The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  They had turned to the bombing out of their own desperation, because what they were doing no longer worked and because bombing was the easiest thing. It was the kind of power which America wielded most easily, the greatest technological superpower poised against this preposterously small and weak country. (“Raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country,” Lyndon Johnson called it during the great debates, complaining to John McCone of the CIA about the lack of information coming out of Hanoi. Wasn’t there someone working in the interior of their government who would slip out with a stolen paper saying what they were going to do? “I thought you guys had people everywhere, that you knew everything, and now you don’t even know anything about a raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country. All you have to do is get some Chinese coolies from a San Francisco laundry shop and drop them over there and use them. Get them to drop their answers in a bottle and put the bottle in the Pacific . . .” McCone, who was not noted for his sense of humor, sulked for several days.) Since, after Korea, this country was sensitive about ground wars, bombing would not seem like going to war, but combat troops would. Besides, the decision makers were men from the successful areas of American life, they believed in the capacity of American production and technology to satisfy human needs; therefore the deprivation by bombing would have effect. It was particularly hard for them as a group to understand how very little effect something like bombing would have on revolutionary Asian Communist-nationalists, other than to make them more determined. They were all private men, and thus the idea that the 1964 election mandate might be quite different from going to war had very little effect, except on George Ball, and to some degree on Lyndon Johnson.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  And so it was that 1964 passed, bringing Lyndon Johnson to the Presidency on his own as a peace candidate, and now on the brink of going to war. But the bombing allowed them a rationale for thinking that it was not war, it was just bombing, a way increasingly in their own minds, of not going to war. Something that would be over shortly and quickly; the use of power to prevent using power. So it was that a subtle thing had taken place over the last year and a half; in their desperation, in their grasping at almost any rationale, anything to do, the principals had turned to the Rostow thesis for bombing, with its built-in reassurances—Rostow, whom they had snickered about earlier, whom they had not really taken seriously. Walt was not exactly a joke, but he was not entirely a serious figure, either, too involved in his own world, always talking about bombing, a zealot in an Administration uneasy with zealotry. Now, with the bureaucracy grasping at straws, Walt was no longer the semicomic, peripheral figure. He was a zealot with an answer, and as such he was about to become, for lack of anyone or anything better, a very influential intellectual—the wrong man at the wrong place with the wrong idea. But it was reassuring that he seemed to have answers, and right then, answers were what they desperately needed.

  There was another man who seemed to have answers, and that was Robert McNamara; if we were turning to a technological war, a war which could be fought antiseptically, war without death, then he, the master of this new modernized war machine, was the right man to have there. In January, McNamara once more became the forceful advocate of escalation, of going ahead with the bombing plan, of using force, but not too much force. With Lyndon Johnson still dragging his feet, McNamara set out to convince him that bombing was at least the first answer, McNamara being pushed by the Chiefs, his constituency. He was, after all, not one to turn away from a challenge. The mark of him in government, his imprimatur, was his capacity to say that something could be done, understood, mastered, accomplished. To say that something could not or would not work or that it was beyond the reach of this most powerful nation in the world was to admit not just human frailty, but to fail in a very special and almost terrible way. McNamara hated failure; he had conquered it all his life, risen above it, despised it in others. Besides, and this was later easy to forget, he was very much a part of that era; he had been particularly close to Mac Bundy, the intellectual, and influenced by him. McNamara wanted to win, to move Castro out, to deny Vietnam to the Communists; his speeches warning of the Chinese Communist peril preceded those of Rusk as Administration documents. In discussing Vietnam, he was capable of telling aides that there was something worse than physical enslavement, that there was enslavement of the mind the way the Communists practiced it. He would later shed much of that viewpoint, or at least seem to shed much of it (he carefully fended off questions on what he really thought by pointing out that as head of the World Bank, he had no viewpoints, no politics). Besides, he was already so much of a part of Vietnam’s history that it was becoming a large part of him.

  So he pushed ahead. Aides remember him in those days busy making the case for escalation, building up the evidence. Even as the bombing decision hung in the balance he assigned two staff men to check on Vietcong torture against Americans. The Vietcong had recently captured two Americans, a captain and a sergeant, and had committed appalling atrocities against them, which was unusual because in the past, atrocities had been used regularly against the South Vietnamese but not against Americans. So in February the two staff men were on the phone to Saigon because McNamara wanted something to present to the President as a means of convincing him to go along with the bombing campaign. The idea was that if there were many incidents like this, the mutilation of Americans, the President would have to react and the American public simply would not stand for it; thus the first soldier becomes the rationale for the second soldier. The word was that this was very important to McNamara and that he wanted every detail, all of it, spare nothing. So the aides spent what was to be the night of the Vietcong attack on Qui Nhon on the phone to Saigon getting all the atrocity information they could, which was very gory. (A few days later, after the Qui Nhon attack, when the President finally made up his mind, the word came down from McNamara that it had been very effective with the President.)

  The idea of cutting losses, as George Ball suggested, was unacceptable—so much was already invested, it concerned prestige and honor. Indeed John McNaughton, his chief deputy on Vietnam in 1964 and like his boss a great quantifier, outlined the reasons for going into Vietnam and escalating, and assigned 70 percent not to save dominoes, but to avoid a humiliating American defeat; the second, and in McNamara’s eyes—though not Rusk’s—less important reason was to keep Vietnam and other adjacent territory from the Chinese, and to that McNaughton assigned 20 percent; and finally the official reason, the one for the high school history books, to aid the South Vietnamese so that they could have a better life was given 10 percent. Westerners, it seemed, were much like the Asians they always talked about; when it came right down to it, they wanted to save face. They could not cut now, the President had been brought this far, and the damage to him and the Administration, though not necessarily the country, if they pulled out and suffered a humiliating loss would be too great.

  Bob McNamara was not blindly optimistic (later, after it had all failed, he would tell this reporter that he had always doubted the bombing, that anyone who knew anything about bombing in World War II would be dubious about what it would accomplish, a startling admission from a man who had urged the bombing to the President as forcefully as he did), but it was more likely to work than not. It was worth trying, and if it didn’t work out, it could always be stopped. Thus the later frustration of McNamara, who would always favor whatever bombing halt was being proposed, wanting at once to negotiate but unable to give Hanoi terms under which it would negotiate, offering instead terms which for Hanoi meant surrender. But if McNamara had doubts, he was also, much more than Rusk, action-oriented. His instinct was always to do something, to move something, above all to try something. Besides, the case study of the Cuban missile crisis was still vivid in his mind and in the minds of the others (he was experienced in crisis management, whereas Johnson was not; a veteran Secretary of Defense, a rookie President); this was the precedent for what they were planning now. They would, as the
y thought, use power in the same slow, judicious manner as they had during the missile crisis. Not too much, not too little. Signaling clearly and cautiously their intentions (that is, that they did not want to go to war). Rejecting the radicals on both sides (“the wild men waiting in the wings,” McGeorge Bundy called them at the time, linking in equal insanity and irrationality those who wanted to get out with those who wanted to obliterate North Vietnam). Being in control of the communications all the way through. Riding herd on the military and keeping them away from all but technical decisions. Which was fine, except that they made one fatal mistake; they forgot that in the Cuban missile crisis it was the Russians, not the Cubans, who had backed down. The threat of American power had had an impact on the Soviets, who were a comparable society with comparable targets, and little effect on a new agrarian society still involved in its own revolution. Thus, though they were following the same pattern as they had in the missile crisis, they lacked a sense of history, and what had seemed so judicious before became injudicious in Vietnam. The bluff of power would not work and we would be impaled in a futile bombing of a small, underdeveloped country, an idea which repelled most of the world and increasing numbers of Americans.

  When it came right down to it, McNamara had doubts about the bombing in his mind, but those doubts were not reflected in the meetings. He was forceful, intense, tearing apart the doubts of the others, almost ruthless in making his case; those around him were sure that he was being encouraged by the President to do this; he was too much the corporate man to go as far as he did without somehow sensing that this was to be his role. He was, Ball found, quite different in private sessions than in the major meetings where Johnson presided. When Ball prepared paper after paper for Johnson, he would first send them to the other principals, and occasionally McNamara would suggest that he come by and talk the paper over before they went to see the President. Ball would find McNamara surprisingly sympathetic, indeed there seemed to be a considerable area of agreement. Sometimes John McNaughton was present and McNamara would note that McNaughton was in general agreement with Ball, that he had great doubts about the course they were following. So Ball often left feeling that he had made some impression, that he had stirred some doubts in McNamara, that there was the beginning of an area of agreement. But then, in the real meetings, with Johnson present, it would be quite different: McNamara, the ripper now, his own doubts having disappeared, could not afford to lose an argument, or even express partial doubt; partial sympathy for Ball might hurt his own case. So he plunged forward, leaving Ball somewhat surprised and dominated by his force, his control and his statistics. McNamara may have realized that there was an enormous element of chance to what he was proposing, that he was only for it 60-40, but it seemed at the meetings that he was for it 100 percent. There was never anyone better at a meeting; it was a performance, really—programmed, brilliantly prepared, the right points fed in, in just the right way. It was done without emotion, that was a key point, it always seemed so objective and clear; and yet it carried conviction. Conviction and certitude without emotion. When he finished everyone knew what to do. The modern man.

  He was extremely tough in those late 1964 and early 1965 meetings. Perhaps bombing wouldn’t work, but what was the alternative? Defeat? Humiliation? Withdrawal? “George here,” he said, “is exaggerating the dangers. It is not a final act,” it could be turned off, pushed up, and it would have effect. It seemed the lowest risk. We had to do something, he said, we couldn’t just stand there. We had to act. His statistics on force ratios showed that the South was collapsing (the JCS had told Westmoreland in the fall of 1964 that the material he was sending on the decline in the force ratio—that is, stepped-up enemy infiltration, the massing of Vietcong units, the inability of the ARVN to mobilize—was having a strong effect on McNamara. Please send more, they cabled Westmoreland, they could use it well with him, it was something he understood). So he was carrying the brunt for escalation in January 1965, with Rusk still on the fence, not wanting to get out, but uneasy about going ahead. And Mac Bundy seemed to be siding with McNamara. Although he had been in agreement on the bombing in the past, he was in no sense committed on the issue of Vietnam. He was biding his time, committed on tit-for-tat reprisals but still uncommitted on a real bombing campaign, and in no sense supporting Ball; if anything, quite the reverse.

  Up until now McGeorge Bundy had never played a major role on Vietnam, either in the early days, in the Diem period, or during the early debates on bombing. He was not particularly interested in Asia (indeed he would finally give as a major reason for his conversion the need to keep our reputation to back an ally credible with our European friends), and the messiness of Saigon did not appeal to his orderly mind. As the debate on bombing and escalation raged, he had been more of an adjudicator, trying to keep himself out of it to a large degree, trying to present to the President as honestly and coldly as he could the various alternatives and possibilities, and above all, trying to keep the flow going, trying to let the President know when he had to make a decision, when the buffer zone of time was running out, being very operational and functional and not really looking down the long road.

  His relationship with Johnson had been improving steadily for about a year. When Johnson first came in, their mix had not been very good at all. Johnson had regarded the White House staff as something of a hostile area, not without cause, since the Bundy group had felt a certain contempt, the attitude being: How do you keep him at bay, how do you placate him without telling him anything and without violating the Constitution? The tension from those days had existed after Johnson took over, though in the eyes of the Kennedy people Bundy tried quite hard, in fact a little too hard, to make the transition to Johnson, a transition which demanded extraordinary tests of loyalty, which Johnson took no small pleasure in submitting Bundy to. It was not easy, but Bundy and Johnson had worked out their relationship, Johnson occasionally taking great pleasure in having Bundy work for him, delighting in Mac’s sheer style. “My intellectual,” he called him. And they had both, each needing the other, put aside their distaste for the other’s style, Bundy for the rages of Johnson toward subordinates, including occasionally even him, for his making Bundy deliver papers while in an open-door bathroom (“Mac, I can’t hear you . . . Mac, get closer . . . Mac, get in here”), and Johnson for his part put aside, although he never forgot, that Bundy epitomized a breed and tradition which had long felt itself superior to the Lyndon Johnsons of the world.

  Now in late January decisions were coming up on Vietnam and time was running out. McNamara and Bundy talked it over and decided it was time to move the President off the dime, and they came up with the idea of a trip to Vietnam by Bundy as the eyes and ears of Johnson. Though the memo suggesting the trip was a Bundy memo, the two of them had worked it out together, both so committed to activism. The memo, which went to Johnson on January 27, 1965 (significantly, right after the inauguration), said that decisions could not be delayed any longer, that the present course could only bring “disastrous defeat.” We had to move all-out to negotiations or use more force, and they recommended the latter:

  Both of us recognize that the ultimate responsibility is not ours. Both of us have fully supported your unwillingness, in earlier months, to move out of the middle course. We both agree that every effort should still be made to improve our operations on the ground and to prop up the authorities in South Vietnam as best we can. But we are both convinced that none of this is enough and that the time has come for harder choices.

  The memo also noted that Rusk did not agree:

  What he does say is that the consequences of both escalation and withdrawal are so bad that we simply must find a way of making our present policy work. This would be good if it was possible. Bob and I do not think it is.

  So there it was, the activism, the can-do, the instinct to go forward, and the alliance of Mac Bundy and McNamara, operating in tandem to increase their bureaucratic power; two were better than one,
they were not alone, and it put the pressure on Rusk, who did not like being alone, to accommodate. Their position was thus noticeably strengthened. (Later, as the war progressed, aides to the three men would be appalled by the way the three stayed in touch with each other by phone every afternoon to be sure that each was in the same position, that no one had changed, that they were all still lined up; and in fact, later, after Bundy left and Rostow took his place, Rostow used this as a form of brilliant gamesmanship to keep McNamara on board, to keep him off balance, dangling little bits of new Vietnam information in front of him, the latest body counts, so that McNamara and Rusk both became overwhelmed with Vietnam trivia.) Now he, Bundy, should go out there and take a look. Vietnam doubters who knew Bundy and his instinct to be operational, to use force, and his closeness to McNamara, were not optimistic about the outcome of the trip. Yet it was an important moment within the bureaucracy, for Mac was not considered to have signed on, and it was known that the President was wavering, that Ball was making his stand; perhaps there might be a chance of changing it, what with Mac going there, a man of force but a man of a great intellectual tradition, the dean of Harvard College. He was then still ambitious, and though he would later point out that it had been obvious from the very start that no one could separate Rusk from Johnson, the consensus of those around him was that he believed that he had a chance to be Secretary of State and that it was one of the prime motives in his actions in those days.

  At the State Department there was some rancor about the trip, based on the view that if the President wanted his own look he had the entire State Department there to look for him, and on the belief that no one going to Vietnam cold could make any kind of assessment in that hothouse atmosphere, everyone in Saigon lined up to give as intensely as possible the case for escalation. (“Brainwashing,” George Romney would call it in 1968, and be immediately jumped on by all sorts of people, like Robert Kennedy, who had been brainwashed themselves and never known it or admitted it.) In addition, the Intelligence and Research people at State were opposed to the trip for reasons of their own; Hanoi, they pointed out in a memo, knew that a bombing campaign was being considered by the Americans and that the Bundy trip was related to it. Thus Hanoi would view the Bundy trip as a real fact-finding trip and would try to influence Bundy’s decision by showing that it did not fear bombing, and the way it would do this was by provoking some kind of incident while Bundy was in Vietnam. The same memo noted that of the three places which housed planes, Tan Son Nhut, Bien Hoa and Pleiku, Tan Son Nhut was the most likely to be attacked because it was the most open, and, being in Saigon, would be connected with the Bundy trip. In addition, the memo said, the fact that Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin would be in Hanoi at the time was enormously important, since the Russians, in the immediate post-Cuban missile crisis atmosphere, were almost sure to tell Hanoi not to push forward, that it was all too dangerous and they might do well to cool it a little. So an incident would show that Hanoi was not dependent upon Soviet aid, that the Soviets could not dictate to them, particularly since, if the Americans went ahead the way Hanoi sensed they would, and bombed, the Russians would be forced to support Hanoi, anyway.