The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  All of this had a profound effect on Clifford. Being a good politician and a Democratic party loyalist (he was the principal architect of Harry Truman’s election in 1948, which was one additional reason why Johnson had now chosen him), he also knew the political limits of what was going on. He wanted, friends thought, to turn Johnson around on the war; perhaps, separated from the war, Johnson could run again. But whatever else, Clark Clifford did not intend to see his own reputation destroyed by either Lyndon Johnson or Vietnam. So in the months of February and March 1968 as the Tet battle raged, as the Joint Chiefs reopened the old Westmoreland request for 206,000 more troops, Clifford fought ferociously to turn the tide, to limit the number of troops and to reduce the bombing. In that battle he was usually alone. Rusk, Taylor, Bill Bundy, Rostow were no help. Nick Katzenbach, Undersecretary of State, worked quietly to help him, but he was limited with Rusk as his superior. Nor did Clifford find the President receptive or pleased by this lonely struggle. Their relationship, once so warm and easy, turned cool and distant. The President did not seek his advice, and Clifford’s phone did not ring. He was even cut off from important cable traffic by the White House in ensuing months. But he posed a special problem: when McNamara had gone soft on the war, that could be ascribed to McNamara’s idealism, his distaste for blood, his friendship for the Kennedys. But none of this could be said of Clark Clifford; he was no Kennedy enthusiast, no kook, there was nothing soft about him. Slowly, cautiously, painfully, Clifford forced Johnson to turn and look honestly at the war; it was an act of friendship for which Johnson could never forgive him.

  And slowly Clifford found allies. Not men in government so much as men outside it, men who had Johnson’s respect. In late March, Johnson summoned his Senior Advisory Group on Vietnam, a blue-chip Establishment group. These were the great names of the Cold War: McCloy, Acheson, Arthur Dean, Mac Bundy, Douglas Dillon, Robert Murphy. And over a period of two days they quietly let him know that the Establishment—yes, Wall Street—had turned on the war; it was hurting us more than it was helping us, it had all gotten out of hand, and it was time to bring it back to proportion. It was hurting the economy, dividing the country, turning the youth against the country’s best traditions. Great universities, their universities, were being destroyed. It was time to turn it around, to restore some balance. At one of the briefings of the Wise Men it was Arthur Goldberg, much mocked by some of the others, who almost single-handedly destroyed the military demand for 205,000 more troops. The briefing began with the military officer saying that the other side had suffered 45,000 deaths during the Tet offensive.

  Goldberg then asked what our own killed-to-wounded ratios were.

  Seven to one, the officer answered, because we save a lot of men with helicopters.

  What, asked Goldberg, was the enemy strength as of February 1, when Tet started?

  Between 160,000 and 175,000, the briefer answered.

  What is their killed-to-wounded ratio? Goldberg asked.

  We use a figure of three and a half to one, the officer said.

  Well, if that’s true, then they have no effective forces left in the field, Goldberg said. What followed was a long and very devastating silence.

  Acheson had told the President earlier that the Joint Chiefs did not know what they were talking about, and the switch in this group, which was saying in effect that the war had to be de-escalated, had a profound effect on the President. Did they know things he didn’t know? He demanded to be briefed by the same three officials who had briefed them on the war. Events, and pressure, it was clear, were closing in. He was cornered now. Even in the last days he had fought off those who wanted to stop the bombing, telling Arthur Goldberg angrily, “Let’s get one thing clear. I am not going to stop the bombing. I have heard every argument on the subject and I am not interested in further discussion. I have made up my mind, I am not going to do it.” He had in late March given particularly belligerent speeches, but now he was caught and he knew it. The Wise Men, as they were called, were telling him what the polls and the newspapers had told him: that the country had turned on the war.

  New Hampshire had not been an isolated test. The next primary was in Wisconsin, and the President was entered there as well. The early reports from Wisconsin were very bad. No workers, no volunteers, no enthusiasm. Cabinet members went to Wisconsin in the President’s behalf, and drew small crowds. The President himself could not speak in his own behalf—it was too much of a security problem. The polls were bad and getting worse. One night in mid-March there was a sign which the President, hoping against hope, noticed and which he thought might mean there was some change—an upswing. A meeting in one town seemed jammed and enthusiastic. It was actually a small room, but the way the television camera flashed around it made the hall seem like the Roman Coliseum. The President, watching the meeting, called Larry O’Brien, his political operative, to congratulate him and say that it all looked very good. O’Brien, hearing the enthusiasm and excitement in the President’s voice, tones and emotions missing now almost four years, thought Johnson was being a little carried away, so O’Brien cautioned him. “Mr. President, it was a good meeting and we had a few hundred people here, but it was in Clem Zablocki’s area and he worked hard and the union people worked hard, but it doesn’t mean much. To tell you the truth, we’re in real trouble here.” Later he would tell Johnson not to expect more than 35 percent of the Wisconsin vote, and that it might even be below 30. Lyndon Johnson knew then that he was beaten. He knew he was locked in; he could not do what he wanted on Vietnam and run for re-election. Rather than absorb one more defeat, he withdrew from the race on the eve of the Wisconsin primary and announced that he was pulling back on the bombing. The war was finally turning around; it was time for de-escalation. For Lyndon Johnson it was all over.

  In November 1968, after the election, a group of executives from a New York publishing firm went to the White House to talk with Walt Rostow about publishing his memoirs. The three were important men from the house and the prospect of Rostow’s book was tempting—big figures were in the air. The meeting was pleasant, and Rostow was very friendly. There was some small talk, some reminiscence about the war and the past, and at one point Rostow mentioned that he did not think that the war had been a factor in the 1968 campaign, and he turned and asked his visitors what they thought. One of them, James Silberman, said that he could not vouch for other states, but in the state he lived in, New York, it most certainly had been an issue, most likely the decisive issue. Silberman noticed that Rostow immediately changed the subject, and also that he did not direct any more questions his way. In fact, when the meeting broke up a few minutes later the editors noticed that Rostow shook hands pleasantly with two of them and completely ignored Silberman.

  Lyndon Johnson had lost it all, and so had the rest of them; they had, for all their brilliance and hubris and sense of themselves, been unwilling to look to and learn from the past and they had been swept forward by their belief in the importance of anti-Communism (and the dangers of not paying sufficient homage to it) and by the sense of power and glory, omnipotence and omniscience of America in this century. They were America, and they had been ready for what the world offered, the challenges posed. In a way Lyndon Johnson had known better, he had entertained no small amount of doubt about the course he was taking, but he saw, given his own instincts, his own reading of American politics, his own belief in how he had to look to others, no way of getting off. He and the men around him wanted to be defined as being strong and tough; but strength and toughness and courage were exterior qualities which would be demonstrated by going to a clean and hopefully antiseptic war with a small nation, rather than the interior and more lonely kind of strength and courage of telling the truth to America and perhaps incurring a good deal of domestic political risk. What was it Jack Kennedy had said about Adlai Stevenson during the Cuban missile crisis when he had mocked Stevenson’s softness—that you had to admire the way Stevenson was willing to fight for his
convictions when everyone else in the room was against him. The irony of that statement was missing for Kennedy and it was missing for Johnson as well.

  Nor had they, leaders of a democracy, bothered to involve the people of their country in the course they had chosen: they knew the right path and they knew how much could be revealed, step by step along the way. They had manipulated the public, the Congress and the press from the start, told half truths, about why we were going in, how deeply we were going in, how much we were spending, and how long we were in for. When their predictions turned out to be hopelessly inaccurate, and when the public and the Congress, annoyed at being manipulated, soured on the war, then the architects had been aggrieved. They had turned on those very symbols of the democratic society they had once manipulated, criticizing them for their lack of fiber, stamina and lack of belief. Why weren’t the journalists more supportive? How could you make public policy with television cameras everywhere? The day after he withdrew from re-election in 1968 Lyndon Johnson flew to Chicago for a convention of broadcasters and he had placed the blame for the failure squarely on their shoulders, their fault being that the cameras had revealed just how empty it all was. A good war televises well; a bad war televises poorly. Maxwell Taylor was the key military figure in all the estimates, and his projections—that the war would be short, that the bombing would be a major asset—had proven to be false, but he had never adjusted his views to those failures; there was no sense of remorse, nor concern on why they had failed to estimate correctly. Rather, even in his memoirs, the blame was placed on those elements of the society which had undermined support for the war; when his book was finished, friends, looking at the galleys, cautioned him to tone down criticism of the press. What was singularly missing from all the memoirs of the period—save from a brief interview with Dean Rusk after the publication of the Pentagon Papers—was an iota of public admission that they had miscalculated. The faults, it seemed, were not theirs, the fault was with this country which was not worthy of them.

  So they lost it all. There was a sense of irony here, as if each player had lost, not just a major part of his personal reputation, but much of what he had truly believed in and wanted, much of what he had manipulated for in the first place. Johnson of course had never wanted to go to war, he had become a war President reluctantly, in large part because he feared that otherwise he would lose the Great Society. He had instead gotten the war, but the Great Society was stillborn, it lacked his time, his resources, his second term to bring it to any genuine effectiveness. Which he was bitterly aware of. (In 1969 when a former Pentagon official named Townsend Hoopes wrote a book on how Clark Clifford had turned the war policy around, Johnson was furious with the book. “Hoopees! Hoopees! Who the hell is Hoopees? Here I take four million people out of poverty and all I ever hear about is Hoopees.”) The one thing he could not admit was that he had miscalculated on Vietnam, that Clifford had subsequently turned him around, and that the war had driven him out of office. The knowledge that this was true led to the suspension of his friendship with Clifford for several years, and the closer anyone came to telling the truth, the more Johnson bellowed in anger. He had, it seemed, in his version of events always been in control; everything had worked out as he intended it to.

  For McNamara, the great dream had been of controlling the Pentagon and the arms race, but the war had ruined all that. War Secretaries do not limit the power of the military, and to a large degree he had lost control. The war absorbed so much of his time, his energy, his credibility, that he had little to give to the kind of controls he might have wanted. It was not by accident that his name would come more to symbolize the idea of technological warfare than it would civilian control of the military.

  McGeorge Bundy was a rationalist in an era which saw the limits of rationalism and which rekindled the need for political humanism; the man of operations and processes in an Administration which seemed to undermine the limits of the processes without moral guidelines. But above all he was a man of the Establishment, the right people deciding on the right policies in the right way, he believed in the capacity and the right of an elite to govern on its terms. The war changed all that; it not only tarnished his personal reputation so that his endorsement of an idea or a candidate had to be done covertly, but it saw a major challenge to the right of the elite to rule. In the Senate, the leading doves believed they had been wiser than the executive branch, and they were beefing up their staffs and playing a larger role in foreign policy. Too, the years had made all the other political groups in the country aware of just how little a part they played in foreign policy, and by the end of the decade the outlanders, Negroes, women, workers, were determined to play a greater role; they had reached the moat and were pressing on.

  Dean Rusk had believed not so much in the class as in the policies, mutual security, strong political and military involvement everywhere in the world to stop totalitarians. The war, of course, had brought on a new sense of the limits of power, and with that a growing attitude about the need for the United States to roll back its commitments, which Rusk and others deemed to be a new isolationism. If anything, to a new generation of Americans the war had blurred the differences between the democracies and the totalitarian states. Thus the war, rather than setting the precedent of what the United States had done in the past and would continue to do in the future in the world, had symbolized to growing numbers of Americans what the United States must never do again. It reversed all the traditional directions of American foreign policy, and for Rusk this was a far more bitter thing than the personal abuse which he had suffered.

  Max Taylor had always believed in the liberal society and the citizen-democratic Army, a professional army respected by its citizenry, the best kind of extension of a healthy society. The Army would contain the finest young men of the society, well-educated civilized young officers, and this very fact would temper old civilian suspicions and alienations. The war of course had ravaged the Army; the kind of officer Taylor sought for the Army suffered because of it and was increasingly driven out of service. A bad war means a bad system; the wrong officers are promoted for the wrong reasons, the best officers, often unable to go along with the expected norm, the fake body count, the excessive use of force, wither along the way. And the gap between the Army and the society as a whole did not close, it widened; there was a growing sense of antimilitary feeling in the country, and the Army was of course selected as a scapegoat.

  The Democratic party too was damaged. It had been hiding from its past at the very beginning of the Kennedy era, unwilling to come to terms with China and what had happened there, and in large part it had gotten into trouble in Vietnam because it accepted the Dulles policies in Asia. But Dulles policies or no, it was the Democrats who had brought us into Vietnam, and the sense of alienation between the party and not just the young but millions of other nominal Democrats was very large. American life was changing very quickly and the party was adjusting very slowly; it seemed increasingly an outmoded corroded institution, its principal spokesmen figures of the past.

  Such as Hubert Humphrey, who was one more victim of the war. He had of course always wanted to be the Democratic nominee for the Presidency and he had finally received the nomination one terrible night in Chicago, but by that time it was no longer worth anything (there was a certain irony in this too, because he had sought it so long and feverishly and promiscuously as to be unworthy of it). He was nominated in Chicago on a night when police hacked the heads of the young, and Humphrey’s only response was to kiss the television set. He had gained the nomination and in so doing lost most of what was left of his reputation.

  But it was Lyndon Johnson who had lost the most. He had always known this, even in the turbulent days of 1964 and 1965 when the decisions on the war seemed to press on him; even then he was more dubious than those around him, knowing that of them, he had the most to lose. And he lost it, so much of his reputation, so much of his dreams. He could not go to the 1968 Democratic conve
ntion, it was all too painful and explosive; nor did he attend the 1972 convention either. There at Miami Beach the Democrats had hung huge portraits of their heroes of the past in the main hall, photos of Presidents and national candidates. But Lyndon Johnson’s photo was not among them, rather it could be found in a smaller room where photos of past congressional leaders hung. He had always dreamed of being the greatest domestic President in this century, and he had become, without being able to stop it, a war President, and not a very good one at that.

  A Final Word

  In the days, weeks and months after his withdrawal from the race and his decision to cut back on the bombing, Lyndon Johnson was immobilized on the war and so was his Administration. He had been most at ease with a consensus policy, a policy in which all the very great men agreed on the essential wisdom of one centrist idea, and now this consensus was openly and finally shattered, his government totally and irreconcilably divided, and he simply could not come to terms with the division. Events had forced him to set a limit on the American escalation, which he had done reluctantly, though his own generals had warned that even at the current rate of commitment of more than 500,000 Americans, the war might drag on indefinitely. So he had at once limited the war, but he could not make the next step which might see the liquidation of it politically. Perhaps there was simply too much of his own ego involved in it. So the policy on the war was in a kind of suspension.