The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  They had come to their essential agreement in Honolulu on April 20. The next morning John McCone, informed of their decision, told the NSC that it simply meant that Hanoi would increase its infiltration and step up the war. Thus more Americans. Thus more North Vietnamese. Thus a higher level of violence.

  When George Ball heard of the decisions in Honolulu, he was appalled; he sensed that they were crossing a point of no return and he was disturbed about their lack of awareness of what was happening. On that afternoon he again made a major appeal to hold the line. The request to go to 80,000 confirmed what he had always feared, the beginning of the long slide toward an American combat commitment without a real recognition or admission by the men themselves that this was so. Eighty thousand, he knew, might not long remain the ceiling. It was not a figure to frighten the President, but it was an extremely dangerous precedent. If they could go to about 80,000 without great pressure from the Vietcong, what would be next? And what were the guidelines to be, what was the strategy? At what point would they stop? That afternoon he pointed out that the figure of 80,000 represented a quantum jump of 150 percent. Nor would it, he said, induce Hanoi to quit, and cited the opinion of McCone given that morning, that Hanoi would now substantially increase the rate of infiltration into the South. It was, he said, time to pause, to wait and to look, and to try and do some political soundings. The bombing, he noted, had hardly turned out to be the decisive act predicted for it. We had been bombing the North for ten weeks, a total of 2,800 sorties, going from 122 per week to 604 in the last week, an awesome show of bombing; this had slightly improved Saigon’s morale, and probably hurt the Vietcong morale. But there was, and he was obstinate about this, no evidence that it had caused Hanoi to slow down the infiltration. Rather the reverse was becoming evident. We were, he said, at a threshold. It was time not to send more men, to rush ahead without a clear strategy, without a clear definition of what we were getting into. Instead, it was a time to pause, to re-examine Hanoi’s position. There was, he thought, much that was acceptable in Hanoi’s recently announced four points for negotiation. It was time to make a major effort to see what the possibilities of negotiation were, but it was, he realized even at the time, the wrong proposal at the wrong time. No one was interested in such a solution because we would have been negotiating from weakness (nor, of course, would there have been much interest in negotiation had we been in a strong position, then we would have wanted to win). We could not negotiate until we had committed enough of our own resources to turn the tide; at that time, however, having invested much more, the price we wanted to extract from negotiations would have risen.

  Ball found himself very much alone; in a sense McCone seemed to be arguing from the same position, but McCone wanted to use more force. Taylor seemed to be arguing from the same position, but he was unwilling to face the reality of what it meant, withdrawal. And Bill Bundy felt the same way, saw the dangers, but he, too, was unwilling to do the unthinkable, to cut our losses. Bill Bundy was an even more divided man than Taylor at this point. As a CIA man he had dealt with Indochina and he knew better than most the French chapter of that story; he was very uneasy about committing American troops, of what this might do to the population. At the same time he was a believer in using force, and he was a good bureaucrat and an ambitious one, and he knew which way the play was going. So at this point the idea of American troops was an unnerving one, and like Taylor he was worried about the Plimsoll line: would it come at 75,000, or 80,000, and during this debate Bill Bundy seemed to be making the case against sending combat troops, the weakness of the society, the hazards of following in the French footsteps. And Ball, who had been searching for allies, who had believed one more man would turn it, thought: Here is my man, my one ally. When they went back to State together, Ball suggested to Bundy that they work together on a major paper on how to extricate the United States from the growing quagmire. It was a crucial moment. Bundy desisted. He saw all the problems, he had all the doubts, he told Ball, but he did not go that far, he was not prepared to reverse twenty-five years of American policy. We couldn’t let Vietnam go down the drain . . . So he left Ball there and it became a Ball paper, not a Ball-Bundy paper. But Ball was far from alone in believing that the combat-troop commitment was just about to start, that it would be impossible to control and that the North Vietnamese would match our commitment and match us in endurance. Yet it was a lonely time for Ball.

  There was in the meetings occasional support from Bill Bundy, but then he would always slip away. Taylor was not really an ally; he was a doubter, but when it came down to the hard edge, he was always on the other side. Rusk was a friend, he never sprang ambushes at the meetings (as McNamara did), but he was an impenetrable man. He had few beliefs but those he had went very deep; if the world was changing, Dean Rusk was not; he had learned his lessons and learned them well. Munich. Mutual security. Containment. The necessity of a democracy to show dictatorships that it could not be bluffed. And a belief that American force could do anything that its leaders set their minds to.

  It was not Ball’s easiest time and McNamara was the problem for Ball in those days. He was the ripper. On the sidelines, Mac Bundy was the kibitzer, joining in with McNamara to cut at Ball, but it was McNamara who did the ripping. He would not have done it unless he thought it was the role the President wanted him to play, the President in a sense seeming to encourage both Ball and McNamara. So McNamara was forceful and tough, the advocate of escalation. Perhaps he did have doubts, he was certainly not euphoric (he would say years afterward that he was not without doubts, he knew it would not be easy). But his own doubts were reconciled when he was in those meetings; then they were never evident, and he was brilliant and forceful at obliterating others. In those days after Hawaii, Ball would argue that this step opened the door, that they had been, in his words, at the threshold and they were on their way to crossing it. Soon they would lose control, he said; soon we would be sending 200,000 to 250,000 men there. Then they would tear into him, McNamara the leader: It’s dirty pool; for Christ’s sake, George, we’re not talking about anything like that, no one’s talking about that many people, we’re talking about a dozen, maybe a few more maneuver battalions. McNamara was a ferocious infighter, statistics and force ratios came pouring out of him like a great uncapped faucet. He had total control of his facts and he was quick and nimble with them; there was never a man better with numbers, he could characterize enemy strength and movement and do it statistically.

  Poor George had no counterfigures; he would talk in vague doubts, lacking these figures, and leave the meetings occasionally depressed and annoyed. Why did McNamara have such good figures? Why did McNamara have such good staff work and Ball such poor staff work? The next day Ball would angrily dispatch his staff to come up with figures, to find out how McNamara had gotten them, and the staff would burrow away and occasionally find that one of the reasons that Ball did not have comparable figures was that they did not always exist. McNamara had invented them, he dissembled even within the bureaucracy, though, of course, always for a good cause. It was part of his sense of service. He believed in what he did, and thus the morality of it was assured, and everything else fell into place. It was all right to lie and dissemble for the right causes. It was part of service, loyalty to the President, not to the nation, not to colleagues, it was a very special bureaucratic-corporate definition of integrity; you could do almost anything you wanted as long as it served your superior.

  If they were at the threshold, the crossing would come sooner than any of them thought. The Vietcong had passed the winter resting, building up their forces, expanding their logistical base to go with their bigger, more formidable units. In early May the Vietcong began their spring offensive. They struck the capital of Phuoc Long province in regimental strength. It was a ferocious, audacious attack; in addition to the sheer bravery and intensity which had marked the Vietcong in the past, there was now an added element of the size of the units. In the past the Vietco
ng had usually been outnumbered and outgunned by the ARVN and had usually won simply because its units were better led and better motivated. Now, in addition to being better units man for man, they were turning out to have units as large and as well armed, the weapons they had captured in 1962­1964 were finally being used. The ARVN was no match for them. The Vietcong overran the town, held it for a day and then retreated. The message was ominous: if they could strike here this openly and with this force, they could do it elsewhere in the country. And they soon did.

  To Westmoreland and Depuy, who were already convinced of the basic weakness of the ARVN and of the Vietcong capacity, it was clear that the ARVN would not be able to hold the line. The big beefed-up Vietcong battalions and regiments were a formidable infantry force, fighting on their terrain, in a type of war they had virtually invented, and in which they set the rules. (Years later Westmoreland would describe this particular time as the point at which the Vietcong had won the war, but neither side realized it.) Now they were knocking off ARVN battalions with lightning speed, and the results were always the same, the destruction of the ARVN units. What was more ominous for Westmoreland was that this systematic destruction of the ARVN was taking place without the Vietcong using anywhere near its full potential (in early June, after a series of major ARVN defeats, the Vietcong had used only two of its nine regiments in any serious form). What was perhaps even more dangerous was that elements of one North Vietnamese division, the 325th, had clearly entered the country and were poised (but still unused) in the Kontum area, while elements of the 304th were also suspected of being in the northern regions of the South. It looked as if the enemy was moving in for the kill.

  In May, Westmoreland’s cables became increasingly forceful and pessimistic, warning that the situation was very bad, that the ARVN simply could not hold the line, and warning of the danger of the Vietcong cutting the country in half, something that had long worried the American command, though it was, in fact, a fairly thin threat, since the Vietcong did not hold terrain. No single cable from Westmoreland jarred Washington; rather it was like a gathering cloud, warning Washington that things were going poorly, that Saigon’s worst fears were being confirmed. Then at the end of May the Vietcong ambushed an ARVN regiment near Quang Ngai; the ARVN rushed reinforcements to the scene, and these were, in the tradition of this war, also ambushed, a favorite tactic of the other side. The battle lasted for several days; the ARVN force was badly mauled, two battalions completely destroyed, and ARVN commanders showed fear in the face of the enemy.

  A few days later, on June 7, Westmoreland asked for a major American troop commitment, and for freedom to use the troops as he saw fit. He was asking for immediate U.S. reinforcements totaling thirty-five battalions; in addition, he named nine other battalions that he might soon want. This became known within the bureaucracy as Westmoreland’s forty-four-battalion request. His request was endorsed by Admiral Sharp at CINCPAC, and the feeling in Washington appeared to be immediately favorable. Four days after he made the request, Westmoreland was told by the Chiefs that the President was close to approving most of what he wanted. Then on June 17 Taylor also signed on; he told Washington that the situation in Saigon was every bit as serious as Westmoreland was claiming, which removed the last real restraint. Only tactical reservations had held them back, in particular Taylor’s feeling that things weren’t that bad, but now there was a consensus. Everyone was lining up behind the U.S. troops, including the most influential civilian-military official. They had in fact made decision after decision in the last few months slipping into the combat troop commitment; they had closed off the only real alternative, which was negotiation from a position of weakness. Now they were crossing the Rubicon. The Westmoreland package would take them to 200,000, and it would be open-ended. There was of course some hope that the 200,000 might do it. The President hoped so.

  On June 22 General Wheeler, at the President’s request, cabled Westmoreland asking him if the forty-four battalions would be enough to convince the other side that it could not win. Westmoreland, always a good deal more cautious about the job ahead than the civilians, said that he did not think anything would affect the Hanoi-Vietcong position in the next six months, but that this would establish a favorable balance of power by the end of the year, and thus reverse the then favorable Vietcong balance. For the United States to take the initiative, he added, further forces would be needed in 1966, and beyond that. What he was saying was not that different from what George Ball was saying: it was getting big and it might get bigger. For almost immediately after Westmoreland’s request, Ball made his last pitch. He knew now that he had in effect lost: he was now trying to fight a delaying action. Instead of our going to 200,000 as recommended, he wanted to hold the line at 100,000, with an understanding that this was the ceiling, and to use the troops for a three-month trial period. But he knew he was on the defensive, that he was taking what were by now compromised positions. Nonetheless, he again warned that we were underestimating the enemy and his endurance. A half-million Americans would not do the job, he warned; rather, the enemy would simply match our level of violence. As for optimism by generals, the French generals had always exuded optimism, and it had done them no good. But it was all getting out of control now, and Ball knew it.

  The issues were no longer whether to send combat troops, or essentially what mission they would be employed in (Westmoreland was asking for freedom to maneuver them as he chose, and being a commander, that would almost automatically be his prerogative). At this point the issues were whether or not to go on a wartime footing (as the Chiefs wanted), to call up the reserves, to bring the war openly into the budget on special financing, and thus in an open and honest way let the public know what was ahead. In particular the question of the reserves was one which dominated the decisions in late June and July. But in any real sense the question of combat troops on the mainland of Asia had already been answered. They had inched their way across the Rubicon without even admitting it. The job of their public spokesmen had been to avoid clarifying the changes in the policy, to misinform the public rather than inform it.

  The last days of May and the early days of June were not a time that George Reedy would later recall with very great pleasure. They were in fact a nightmare for him. He was Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary and he was caught between growing pressure from the White House correspondents to find out what was going on about Vietnam, a sense that the rules were changing, and an almost total blackout on the subject by Johnson and an almost neurotic desire by the President to keep it that way, for of course, given the nature of Johnson, the more things changed and the worse they got, the less he wanted written about them. Reedy was in fact caught directly between the clash of those two most distinct and separate forces at work in the Johnson Administration, the private men making secret decisions on Vietnam as though they were part of a closed society, and the traditional open American society, represented by the American press. The result was a constant horror for Reedy, a daily humiliation for a very sensitive man from which he would not easily recover. Each day the reporters would surge forward, not unlike picadors in a bullfight, with their prickly questions on Vietnam, and each day Reedy would try to turn them aside, and each day there would be a little more blood, primarily Reedy’s, on the White House press-room floor. Reedy, a former wire-service man, a thoughtful man (who would later write one of the era’s most reflective books on the Presidency), had prided himself on his candor. Now he watched his own reputation for honesty diminish daily. If being assaulted by twenty reporters each day was not sufficient torture, there was more: Lyndon Johnson was beating on him too, Johnson was blaming Reedy for each negative story in the press which hinted at the imperfections of Vietnam. Why couldn’t Reedy be like Pierre Salinger? Pierre got Kennedy good positive stories (Johnson forgetting his own anger with Pierre when he failed to get a Kennedy-style press for Johnson). Why couldn’t Reedy be a creative press officer? To make sure that Reedy might not be too creati
ve, however, Johnson deliberately kept him as far as possible from any meetings and any information on Vietnam. Those were orders; neither he nor any member of his staff was to know about Vietnam. If he did not know, he could not leak, and thus he could truthfully stand before the reporters and say he knew nothing. Vietnam was a military operation, and if there was any news it would come from Arthur Sylvester at the Pentagon (who of course was under orders to say nothing). The White House reporters, playing that particularly savage game, knowing that Reedy had no access to power, treated him accordingly with mounting disrespect. He was becoming something of a joke to them, and they wrote that he was on his way to becoming the greatest “No comment” press secretary in White House history. His job seemed increasingly to be a dartboard for an angry and irritable press.

  At the State Department, similar scenes were unfolding day after day. In particular, a struggle of remarkable proportions was taking place between John Finney of the New York Times and Robert McCloskey, the State Department briefing officer. Finney was not particularly well known outside his profession, but within it he has a flawless and enviable reputation; he is the very model of what a reporter ought to be. Before covering the State Department, he was the Times’s man on science, almost a pioneer journalist covering the relationship between politics and science; to both that assignment and his subsequent covering of State he brought a kind of relentless intelligence and integrity, and he was, above all, dogged. Now in late May, with the arrival of the Marines in Vietnam, he began to question their mission, he was old enough, he would say later, to know that if the Marines were there, sooner or later they were going to fight. His antagonist was his friend McCloskey, who was a special favorite of the men who covered State. He had a reputation for being straight, honest and professional, and many reporters considered him the best briefing officer in Washington. His credibility with reporters was very high because he had a reputation for working hard to give accurate information on State Department policy, whether good policy or bad.