The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  In despair and frustration over the war, in 1967 he ordered a massive study of all the papers on Vietnam, going back to the 1940s, a study which became known as the Pentagon Papers. When it was handed in he read parts of it. “You know,” he told a friend, “they could hang people for what’s in there.” His own behavior seemed increasingly erratic as the pressures on him mounted, and close friends worried about his health. In 1967 when there was a possibility of peace negotiations being worked out through the British, Kosygin was in London and a bombing pause had gone into effect. Acting on his talks with the British, Ambassador David Bruce recommended strongly that we not resume the bombing until Kosygin had left London. Bruce pleaded to State that if it valued the alliance at all, it must observe the British request. Rusk, a great chain-of-command man, accepted the Bruce thesis and pushed it. McNamara argued forcefully against it and tore into it at the meetings, but Bruce and Rusk held the day. A few minutes after the last discussion, McNamara was on the phone to Bruce, congratulating him on his victory, how well he had presented his case, and how proud McNamara was of him. At first Bruce was touched by McNamara’s warmth and courtesy, but later he was appalled when he learned that McNamara had been his principal adversary, and the story spread through both American and British diplomatic circles in London.

  If by 1966, and increasingly in 1967, McNamara was beginning to move away from the policy, then Rusk was, if anything, more steadfast than ever. He not only believed in the policy, he had a sense of profound constitutional consequences if the President, already at loggerheads with one of his chief advisers, was separated from the other. If Rusk too dissented, if that gossipy town even thought he was a critic, then in Rusk’s opinion the country would be in a constitutional crisis. There must be no blue sky between the President and the Secretary of State, he told aides. Besides, he believed the war could and should be won. So he became a rock, unflinching and unchanging, and absorbing, as deliberately as he could, as much of the reaction to the war as possible. The abuse he took was enormous; he who had been the least anxious of the principal advisers to become involved but who had never argued against it, now became the public symbol of it, a target of public scorn, his statements mocked, so that he would once say in exasperation that he was not the village idiot; he knew that Ho was not Hitler, but nonetheless, there was an obligation to stand. In a pay phone booth in his own State Department someone in 1967 scratched the graffito: “Dean Rusk is a recorded announcement.” As he became a rock, so his own Department was immobilized; the best people in State, increasingly unhappy about the policy, felt they could make no challenge to it, and that they had become parrots, that and nothing more, and departmental morale sank to a new low.

  For Rusk, the job of the Secretary of State seemed to be to absorb pain. That and nothing more. Though there was much to challenge the military on—particularly the political mindlessness of the attrition strategy—State’s challenges were few, infrequent, mild and usually on minor matters. Occasionally there would be quick flashes of the hurt, as when he talked about the journalists who covered the war—which side were they on, were they for their country or against it? Years later, when the ordeal was over, he would tell friends that he did not know how he had lasted through it—if he had not been able to have that drink at the end of the day he could not have survived. There were moments when he did not conceal the anger and the rage, though they were few. Tom Wicker of the Times was at a dinner party with Rusk at the Algerian embassy one night in 1966 at a time when there had been a Buddhist crisis in Hué, when suddenly Rusk turned to him and started screaming—there was no other word for it: Why can’t the New York Times get things right? Why does it always print lies? Which side is it on? Wicker, whose own relations with Rusk had always been pleasant, was stunned by the anger and ferocity of the attack, and it was minutes before he could even understand what Rusk was talking about—a report in the Times that day saying that Buddhist dissidents had taken over the Hué radio station. Rusk had read the story and had been so upset by it that he had personally called the American consulate in Hué, where of course the American officials had denied the report, and on the basis of this he had proceeded to lecture Wicker on the perfidy of American journalism. The entire episode, particularly the sudden savagery of Rusk’s attack—after all, it is not fun to be assaulted by the Secretary of State of the United States of America over coffee and cognac—stayed with Wicker, and six months later when he was in Vietnam he dropped by the American consulate in Hué and asked a young man on the staff there about the Buddhist crisis. Oh yes, said the young man, the Buddhists had captured the radio station, and Wicker, thinking of Rusk and his obvious sincerity, had decided then that the real problem was that they had created an elaborate machine to lie to them, only to become prisoners of their own lies.

  But generally Rusk bore the brunt of it well. He did not complain. He was a proud man and at times it seemed as if he took sustenance from the criticism. In the great clubs of New York and Washington his old friends, his sponsors, men like Lovett and McCloy, were worried about Dean being the target of all the nation’s anger. One day McCloy stopped Lovett and said that he wished Dean would fight back, answer his critics or yell for help—they would like to get in the fight and help him. But Lovett, who knew Rusk well, said that Dean would never do that, he was too proud. Yet proud or not, at the end the taste, which should have been so good—eight years at the job that he and every other serious young man coveted—was sour, and he was exhausted financially, physically and spiritually. At the small farewell party for him given by some State Department reporters, the atmosphere was suitably pleasant; these men who had covered Rusk for that long recognized in him qualities of grace, decency and modesty which were not always obvious from a distance. And Rusk, who had always held together so well, finally broke. He went over to British correspondent Louis Heren and asked why the British had not sent any troops to Vietnam. Rusk knew of course well enough, as they had all known from the start, that this was a war that no one else had wanted, that except for a genuine effort by the Australians and a semimercenary effort by the Koreans, it was virtually a unilateral war. As gently as possible, Heren began to stumble through the usual rationalizations when Rusk, whose own allegiance, whose own lessons of mutual security were derived from England, suddenly cut him off. “All we needed was one regiment. The Black Watch would have done. Just one regiment, but you wouldn’t. Well, don’t expect us to save you again. They can invade Sussex and we wouldn’t do a damn thing about it.”

  Many of the people around Lyndon Johnson and many of the people at State had been relatively pleased when Walt Rostow replaced McGeorge Bundy. In contrast to Bundy’s cold, haughty style, Rostow was warm, pleasant, humble, almost angelic, eager to share his enthusiasm, his optimism, with all around. He had time for everyone, he was polite to everyone, there was no element of put-down to him. The real Johnson loyalists were particularly pleased because they had not liked the Bundy-Johnson relationship, and here was Rostow, bearing the same credentials as Bundy, with far more serious books to his credit, a man far more pleasant to work with, and who was joyously, unabashedly pro-Johnson. It was not fake enthusiasm, it was genuine; Johnson had rescued Rostow from the Siberia of Policy Planning, and Rostow was properly grateful, but more important, Rostow genuinely admired Lyndon Johnson. They saw eye to eye on both domestic and foreign affairs, and Rostow thought Johnson the smartest, toughest man he had ever dealt with. As for Johnson, if he had liked about Bill Bundy his willingness to run it in up to the hilt, then Rostow was a man after his own heart.

  But the enthusiasm of others for Rostow soon floundered on Rostow’s own enthusiasm. He became the President’s national security adviser at a time when criticism and opposition to the war were beginning to crystallize, and he eventually served the purpose of shielding the President from criticism and from reality. He deflected others’ pessimism and rewarded those who were optimistic. It was not contrived, it was the way he was. Perhaps, too,
it was a symptom of the war: a President in a hopeless war did not need, could not accept a chief adviser wringing his hands, an adviser who seemed to reflect the gathering doubts. Maybe the job required a positive thinker. There was no more positive thinker in Washington than Walt Whitman Rostow.

  His optimism was almost a physiological thing, organically part of him. He always believed in the war and in particular in the bombing. He believed early in what the bombing would do, that it was something quick and dramatic and that the other side would have to give in. Year after year, as the failure of the bombing became apparent, it did not faze him; just a little more bombing. And enthusiastic himself, he was anxious to pass on his enthusiasm. He headed the Psychological Strategy Committee, which met at the White House to think of psy war, a strategy which, it turned out, would be largely aimed at the American people. If any of the incoming reports indicated any kind of progress, Rostow immediately authorized a leak. Business Week got computer data charts of attacks by Vietcong (if they were down); the Christian Science Monitor got computerized population-control data from the Hamlet Evaluation Survey; the Los Angeles Times received data on the searches of junks and hamlets secured. He could always see the bright side of any situation, and in that sense he became legend. In the thousands of items flooding in from Saigon as part of the information glut he could find the few positive ones, pounce on them and bring them to his boss, as for instance one morning in 1967 when he told the President that never had the Boy Scouts of Vietnam gone out to clean up the rubble as they had just done in Danang. He made his predictions and nothing bothered him. He could grab Dan Ellsberg in July 1965 and excitedly pass on the news about the bombing (which to most experts in the CIA had already proven itself a failure): “Dan, it looks very good. The Vietcong are going to collapse within weeks. Not months but weeks. What we hear is that they’re already coming apart under the bombing.” They did not come apart in a few weeks, but neither did Rostow, and Ellsberg went off to Vietnam, where for two years he became something of an authority on the failure of the Vietcong to collapse. Two years later, tired, depressed, and thoroughly pessimistic about the lost cause in Vietnam, he returned to Washington, where he found Rostow just as upbeat as ever.

  “Dan,” said Rostow, “it looks very good. The other side is near collapse. In my opinion, victory is very near.”

  Ellsberg, sick at heart with this very kind of high-level optimism which contrasted with everything he had seen in the field, turned away from Rostow, saying he just did not want to talk about it.

  “No,” said Rostow, “you don’t understand. Victory is very near. I’ll show you the charts. The charts are very good.”

  “Walt,” said Ellsberg, “I don’t want to hear it. Victory is not near. Victory is very far away. I’ve just come back from Vietnam. I’ve been there for two years. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to see any charts . . .”

  “But, Dan, the charts are very good . . .”

  He had a great capacity not to see what he did not choose to see; in Washington at a dinner given for Everett Martin, a distinguished Newsweek reporter expelled from Vietnam for the pessimism of his reporting in late 1967, Rostow managed to pass the entire evening without ever acknowledging that Martin had been in Vietnam. Within the bureaucracy the word went out among those who briefed him that if they wanted to get his attention they had to bait their news with sugar, get the positive information in first, and then before he could turn off, quickly slip in the darker evidence. (Once in 1967 after a somewhat pessimistic briefing by John Vann, Rostow, slightly shaken, said, “But you do admit that it’ll all be over in six months.” “Oh,” said Vann somewhat airily, “I think we can hold out longer than that.”)

  With the White House under siege, with increasing evidence that the American military commitment to Vietnam had been stalemated, Rostow fought back; in the White House basements, aides culled through the reams of information coming in from Saigon and picked the items which they knew Rostow was following, particularly the good ones. They would send this up to Rostow, and he would package it and pass it on to the President, usually with covering notes which said things such as—this would give confirmation to the statement which the President had so wisely made to the congressional leadership the day before. The notes were similar—there were little touches of flattery: The record of your success indicates . . . Your place in history will bring you . . . The theme was the greatness of the cause and the immortality of Lyndon Johnson. Later, as McNamara’s doubts became more evident, there would be references to the need to stop McNamara’s wickedness, and when Clark Clifford replaced McNamara and began to fight the policy, there were verbal references to the need to “combat Cliffordism.”

  He fought evidence which was contrary. He encouraged George Carver, the CIA man who was assigned to brief the White House, to be more optimistic, and by 1967 there was a major split within the CIA. Most of the pure intelligence analysts were much more gloomy than Carver (in fact, in savvy Washington circles it was said that there were two CIAs: a George Carver CIA, which was the CIA at the top, generally optimistic in its reporting to Rostow; and the rest of the CIA, which was far more pessimistic). Rostow himself, drawing on his experience as a World War II intelligence officer, was not above reanalyzing and challenging some CIA reports and somehow making them, upon revision, more optimistic than they had been. He fought elements of the government which he considered unworthy and disloyal. When officers at State put out a weekly summary called the “Evening Reading Items,” a one-page sheet which attempted to show how American moves in Vietnam looked to Hanoi (showing in effect that we were more aggressive than we thought we were and reflecting Hanoi’s determination to keep coming), Rostow was appalled. He hated the sheet and got into bitter conflicts with State over its right even to publish it. It’s very pessimistic, he would argue, and it’s all supposition. All supposition. Nothing hard in it. But the State Department people argued back that the President had to see it, we had to know how we looked to the other side.

  He also played a form of gamesmanship with Rusk and McNamara, particularly McNamara. He would pore over the voluminous amount of incoming military information, make his selections, and come up with one or two positive pieces of news. Then he would call Rusk and McNamara, very cheerful, very upbeat: Have you seen the new captured documents? They’re terrific! Have you seen the stuff about the battle at An Xuyen? Great victory. A civil guard company stood off a VC regiment. The body count in Chau Doc is marvelous! . . . It was always minuscule stuff in a broad vast war with hundreds of other items far more pessimistic, but it kept McNamara and Rusk busy wasting long hours culling the material themselves so they would be prepared for his calls. Thus valuable time was wasted and the great men of the government went through material checking out platoon ambushes lest they be ambushed themselves. And Lyndon Johnson, already isolated because of the war and because of his office, was kept even more remote.

  By the nature of his office, a President is separated from his natural constituency and from the art of his profession, politics. The office restricts his movements, his access to events and reality, since few want to bring the President bad news. If a politician is a senator, a friend can sometimes tell him the honest truth in a gentle manner. If he is a President there is no such equality, no way of gently and honestly bearing bad tidings. Respect for the office demands that bad news be filtered down. At first Johnson was isolated involuntarily by the nature of the job, but then as the war progressed, the isolation became voluntary. He saw enemies everywhere. He became a figure of scorn. A scurrilous play, MacBird, was written about him and enjoyed remarkable critical success. He became a cartoonists’ delight: he bombed Vietnam and wept crocodile tears, and the tears turned out to be maps of Vietnam; he showed his famous abdominal scar and the scar turned out to be a map of Vietnam.

  The liberal intellectual community, crucial to the success of a Democratic liberal President, was turning on him. The first signs had come in 196
5 when he gave a major Festival of the Arts—what he hoped would be an intellectual ratification of his great electoral triumph. Instead it turned out to be an intellectual rejection of his Vietnam policies. Some of the writers and artists invited wanted to boycott, others wanted to come and picket and read protests. “Half of those people,” Johnson said, “are trying to insult me by staying away and half of them are trying to insult me by coming.” But the art festival was the beginning: rather than crowning his legislative victories, it symbolized the intellectual community’s rejection of the war. More radical voices, fueled by the war, came to prominence, and in so doing, moved the traditional liberal intellectual center over to the left. The liberals had to move to the radical position on the war or lose influence. The Fulbright hearings came in early 1966, and further legitimized opposition; gradually opposition became increasingly centrist and respectable. Opposition mounted on the campuses; Norman Mailer in 1966 could dedicate a book of essays to Lyndon Johnson with gratitude for having made young Americans cheer at the mention of Mailer’s name.

  With liberal pressure mounting, with Robert Kennedy making the first uneasy gestures toward opposition, Johnson turned ever more inward. He dared not venture out; isolation begot isolation. When in mid-1967 he decided to defend his policies, the site and the group he chose was significant—the annual Junior Chamber of Commerce meeting. If a liberal Democratic President, needing a friendly and respectful audience, had to choose the Jaycees, then he was in trouble (as was his protégé Hubert Humphrey; Mrs. Humphrey, questioned about antagonism of American youth to her husband in 1968, answered that it was not true that the Vice-President was not keeping up with youth—the Humphreys, she said, kept in touch with many of the Jaycees). Someone like Martin Luther King, Jr., could not be a friend on civil rights and a critic on the war; he became in effect an enemy, he had to be kept away. (Of course the price for those who stayed friendly to Johnson was quite considerable, it moved them increasingly away from their own people and their own constituencies. At one Negro meeting in March 1967, Whitney Young of the Urban League defended the war and ended up in a bitter confrontation with Dr. King; Young told King that his criticism of the war was unwise, it would antagonize the President and they wouldn’t get anything from him. King, genuinely angry, told him, “Whitney, what you’re saying may get you a foundation grant, but it won’t get you into the kingdom of truth.”)