Within twenty-four hours of his election as president on November 8, 1960, John F. Kennedy announced his intention to retain Allen Dulles as CIA director. When the new president took office on January 20, 1961, Curtis LeMay, no longer commanding SAC, was serving as the air force’s vice chief of staff, the number two uniformed position in that service. Soon thereafter, with the current chief of staff due to retire, Kennedy nominated LeMay as his replacement.
Through such appointments, Kennedy signaled his administration’s commitment to the prevailing national security paradigm and to the bipartisan consensus from which it derived its legitimacy. To those who questioned whether the young president possessed the requisite experience and toughness to take on the Soviets, keeping old hands like Dulles and LeMay on board (along with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover) provided a suitable response. Although the New Frontier, as the incoming administration branded its program, promised vigor and fresh thinking, those who had been at the forefront in waging the Cold War were keeping their seats at the table.
This reassuring picture with its emphasis on continuity concealed an intensifying behind-the-scenes struggle, simultaneously masked by, and captured in, the phrase flexible response. The national security policies devised during the Truman and Eisenhower eras had created winners and losers. Chief among the losers had been the U.S. Army. The heyday of massive retaliation and the golden age of covert operations rendered the army all but irrelevant.
Other than serving as a “tripwire”—plainly visible in West Germany and postarmistice South Korea to warn away would-be intruders lest they trigger a nuclear war—the army found itself largely cut out of the action. The clearest expression of this exclusion came in the form of the Pentagon budget share. By 1959, the army claimed but 23 percent of defense dollars while the navy received 28 percent, and the dominant air force scooped up the remaining 46 percent. Army leaders of the 1950s, preeminently Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor, another now-forgotten figure who left in his wake a wide swath of calamity, viewed this as intolerable.1
Flexible response, General Taylor’s brainchild, grew out of the army’s determination to reclaim a greater role in implementing the sacred trinity. Jockeying by have-nots to improve their position has long figured as a commonplace expression of bureaucratic politics, those with an ax to grind typically attributing to their parochial concerns cosmic significance. As Taylor saw it, by putting the army on half-rations, the Eisenhower administration was endangering the country. A minimally adequate national security posture meant not just being able to wage nuclear war and conduct covert operations, but standing ready to do everything else in between—“everything else,” of course, encompassing tasks typically falling under the army’s purview.
During his tenure as army chief of staff from 1955 to 1959, Taylor’s efforts to win greater respect (and budget share) for his service met with little sympathy within the confines of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or at the Eisenhower White House. On leaving active duty, the frustrated Taylor wasted no time in repackaging his argument as a short book, which in the spring of 1960 appeared to considerable acclaim. A stinging critique of Eisenhower-era policies as well as a blueprint for reform, The Uncertain Trumpet enjoyed a seven-week run on the New York Times bestseller list and found particular favor among Democrats, delighted to have a highly decorated and reputedly cerebral four-star general publicly lambasting a Republican administration headed by a highly decorated and exceedingly popular five-star general.
Taylor’s message was nothing if not straightforward. A perception that the nation was “faced with declining military strength at a time of increasing political tension” compelled him to go public. Counting on nuclear weapons to avert war, he wrote, was a “Great Fallacy.” Eisenhower’s strategy of massive retaliation, which offered “only two choices, the initiation of general nuclear war or compromise and retreat,” had “reached a dead end” and needed to be scrapped. True security demanded that the United States acquire the means “to react across the entire spectrum of possible challenge.” A new, more diverse mix of capabilities that would enable the United States “to respond anywhere, any time, with weapons and forces appropriate to the situation” defined the essence of flexible response. Diversifying U.S. military capabilities would inter alia boost the army’s claim on resources, a point that Taylor did not bother to make explicitly, but one not lost on even the casual student of interservice politics.2
The contest to choose Eisenhower’s successor transformed Taylor’s critique from an unhappy general’s complaint into a full-fledged Idea Whose Time Had Come. While campaigning for the presidency Senator Kennedy echoed the notes sounded by Taylor’s Trumpet, depicting Eisenhower-era national security policy as stodgy, stale, complacent, and completely inadequate. His language was unsparing. “[N]o amount of oratory,” he told the American Legion,
no extravagant claims or vociferous braggadocio, no unjustified charges, can hide the harsh fact that behind the rhetoric, behind the soothing words and the confusing figures, American strength relative to that of the Soviet Union has been slipping, and communism has been advancing steadily in every area of the world.3
If elected, Kennedy vowed to reverse this “decline” and make the United States “first in military power across the board.” This implied, among other things, “expanding and modernizing our conventional forces,” while endowing them with greater “versatility and mobility.” Kennedy was by no means averse to nuclear weapons—indeed, promising everything for every service, he vowed to enlarge the strategic arsenal as well. Like Taylor, he merely insisted that it was also necessary to develop robust non-nuclear intervention capabilities, enabling U.S. forces to “put out a brush-fire war before it becomes a conflagration.”4
Kennedy took power amid expectations that he would vanquish the uncertainties that had so worried Taylor. In his inaugural address, the new president announced that “the trumpet summons us again” and made plain his eagerness to answer that summons with unflinching resolve. Soon thereafter Kennedy appropriated the phrase Taylor had coined and flexible response became the official label attached to the new administration’s program for military reform.
Yet the purposes animating Kennedy’s defense initiative extended well beyond the narrow aims that had inspired Taylor to speak out. This was no simple attempt to restore the army’s relevance. The president and his advisers intended to devise new and creative ways of making force useful. Keen to reinvigorate U.S. global leadership, they wanted to expand the range of options available to policy makers. Whereas Eisenhower had counted on the prospect of nuclear cataclysm to forestall the actual event, Kennedy’s “action intellectuals” believed that keeping World War III at bay required a forward-leaning posture: The United States needed to demonstrate its willingness to fight non-nuclear wars. With all the certainty of men unacquainted with the actual use of power, they did not doubt their ability to compel war to do their bidding. Not for the last time, an enthusiasm for limited war served chiefly to open the door to unlimited military expenditures.
That flexible response was going to cost money was never a concern. So the lid Eisenhower had struggled to impose on Pentagon spending now came off. During Kennedy’s first year in office, military outlays rose 15 percent.5 To close a nonexistent “missile gap” that had figured as a prominent campaign issue, the administration doubled the production rate of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles from thirty to sixty per month and boosted the planned fleet of Polaris nuclear submarines—each of which carried sixteen nuclear-tipped missiles—from twenty-nine to forty-one. The effect of this urgently promoted buildup was to increase the actual “missile gap” that already favored the United States by a considerable margin. In this sense, although spooking the Kremlin, Kennedy gave the air force and navy little cause for complaint.
Much as Taylor had intended, however, the primary beneficiary of flexible response was the army. Between 1961 and 1962, its budget shot up, as the service added 207,000 more soldiers to its rolls. The number of active-duty divisions increased from eleven to sixteen. To bolster the U.S. commitment to NATO, Kennedy dispatched additional ground troops to West Germany. He also more than doubled the army’s Special Forces and expressed intense personal interest in the development of counterinsurgency doctrine and techniques—these, Kennedy believed, held the key to rolling back the Red tide threatening to inundate the Third World.6 Readiness, mobility, and deployability became the new watchwords: Kennedy’s army existed not to serve as a nuclear tripwire, but to engage the enemy—with particular attention to applying force on a limited scale for limited aims while minimizing the risk of events mushrooming out of control.
An editorial published in Life on the eve of Kennedy’s inauguration conveyed the spirit of the moment. Along the “long frontier between the Communist and free worlds,” it claimed, the United States and its allies were likely to face “the necessity of resisting aggression” in any number of places. Existing capabilities did not suffice for what Life called the “brush-fire wars” now looming on the horizon. In fighting such wars, the overriding aim was to put out the fire, not blow up the world. In that regard, “a tailored response is the best way to minimize the risk of ‘escalation.’ ” The magazine left it to a then obscure Harvard professor named Henry Kissinger to spell out the implications. “[T]he security of the free world,” he opined, required that the United States have “military units capable of checking Soviet aggression at any scale of violence.” The editors of Life agreed wholeheartedly. And that meant the United States was going to need many more “foot soldiers than are now in uniform”—a view that comported precisely with the thinking of the new administration about to assume power in Washington.7
So the years of neglect that Taylor had called the army’s “Babylonian captivity” came to an end.8 No longer would the United States have to rely on SAC and the CIA as its sole instruments of power projection with the range of alternatives confined to all-out nuclear attack or covert “dirty tricks.” Conventional war fighting and unconventional counterinsurgency forces now formed part of the mix.
The intent, recalled Robert McNamara, the Ford Motor Company executive recruited to become Kennedy’s secretary of defense, was “to broaden the range of options by strengthening and modernizing the military’s ability to fight a non-nuclear war.”9 In the lexicon of the New Frontier, options ranked as a favored word. Flexible response was all about creating options.
Kennedy’s acolytes portrayed this as a dramatic departure from the past. In truth, it was anything but. Rather than overturning the national security paradigm of the 1950s, flexible response actually served to affirm it, even while incorporating into the Washington consensus those who had felt excluded.
During the Eisenhower era, there had never been enough money to go around. Flexible response promised more money more evenly distributed. Henceforth, every part of the national security establishment was going to have a part to play. In this sense, the administration’s real achievement was to eliminate the last remnants of internal resistance: Obstreperous army generals were now on board. Kennedy had renewed and enriched the U.S. global military presence, its power projection capabilities, and—as events quickly demonstrated—its penchant for intervention as well.
Largely concealed from the American public, but clearly evident within Washington, flexible response also raised key questions of control. Who exactly was to exercise the options that the administration’s defense reforms were making available? For Kennedy and his lieutenants the answer to that question was quite clear: They were intent on restoring to the White House the authority over national security issues that, in their view, had been severely compromised during the Eisenhower era. Reasserting presidential primacy necessarily implied bringing the CIA and SAC to heel.
In a sense, this effort had already begun. In December 1960, Eisenhower himself had taken a first step toward chipping away at SAC’s monopoly over nuclear war planning. The outgoing president ordered the Pentagon to draft a comprehensive new blueprint for nuclear war, a plan incorporating guidance issued from Washington, rather than simply reflecting SAC’s own preferences.10
In its first iteration, the resulting Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) was more symbolic than real. The struggle for control of the nation’s nuclear arsenal was only beginning, that struggle now pitting Secretary of Defense McNamara, an exceedingly smart man who, in his own words, saw “quantification as a language to add precision to reasoning,” against LeMay, who tended to go with his gut and knew that he had forgotten more about warfare than even the smartest civilian could learn, whatever the analytical tools applied. The McNamara who, at age forty-four, took office in January 1961 “had no patience with the myth that the Department of Defense could not be managed.”11 Dispelling that myth meant among other things showing Curtis LeMay who was boss.
McNamara’s arrival at the Pentagon marked the resumption of a relationship with LeMay that dated back to World War II. The two men had their own rich history. If by the 1960s their thinking about war had diverged, they had once been close collaborators. During the latter stages of World War II, McNamara, then a young army air corps staff officer, worked for LeMay, serving as (in McNamara’s words) “part of a mechanism” that proffered advice on how to inflict the greatest amount of damage on Japanese cities with the greatest efficiency.12 McNamara’s considerable analytical prowess had facilitated the killing of several hundred thousand noncombatants. Whether the result qualified as harsh but necessary or as a war crime—late in life, McNamara inclined toward the latter—the new defense secretary’s fingerprints were all over the bombing campaign that had reduced Japan’s cities to ashes and that LeMay viewed as the model for how to wage war against the Soviet Union.
The ensuing contest between the two centered on the composition, size, and anticipated employment of America’s nuclear strike force, with its stockpile of existing weapons now exceeding eighteen thousand. During the previous decade, LeMay had played a dominant role in determining these matters. In the new decade, McNamara intended that he, acting as the president’s agent, would do so.
When it came to the composition of the force, the contest centered on the future of the B-70 Valkyrie, a supersonic, long-range bomber then under development. LeMay viewed the Valkyrie as essential to ensuring SAC’s ability to penetrate Soviet air space. Fielding the B-70 was his—and therefore, the air force’s—top priority.
Given the growing capabilities of land-based and submarine-launched ballistic missiles, McNamara was not persuaded, especially with the subsonic B-52 less than a decade old and the B-70 expected to cost $20 billion over ten years. Concluding that the United States really didn’t need the Valkyrie, McNamara decided to kill it, sending LeMay into a rage. The air force general found especially intolerable “the Secretary’s saying ‘No’ to something the military wished to do and giving a military reason for his action.” While devaluing genuinely professional advice, “he and his coterie were setting themselves up as military experts.”13 LeMay dialed up his friends on Capitol Hill and persuaded them to appropriate enough funds to keep the B-70 program alive. McNamara simply refused to spend the money: The B-70 was dead. McNamara had seemingly won the first round on points.14
McNamara and LeMay next locked horns over the size of the U.S. strategic arsenal: How much was enough? The ability of the United States to produce nuclear weapons along with the means to deliver them had become essentially limitless. When it came to the silo-based Minuteman ICBM, Gen. Thomas Power, LeMay’s successor at SAC, was pressing for a force of ten thousand missiles. The air force was formally requesting three thousand. McNamara’s analysis persuaded him that even Eisenhower’s planned force of six hundred ICBMs was probably too large; a few hundred missiles should suffice. Yet with Kennedy having vowed to close an ostensibly dangerous, but actually nonexistent “missile gap” invented by his campaign and with Congress unhappy with the defense secretary’s highhanded disposition of the B-70, analytical rigor took a backseat to politics. McNamara arbitrarily declared that the nation’s security required 1,200 Minutemen, giving the air force less than it wanted, but enough to keep its supporters happy.15 Score round two for LeMay.
Finally, there was the matter of thinking the unthinkable: envisioning how to wage actual nuclear war. Here, McNamara managed to tie himself in knots while essentially affirming the status quo. SIOP-61 reflected LeMay’s preference for an all-out nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, and most of the communist world. McNamara recoiled from the prospect of cold-blooded slaughter on such a scale. He sought an approach to nuclear war offering the president (and himself) choice, flexibility, and the ability to discriminate. McNamara wanted options. And as the forces under his direction refined their plans for blowing up the world, he wanted the conscience-salving assurance that the United States had not entirely disregarded the moral implications involved.
For assistance in this quest, McNamara turned not to the uniformed military, whose creative capacity he doubted, but to the fraternity of nuclear strategists. By the 1960s, these well-credentialed political scientists, economists, and mathematicians, installed in leading universities or at think tanks such as RAND, had carved out for themselves a comfortable niche as influential interpreters of the Washington consensus. Trafficking in jargon tricked out as profundities, these self-described policy intellectuals purported to bring to the study of nuclear warfare greater rigor than the likes of LeMay deemed either feasible or necessary.
Intent on investing the U.S. nuclear posture with greater “credibility” without being excessively provocative, they generated a dizzying array of obfuscating twaddle: finite deterrence, graduated response, controlled response, counterforce, counter-cities, counterforce no-cities, damage limitation, full first strike, decapitation, second strike, assured second strike, and assured destruction. Never, however, did this endeavor yield any definitive conclusions, ostensibly brilliant strategic insights becoming obsolete more quickly than the aircraft comprising SAC’s bomber force. To model nuclear war, they conjured up absurdly complex scenarios—Herman Kahn’s “escalation ladder” had forty-four rungs beginning with “Ostensible Crisis” and culminating with “Spasm or Insensate War.”16 They pondered such imponderables as how to create space for negotiating pauses in the middle of a nuclear exchange.
Intent on basing nuclear strategy on something other than the naked threat to obliterate large segments of humankind, McNamara waded into this murky thicket, almost immediately lost his bearings, and eventually emerged pretty much where he had entered. Whichever way he turned, McNamara ran up against the same conclusions: In any nuclear crisis, there was no way to guarantee that the other side would understand, agree with, or conform to whatever logic happened to inform U.S. actions.
The very notion of exercising carefully calibrated “options” to maintain “control” in a war gone nuclear was a mirage. Barring the absolutely certain and complete elimination of an adversary’s retaliatory capability, any use of a nuclear weapon against another nuclear weapons state would pose unacceptable risks to the attacker; victory, that is, was a chimera. Finally, any use of nuclear weapons would result in devastation on a scale impossible to justify; humanely waged nuclear war was an oxymoron.
Regarding massive retaliation as crude and brutal, while unable to imagine himself ordering such an extreme response, McNamara felt the Eisenhower approach lacked credibility. It was, therefore, “useless” as a basis for a strategy of deterrence.17 He pursued what he fancied to be a more rigorously analytical approach. His conclusion was this: Confronting the Kremlin with the prospect of assured destruction of one-quarter to one-third of the Soviet population and two-thirds of Soviet industry would prevent the Cold War from turning hot. He calculated further that the delivery of four hundred megatons of nuclear weapons—equivalent in destructive power to 26,600 Hiroshima-type bombs—would suffice to inflict that level of damage.18
As it happened, the U.S. nuclear arsenal had long since passed that plateau. The strategic forces being expanded at McNamara’s behest already had many thousands of megatons at their disposal. To bring his revised strategy into alignment with these already existing capabilities (and undoubtedly with an eye to satisfying various political and bureaucratic interests), McNamara declared that each of the three major components of the U.S. strategic strike force—the long-range bombers, the land-based ICBMs, and the submarine-launched ballistic missiles—needed to be independently capable of inflicting the requisite level of assured destruction. Whether such an attack implied killing the entire Soviet population or one-third of the population three times over was not clear. McNamara had plainly decided that credibility required considerable redundancy.
This “strategic triad,” too, now became enshrined as an essential component of U.S. policy. The net effect was to render permanent the oversized, multidimensional nuclear strike force that the Kennedy administration had declared an urgent necessity. Even today, nearly fifty years after its creation, twenty years after the end of the Cold War, the triad, although modified and updated many times, survives. Here lies McNamara’s most enduring contribution to nuclear policy.
McNamara’s search for options and flexibility, not to mention his attempt to inject moral considerations into nuclear war planning, produced negligible results. No matter how hard McNamara tried to rationalize nuclear strategy, it remained stubbornly irrational. As in the 1950s, so too in the 1960s, nuclear war meant nuclear holocaust. The real winner of the contest was the Washington consensus, which emerged from this supposed battle of the titans reaffirmed and stronger than ever.
When the dust of McNamara’s strategic reassessment had settled, the outcome did not especially discomfit senior military officers like LeMay, defense contractors, or their congressional supporters. They got most of what they wanted and could live comfortably with the results. For their part, the Soviets must have wondered what all the fuss was about. The label attached to U.S. strategy might have changed, but as one historian has aptly observed, “assured destruction was surely massive retaliation by another name.”19
Meanwhile, a covert operation gone badly awry provided Kennedy with a tutorial regarding the risks involved in allowing agencies other than the White House to determine the course of national security policy.
Eisenhower was hardly the first and would not be the last president to bequeath his successor a poison pill. In Kennedy’s case, the inheritance bore the label Operation Zapata, a scheme concocted by the CIA, albeit with Eisenhower’s assent, that aimed to repeat in Cuba the successes the Agency had ostensibly achieved in Iran and Guatemala. Just as the CIA had overthrown Mossadegh and Árbenz, it now set out to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro, raising a small force of 1,400 Cuban exiles to invade their homeland with expectations of triggering a popular uprising.
The ensuing failure is too well known to require a detailed accounting here. Suffice it to say that Kennedy, sensing the enterprise was a dubious one, stalled for time, sent subordinates back to take a second look, and tinkered with operational details before reluctantly allowing it to proceed. When giving the final go-ahead, the president insisted that the operation succeed or fail on its own: Under no circumstances was he going to send in U.S. forces if the CIA-trained proxies got into more trouble than they could handle.20
Even before the first Cuban exile hit the beach at the Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961, everything had begun to go wrong. With disaster looming, the CIA made an eleventh-hour appeal, entreating Kennedy (through Secretary of State Dean Rusk) to order direct military intervention. The president denied that request. When the operation soon thereafter collapsed, leakers wasted no time in blaming the White House: Kennedy’s timidity in refusing to commit American muscle, they claimed, had doomed the enterprise.
For our purposes, the real significance of the Bay of Pigs lies in what next ensued. Kennedy’s response to his first foreign policy crisis produced results—almost all of them negative—that went far beyond what the president himself could possibly have envisioned. In that sense, the Bay of Pigs stands in relation to the Kennedy presidency as the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident would to the presidency of Lyndon Johnson or the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran to the presidency of Jimmy Carter. As a turning point, the Bay of Pigs deserves comparison with 9/11—a moment that created an opening to pose first-order questions, but elicited instead an ill-conceived, reflexive response. As would Johnson, Carter, and George W. Bush, Kennedy in 1961 squandered an opportunity to rethink and reorient U.S. policy, with fateful implications.
Less than a hundred days into his presidency, Kennedy found himself obliged to take personal responsibility for the most humiliating foreign-policy failure the nation had experienced in decades. He was adamant that this would never happen again.
In Washington, large-scale failure or scandal inevitably produces demands for explanations. More often than not, however, the ensuing investigation undertaken by some congressional committee or blue-ribbon commission devotes less attention to uncovering truth or probing for underlying causes than to limiting political fallout.
So in the wake of the Bay of Pigs, the president turned to Maxwell Taylor, recruiting him to head up an in-house inquiry into the causes of the debacle. As chair of the Cuba Study Group, the retired general presided over an investigation that gave the president what he wanted. Besides Taylor, the group consisted of chief of naval operations Adm. Arleigh Burke, CIA director Allen Dulles (whose agency had, after all, planned, prepared, and overseen the debacle), and Attorney General Robert Kennedy—all of whom, albeit for different reasons, were more interested in damage control than in pursuing the facts wherever they might happen to lead. Not surprisingly, Taylor and his colleagues focused almost exclusively on tactical and operational issues, while giving wide berth to anything touching even remotely on basic policy. It was the equivalent of investigating a bridge collapse without bothering to assess the structural integrity of the basic engineering design.
As Taylor interpreted his charge, he was to evaluate the Bay of Pigs as one instance of U.S.-orchestrated “paramilitary, guerrilla, and anti-guerrilla activity . . . with a view to strengthening our work in this area.”21 What mattered most was to get on with business. When it came to identifying the “proximate cause” of Operation Zapata’s failure, therefore, Taylor’s group concluded that the core problem was a “shortage of ammunition.” That the Cuban exile air force—a ramshackle collection of obsolete aircraft, largely crewed by CIA contractors—had performed poorly also emerged as a matter of concern. Finally, there was the fact that the executive branch “was not organizationally prepared to cope with this kind of military operation.” A rejiggering of the organizational charts, allowing for more effective presidential control, was clearly in order.22
Exactly how Cuba threatened U.S. interests, thereby necessitating Castro’s removal, and whether or not covert action offered a plausible way to achieve that aim: These were matters the Cuba Study Group did not take up. In reporting their findings to the president, Taylor and his associates were content to note: “They had been struck with the general feeling that there can be no long-term living with Castro as a neighbor.” The basis of this general feeling remained unexplored and unexplained.
The members of the study group—who engaged in little actual study—deemed it sufficient to assert that Castro’s “continued presence within the hemispheric community as a dangerously effective exponent of Communism and Anti-Americanism constitutes a real menace.” They urged Kennedy to have another go at the Cuban dictator, recommending that “new guidance be provided for political, military, economic and propaganda action against Castro.”23 Kennedy welcomed these findings, which conveniently coincided with his own existing views.
The Bay of Pigs might have provided an opportunity for what we today call “a teachable moment.” Taylor’s management of the Cuba Study Group—its classified findings needless to say withheld from the public—ensured that nothing of importance would be taught or learned. Yet when he had finished his assignment, Taylor could rightly claim a threefold achievement. First, by confining his inquiry to tactical issues, he deflected criticism away from the existing national security consensus. Fundamental questions, whether, for example, relying on covert action to overthrow foreign governments was worth the risk and actually served the national interest, remained off-limits. Second, by suggesting that culpability within the White House extended no further than a few organizational deficiencies, he created an opportunity for Kennedy (working through trusted lieutenants) to assert greater oversight over high-priority covert operations. Exercising direct White House control over CIA activities would reduce the likelihood of Agency gaffes ever getting the president into a similar pickle.
Finally—perhaps as a reward for items one and two—Taylor managed to make his way back into a position of power. Kennedy’s disenchantment with the Joint Chiefs of Staff for having failed to alert him to the risks posed by Zapata—whether the Chiefs were malicious, lazy, or just stupid was not clear—persuaded him to recall Taylor to active duty, first by inventing the post of Military Representative to the President, and then by appointing him as chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
The most immediate result of the Bay of Pigs debacle was to redouble the administration’s determination to eliminate Castro. Although the Pentagon focused its attention on the possibility of direct military intervention, the White House remained wary of action that smacked of naked imperialism. Instead, the Cuba Study Group’s recommendation that the president issue “new guidance” regarding action against the Cuban dictator found expression in Operation Mongoose, an aggressive program of covert action that aimed to get rid of Castro and subvert his revolution. In hopes of ensuring the program’s success—and protect himself from being duped again—Kennedy fired Allen Dulles along with other senior CIA officials who had concocted Operation Zapata. He then assigned responsibility for Mongoose to his most trusted deputy: his brother Robert, the attorney general, now doing double duty as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and its principal impresario of dirty tricks.
The younger Kennedy became chair of a newly created anti-Castro steering group known as the Special Group (Augmented), charged with coordinating the actions of all government agencies conspiring to topple Castro. Bringing to this task the energy for which he was well known, Robert Kennedy declared his intention to “stir things up on [the] island with espionage, sabotage, [and] general disorder,” working through Cuban exiles. Direct military intervention was to be a last resort.
The likelihood of such actions inducing unintended consequences left the attorney general undaunted: “[W]e have nothing to lose in my estimate.”24 The younger Kennedy wasted no time declaring that solving the Cuba problem ranked as “the top priority in the United States Government—all else is secondary—no time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared.”25
Likewise not to be spared were the legal and moral norms to which U.S. officials professed allegiance. With legendary spook Maj. Gen. Edward Lansdale acting as Kennedy’s chief of operations, all sorts of bizarre chicanery soon followed, including collusion with the Mafia in plots to assassinate Castro, fantastical schemes aimed at inciting popular insurrection, and a program of sabotage directed at Cuba’s food supply, power plants, oil refineries, and other economic assets—all of this together constituting one of the most infamous and profitless episodes in the history of American statecraft.
From the outset, Mongoose was bravado and swagger masquerading as policy. “We are in a combat situation—where we have been given full command,” Lansdale announced in January 1962, adding that with “all the men, money, material, and spiritual assets of this most powerful nation on earth,” failure was not an option.26 At Robert Kennedy’s urging, Lansdale cobbled together an ambitious program to “help the Cubans overthrow the Communist regime from within Cuba and institute a new government with which the United States can live in peace.”
The resulting plan distributed among various executive departments and agencies thirty-two specific tasks, running the gamut from “inducing failures in food crops” and mounting sabotage attacks to recruiting defectors and devising “songs, symbols, [and] propaganda themes” to boost the morale of an all but nonexistent indigenous resistance. According to Lansdale, accomplishing this menu of tasks would culminate with Castro’s overthrow. The target date for completion: October 1962.27
The manic activity that followed included a pronounced element of opéra bouffe. The slogan devised to inspire the Cuban opposition (task 27) was “Guasano Libre,” loosely translated by one unimpressed State Department official as “worms of the world unite.”28 Concerted attempts by the Defense Department to induce Cuban exiles to enlist in the U.S. armed forces (task 32) yielded a meager total of 142 recruits. Hundreds more expressed interest only to be rejected on “moral and security grounds.” The explanation for this puzzling problem? Most of the would-be warriors, reported Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric, “were found unacceptable on the basis of admitted sexual deviations.”29
Within weeks, it became evident that prospects for fomenting an uprising inside Cuba were remote. Sabotage, harassment, propagandizing, economic warfare, and assassination plots would not suffice to eliminate Castro. Disappointment did not, however, persuade the administration to reassess its objectives, nor is there evidence that it abandoned Lansdale’s timetable. Instead, Mongoose underwent a metamorphosis. Rather than itself serving as the instrument of decision, it became an interim step, intended to pave the way for “the instantaneous commitment of sufficient armed forces to occupy the country, destroy the regime, free the people, and establish in Cuba a peaceful country.”30 As early as March 1962, therefore, Lansdale was asking the Pentagon to provide “a brief but precise description of pretexts which the JCS believes desirable” to justify “direct military intervention.”31
From our present vantage point, with the passing of several decades during which nine of Kennedy’s successors managed to coexist with Castro even as the Kennedy brothers achieved the status of secular saints, Operation Mongoose appears inexplicable. Suffice it to say that by the end of 1961, the Kennedy administration was fixating on Fidel Castro with the same feverish intensity as the Bush administration exactly forty years later was to fixate on Saddam Hussein—and with as little strategic logic.
In its determination to destroy the Cuban Revolution, the Kennedy administration heedlessly embarked upon what was, in effect, a program of state-sponsored terrorism. In substance if not in scope, the actions of the United States toward Cuba during the early 1960s bear comparison with Iranian and Syrian support for proxies engaging in terrorist activities against Israel since the 1980s. The principal difference is that, whereas Hamas and Hezbollah have achieved considerable success, at least in enhancing their political standing, the U.S. attempt to unseat Castro achieved none whatsoever. Apart from expending the lives of several dozen guileless exiles who, at the CIA’s behest, attempted to infiltrate their home island, those efforts were stillborn. From a moral and legal point of view, Operation Mongoose was indefensible. From a practical point of view, it turned out to be arguably even more stupid than Operation Zapata.
How can we explain this? Why did an administration whose senior members fancied themselves to be pragmatic and analytical go off the deep end in its pursuit of a dictator governing a country that, in 1961, boasted a population of slightly less than six million, a per capita income one-fifth that of the United States, and negligible military power?32
No doubt domestic politics provides at least a partial explanation. In his handling of the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy looked weak and vacillating, opening himself up to withering criticism from the Republican opposition as well as from elements of the permanent government, notably the military and the CIA, skilled at manipulating the popular fear of communism for their own political purposes. Reenergizing the campaign to get Castro offered a way of rebutting any charges that the young president lacked toughness and so could be circumvented or ignored. For Kennedy (and every president since), projecting an image of toughness became an essential part of the job description.
That said, the response to the Bay of Pigs also testified to the authority of the reigning precepts of national security. Even in the wake of a humiliating setback, they remained sacrosanct. After all, since the onset of the Cold War, covert action had established itself as the preferred instrument of power projection. As the most readily available means of satisfying Washington’s appetite for global interventionism, it complemented a nuclear arsenal that was considered absolutely essential but difficult to use. The methods devised by Allen Dulles and the methods perfected by Curtis LeMay worked in tandem to create the aura of secrecy, prestige, and power that now allowed presidents to assert and exercise quasi-imperial prerogatives.
The Bay of Pigs fiasco had seemingly called into question the efficacy of covert operations. This Kennedy and his lieutenants, devoted to enhancing the authority of the presidency, were not prepared to accept. After all, the agenda being marketed under the banner of flexible response aimed not to reduce the options for projecting power but to enrich them, while ensuring that the president alone call the shots. Operation Mongoose’s transformation from a program of subversion into a prelude to invasion hinted at where this search for more options pointed.
Not surprisingly, then, just as there was no serious effort to reevaluate the threat the Cuban Revolution posed to U.S. interests, so too there was no serious effort made to reassess the U.S. penchant for overthrowing governments not to its liking. To entertain either prospect would have required gifts of imagination (and, arguably, political courage) that neither Kennedy nor the other Cold Warriors of his inner circle possessed. The antidote to covert failure was—and this became a pattern in the future—to up the ante and devise overt alternatives.
Theodore Sorensen, special counsel to the president and a loyal chronicler of Camelot, found it heartening that Kennedy had taken from the Bay of Pigs episode “so many major lessons,” gained “at so relatively small and temporary a cost.”33 Soon thereafter, those lessons “helped save the world.”34 Arthur Schlesinger, the Democratic court historian then serving as one of the president’s special assistants, concurred. “[N]o one can doubt,” he wrote, “that failure in Cuba in 1961 contributed to success in Cuba in 1962.”35 To arrive at such exceedingly generous judgments, Sorensen and Schlesinger excluded from their accounts the post–Bay of Pigs vendetta against Castro that consumed the Kennedy brothers.
In fact, Kennedy and his advisers learned astonishingly little from the Bay of Pigs. In that action-oriented era, the tempo of CIA activity actually quickened. “Ike had undertaken 170 major covert CIA operations in eight years,” writes Tim Weiner in his history of the CIA. “The Kennedys launched 163 major covert operations in less than three.”36 In short, the only thing that mattered to the president and his brother was how to get Operation Zapata right the next time.
The president memorialized by Sorensen and Schlesinger was a singular figure, standing apart from the notably dull and pedestrian Eisenhower and from Kennedy’s own immediate successor, the boorish Lyndon Johnson. Keepers of the JFK legend could never bring themselves to acknowledge that Zapata and Mongoose situated their hero squarely within a dubious tradition that predated his presidency and survived his assassination. Peas need not be identical to come from the same pod.
Intended to deflect threats to U.S. security, the pattern of behavior that produced Zapata and Mongoose served instead to create threats where none had existed. So it was in 1962. In mid-August, the CIA warned General Lansdale that Soviet leaders intent on “deter[ring] an anticipated US military intervention against Castro” might be tempted to “establish a medium-range missile base” in Cuba.37 Neither Lansdale nor anyone else in a position of influence paid much attention to this prescient forecast.
The Kennedy administration’s obsessive pursuit of Castro had accomplished only one thing: It removed any doubts the Cuban dictator may have entertained about the dangers facing his regime. To defend his revolution, Castro looked to the Soviet Union, with which Cuba had already established a “fraternal” relationship. In response to his insistent entreaties, Nikita Khrushchev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR—resenting Soviet strategic inferiority and keen to preserve Marxism’s sole foothold in the Western Hemisphere—now offered protection in the form of generous Soviet security assistance: more and better weapons along with more trainers. In April 1962 Castro readily accepted this offer.38
At first, the weapons were defensive—antiaircraft missiles, for example. In May, however, the Soviet presidium added surface-to-surface ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads to the list. Shrouded in secrecy, these along with contingents of Red Army regulars soon began making their way toward Havana. The two preferred means of projecting U.S. power—covert operations and strategic attack—were now on a collision course. Washington’s enthusiasm for clandestine warfare had emerged in part from the belief that it offered a way to solve problems without undue risk of triggering all-out war. Now the Kennedy administration’s insistence on using covert means to liquidate its Castro problem would bring the world to the brink of a nuclear exchange.
Americans habitually assign responsibility for the ensuing Cuban missile crisis to the Soviet Union. According to the conventional story, Khrushchev, a boorish, blustering gambler given to emotional outbursts, overreached. Exhibiting coolness and sophistication, Kennedy then saved the day, thereby averting World War III. This self-justifying interpretation works only by confining the narrative to the famous “thirteen days,” excluding most of what went before and much of what came after.
“Khrushchev should have realized,” wrote Kennedy’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, in his memoirs, “that deploying missiles in Cuba was too threatening and destabilizing for the United States meekly to allow this to happen.”39 On whether Kennedy should have realized that the Soviet Union would not meekly allow Castro’s overthrow, Rusk is silent. Indeed, inside the administration the governing assumption was that the Soviets would remain passive in the face of American provocations. An interagency “Plan for Cuba” declared categorically that “the USSR will not intervene militarily” to preserve the Cuban Revolution. Although the Soviets might ratchet up the pressure in Berlin or other hotspots, they were sure to “stop short of a direct major confrontation with the U.S.”40
Dismissing Operation Mongoose as “terribly ineffective”—and by implication inconsequential—Secretary of Defense McNamara found it hard to believe that either Cuba or the Soviet Union took seriously U.S. efforts to subvert Castro. After all, McNamara avowed long after the fact, prior to October 1962 the United States “had no plan to invade Cuba.” When challenged on this point, he amended his statement: “Okay, we had no intent.” Yet the veracity of even that assertion requires an exceedingly narrow definition of “we.”41 In OPLAN 314-61, the military establishment over which McNamara presided had developed a detailed invasion plan that senior U.S. commanders by the autumn of 1962 were fully prepared—even eager—to implement.42
Kennedy administration officials also rejected comparisons between the nuclear-tipped Jupiter missiles targeting the USSR from U.S.-controlled launch sites in Turkey and Italy and the subsequent Soviet decision to deploy nuclear-tipped missiles to Cuba. That a causal relationship might exist between the two, with U.S. actions inspiring or provoking a Soviet response, was not something they were prepared to consider. Kennedy’s advisers deemed the Jupiters another part of the Eisenhower legacy, unworthy of anyone’s serious attention. The U.S. missiles, wrote Sorensen, “had practically been forced on Italy and Turkey by an administration unable to find any worthwhile use for them.” They were “obsolescent and of little military value.”43 That the Kremlin might see matters differently—that the Jupiter’s very vulnerability might persuade the Soviets to see it as a first-strike weapon—was inconceivable.
Even as the administration sought to widen its edge over the Soviet Union in nuclear striking power and worked feverishly to subvert the Cuban Revolution, the men of Kennedy’s inner circle remained certain of their good intentions. They abhorred war and yearned for permanent peace. If peace somehow remained elusive, the fault must necessarily lie with others—with the recklessness (or malevolence) of Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev in the early 1960s, and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and Al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden at a later date, all of whom maliciously misconstrued America’s motives or stubbornly refused to endorse America’s benign vision for world order.
When some event disrupts the American pursuit of peace—the missile crisis of 1962, the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979, Saddam Hussein’s assault on Kuwait in 1990, or the terrorist attacks of 9/11—those exercising power in Washington invariably depict the problem as appearing out of the blue, utterly devoid of historical context. The United States is either the victim or an innocent bystander, Washington’s own past actions possessing no relevance to the matter at hand. Critics of the reigning national security consensus—skeptical scholars or political radicals—might suggest otherwise, but in the corridors of power such dissenters have no standing.
So although the dots connecting Zapata and Mongoose to the missile crisis were plainly evident, the Kennedy administration professed not to see them. In much the same way, the administration of George W. Bush would ignore the chain of events that paved the way for September 11, 2001: the overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh and the fervent U.S. embrace of the shah in 1953, its deference to Israel since the 1960s, its marriage of convenience with Saddam in the 1980s, its support for jihadists in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan during that same decade, and its military occupation of the Persian Gulf after Operation Desert Storm in the 1990s—each one eminently justifiable according to the established precepts of national security policy, but together producing an explosive backlash. To acknowledge the relationship between these policy initiatives and 9/11 would be to call into question a national security tradition going back decades—this American leaders still refuse to consider.
To his enduring credit, in this moment of maximum peril, President Kennedy suspended that tradition, even if only briefly. For public consumption, the administration insisted—and never ceased to insist—that the surprise sprung by Cuba and the Soviet Union had come out of nowhere and was utterly without justification. Privately, however, Kennedy was willing to acknowledge the causal relationship between past U.S. actions and the problem he now confronted. Those on the other side had their own gripes, not least of all the relentless U.S. campaign to destabilize Cuba and the presence of U.S. nuclear-tipped missiles along the perimeter of the Soviet Union. Castro and Khrushchev were acting in ways that Kennedy himself would have acted, had circumstances been reversed. Negotiating a peaceful resolution of the missile crisis, therefore, required that Kennedy take their complaints into account.
In navigating a way out of a predicament that his own intemperate actions had helped induce, Kennedy did exhibit admirable coolness and sophistication. He ignored the goading of those, Maxwell Taylor and Curtis LeMay prominent among them, who insisted that (in LeMay’s words) “we don’t have any choice except direct military action.” He opted instead for indirect action, a naval blockade styled as a “quarantine.” In a Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting with the president, LeMay derided this decision as “almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.”44 In fact, LeMay knew only half the story. In exchange for Khrushchev’s promise to remove Soviet nuclear weapons from Cuba, Kennedy was secretly offering the Russian leader important concessions. These included a pledge not to invade Cuba and a promise to quietly withdraw the Jupiters from Italy and Turkey. “Appeasement” by almost any definition of the term, this approach worked, at least in defusing the immediate crisis.
What had Kennedy and his men learned from their brush with Armageddon? The conventional view is that they learned a lot, the chief evidence offered being a speech the president gave at American University on June 10, 1963. In this address, Kennedy vowed that the United States would do its “part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just.” He invited Americans to rethink the Cold War, quit blaming the Soviet Union for the world’s ills, and “help make the world safe for diversity.” To emphasize his administration’s support for a proposed permanent global ban on the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, he announced a unilateral suspension of further atmospheric tests by the Pentagon.
The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough—more than enough—of war and hate and oppression.
As interpreted by his admirers, the president’s remarks heralded a major policy shift, with the United States henceforth oriented, in Kennedy’s words, “not towards a strategy of annihilation but towards a strategy of peace.”45 In fact, the shift entailed far less than was advertised. Having barely avoided war in the Caribbean, the United States was even then hurtling toward war in Southeast Asia.
The previous October during secret White House deliberations while the United States stood eyeball-to-eyeball with the Soviet Union, Maxwell Taylor had predicted that “if we do not destroy the missiles and bombers, we will have to change our entire military way of dealing with external threats.”46 As the JCS chairman saw it, to give way over Cuba would be tantamount to abandoning the essential premises of national security policy.
Taylor need not have worried. Even though the United States did not destroy the Soviet missiles and bombers deployed to Cuba, the standard U.S. response to perceived external threats, emphasizing global military presence, power projection capabilities, and intervention, survived without a scratch. The peaceful resolution of the missile crisis in no way dampened the Kennedy administration’s enthusiasm for flexible response or enriching the options available to the president for employing force. In this regard, the course of events in Vietnam testifies to the realities of U.S. policy far more accurately than does Kennedy’s oft-cited speech at American University.
To be fair, Kennedy inherited a mess in Vietnam. Yet over the course of his brief tenure in office, he compounded that mess, passing to his successor a far more difficult situation. There is no evidence that any lessons drawn from his administration’s Cuban encounters had a positive effect on the way it dealt with Vietnam.
Whenever the subject of Vietnam comes up, Kennedy’s defenders invariably explain what the president would have done had he not been assassinated in November 1963. Once elected to a second term, they insist, he intended to pull the plug on the American commitment to South Vietnam. “I think it highly probable,” wrote Robert McNamara in his memoir, “that, had President Kennedy lived, he would have pulled us out of Vietnam.”47
Those less enamored with the martyred president might be tempted to quote the protagonist of Ernest Hemingway’s great novel of the 1920s, The Sun Also Rises. The woman with whom Hemingway’s protagonist Jake Barnes is in love suggests that, were it not for World War I, they might have lived happily ever after. “Yes,” Jake replies. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
In fact, Kennedy saw South Vietnam as the crucial test case of flexible response, an opportunity to demonstrate that counterinsurgency and nation-building techniques could defeat communist-inspired “wars of national liberation”—that when it came to projecting power, the United States had at hand tools other than those offered by the CIA and SAC.48 With this in mind, the president
In 1961 Vice President Lyndon Johnson had hailed Diem as the “Winston Churchill of Asia.” Two years later, however, the South Vietnamese autocrat had become, in Washington’s eyes, an intolerable impediment to U.S. efforts to defeat the communist insurgency, widely assumed to be directed by North Vietnam.
The coup, launched on November 1, 1963, with direct involvement of both the U.S. ambassador in Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, and the CIA, succeeded. The generals overthrew Diem and murdered him, choosing a U.S.-manufactured armored personnel carrier as the execution site. Washington had counted on Diem’s removal to reenergize the war against the Viet Cong (VC). The generals who made the coup were expected to be more cooperative. In fact, operational success produced political catastrophe. In Saigon, the coup threw open the floodgates of instability and dysfunction. Three weeks later, with events in Vietnam careening out of control, Kennedy himself was dead.
Here was yet another debacle on a par with the Bay of Pigs, this time entirely of the administration’s own making. American complicity in the coup again showed how little those around Kennedy had learned from the events that had occurred on their watch. Assumptions that decisions made in Washington were sure to shape and determine the course of events far afield remained firmly in place. Having concluded that Diem was obstructing their purposes in Vietnam, they acted with astonishingly little consideration for the downside risks.
Kennedy’s assassination freed the president from being called to account for all that ensued. In fact, as U.S. involvement evolved into a national nightmare, it became all the more necessary to hold the martyred president sinless. Doing so sustained the comforting belief that, were it not for an assassin’s bullet, the United States might have avoided a decade of trauma involving war, division, demoralization, domestic upheaval, and defeat. Had fate only allowed Kennedy to live, the high ideals and visionary aspirations that he was said to have represented might have achieved fulfillment.
In the popular imagination, none of the subsequent revelations about Kennedy’s character have dented this wishful thinking. The problem with sacralizing his memory is not that it ignores his philandering, abuse of drugs, and concealment of chronic health problems, but that it creates an impression of discontinuity where none existed. The abrupt termination of Camelot did not ring down the curtain on some ambitious effort to reorient American statecraft. The Kennedy who embraced the strategy of overkill, sought to subvert the Cuban Revolution, and deepened the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam was continuing work that his predecessor had begun. When Lyndon Johnson replaced Kennedy in the Oval Office, the postwar tradition of American statecraft passed into the hands of yet another faithful steward.
Taylor and McNamara restore our appreciation of those continuities. When Kennedy went to his reward, they stayed on to serve his successor—Taylor accepting LBJ’s appointment to become U.S. ambassador to Saigon in 1964 and McNamara remaining at his post in the Pentagon until 1968.
Taylor and McNamara did not see themselves as turncoats. They were not defiling Kennedy’s memory. They were carrying on his work. The pursuit of options did not end with Kennedy’s death.
Well over forty years after his passing, the carefully burnished image of John F. Kennedy still glistens. Ngo Dinh Diem, meanwhile, has all but vanished from collective memory. Yet to a far greater extent than Kennedy’s murder at the hands of a deranged gunman, Diem’s overthrow, engineered by the U.S. government, qualifies as a historical turning point.
Once Diem passed from the scene, the situation in South Vietnam quickly went from awful to far worse. For senior officials back in Washington, every available course of action now appeared unattractive. Devoted to the techniques inherent in the Washington consensus, however, and unable to conceive of an alternative approach to exercising “global leadership,” they swallowed their doubts and plunged on. All of this happened to the accompaniment of considerable angst and hand wringing, with Taylor and McNamara playing pivotal roles. Making an equally important contribution was McGeorge Bundy, the bespectacled and buttoned-down former Harvard dean who had served as Kennedy’s special assistant for national security affairs and who soldiered on in that capacity under Johnson.
At the urging of this unholy trio, Lyndon Johnson bet his presidency and his domestic vision of creating a “great society” on the proposition that the exceedingly unwelcome climes of Southeast Asia posed no barrier to the effective application of flexible response.
Again, the domestic political calendar dictated the tempo of decision making. In August 1964, the Tonkin Gulf incident—North Vietnamese gunboats allegedly launching unprovoked attacks against U.S. Navy warships—enabled Johnson to pocket a blank check for further war. Voting with near unanimity, a compliant Congress authorized him “to take all necessary measures to repeal any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent any further aggression.” Yet for the moment, Johnson, presenting himself in the 1964 presidential campaign as the candidate of peace and reason, temporized. Only after he had secured a full term as president did Vietnam claim his sustained attention. Then, with deteriorating conditions in Saigon permitting no further delay, the pace of events quickened. Between January and April 1965, the United States took full ownership of the Vietnam War.
As McNamara described it, throughout this brief interval, the administration fixated exclusively on the “question of what military course to follow.”53 That a viable military option might not exist or that nonmilitary alternatives deserved careful consideration were propositions that received scant attention.
A long January 6 cable from Ambassador Taylor to President Johnson set in motion the train of decisions that culminated in the full-fledged application of flexible response. The situation in Saigon looked bleak, Taylor reported.
We are faced here with a seriously deteriorating situation characterized by continued political turmoil, irresponsibility, and division within the armed forces, lethargy in the pacification program, some anti-US feeling which could grow, signs of mounting terrorism by VC directly at US personnel and deepening discouragement and loss of morale throughout [South Vietnam].
Absent urgent and forceful action by Washington, Taylor foresaw the emergence in Saigon of a government likely to seek “accommodation with the National Liberation Front and Hanoi.” Diem, it turned out, had been an irreplaceable figure. “I doubt that anyone appreciated the magnitude of the centrifugal political forces which had been kept under control by his iron rule.”
Simply trying harder was unlikely to produce better results next week or next month. The advisory program—Taylor reported that there were now 23,700 U.S. military personnel in country—had “probably reached about the saturation point.” The order of the day was to try something different. “The game needs to be opened up,” Taylor advised, “and new opportunities offered for new breaks which hopefully may be in our favor.”
In Taylor’s view, opening up the game need not require the introduction of U.S. ground troops. Instead, the former army general and self-described skeptic regarding the efficacy of aerial bombardment pressed for a “program of graduated air attacks” directed against North Vietnam. Air power constituted “the most flexible weapon in our arsenal of military superiority,” he wrote. Its skillful application would “bring pressure on the will” of those who governed in Hanoi.
“As practical men,” Taylor continued, “they cannot wish to see the fruits of ten years of labor destroyed by slowly escalating air attacks (which they cannot prevent) without trying to find some accommodation which will exorcise the threat.” In the meantime, this affirmation of America’s commitment to South Vietnam was sure to “give the local morale a much needed shot in the arm,” boosting flagging spirits and putting to rest suspicions that the United States might be looking for ways to cut its losses. Taylor concluded: “[W]e should look for an occasion to begin air operations just as soon as we have satisfactorily compromised the current political situation in Saigon.”54
“Compromising” the political situation in Saigon implied establishing some semblance of a stable and effective South Vietnamese government. First, get the South on track politically, then hammer the North militarily: This was Taylor’s proposed sequence. Unfortunately for his plan, there was little to suggest that further American coaching, chiding, or conspiring was going to fix the political situation in Saigon. As Taylor himself acknowledged, “No amount of persuasion or communication is going to make [the South Vietnamese] other than what they are over the short term.”55 Nonetheless, bombing the North—styled as “reprisals” to convey the sense that the United States was responding defensively to Viet Cong attacks in the South—now emerged as the favored next step.
Johnson himself remained unconvinced. So the president’s national security adviser and defense secretary now weighed in, prodding their boss to act. The United States, they argued, could no longer afford to wait for South Vietnam to get its act together. “Bob [McNamara] and I,” wrote Bundy in a memo to the president on January 27, “are persuaded that there is no real hope of success in this area unless and until our own policy and priorities change.” The confidence of the South Vietnamese in their patron and protector was, Bundy insisted, waning. Seeing “the enormous power of the United States withheld,” they now doubted the depth of American seriousness.
By declaring that “we will not go further until there is a stable government” in Saigon, the administration had shackled itself to “a policy of first aid to squabbling politicos and passive reaction to events we do not try to control. . . . Bob and I believe that the worst course of action is to continue in this essentially passive role which can only lead to eventual defeat and an invitation to get out under humiliating circumstances.”
The United States needed to shed its shackles. “We see two alternatives,” Bundy added.
The first is to use our military power in the Far East and to force a change in Communist policy. The second is to deploy all our resources along a track of negotiation, aimed at salvaging what little can be preserved with no major addition to our present military risks.56
Both he and McNamara, Bundy told the president, favored the first alternative. They could hardly do otherwise. To concede that American military power was inadequate to the task of making the North Vietnamese behave would nullify claims that flexible response was enhancing the utility of force while reducing the moral impediments to its employment—in other words, that it represented an improvement over the strategy of massive retaliation that they openly disdained.
Instead, McNamara and Bundy had neatly removed one of the major obstacles to Taylor’s proposed coercive air campaign—the assumption that the United States needed first to establish a stable government in Saigon.57 All that remained was to find a convenient excuse for launching such a campaign.
This the Viet Cong obligingly provided on February 6, 1965, when they attacked Camp Holloway, the U.S. air base at Pleiku, killing eight Americans, wounding dozens more, and destroying ten U.S. military aircraft.
“Pleikus are like streetcars,” Bundy subsequently remarked. The key was to be ready to hop aboard when one came trundling along.58 Visiting Taylor in Saigon at the time of the Pleiku attack, Bundy was ready for his streetcar.
Within twenty-four hours he was cabling Johnson that, absent a “policy of graduated and continuing reprisal,” defeat in South Vietnam appeared “inevitable—probably not in a matter of weeks or perhaps even months, but within the next year or so.” To attempt a negotiated settlement was folly, amounting to “surrender on the installment plan.” Immediately at risk were not only “the international prestige of the United States” but also “a substantial part of our influence.”59 An opportunity to regain the initiative and turn things around was now presenting itself.
One point deserves particular emphasis here. For Bundy and others in the administration, the urge to act grew out of considerations unrelated to the crisis of the moment or even to Vietnam as such. The formal report rendered by the Bundy mission let the cat out of the bag. “We cannot assert that a policy of sustained reprisal will succeed in changing the course of the contest in Vietnam,” that report acknowledged. “What we can say is that even if it fails, the policy will be worth it.” The very act of bombing the North would demonstrate American will, “damp[ing] down the charge that we did not do all that we could have done.” Pain inflicted on the North Vietnamese would “set a higher price for the future upon all adventures of guerrilla warfare,” thereby increasing “our ability to deter such adventures.” In effect, the United States needed to bomb North Vietnam to affirm its claims to global primacy and quash any doubts about American will. Somehow, in faraway Southeast Asia, the continued tenability of the Washington consensus was at stake.60
Clambering onto his streetcar, Bundy found plenty of company already aboard. Within the administration, his own efforts, reinforced by those of Taylor and McNamara, had forged a solid majority in favor of escalation. On February 8, back in Washington and presiding over a meeting of the National Security Council, Bundy polled those in attendance and found that “without dissent, all agreed to act, that we should apply force against the North.” According to notes taken at the meeting, McNamara chimed in with the comment “that we should move forward and should keep going.”61 Soon thereafter, President Johnson gave his consent.
In this case, moving forward had a specific meaning. Declaring its determination to prevent further incidents like Pleiku, the Johnson administration decided to subject North Vietnam to a campaign of sustained aerial bombardment. In effect, self-defense provided a rationale—or pretext—for making a small war bigger, for loosening those shackles on American military might, and for going on the offensive.
Much the same thing, of course, occurred after September 11, 2001. Averting further terrorist attacks provided a rationale—or pretext—for launching a “global war on terror,” for shedding any remaining constraints on the use of American power, and for invading Afghanistan and Iraq. In its own way, 9/11 was also a streetcar that members of the George W. Bush administration seized upon with the same alacrity that Bundy and his colleagues had seized upon Pleiku.
As in 2001 so in 1965, the underlying purpose was anything but defensive. In the wake of painful tragedy, U.S. officials preoccupied themselves not with protecting exposed American assets (whether Camp Holloway or Manhattan), but with doubling down on the existing approach to exercising global leadership. In both cases they rejected out of hand the possibility that such an approach might itself render the United States more vulnerable rather than more secure. For Washington, the essential response to setbacks, whether relatively modest as in February 1965 or calamitous as in September 2001, is not thoughtful reflection but energetic action, preemptively diverting attention away from the existing premises of national security.
On his way back from Saigon, Bundy made a special point of reassuring Johnson that “U.S. policy within Vietnam is mainly right and well-directed.” Naysayers didn’t know what they were talking about and could be ignored. “None of the special solutions or criticisms put forward with zeal by individual reformers in government or in the press is of major importance, and many of them are flatly wrong.”62
In 1965 as in 2001, naysayers with access to the White House were few in number. In the wake of Pleiku, the role of lonely dissenter fell to Senator Mike Mansfield, the Democrat from Montana who was then Senate majority leader. In a city where esteem is the reward of well-regarded figures who don’t wield much clout, Mansfield was said to be much esteemed.
Yet his critique of the Pleiku incident and its aftermath merits our attention. In a letter to President Johnson on February 8, Mansfield had the temerity to suggest that the Viet Cong had penetrated Camp Holloway because the Americans there had failed to properly defend themselves. The problem, he told the president, was one of “lax” security. The failure resembled another recent incident, in Bien Hoa, where “we were caught off guard.” The solution to the problem was not to bomb North Vietnam. It was to do a better job of manning the perimeter.63
Much the same argument might have been made after 9/11: Nineteen jihadists armed with box cutters perpetrated the most devastating attack on the United States since the War of 1812 because security at American airports was lax. To avert a recurrence, the United States might have attended to repairing its defenses. Instead, within twenty-four hours, senior officials in the Bush administration were pressing for an invasion of Iraq, a country not involved in the 9/11 conspiracy.
As in 2001 so too in 1965, defense—protecting Americans from harm—never figured as more than an afterthought. At stake was a thoroughly militarized conception of statecraft to which those at the center of power remained deeply wedded. Those adhering to that conception—officials like Bundy, McNamara, and Taylor in 1965 or Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz in 2001—depicted the vigorous exercise of American leadership (by which they meant the vigorous application of hard power) as essential to peace. When leadership thus defined yielded not peace but war, questions naturally arose about the efficacy of that conception. Sustaining the Washington consensus—and preserving the status of those whose authority derived from their ostensible ability to interpret that consensus—meant suppressing such questions. In practice, this meant that the only permissible response to violence was more violence.
Mansfield’s critique challenged that consensus. Deepening the U.S. involvement in the war would exacerbate rather than alleviate the nation’s security problems, he told the president. Given existing commitments to some forty-two “countries or groups of countries scattered around the world,” the United States was already facing the risk of overextension. Although Mansfield couldn’t specify a solution to the particular predicament posed by South Vietnam, he felt certain that “the trend toward enlargement of the conflict . . . is not going to provide one.”64
Mansfield may not have articulated an alternative to the Washington rules, but he was implicitly questioning the principles on which they rested. He was, after all, inviting the president to consider reducing the U.S. global military presence. He was suggesting that, for all the money the country had invested in configuring its forces for power projection, the utility of those forces might be limited. When it came to intervention, he was suggesting that the United States ought to exercise greater self-restraint.
President Johnson assigned Bundy the task of rebutting this critique, which the national security adviser did in a long letter dated February 9, 1965. Bundy refused to give an inch. There was no need to reassess administration policy. Things were essentially on track. “[T]he vast majority of the Vietnamese people do not wish to fall under Communist domination,” Bundy assured Mansfield. Recent events on the battlefield showed that ARVN soldiers “are tough and resilient fighters and that their morale remains high.” For their part, American soldiers were learning “important lessons” from whatever setbacks they might be experiencing. “More generally,” Bundy wrote,
it does not appear to me that the power of the United States around the world is “stretched too thin.” We have been able to keep our commitments around the world for a quarter of a century and our country has never been richer or more at ease.
That Americans were dying in South Vietnam “gives the President personal sorrow.” Even so, Bundy continued, “we cannot say that the current level of sacrifice in Southeast Asia is unduly heavy.” In short, there was no need for the Johnson administration to consider a different course in Vietnam, nor to reevaluate its posture globally.65
A day later, the senator fired back. In a second letter to the president, Mansfield predicted that U.S. air attacks against the North would succeed only in increasing the level of violence in the South. “They are not fools,” he wrote in reference to the North Vietnamese leadership, “and they are not going to play the game as fools.”
They are going to continue to play their strength against our weakness. Our weakness is on the ground in Viet Nam, where isolated pockets of Americans are surrounded by, at best, an indifferent population and, more likely, by an increasingly hostile population.
Mansfield anticipated air strikes against the North producing a “tit-for-tat pattern” of mutual retaliation, putting U.S. installations in the South at ever greater risk. To ensure their security, “the outposts will have to be vastly strengthened by American forces.” Air escalation, therefore, necessarily implied escalation on the ground. This Mansfield adamantly opposed, proposing instead that the United States launch a diplomatic initiative aimed at securing “a cease fire throughout Viet Nam and Indochina.”66
Again, Bundy replied on the president’s behalf, undertones of exasperation creeping into his response. “Let me try once again to comment,” he began. Yes, “the Vietnamese Communists will try as hard as they can to show that they have more determination than we.” Yet Bundy seemed unabashed at the prospect. Bring ’em on. As for Mansfield’s proposed cease-fire initiative, this Bundy dismissed as akin to applying “equal standards to the cops and to the robbers.” Negotiations were out of the question.67
With that, debate—such as it was—ended. That same day, the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam began in earnest. Nominally in response to an attack on an American barracks at Qui Nhon, the retaliatory air strike of February 11 blended seamlessly into a comprehensive and continuing series of raids dubbed Operation Rolling Thunder. Although the Johnson administration styled the U.S. attacks as reprisals, this was but a useful fiction. Washington’s objectives determined the tempo of air operations. Foremost among those objectives was relying on air power to coerce the North Vietnamese leadership into accepting the existence of South Vietnam as an independent nation aligned with the United States.
Rolling Thunder’s leading proponents did not set out to destroy North Vietnam. Although Curtis LeMay was then still advocating a one-size-fits-all solution to the problem—“bomb them into the Stone Age”—they rejected this maximalist approach in favor of what they considered more nuanced and discriminating methods.68 The object of the exercise was not to obliterate but to influence. Through a “measured, controlled sequence of actions,” consistent with the spirit of flexible response, the United States intended to “persuade [North Vietnam] to stop its intervention in the South.”69
Yet just as Mansfield had predicted, the air offensive against the North almost immediately generated demands for additional reinforcements in the South. By February 23, Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the senior commander in Saigon, was already pressing for a marine battalion to secure the American base at Da Nang, essential to U.S. air operations.70 Four days later, President Johnson approved the commitment of not one, but two marine battalions, supplemented by a helicopter squadron.71 On March 2, McNamara cabled Taylor with the news that he was sending army chief of staff Gen. Harold K. Johnson on a mission to Saigon “to examine . . . what more can be done within South Vietnam.” In his consultations with General Johnson, McNamara advised Taylor to “assume no limitation on funds, equipment, or personnel.”72
On March 10, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton, a key McNamara aide, produced a paper offering “a massive US ground effort” in South Vietnam as one possible way to regain the upper hand.73 On March 14, General Johnson produced his “what more can be done” proposal, which floated the possibility of deploying four U.S. divisions across South Vietnam and Laos.74 Within two days, Bundy was writing that the deployment of major U.S. ground forces “may soon be necessary for both military and political reasons.”75
On March 18, Taylor signaled his support for sending a U.S. Army combat division to South Vietnam.76 On March 20, the Joint Chiefs of Staff told McNamara that the commitment of major U.S. combat formations had become “imperative if defeat is to be avoided.”77 At an April 6 meeting of the National Security Council, President Johnson approved a major expansion of U.S. support personnel in South Vietnam, entailing an additional eighteen thousand to twenty thousand troops. He also revised the mission of the marines already in Da Nang “to permit their more active use.”78 Finally, on April 14, at a luncheon meeting with Bundy, McNamara, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the president agreed to the immediate deployment of the army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade, to begin combat operations near Bien Hoa. The American war in Vietnam now began in earnest.
Just shy of one hundred days earlier Ambassador Taylor had ventured to suggest that “the game” needed opening up. During the weeks that followed, he and his colleagues had done that and more; indeed, they had radically transformed the game. That they were able to do so reflected modifications to the Washington rules implemented under the auspices of flexible response.
Between 1961 and 1965 much had happened. No longer did observers wonder if CIA headquarters in Langley or SAC headquarters in Omaha had hijacked basic national security policy. From his perch in the Pentagon, McNamara was in charge of the military, including General LeMay. Indeed, McNamara’s control of Operation Rolling Thunder extended to personally approving the list of targets to be hit.79 At the White House, the president and his lieutenants were in charge of everything, including the Central Intelligence Agency.
By 1965, projecting American power no longer meant choosing between covert-style “dirty tricks” and all-out nuclear war. New concepts and capabilities abounded, providing a panoply of additional options: limited strategic bombing employed as a method of signaling or suasion; conventional combat emphasizing technologically enhanced firepower and mobility; theories of counterinsurgency, pacification, and nation building; and innovative new approaches to covert action, among them a secret program for liquidating Viet Cong cadres that came to be called Operation Phoenix.
Beginning that summer, U.S. forces flooded into South Vietnam, the American troop presence in that country eventually exceeding half a million. In the ensuing years, flexible response faced its most demanding test. It failed that test ignominiously.
No single factor can adequately explain why the event that Americans call the Vietnam War occurred. A profound ignorance of Vietnamese history and the legacy left by European colonialism; Washington’s insistence on seeing communism as monolithic; the ostensible lessons of Munich and the influence of the so-called domino theory; the perverse political impact of domestic anticommunism; a civil-military relationship crippled by mistrust and dishonesty; the limited abilities of key advisers like Taylor compounded by the hubris of others like Bundy and McNamara; Johnson’s fear of being the president who “lost” Vietnam, along with a host of other private insecurities besetting the president of the United States: All of these played a role.
Yet there was also this: In an obscure corner of Southeast Asia about which most Americans knew little and cared less, the survival of the Washington rules was seemingly at stake. By 1965, America’s inability to impose its will on Vietnam threatened the underpinnings of U.S. global leadership. As viewed from Washington, American credibility was on the line. If Viet Cong insurgents and their North Vietnamese backers got away with defying the United States, then others might be similarly tempted. Enemies would be emboldened while nations in the habit of taking their marching orders from Washington might become less inclined to do so. With a strategy of global presence, power projection, and interventionism no longer guaranteeing success, alternative approaches to national security strategy might even gain a hearing at home, with basic strategy no longer taken as given. To those whose interests were served by preserving that strategy, this was an intolerable prospect. So among the explanations for the Vietnam War we can add this one: It was a war fought to sustain the Washington consensus.
In 1961, the “best and brightest” had assumed ownership of that consensus. Determined to remove any doubt as to who was in charge, they moved quickly to assert unquestioned control. Dissatisfied with the means available, they sought to devise new and more flexible instruments of power. Beginning in 1965, they put their handiwork to the test in Vietnam, the brush-fire war that, in their own minds, loomed large as a test of American global leadership. To their considerable dismay, they soon discovered that efforts to douse the fire produced the opposite effect. In attempting to snuff out a small war they produced instead a massive conflagration. Determined to demonstrate the efficacy of force employed on a limited scale, they created a fiasco over which they were incapable of exercising any control whatsoever.