The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  Yet for all the optimism of men like Bunker and Westmoreland, talk of stalemate, of the war being unwinnable, continued to appear, driving the President into spirals of rage. What was all this goddamn talk about stalemate? What stalemate? What the hell did a bunch of journalists know about war? Yet, curiously, the source was his own military machine. Some of his generals were sick of what was to them the half-hearted quality of the whole thing, the attempt to win on the cheap. General Wallace Greene told some reporters at a background briefing that the war was in fact stalemated in Vietnam, that we needed mobilization and were paying too light a price. We needed to get on with the job. Six hundred thousand men would do it. “In 1964 I told them it would take four hundred thousand men and they all thought I was crazy,” he said. “I was wrong. We needed six hundred thousand men.”

  At almost the same time a young Army officer was sent over to the Pentagon to attend a briefing of the Air Force Chief of Staff, John McConnell. It was the normal daily briefing, and in the figures the substance became clear: great personal risks on the part of American airmen for very small gains. Just like yesterday and the day before. Day after day of risk to make toothpicks on the Ho Chi Minh Trail; no absence of danger but a real absence of targets. This time the frustration showed and McConnell just sat there after the briefing ended, holding his head in his hands, saying, “I can’t tell you how I feel . . . I’m so sick of it . . . I have never been so goddamn frustrated by it all . . . I’m so sick of it . . .”

  If Saigon was headed by men who had no doubts, who exuded confidence, and Washington and the United States were filled with men beginning to turn on the war, then there was only one thing to do: bring Saigon to Washington. In 1967, as a means of generating new enthusiasm for his policies, the President brought Westmoreland and Bunker back to America for major speeches designed to polish up the war’s image and remove those mounting doubts. But the visits had little effect; Westmoreland’s appearances simply inspired more protest, more charges that the President was manipulating the military for political gains. For Bunker and Westmoreland it was perhaps the first glimpse of how serious the President’s domestic problems were. The protests against the war were no longer voiced by some small strident minority; there was a deep and growing frustration of vast segments of American society. But that society had little link to the special world of Saigon, where so many of the decisions which affected American life were now being made. American domestic problems did not matter to the officials in Saigon; the idea that American society might actually turn on the war was alien. So Saigon was the separate organism: upbeat, confident, optimistic. For the New Year’s Eve party at the American embassy, the invitations read: “Come see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

  Whose light at the end of the tunnel? If Lyndon Johnson knew increasingly in his gut that it had all gone wrong, that the other side had not folded, then he had one thing working for him: the other side’s victories were never clear, never tangible. The NVA and the Vietcong were resilient, but their successes never showed; they did not hold terrain, they faded into the night, their strength was never visible. Even the NBC and CBS camera teams, frustrated by the fact that they usually arrived at a battle after the other side had already slipped away, had a title for the film of most battles: “The wily VC got away again.” So if the enemy and his gains were invisible, it was hard for domestic American critics to make the case against the war, to make the case for the success of the enemy. Instead it was the word of General Westmoreland against the word of a bunch of snot-nosed kids.

  The Tet offensive changed all that. For the first time the patience, durability and resilience of the enemy became clear to millions of Americans. In the past, the Vietcong and NVA had always fought in distant jungle or paddy areas, striking quickly and slipping into the night, their toughness rarely brought home to the American people. In the Tet offensive they deliberately changed that. For the first time they fought in the cities, which meant that day after day American newspapermen, and more important, television cameramen, could reflect their ability, above all their failure to collapse according to American timetables. The credibility of the American strategy of attrition died during the Tet offensive; so too did the credibility of the man who was by now Johnson’s most important political ally, General Westmoreland. If Westmoreland’s credibility was gone, then so too was Johnson’s. The Tet offensive had stripped Johnson naked on the war, his credibility and that of his Administration were destroyed. Indeed, Johnson and Rostow made it even easier for Hanoi; almost as soon as the offensive started they moved to combat the full force of a military push with words, a technique which had, after all, worked in the past. The Tet offensive began in earnest on January 31 and it would be felt for weeks; but within two days of its beginning, on February 2, Johnson held a press conference saying that the offensive was a failure, that the Administration had known all about it, in fact the Administration had the full order of Hanoi’s battle. It was demonstrably untrue, and the public was aware of it. Rostow had been warned by aides before the press conference not to do this, not to commit the Administration’s credibility into one more battle, that it might backfire, but he did not listen and the President went ahead. Thus, in the following days as the sheer fury of the offensive mounted, as the frailty of the defenses became more evident, the Administration simply looked more foolish, as evidenced by a February 6 Art Buchwald column, datelined Little Big Horn, Dakota:

  Gen. George Armstrong Custer said today in an exclusive interview with this correspondent that the battle of Little Big Horn had just turned the corner and he could now see the light at the end of the tunnel. “We have the Sioux on the run,” Gen. Custer told me. “Of course we will have some cleaning up to do, but the Redskins are hurting badly and it will only be a matter of time before they give in.”

  So with Johnson’s involuntary co-operation, Hanoi had managed to make the White House look particularly foolish; now the President faced an election year suddenly more vulnerable than ever . . .

  The protection of the President in an election year of course had been an unwritten, unspoken goal among his principal aides. Even Westmoreland, in wanting larger troop commitments, had seen it as a way of expediting the war, and thus helping the President. In Saigon in the fall of 1967 Robert Komer, the chief of pacification, bumptious, audacious, anxious to show everyone in town how close he was to the President (six photographs of Lyndon Johnson on his office wall, a Saigon record), had gone around dinner parties telling reporters that he had assured the President that the war would not be an election issue in 1968. It was not one of his better predictions.

  The President was in fact extremely exposed. The war had become the one issue of his Presidency; it had burned up not just his credibility but his resources as well. He had initiated the Great Society but never really built it; he had been so preoccupied with handling the war that the precious time and energy needed to change the bureaucracy, to apply the almost daily pressure to make the Great Society work, those qualities were simply not forthcoming. As far as the Great Society was concerned he was a father, but finally an absentee father. Nor had he been a very good practicing politician; he had let the Democratic party disintegrate, had not kept in touch with its principal figures, in part because of lack of time, in part because a genuine rapport might have necessitated listening to their growing doubts about the war. So he was isolated from even moderately loyal politicians. Inflation was rampant, and inflation certainly was not easing racial tensions as the country hurtled through racial change. It made vulnerable blue-collar workers feel even more vulnerable, even more resentful of the increasing protest going on around them. Nor was Johnson’s position with blacks solidified; he had pushed more and broader civil rights legislation through the Congress than any President in history, and had endeared himself to a generation of older, middle-class blacks. But that was not a visible thing; what was visible was the potent anger of younger, more militant blacks, restless not only with Johnson’
s leadership, but with their own traditional black leadership, and they were busy linking the peace movement with what had once been the civil rights movement. The country in late 1967 seemed to be more and more in disarray; protest seemed to beget protest. Lyndon Johnson, who above all loved to control events, even little events, had lost control of the country, and he had immobilized himself on the one issue that might allow him to regain it. In 1963 Paul Kattenburg, the young State Department expert on Vietnam, had returned from Saigon to tell Roger Hilsman that Vietnam was poison, and it would poison everything it touched. Now, four and a half years later, the poison was very deep in the bloodstream.

  Part of the frustration and bitterness, of course, was the feeling in the liberal community—the political segment most aggravated and most offended by the war—that it was powerless, that Lyndon Johnson was a liberal Democrat and could not be beaten, that they had no real political alternative. For the mythology lived; one could not unseat the sitting President of his own party. Eventually, however, despite the protests of older liberals (some of whom wanted to fight Johnson only on the platform at the forthcoming convention), younger liberals went looking for a candidate. They had only one choice, they thought, and that was to take the issue to the country and make the challenge to the President within the party. Robert Kennedy was the logical choice, but he was torn by the idea. Part of him wanted to go and was outside the system; part of him was still a traditionalist and believed what his advisers said, that you could not challenge the system. In the end he turned it down. Then they went to George McGovern, who was sympathetic and interested, but he faced a re-election race in South Dakota and that posed a problem. But if no one else would make it, then he told them to come back. So they turned to Gene McCarthy of Minnesota, and he accepted. There comes a time, he told reporters, when an honorable man simply has to raise the flag. “What will you do if elected?” a reporter asked, and borrowing from Eisenhower in 1952, he answered, “I will go to the Pentagon.”

  But if a Robert Kennedy challenge frightened Johnson, one by Gene McCarthy did not; he did not seem a formidable candidate, he had a reputation for being a little lazy. Johnson saw McCarthy enter the race and viewed it as one more way of demonstrating how frail the left really was.

  But even as McCarthy was making his lonely way through the small towns of New Hampshire, General Vo Nguyen Giap was moving his men down the trails for what would be called the Tet offensive. It began on January 31, 1968; day after day as the battle continued it became clear that the optimism from Saigon had been premature, that the enemy was tough and durable, that journalistic critics had been more correct in their estimates about the war than the government spokesmen. The Tet offensive destroyed Westmoreland’s credibility; what crumbled in Saigon now crumbled in Washington and crumbled in New Hampshire. The people of this country were already sick of the war and dubious of the estimates of the government; reading as they did in early March that the generals in Saigon wanted to send an additional 200,000 men, it seemed to symbolize the hopelessness and endlessness of the war. American politics and the war were finally coming together. In New Hampshire, Gene McCarthy took more than 42 percent of the vote, pushed Robert Kennedy into the race, and a race by Kennedy was no longer a joke to the President. It was a serious threat.

  Nor was the President entirely in control of his own house. He had purged McNamara because he was no longer on the team and because he was a walking reminder of failure, but McNamara’s successor, Clark Clifford, was turning out to be even more difficult. Clifford was the prototype of the rich man’s Washington lobbyist, the supersmooth, urbane lawyer who knows where every body is buried, the former high official who works for the government just long enough to know where the weak spots are; to Johnson he seemed a reassuring replacement for the idealistic, tormented McNamara. But Clifford was proving to be a new kind of high official for Lyndon Johnson; whatever else, he was not the corporate man. Instead he had a great sense of his own value, and did not believe that anyone hired Clark Clifford except to gain the full benefit of Clark Clifford’s services. A great lawyer is paid for telling a rich and powerful client the truth, no matter how unpalatable. (The story is told of Clifford’s being called by a company president who explained a complicated problem and then asked for Clifford’s advice. Clifford told him not to say or do anything. Then he sent a bill for $10,000. A few days later the president called back protesting the size of the bill, and also asked why he should keep quiet. “Because I told you to,” Clifford answered and sent him another bill, for an additional $5,000.) He knew that if he went to work for the President he would be making a considerable financial sacrifice, so he fully intended to weigh in with the best of his wisdom, not simply to lend his name to a dying cause for the sake of being congenial. Earlier he had edged away from being the head of CIA under Kennedy and had rejected tentative offers by Johnson to become Attorney General and Undersecretary of State. When he took office at Defense he was already bothered by the growing domestic turbulence over the war and his own feeling that perhaps it was indeed hopeless. Also, he had just finished a tour of Asia for the President during which he and Max Taylor worked to drum up additional troops for the war from Asian allies. Their report at the end of the trip had been properly supportive, but Clifford was bothered by the fact that the other Asian nations showed no great interest in sending additional men. Oh yes, they thought standing in Vietnam was a marvelous idea, and they certainly gave us their blessing, but it just so happened that they had very little in the way of resources. The threatened dominoes, Clifford discovered, did not seem to take the threat as seriously as we did. Since he was a man of compelling common sense, this offended his sense of reality and proportion.

  In addition, he was privy to the forces that McNamara had unleashed at Defense in the last year and a half, the dovishness now prevalent there. John McNaughton was dead, in an airplane crash, but his replacement, Paul Warnke, was a Washington lawyer with no previous experience in foreign affairs, and thus marvelously irreverent and iconoclastic toward all the myths of the period. He was, in fact, a heretic by the era’s standards. (Once asked by a reporter when his own doubts about Vietnam had begun, Warnke said, “At the beginning, in 1961. I could never understand why a smart politician like Jack Kennedy was always talking about being against insurgencies when we should obviously have tried to be for them.”) Warnke was more open in dealing with his subordinates than McNaughton had been, and the young civilian defense intellectuals therefore felt themselves encouraged in their doubts. These were unlikely doves; they were all men who had entered the Defense Department convinced that the world hinged on the great struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. They had been among the most militant Cold Warriors of the period, but now the evidence in the decade was going the other way, and they were for tempering the arms race and limiting the Pentagon’s power. Nor were they professional bureaucrats; most were men with Ph.D.s who could go back to universities and thus did not feel that their careers depended upon subservience to existing myths. So a curious struggle developed as the battle began over the limits of war: State, which was supposed to set the political limits, had no doubts because of Rusk and neither did the military under the Chiefs, and they became allies against the civilians at Defense. (Daniel Ellsberg symbolized the conversion—or reconversion—of the Defense intellectuals, though of course there were others. But Ellsberg seemed to dramatize the great currents of an era. At Harvard he had seemed at first the normal humanist student; serving as president of the literary magazine, more humanist and aesthete than warrior. But he had gone from Harvard to the Marine Corps and had drifted, during the years of the fifties, into the world of defense studies and theories, believing that the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union was the key to the survival of all values. He had ended up in Washington in the Kennedy years, one of the bright stars in John McNaughton’s constellation of young intellectuals, and he had done some of the early planning on the war. I
n 1965 he went on assignment to Vietnam and gradually turned against the war; year by year both his doubts and his outspokenness had grown. In 1969 he publicly criticized President Nixon’s policies on Vietnam, statements which expedited his departure from Rand, and which were picked up in the New York Times. An old friend named John Smail read in the Times of Ellsberg’s statements and wrote asking: “Are you the Dan Ellsberg I used to know in college?” Ellsberg answered back, in what was an epitaph for many in that era, “I haven’t been for a long time, but I am again.”)

  The Defense civilians had in the past year turned up increasing evidence on the futility of our commitment. Studies made by Systems Analysis showed that the bombing did not work, that for much of the war, North Vietnam’s GNP had risen at the prewar rate of 6 percent. If the bombing was failing, so, too, claimed the civilians at Defense, was the strategy of attrition. We had, despite three years of ferocious fighting, barely touched their manpower pool. Defense estimates showed that no more than 40 percent of the males between seventeen and thirty-five had served in the Army, that more than 200,000 North Vietnamese became of draft age every year, and that only about 100,000 had been sent off to the war. Indeed, their main-force army had grown during the war from 250,000 to about 475,000. The war of attrition had barely touched them; we were not keeping up with their birth rate.