by Tom Bissell
The following day, North Vietnam's coast was again attacked in a South Vietnamese raid, after which the North Vietnamese reported finding 125 mm shell fragments—the type a destroyer such as the Maddox would fire. The North Vietnamese probably lied about the shell size (the raid that carried out the attack in question had no weapon large enough to fire such a shell), which illustrates the bellicose suspicion that characterized these few significant days. By August 4, the Maddox's rattled commander was sending messages to his superiors that, based on the intercepted messages he was seeing, it “is apparent that [North Vietnam] … now considers itself at war with us.” The Maddox, having been ordered back out on patrol, was soon joined by the Turner Joy.
Many of those aboard the Turner Joy maintain to this day that they were attacked on August 4, despite the voluminous mass of evidence to have surfaced in the interim that all but proves otherwise. The most interesting argument against the attack's veracity is hinged upon the so-called Tonkin Gulf Ghost. There does seem to be an actual phenomenon—personally verified with a Vietnamese sailor who has spent his life in the South China Sea—that generates radar irregularities due to reasons of weather, humidity, flying fish, seabirds, or some combination thereof. Although Vietnamese sailors were well aware of the Tonkin Gulf Ghost phenomenon, U.S. sailors in 1964 were not. Why, then, do many of the Turner Joy's sailors still believe they were attacked? It seems that yet another South Vietnamese raid was planned for August 5. North Vietnam learned of the raid and instructed its torpedo boats to sink any incoming ships. These instructions were intercepted by the Turner Joy and, combined with the strange atmospherics native to the Tonkin Gulf, created an understandably besieged impression in the minds of those on board the Turner Joy.
Mo'ise notes that the North Vietnamese did not make much of the first attack until after the United States did. Following the second incident, the Party paper in Hanoi ran a farcical account of the first incident, in which it was revealed that “patrol boats” (rather than aggressive torpedo boats) had driven the Maddox out of North Vietnamese waters. The second attack the North Vietnamese always denied. Soon after the second incident, Johnson came to suspect that it had not occurred— information he shared only with select members of his cabinet. The reason for why he went ahead anyway is tragically uncomplicated: retaliatory bombing in the name of Pierce Arrow had already been decided upon, and the airtime announcing the bombing had been booked. Johnson's decision to announce the bombing, combined with unforeseen delays upon a U.S. aircraft carrier, inadvertently warned the North Vietnamese of the attack, and they were able to shoot two of the attacking U.S. planes from the sky. The targets in North Vietnam were arrived at so quickly because they had been drawn up and planned for almost six months prior to the incident.
In light of that fact in particular, the common belief, from Noam Chomsky to Vo Nguyen Giap, is that the United States deliberately set out to fashion a casus belli that would bring it to war with North Vietnam. Mo'ise rejects this interpretation, concluding that the decisions made in the aftermath of the two incidents—one real, the other false— were made less from a desire to deceive than from a desire not to affirm. The story was “too good to check,” in journalistic terms. Mo'ise does believe that given the raids and the questionable orders of the Maddox and Turner Joy, a consensus existed among the Johnson administration “to avoid candid discussion of the subject.” In August 1964, neither Johnson nor his men were looking for war in the Gulf of Tonkin. War was looking for them, and it found them. The Southeast Asia Resolution, quickly dubbed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which claimed that the North Vietnamese had “repeatedly” attacked U.S. vessels, passed 416 to 0 in the House of Representatives and 88 to 2 in the Senate, despite what has been described as its “unusually vague and open-ended scope.” Few understood that this resolution would increase U.S. forces in South Vietnam from 16,000 to 550,000 in only a few years. One who did understand the danger was Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon. “War cannot be declared,” he said, “to meet hypothetical situations yet to arise on the horizons of the world.”
The most profound result of the second phantom attack was Vietnamese, not American. In short, the North Vietnamese were accused of, and punished for, an attack they knew they had not committed. This, above all else, convinced Hanoi that the United States was seeking to conquer and exploit Vietnam and strengthened Hanoi's resistance to any terms of negotiation, save its own.
Johnson was well aware of war's disconnects and implausibilities. It in fact tortured him, and some of his less guarded statements regarding the war today have a Lear-like intensity. “We fight for values and we fight for principles,” he said in April 1965, “rather than territories or colonies.” Yet, privately, he referred to Vietnam—a “raggedy-ass, little fourth-rate country”—in both overly personal and reflexively possessive terms. “What the hell is Vietnam worth to me?” he asked his cabinet in 1964. “What is Laos worth to me? What is it worth to this country?” Of protestors, Johnson once said, “I don't blame them. They don't want to be killed in a war, and that's easy to understand.” (A Secret Service agent remembers Johnson peering avidly out the window of his limousine while driving past some protestors: “The president was highly interested in what a hippie looked like, their dress, age groups, and items they carried.”) “Light at the end of the tunnel?” Johnson once scoffed. “Hell, we don't even have a tunnel. We don't even know where the tunnel is.” Alongside Johnson's seemingly honest torment, however, existed his cruelty, his brutishness, his dishonesty, his love of loyalty that too often became crass nepotism. Indeed, Johnson's administration sometimes bore more than a little resemblance to that of Ngo Dinh Diem, whose overthrow Johnson always rued.
As Tom Wicker, in his study of how the personalities of Kennedy and Johnson influenced events, has pointed out, Johnson “would look around him and see in Bob McNamara that it was technologically feasible, in McGeorge Bundy that it was intellectually respectable, and in Dean Rusk that it was historically necessary.” One gets a sense of the pinched grandeur with which many of these men, almost all of them veterans in one way or another of World War II, regarded the world from what they titled their inevitable memoirs: As I Saw It (Dean Rusk), The Past Has Another Pattern (George Ball), The Storm Has Many Eyes (Henry Cabot Lodge), A Tangled Web (William Bundy), Swords and Plowshares (Maxwell Taylor), In Retrospect (Robert McNamara). Only National Security Adviser Walt Rostow—by all accounts an intelligent man, despite the unseemly pride he has taken in his refusal to refine the positions he defended during the war—failed to indulge in this arms race of titular pomposity, weighing in with titles such as The United States and the Regional Organization of Asia and the Pacific, 1965-1985. These intelligent, dedicated, and even wise men: how they betrayed their best selves; how they lied.
General Maxwell Taylor (who before coming aboard the Kennedy administration was president of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts) voiced early opposition to the introduction of U.S. troops into Vietnam if the intention was to use them as counterguerrillas. “The white-faced soldier,” Taylor argued in a 1965 memo, “armed, equipped, and trained as he is, is not a suitable guerrilla fighter for Asian forests and jungles. The French tried to adapt their forces to this mission and failed. I doubt that U.S. forces could do much better.” In 1964, Taylor's view of South Vietnam was that “only the emergence of an exceptional leader could improve the situation and no George Washington is in sight.” (Actually, the Vietnamese George Washington, like it or not, was in Hanoi.) But even Taylor, a member of the so-called Never Again Club—a group of U.S. military minds so scarred by the nightmare of the Korean conflict that they had vowed never to engage in Asian land war again (at least, not without nuclear weapons)—was privately writing memos that contradicted every public and semipublic reservation he voiced: “I do not believe,” he wrote President Johnson in a top secret cable, “that our program to save [South Vietnam] will succeed without [the introduction of] U.S. troops.” He even suggested introducing U.S. tro
ops under humanitarian camouflage by sending them to deal with South Vietnam's incessant flooding.
McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy and Johnson's special assistant for national security affairs, wrote to McNamara an agonized, conflicted memo in 1965: “I see no reason to suppose that the Viet Cong will accommodate us by fighting the kind of war we desire…. [D] o we want to invest 200,000 men to cover an eventual retreat? Can we not do that just as well where we are?” Yet despite his own analysis he, too, consistently advised staying the course. In fact, he opted for the war's escalation in order “to pull the South Vietnamese together,” when he should have been able to conclude from the war's established narrative that the more the United States involved itself in South Vietnam the more South Vietnam disintegrated. “[Our] immediate targets,” Bundy believed, accurately, “are in the South—in the minds of the South Vietnamese and in the minds of the Viet Cong cadres.” Yet Bundy had a savantlike inability to understand the implications of what he himself argued. He supported the war but never sounded as though he did. Johnson eventually fired him for this seeming inconsistency of mind.
One sees similar sagaciousness, though more inclination to heed it, in Undersecretary of State George Ball, the house peacenik of the Johnson administration. Ball, who believed Europe was where the United States’ struggle against Communism would live or die, wrote of the war in Vietnam more devastatingly, and far earlier, than any member of the Johnson administration. “Either everybody else is crazy,” he once said in frustration, “or I am.” When Ball began to realize Johnson's constant reassurance that he “listened hard” to Ball was completely false, he resigned in 1966, but not before composing a memo containing this memorable warning: “Once on the tiger's back we cannot be sure of picking the place to dismount.” In 1946, Ho Chi Minh used a similar analogy for war in Indochina: “[T]he tiger does not stand still. He lurks in the jungle by day and emerges by night. He will leap upon the back of the elephant, tearing huge chunks from his hide, and then he will leap back into the dark jungle. And slowly the elephant will bleed to death.” Ball, who was right about so much, was wrong about this. The United States was not on the tiger's back in Vietnam; it was on the elephant's.
Secretary of State Dean Rusk was socially removed from Kennedy and Johnson's inner circle; Kennedy did not even call him by his first name. Despite his rough looks (one of his colleagues’ wives claimed he resembled nothing so much as a bartender), Rusk was the most priestly and imposing of the war's architects, and quite possibly the most intelligent. What truly strikes one when reading about the war's political history is the extent to which Rusk, America's chief diplomat, dismissed and belittled the devices of diplomacy when it came to Vietnam. It may have been McNamara's War, but in serious ways it was Rusk's Fault. (One promising early overture for negotiation, floated by North Vietnam's Pham Van Dong through an intermediary in 1965, did not earn as much as a response from the American secretary of state. After another fumbled overture, Rusk explained that “there is a difference between rejecting a proposal and not accepting it.”) Rusk is the man who turned the war from an attempt to save South Vietnam from Communism to an endeavor to save American credibility from itself. His unblinking hostility toward Communism, though admirably clear-sighted, led him to envision donnybrooks where there were none and to compare the feared “loss” of Vietnam with the “loss” of China, which had traumatized him politically. Rusk's claim that “the integrity of the U.S. commitment is the principal pillar of peace throughout the world,” and that withdrawal or defeat in Vietnam would embolden the Communist bloc and higgledy-piggledy “lead to our ruin and almost certainly to catastrophic war,” was worse than inaccurate; it was crazy. Rusk was also capable of spellbound cluelessness: “I don't believe,” he said in 1965, “the VC have made large advances among the Vietnamese people.” He refused to acknowledge that the NLF and North Vietnamese might have had differing goals. He also believed the antiwar movement was controlled by Communists. Rusk could apparently not bring himself to understand that “global conspiracy” is a contradiction in terms and that the same amount of debate concerning Vietnam he saw every day in the White House also gripped the administrative bodies of Moscow and Beijing. In Rusk's mind, Moscow dictated North Vietnam's policy: “I smell vodka and caviar in this proposal,” he said of a North Vietnamese negotiation offer in 1968. On his way out of office, he told Richard Nixon that the war had been lost in “the editorial rooms of this country.”
In Dereliction of Duty, H. R. McMaster writes that Robert Strange McNamara “viewed the war as another business management problem that, he assumed, would ultimately succumb to his reasoned judgment and others’ rational calculation.” In his memoir, McNamara himself writes, “I had always been confident that every problem could be solved, but now I found myself confronting one—involving national pride and human life—that could not.” It is difficult to understand the depth of hatred many have for Robert McNamara—the journalist Mickey Kaus once argued that McNamara had harmed America more than any other figure during the twentieth century, and David Halberstam called him, simply, “a fool”—when, alone among the war's founding fathers, McNa-mara tried to explain why it occurred and the lessons that should be drawn from it. McNamara was not above assuring a browbeaten President Johnson that The New York Times, whose editorial page often went after him, was “influenced by Zionists”; or of having reports detailing the findings of fact-finding trips to South Vietnam written before he actually left Washington, D.C.; or of asking his assistant to write “six alternative lies for him” after a diplomatically embarrassing incident. Although he opposed the introduction of combat troops into Vietnam, McNamara lied about the effectiveness of the bombing early in the war and of the improving state of the ARVN. But once he realized the bombing was not effective and that the ARVN's performance was not getting notably better, McNamara, to his immense credit, stopped lying and then stopped supporting the war altogether. When very few in the U.S. government saw the war's futility, McNamara did. As he said to Johnson in 1967, “the war cannot be won by killing North Vietnamese. It can only be won by protecting the South Vietnamese.” No doubt this is why he became, as Johnson once whispered to his press secretary, “an emotional basket case.” (Both of McNamara's children were involved in the fringes of the antiwar movement, and his beloved wife Margy openly questioned the war's logic.) In May 1967, as he was turning against the war, McNamara wrote Johnson an extraordinary memo: “There maybe a limit beyond which many Americans and much of the world will not permit the United States to go. The picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.”
The contempt people have for Robert McNamara, or even Dean Rusk, would be far better directed at a man such as Walt Whitman Ros-tow, Johnson's national security adviser. McNamara apologized for his behavior. Rusk's son apologized for the behavior of his father, who died a broken and depressed man. Rostow, though, has never apologized, despite some vaultingly ugly behavior during the war. Believing that war in Indochina was part of a large and inevitable U.S. battle against Asian Communism as a whole (a view Communist China's leadership largely shared), Rostow had urged military action in Laos in 1961. When he realized he could not get war in Laos, he turned his attention to Vietnam, where the United States would show “that the Communist technique of guerrilla warfare can be dealt with.” (He even wrote memos warning of “neutralist thought in Thailand.” Send in the Marines.) This is from Edwin Mo'ise:” [James Thomson, of the National Security Council] was very startled to hear Walt Rostow at this luncheon say that it seemed unlikely that there had actually been an attack on the two U.S. destroyers on August 4. This was the first Thomson had heard that there was doubt about the reality of the incident. Rostow was openly gleeful about the fact that the U.S. armed forces had been turned loose to bomb North Vietnam in response to an attack that might not
even have happened.” After Tonkin, Rostow predicted that Ho Chi Minh would buckle under U.S. bombing since he was no longer “a guerrilla fighter with nothing to lose.” In 1965, he told Daniel EUsberg, “Dan, it looks very good. What we hear is that the Vietcong are already coming apart…. They're going to collapse within weeks. Not months, weeks.” Living proof that anti-Communism can become as blindly dogmatic as Communism, Rostow was the valedictorian of the bombs-away school, maintaining that annihilating the gasoline tanks and other storage facilities in North Vietnam would cripple the insurgency in South Vietnam. So the storage facilities were bombed; the North Vietnamese, however, had fuel in other places. At several points during the war, bombing runs were ordered during times when the Johnson administration was attempting to open negotiations with North Vietnam. Not surprisingly, these bombings soured the North's willingness to talk. “I do not see any connection,” Rostow calmly maintained, “between bombing and negotiation.” Perhaps this is because North Vietnam was not bombing Maryland. “In the end,” Rostow wrote recently, “Johnson left his successor a good post-Tet situation in the field, both military and political; but a difficult political position at home.” The American people lost the war, then, because they were hippies. Rostow still defends the war. The linchpin of his argument is that the war in Vietnam gave Asia time to establish confidence against Communism, even though the United States was forced to bribe nations supposedly imperiled by the Communist threat to send allied soldiers to Vietnam. But let us get this straight: Walt Rostow believes that a war that killed nearly 60,000 of his countrymen and hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, made refugees of 10 million more, damaged the image of the United States, and did not even succeed in its most primary objective was worthwhile? (Viva freedom: One confident Asian country, Ferdinand Marcos's Republic of the Philippines, declared itself a dictatorship in 1972.) Men such as Rostow lied to begin the war because the people would not understand why the United States needed to fight it so badly. They lied while the war was being fought because many could not understand why the United States was fighting it. Men such as Rostow are still lying, this time about what people do not understand … but we are no longer in the presence of argument but pathology.