The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  In 1963 Westmoreland left the Point and was given the XVIII Airborne Corps (which gave him command of the 101st and the 82nd). He was clearly one of the three top generals in the Army, a future candidate for Chief of Staff, or for any other special command which might arise. In fact, Westmoreland had been the dark-horse candidate for the command in Vietnam as far back as 1961, when they had finally turned to Harkins. Some of the civilians around Kennedy thought he appeared to be a better general and that Kennedy should not let seniority be a bar to excellence; Taylor, however, wanted Harkins. So in 1964, with the war getting worse and Harkins clearly having lost the respect and confidence of his civilian superiors, the question arose as to who would succeed him. This time the military would go with its best, and the choices were the elite of the Army. The senior man was Harold Johnson, then serving as Deputy Chief of Staff for Military Operations (and soon to be Chief of Staff), intelligent, spare, a man with little political tact or grace; the youngest was General Bruce Palmer, considered then probably the brightest general in the Army, sixth in his class at West Point (and soon to handle the Dominican crisis); Westmoreland; and Abe Abrams, the tough, crusty tank commander who was considered one of the great officers of World War II, a favorite of Patton’s.

  Johnson and McNamara were both impressed by Westmoreland. McNamara liked his reputation for efficiency, for being straightforward. Westmoreland could phrase things in terms McNamara understood, which did not hurt. Johnson in particular was pleased by Westmoreland’s reputation; he had liked the general when they met at West Point, and Johnson was impressed that Westmoreland was straight from West Point, perhaps he would be better prepared to train the Vietnamese army (that hope still burned, the myth that the problem with the ARVN was a lack of training; Americans had been training the Vietnamese army for a decade, and still held to the hope that more training was the solution). There was another quality that Johnson liked about Westmoreland and that was that Westy was a Southerner. Johnson, surrounded by Easterners, felt more comfortable with Westmoreland’s Southern accent. But it was Taylor, who had known Westmoreland for so long, who swung the balance (and who did not really understand the war at that point; he was convinced that Westmoreland’s airborne experience would be helpful; nothing, in fact, was ever more meaningless in Vietnam than the costly, clumsy airborne assaults which the ARVN periodically launched). So it was Westmoreland who was chosen, a good, hard-working man, supremely conventional, supremely confident, classically managerial in style, not a man of subtlety. Rather the corporate general, chosen for the most complex war this country had ever fought. It would be a summation of the letter-perfect career.

  On his way to Vietnam he stopped off at West Point to make a farewell speech to the cadets, the men who had arrived at the Point at the same time he did, and he delivered an unusually personal speech, as if knowing, which he probably did, that many of them would soon serve in his command in Vietnam. He told them he considered himself and his fellow West Point men a special breed, with a calling comparable to that of the ministry, bearing a “sacred trust to provide the dedicated leadership and service to our nation, which is so essential to our national security. I certainly view this, and I am sure you view it as a very high calling, and a noble cause. I feel it is up to a West Pointer to dedicate his personal life and his conscience to this idea. This has been the West Point tradition over the years. I must say this country can be thankful if this is the case.” But outside the Academy, he warned, “you’re going to be dealing with just ordinary people . . . all people aren’t honest. Many have low, if any, sense of duty. Many citizens go to extremes to avoid any kind of military service to their country. I feel that West Pointers must be different, and that is why as a group they have been universally and uniquely successful throughout history.” He warned that not all the problems they faced would be solvable, that life was not easy, but then, in an almost classic exposition of the can-do philosophy, he added, “In my view the positive approach is the key to success . . . and it’s the one that has a strong influence over people. Men welcome leadership. They like action and they relish accomplishment . . . speculation, knowledge is not the chief aim of man—it is action . . . all mankind feel themselves weak, beset with infirmities, and surrounded with danger. The acutest minds are the most conscious of difficulties and dangers. They want above all things a leader with the boldness, decision, and energy that with shame, they do not find in themselves. He then who would command among his fellows, must tell them more in energy of will than in power of intellect. He has to have both, . . . but energy of will is more important. . . .” Then this man, who was the embodiment of the book soldier, who seemed to be able to control his own destiny and everything that he set his mind to, ended with a quotation from Kipling:

  “If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue

  Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch,

  If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you

  If all men count with you, but none too much;

  If you can fill the unforgiving minute

  With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

  Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

  And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!”

  If he was conventional and not brilliant, he had one failing: he did not feel at ease with other unconventional men. His staff in Saigon would not be brilliant; it would in fact reflect him and his limitations. He was conventional; it would be conventional. He did not feel the nuance of the war; it did not feel the nuance of the war. It was to an uncommon degree a reflection of him, and it was not by chance; even the generals around Westy looked like generals. In 1967 when one of the brightest generals in Vietnam, Fred Weyand, was to be given a full field force, in effect a corps command, Westmoreland told him to go ahead and choose any senior civilian he wanted as an adviser. Weyand thought about it for quite a while and said he wanted John Paul Vann (the same Vann who had left the Army in protest over the Harkins reporting system, who had returned to Vietnam as the lowest-ranking AID civilian and had worked his way back up and was considered by many to be the single most knowledgeable American there). “I don’t know about Vann,” said Westmoreland, “better think it over. Vann’s a troublemaker. A very difficult man to get along with.” Weyand thought on it for a while and still requested Vann. (Vann would have a profound influence on Weyand’s thinking, in effect saying that the search-and-destroy strategy played into Hanoi’s hands, and that the troops should be kept closer to the population centers. This resulted in a major split between Westmoreland and Weyand on use of troops in 1967, but it also perhaps helped save the U.S. mission from an even greater defeat at the time of Tet. It was Vann who first noticed that the enemy was up to something unusual and seemed to be massing, and who prevailed upon Weyand to hold back on sending troops to the far regions. Weyand held back despite pressure from Saigon for search-and-destroy operations in the exterior reaches of his zone. When the other side struck, Weyand’s forces were not nearly as scattered as they might have been.)

  So he went to Vietnam, apparently exuding confidence; the U.S. mission which had been staggering and near its knees seemed to regain a certain confidence. Westy was here and he was the best. The first team was on its way. He would avoid the mistakes of the past, the Harkins mistakes, the overoptimism, the self-delusion, and for a time Westmoreland would recommend to friends books which were extremely critical of Harkins and his reporting system. (Indeed, at his farewell speech at West Point, he had warned against “snow jobs . . . In connection with my forthcoming assignment, that is one of the real problem areas—to get the facts from the Vietnamese as to what is going on in that strife-torn country. Because the Vietnamese, as soldiers under your command, are inclined to tell you what you want to hear, and not what the actual facts are. . . .”) But though he had started realistically, Vietnam enveloped him as it had other Western generals; he too showed his frailty, he too became more and more frustrated by the war, and he
too turned to those who would give him the good news. He too began to see in the press, which at first he had handled so well, an almost sinister opponent. And so in early 1967, Joe McGinniss, then just a young reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, would spend a day traveling with Westmoreland to the coastal town of Phan Thiet. There a young American officer startled McGinniss by giving an extraordinarily candid briefing on how bad the situation was, how incompetent the ARVN was. Westmoreland had demanded the briefing and the young American had been uneasy about giving it, apologizing for being so frank with a reporter present, but finally it had come pouring out: the ARVN soldiers were cowards, they refused to fight, they abused the population, in their most recent battle they had all fled, all but one man. That one man had stood and fought and almost single-handedly staved off a Vietcong attack. When the officer had finished his briefing, still apologizing for being so candid, Westmoreland turned to McGinniss and said, “Now you see how distorted the press image of this war is. This is a perfect example—a great act of bravery and not a single mention of it in the New York Times.” But all of that would come later, the gnawing frustration; for in the beginning his very arrival, his presence in Vietnam had seemed to give more oxygen to the mission: from now on things would be done correctly. By the book. But he was a man trained for great wars, with his own vision of great wars. Not a man for small and frustrating wars. A man born to command and with a vision. “He wants,” wrote Peter Arnett of the AP, the best reporter of the war, “to be CINCWorld.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  In March 1965 the struggle began over the sending of combat troops, a struggle which saw Westmoreland and Taylor divided, CINCPAC and the JCS lined up with the advocates of force, and with General Harold Johnson, Chief of Staff of the Army, playing a crucial role, eventually siding with the advocates. The battle would touch on the use of troops, number of troops, and equally important, strategy. Starting in March, the strategy evolved from security to an agreement to follow a Taylor-devised enclave strategy, and finally, by June, to a much more vigorous Westmoreland-Depuy search-and-destroy strategy which would help remove all restraints on the use of American ground forces. It was an evolution which entailed surprisingly little foresight and planning, or definition of roles and strategies on the part of the civilians. One step followed another, each step being an attempt to hold the line, each leading them in deeper, all of it slipping away. In this period Taylor was the man who opposed the use of combat troops, but events worked against him. (Not by chance did Ball quote Emerson on events being in the saddle and riding mankind. For no man would it be more true than Max Taylor. He would try to hold the line on major combat-troop commitments, and in so doing, concede smaller victories to those who wanted greater force, until step by step he was pulled along and the entire debate went beyond him; he, like others, was overtaken by events.)

  The trip of General Harold K. Johnson to Vietnam was important. He was sent specifically by Lyndon Johnson, who had given him a real dressing-down. The President had let loose, right in front of members of the general’s staff. All he heard from his generals, President Johnson said, was “Bomb, bomb, bomb. That’s all you know. Well, I want to know why there’s nothing else. You generals have all been educated at the taxpayers’ expense, and you’re not giving me any ideas and any solutions for this damn little piss-ant country. Now, I don’t need ten generals to come in here ten times and tell me to bomb. I want some solutions. I want some answers.” So General Johnson had hied himself to Vietnam, arriving there on March 5 all fired up, hot for solutions. He spent a week looking over the entire situation, conferring at length with both Westmoreland and Taylor, and found that there was a considerable difference in their estimates of future needs. Westmoreland already wanted combat troops, and he wanted to use them aggressively; Taylor was more conservative, he was wary of how well combat troops might work, and he was reluctant to take too much of the burden away from the Vietnamese. If a division were to be used, he wanted to use it more cautiously, perhaps first in enclaves along the coast, where the troops would have an easy exit to the sea, and where they would have less difficulty with lines of communication than troops stationed in the highlands. They would fight in their own defense and do some limited patrolling, thus releasing the ARVN for other duties, but they would not assume the burden of the war. The use of a division in the coastal region would mean extended lines of communication, and it might be more open-ended in terms of numbers and mission. Taylor opposed using a division for either purpose at the moment, he told both Washington and General Johnson, but if it had to come to a choice, he favored the coastal enclave theory as simpler, safer and less costly. (A year later, when Taylor’s old Airborne rival, Jim Gavin, who had opposed the war, surfaced with the idea of winding down the war by moving to an enclave strategy, the Administration chose Taylor as the weapon with which to knock Gavin down, which Taylor did, Gavin and the general public never knowing that Taylor had proposed roughly the same strategy.)

  But Westmoreland insisted on troops. The situation, he said, was not quite desperate, although perilously near it. He was sure that the Vietcong had not even begun to use its full strength, that it was sitting back preparing a major campaign, and he doubted the ARVN capacity to withstand it. He needed troops, and he wanted the right to maneuver them. Since Westmoreland was the commander, he convinced General Johnson, a man who had many doubts about another land war in Asia, to go along with him, and on his return the Army Chief recommended that an entire American division be sent (and to the highlands, for a mission which would bring greater results). The Harold Johnson recommendations, which would change the nature of the commitment, were so closely held that the highest official at CIA would have to smuggle illicit copies from friends at the White House.

  A division which Westmoreland might have gotten at the time, mid-March. But the Joint Chiefs, always more ambitious, always committed to greater force, had been pushing for three divisions (including one Korean division); the Chiefs wanted to be sure that if force was used, there was enough of it. The JCS recommendation stopped temporarily at McNamara, because neither he nor Lyndon Johnson wanted three divisions; but the three-division idea was not dead and had replaced Harold Johnson’s one division, thus wiping it out. The rest of the Chief of Staff’s recommendations reinforcing ARVN, doing the same things with more vigor, were passed on, leaving Westmoreland with a feeling that had the JCS held back, he would have had his one division, which made him extremely careful about how big a slice of salami he would ask for in the future.

  Yet on March 17 he asked for a Marine battalion landing team for the town of Phu Bai, near Hué; Westy wanted to build a larger base to serve as helicopter field and take the burden of choppers away from the already overcrowded Danang base. Taylor gave his concurrence, but warned again that this was simply a reminder that there would be more requests for troops, that once in, it would not be easy to stop.

  During March, day by day and then week by week, the play was slowly changing. The civilians became increasingly passive in their positions, the military increasingly active, the civilians no longer taking the initiative but sitting back, being overwhelmed by the requests and demands of the military, different generals demanding different things. The civilians were on the defensive, trying to weigh the accuracy and legitimacy of the requests from the military. The JCS wanted a lot of force, and an aggressive policy, three divisions, but then, they always asked for too much. Taylor was far more cautious; he was not saying no, he was casting doubts about the ability of U.S. forces to fight (doubts which his chief political superior Lyndon Johnson did not particularly share, would in fact consider a form of reverse racism, as indeed the Administration would later accuse Fulbright of racism, in believing that Asians were not as valuable as Caucasians). Taylor was trying to hold it down, and he was doing it in part in a very dangerous way; that is, he was challenging not the basic assumption of the war or the commitment but the assessment of Westmoreland of how serious the sit
uation was; he was saying in effect it simply wasn’t that bad. This meant that if the situation deteriorated any further, he would have to sign on or have his arguments completely neutralized. Since the long-range rhythms of the country, growing Vietcong strength and steady ARVN deterioration were on the side of Westmoreland, the future, so to speak, was his. In addition to Westmoreland and the JCS, there was also CINCPAC, constantly calling for more force, more troops. The question soon, then, would be not whether or not to send combat troops, but how many and under what mission and ground rules.

  Taylor returned to Washington at the end of March for a series of meetings which would ostensibly determine strategy. What was significant about these meetings was the timing. After six weeks of Operation Rolling Thunder, the massive bombing of the North, it had become obvious that the bombing was not going to bring Hanoi either to its senses or its knees, and that as a political weapon against the North it had probably failed, which meant that there would be increasing pressures from the Chiefs both to expand it into a military weapon and, now that they were this far in, for more ground forces. It was becoming clearer and clearer that the move which was supposed to have prevented sending troops was not going to affect Hanoi’s decision making, except perhaps to make them escalate. Since Taylor knew that Westmoreland would be submitting a major request for troops, he had already changed his position. From what was an essentially blanket opposition to the use of combat troops and a reluctant approval of even a security mission, he had continued to be eroded. He knew better than most what the military were aiming for, and that the tempo was being speeded up. Now he was arguing not against U.S. troops but for a much more restrained use, for the enclave strategy, for testing out the troops in the enclave strategy, which allowed an easy U.S. exit and which kept the U.S. troop ratio down. The Plimsoll line was very much on his mind. What was it, he asked friends, the point at which for every American you added, you in effect added nothing but simply subtracted one ARVN. Was it 75,000 or 100,000, or perhaps as high as 125,000? At which point did it become an American war? What point would signify the end of the counterinsurgency program, of which he had been the major architect?