The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  One thing in Rostow’s favor was his enthusiasm for the war. At a time when many others were becoming increasingly uneasy about the course of American policies in Vietnam, Rostow was quite the reverse; he did not see failure, he saw inevitable victory and believed himself a prophet of events. So Rostow was a good man to have in a White House under attack—he would not turn tail, he would hunker down with the best of them. Which was precisely why a good many of his colleagues from Washington and Cambridge began a quiet, discreet campaign, not so much for the other candidates as against Rostow. As Jack Kennedy had once said somewhat ruefully of Rostow: Walt had ten ideas, nine of which would lead to disaster, but one of them was worth having. So it was important, the President added, to have a filter between Rostow and the President. Now it looked like he would be right next to the President. Phone calls were made, doubts about him expressed, enthusiasm for others emphasized. But it did not work against Rostow; if anything, it enhanced his chances and increased his attractiveness. If some of the Kennedy insiders were against him, this was not necessarily a demerit; if Rostow was a little outside the Kennedy circle, his loyalty more likely to be first and foremost to Lyndon Johnson, then so much the better. When Rostow got the job, Johnson told one Kennedy intimate, “I’m getting Walt Rostow as my intellectual. He’s not your intellectual. He’s not Bundy’s intellectual. He’s not Galbraith’s intellectual. He’s not Schlesinger’s intellectual. He’s going to be my goddamn intellectual and I’m going to have him by the short hairs.”

  So it was that Walt Rostow moved to the White House and for the second time became a major figure on Vietnam. In the past he had been an advocate and an enthusiast of the war, but he had not been taken altogether seriously; his ideas on the bombing were adapted only when there was nowhere else to go. Now he was to move into an important role, the man who was the Special Adviser to the President on National Security, who screened what the President heard and whom he saw, and who gave a special tonal quality to incoming information, an emphasis here and a de-emphasis there, the last man to talk to the judge after all the other lawyers had left the courtroom each day. Whereas Bundy had been careful not to emphasize his own feelings, Rostow had fewer reservations on many issues, particularly Vietnam. It was not deliberate, and indeed much of it was unconscious; he was a believer and a supporter and his enthusiasm showed through. To a President coming increasingly under attack, he was strong and supportive, someone whose own enthusiasm never wavered, who could always find the positive point in the darkest of days. Thus as the policy came under increasing challenge in 1966 and 1967 Rostow helped hold the line; as the President became increasingly isolated, Rostow isolated him more. He was firm and steadfast, and helped load the dice in 1966 and 1967 and 1968 against members of the inner circle having their own doubts. To a Johnson isolated and under attack, Rostow was, said one of his aides, “like Rasputin to a tsar under siege.”

  In a way George Ball had been counting on the 1966 off-year elections to help him make his case and turn back the American commitment. By mid-1965 he realized he had lost the first part of his battle; from then on he changed tactics. He moved to a fall-back position—to limit the involvement, to hold the line as much as possible, to keep the United States from any miscalculation which would bring in the Chinese. The latter tactic proved particularly effective with Rusk, but it also hurt Ball in the long run; some of his warnings about Chinese entry (that prolonged bombing of the North would lead to war with Peking in six to nine months) proved false. He was opposing the war, yet kept his legitimacy inside, and he was playing what was essentially a delicate game. He wanted to dissent on the war without provoking emotional resentment on the part of the President or on the part of Rusk. Yet he wanted to make his opposition clear enough to the President, so that if Johnson needed to change Cabinet officers after the midterm election, Ball would be the clear choice. To George Ball, good policies and good politics went together.

  He thought that the signs of the war as a major miscalculation would be obvious by mid-1966, and that it would be self-evident that we were bogged down there. Thus the President, in order to prepare himself for the 1968 elections, would have to cut back on Vietnam and rid himself of its architects, which would mean the likely promotion of Ball. He told friends that he thought the President might lose between forty and fifty seats in the 1966 election, largely because of Vietnam. If this happened he would have to react politically. On this judgment Ball was premature, and curiously enough, like Rusk, he was guilty for the first time of using Korea as his precedent. In Korea the stalemate quality of the war had been visible early; but Vietnam was not like other wars, and the kind of frustration which a war of attrition would produce was not yet evident. In the fall of 1966 American troops were still arriving, it did not yet seem like a war where half a million Americans would be involved unsuccessfully, and there was still a general confidence that the war was winnable, a willingness to accept the prophecies offered from Saigon and Washington. The real malaise which the war was to produce was still a year off. The Administration’s credibility—that is, its version of the war—had not yet been shattered. Johnson’s capacity to slice the salami so thin had worked, but the victim in a way would be Johnson; for this premature success, this absence of political reaction, gave him the impression that he could deal with doves, that the population, caught in a war, would rally to the side of its President. The people of the United States were giving the President of the United States the wrong signal because the President had given the people the wrong signal. Someone with a sense of what was coming in Vietnam, a higher level of violence and then a higher stalemate, might have predicted the dilemma for Lyndon Johnson in 1968; but for the moment the war was a hidden issue. (One politician did correctly see the future, and that was Richard Nixon. Campaigning for the Republicans in 1966, he told reporters that there was a very good chance Johnson was impaled by the war, and if so he would be extremely vulnerable in 1968, and his own party would turn on him. So Nixon saw a chance for his own political resuscitation. Knowing that the party did not want to go to its right wing after the Goldwater debacle and that the liberal wing had vulnerable candidates, Nixon busied himself in 1966 speaking all over the country for Republican congressional candidates, building up due bills among them and among local Republican chairmen, due bills which he intended to cash in during 1968 in what struck him as what would be a less than futile run against Lyndon Johnson.) But the 1966 election results did not show any resentment against the war and Ball’s dissent was premature; whether, in fact, it might have changed Johnson, even if there had been evidence of dwindling public support, is debatable. Perhaps even with the loss of forty seats, Johnson might have hunkered down just a bit more.

  So Ball eventually slipped out of the Administration in September 30, 1966, to be replaced by Nicholas Katzenbach (a typical Johnson move; Johnson wanted Katzenbach out of Justice so he could place Ramsey Clark there, and by moving Katzenbach to the number-two job at State, he was hopefully tying up Robert Kennedy just a little bit more. Thus when in 1967 Robert Kennedy came back from Paris, having possibly heard of a peace feeler there, Johnson could tell Kennedy, critical of State, that it was Kennedy’s State Department). Later after Ball left, friends like Galbraith and Schlesinger talked with him about resigning, using his departure as something of a protest against the policies and the direction. But Ball shrugged it off; a resignation would be a gesture of singular futility in this case, he said, particularly with this President. It would mean a one-day splash in the newspapers, one headline perhaps, and then business as usual, with the President just a little more antagonistic than before to their common viewpoint.

  Of the original architects, only one man was undergoing great change, and yet continued to stay in the government to fight for his newer definition of reality—though in a deeply compromised way—and that was Robert McNamara (Bundy had some doubts and from time to time he would pass messages to the President, but his role was in no way comparable
to that of McNamara). In a way McNamara was better prepared for the new darkness, since John McNaughton had been preparing him for more than a year on the likelihood of the North Vietnamese responding and stalemating the Americans. The NVA build-up in the South had proven to McNamara, first, that the other side would respond despite the pressure of bombing, and second, that the bombing was hardly an effective way of stopping infiltration. So by March 1966 he was in touch with a group of Cambridge scientists and intellectuals who were trying to design an electronic barrier for Vietnam as a means of stopping infiltration. The link between the Cambridge people and McNamara was Adrian Fisher, a Harvard Law School professor and a close friend of McNaughton’s, and the scientists working on the barrier included men like Jerome Wiesner and George Kistiakowsky. The ostensible reason was to stop supplies from coming into the South, but the real reason was to take the rationale for bombing away from the military. McNamara discussed the proposal with the scientists, trying to find out what they would need for specifications and to develop plans for it. Between $300,000 and $500,000, they answered. “All right,” he said, “go ahead, but remember one thing. We’re talking in very specific terms. This is to stop infiltration, not the bombing. I don’t want any talk about bombing.” Which they understood, of course, and which the Joint Chiefs understood as well, and they had very little enthusiasm, estimating that the construction and defense of such a barrier would require seven or eight divisions. So they dragged their feet, and they kept putting the price up, until in one classic confrontation McNamara, the same McNamara who was always after the Chiefs to cut costs, to save money, exploded and said, “Get on with it, for God’s sakes, it’s only money!”

  So McNamara, too, was caught in a trap of his own making. Even as he was feeding men and matériel into the pipe lines, he doubted more and more their effectiveness, and he was becoming in effect a critic of his own role. If he had had doubts about the bombing by January 1966, they would grow even more during the next few months in the controversy over the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong’s petroleum reserves and oil-storage facilities. The Chiefs, increasingly frustrated with the limits placed on them by the civilians, had been pushing for these targets for some time, and wanted them included in the May bombing lists. Now they had a new and powerful advocate within the White House in Rostow, who not only believed in bombing but had a particular affection for the bombing of electric grids and petroleum resources. Rostow argued that the bombing of petroleum storage had sharply affected the German war machine in World War II (a dubious proposition according to other students of the bombing): “With an understanding that simple analogies are dangerous, I nevertheless feel it is quite possible the military effects of a systematic and sustained bombing of POL [petroleum, oil and lubricants] in North Vietnam may be more prompt and direct than conventional intelligence analysis would suggest. . . .” Rostow was right that the intelligence community would not understand the real effectiveness and significance of hitting POL; the CIA estimated in early June that bombing POL would have little effect.

  Despite this the President gave the okay, and on June 29 the strikes were launched. At first it appeared that the raids were extraordinarily successful, with all of the Hanoi storage and 80 percent of the Haiphong facility destroyed. McNamara had gone along with the POL raids; it was the last major escalation that he recommended. What became clear in the months that followed was that the air campaign against POL, although seemingly successful, had, like the previous bombing campaigns, failed. The North Vietnamese had learned to adjust to American power, and dispersed their reserves to areas invulnerable to American attack. So at an extremely high cost in American men and planes, we destroyed the surface storage while the North Vietnamese were able to pressure the Soviets into larger and larger petroleum commitments. For McNamara, it helped seal his doubts; he later criticized the Air Force and the Navy for the gap between the optimistic estimates of what the raids could do and what the actual results were. It meant that he would push harder and harder for the barrier, and that he would begin to work to limit bombing. In effect from then on, and particularly in the fall of 1966, he was something of a dissenter, but a dissenter operating under considerable limits. For one thing, Rusk was not given to the same doubts, and thus the Secretary of State was to the right of him. In addition, if he was fighting from within, he was accepting the assumptions of his opponents, fighting them on a tactical level, not on a deeper one; this made him particularly vulnerable to the counterproposals of Westmoreland and the Chiefs. He began to give up combat troops to hold down on the bombings, dissembling to a degree within the bureaucracy so it would not be too obvious within the government that he was a dove. As such, his half measures always failed.

  In October 1966, with the military asking for troop increases which would bring the American commitment to a minimum of 570,000, McNamara went to Saigon again. This time his sense of pessimism was very real; he was convinced that the other side would match us, that in effect Hanoi was now waging its own special kind of attrition, psychological attrition, against us, slowing down the pace of the war slightly, believing that time was on their side. He was affected considerably by reports by one of his own people there, Daniel Ellsberg, whose own gloom was growing and who told McNamara that most of the official optimism was false. On the way back to Washington McNamara talked with aides about the developments, and he seemed very down: things were, he said, worse than a year before. With him was Robert Komer, once the White House aide who had been sent to Vietnam by Johnson to head pacification, a man constantly enthusiastic and upbeat (Komer was liked by journalists, who were amused by his constant optimism. “Do you really believe all that stuff you put out and send back to Washington?” one reporter asked him. “The difference between you and me,” he explained, a lovely insight into the semantics of Saigon, “is that I was sent out here to report on the progress in the war”). Komer disagreed with McNamara and insisted that the war was certainly no worse than a year before. McNamara asked Ellsberg whether it was better or worse than a year before. “Pretty much the same,” Ellsberg answered.

  “You see,” said Komer, “at least it’s no worse.”

  “But it is worse,” insisted McNamara, “because if things are the same, then they’re worse, because we’ve invested so much more of our resources.” (On that same plane ride McNamara asked Ellsberg for an extra copy of his report, entitled “Visit to an Insecure Province,” and then asked him, in the interests of not straining civilian-military relationships, if he would mind not showing it to General Earle Wheeler.)

  McNamara began to be increasingly appalled by the war itself, what we were doing with our power, the pain inflicted on the civilians. He paid particular attention to stories about the destruction caused by the bombing. When Harrison Salisbury of the Times visited Hanoi at the end of 1966, his articles were violently attacked by the Administration, particularly Defense Department spokesmen, but McNamara was fascinated by them and followed them closely. He and Robert Kennedy had remained close friends and in 1966 they began to feed each other’s dissent, McNamara confirming to Kennedy that the war was not going well, Kennedy confirming McNamara’s impressions of what the war was doing to this country. He was an intriguing man in this period; almost as if there were a split personality caught between two loyalties, and more, caught between two eras. In those days he could still be part of the planning of the bombing, but be a very different man in the evening, going to dinner parties, raising a glass to someone like Moyers with the toast “Bless the doves—we need more of them.” He was able to head the war machine, give the Montreal speech, and then regret giving it. It was as if there were a Kennedy-McNamara who said one thing to Kennedy-type people, and a Johnson-McNamara who said another to Johnson-type people. He was able to come back in October 1966 and report to Johnson that things did not look good in Vietnam (“I see no reasonable way to bring the war to an end soon”), commenting on how tough and resilient the enemy was, and then conclude that the United State
s should press on harder militarily and get into a better military position which would make a war of long duration less attractive to the enemy. The word swept through Washington about his unhappiness; some thought he was being disloyal to Johnson, others began to think he was coming apart. In late 1966 he ran into Emmet Hughes of Newsweek, who had just written a hand-wringing piece on Vietnam, and McNamara was very sympathetic about the piece, it certainly wasn’t a good situation, was it? “I never thought it would go on like this. I didn’t think these people had the capacity to fight this way. If I had thought they could take this punishment and fight this well, could enjoy fighting like this, I would have thought differently at the start . . .” Washington watched his dilemma, the split personality, with fascination. A brilliant Defense Secretary, went the Washington line, but no taste for being a War Secretary. His whole ethical and moral structure made him at ease in the job at Defense, but when he became a War Secretary his values were threatened and he could not come to terms with his new role. It was, he sometimes said, the system which had produced the war; yet he was one of the men who was supposed to control the system.