the first place because he feared (as did many Europeans) that it was going to divert America from its prime concern in the world, which was the European alliance.

  Ball was a more iconoclastic man than the Eastern group that Jack Kennedy had gathered around him; he was a Stevenson loyalist, a Democratic party worker, a good New Deal lawyer from Chicago who during the height of the McCarthy period was willing to represent Henry Wallace, a former Vice-President of the United States, when no one in Washington would. Ball had come to Washington with a cold and skeptical eye and a willingness to challenge assumptions. He did not, for instance, consider it a particularly bad thing for most of Africa to go Communist, thinking in fact that it might serve the Communists right to wrestle with the enormous problems of new countries; it might bog them down a little, and perhaps not win them many new friends. The exception, of course, would be an underdeveloped country particularly rich in minerals like the Congo, in which case the attitude of the European patron country might change (and as it changed, so would Ball’s). He had a certain unorthodox view of the world and a lack of preconception, except of course for an almost automatic instinct toward anything which promoted traditional European unity (he was the foremost advocate of the implausible MLF, a cartoonist’s delight and a politician’s nightmare). It was not easy to pin him down in the old split between the Acheson hard-liners and the Stevenson-Bowles faction in the Democratic party; there was a certain allegiance to Stevensonian liberalism, perhaps with a line a little harder and a little less idealistic in foreign policy. (“George,” noted a friend, “has a certain moral framework to his ideas, but he would be absolutely appalled if someone ever said that he did. George is very careful to camouflage his moral concerns—so he can be a better and more realistic player.”)