The Great Society
News of Kennedy’s murder reached Ambassador Lodge in San Francisco as he arrived from Saigon. He continued on to Washington with bad tidings of the progress of the war in Vietnam, a report he delivered on 24 November 1963 to President Johnson. Johnson had been sworn in two days earlier on the aircraft bringing JFK’s body back to Washington and he made one thing clear: ‘I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.’ This pledge became policy two days later when it was incorporated into National Security Council Action Memorandum (NSCAM) 273.1
The hostility felt towards Johnson by the Kennedyites was personal. Bobby, in particular, hated him as the usurper of the deceased legend. The feeling was entirely mutual and Johnson described Bobby as a ‘self-righteous little prick’, which he undoubtedly was. Acolytes of the dead President could only register a snobbish distaste for his successor’s crude vulgarity. The list of offences against good taste was admittedly long, but there is no correlation between good manners and ethical or even decent conduct in office.
Where Johnson grew up in the Texas hill country, everything had to be done by hand since there was no electricity. As a child he had picked cotton and shone shoes himself before discovering a talent for debate. Resembling a bull elephant, he had a far more coherent political vision than his stylish predecessor. He had been a committed New Dealer and as such FDR’s favourite son in Texas politics. He never lost that vision, even as he reached pragmatic accommodations with the big oil men and cattle ranchers of his home state. Lying and fighting dirty came as naturally to him as belching and farting in genteel company. In Washington his dominance first of the House of Representatives and then of the Senate was legendary. It was based on physical intimidation and on an encyclopaedic knowledge of the personal foibles of every colleague that rivalled J. Edgar Hoover’s. The ‘Maharajah of Texas’ and his staff occupied twenty rooms in the Capitol after he became Senate majority leader.
He had led a loyal opposition to Eisenhower, supporting his civil rights initiatives and his liberal internationalism, and shaming his fellow Southerners (many of them conservative Dixiecrats already travelling towards the Republican Party, along with much of the South) by accusing them of being obstacles on the South’s road to modernization. Even before becoming vice president, he had staffers investigate how many of his predecessors had succeeded to the top job. At Kennedy’s inaugural ball, Johnson told the wife of Time’s owner: ‘Clare [Luce], I looked it up: one out of every four Presidents has died in office. I’m a gamblin’ man, darlin’, and this is the only chance I get.’2 The chance came when, in a rented car well behind Kennedy’s Dallas motorcade, LBJ was manhandled to the floor by a secret service agent who realized what the three sharp cracks of sound signified.
As president, Johnson undertook a bold reform programme known as the Great Society, including civil rights and better medical care, which was to be achieved through a combination of budget savings, tax cuts and social programmes financed by high private sector growth.3 Although he was as conventionally anti-Communist as the next American, Johnson’s key concern was that the right should not thwart his domestic legislation because of perceived weakness in foreign policy. The last thing he wanted was a major war to drain away the money he wished to use to transform American society. The trick was to avoid another lost China, without getting stuck in a second Korea. In fact, he got Vietnam, with its own draining, gruelling identity. He vividly dramatized his dilemma. The Great Society was the woman he loved, but he was constantly being led astray by ‘that bitch of a war on the other side of the world’.4
Initially Johnson opted to do ‘more of the same and do it more efficiently’ in Vietnam, or as he put it, ‘by God, I want something for my money [military aid for South Vietnam], I want ’em to get off their butts and get out in those jungles and whip hell out of some Communists. And then I want ’em to leave me alone, because I’ve got some bigger things to do right here at home.’5 The policy of ‘maximum effect with minimum involvement was set out in NSCAM 288 in March 1964. As a supposedly temporary surge, the number of military advisers was increased from 16,300 to 23,300, with an extra $50 million in economic assistance. Recklessly optimistic General Harkins was the most visible casualty of the new efficiency drive, replaced in June by General William Westmoreland, who was a facts-and-figures man in the mould of McNamara, a corporate man in uniform, and as different from Douglas MacArthur as it was possible to be. An exponent of big-unit warfare, ‘Westy’ never mastered how to pacify an unconventional enemy with unconventional means in what was not an asymmetric fight. The following month, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Maxwell Taylor succeeded Cabot Lodge as ambassador to Saigon after Lodge had decided to return to the US to shore up the shrinking liberal internationalist strain in the Republican Party.
Major decisions to escalate US involvement in Vietnam were a year away, but the rationalization for past and present failures began to shift ominously long before. President de Gaulle’s advice in February 1963 to neutralize North and South, which would then block Chinese expansionism, was never seriously considered, and nor was the logic of falling dominoes often disputed. During another visit to South Vietnam in December, McNamara became convinced that the solution was to raise the cost of war to the North. A month later the Joint Chiefs delivered a similar message. The enemy was being allowed to dictate the course of the war, and that enemy was not so much the guerrillas in the South as their leaders in Hanoi. Rostow, now Chairman of the State Department’s Policy Planning Council, had been urging the use of graduated bombing to send signals to the North Vietnamese leadership for years.
The concept was powerfully appealing to the air force and navy, for it would enable them to underline their ongoing (budgetary) relevance to a conflict that had hitherto largely been an army affair. After he returned from yet another depressing trip to Saigon in mid-March 1964, McNamara ordered the Joint Chiefs to plan alternative bombing scenarios. The first would be a limited seventy-two-hour blitz in response to major guerrilla provocations. The second version would be a major strategic bombing campaign, designed to smash the North’s entire military and industrial infrastructure. This would force Ho Chi Minh to the negotiating table, for otherwise he would see his attempts to build a socialist society in ruins.
The Pentagon conducted two sets of war games in April and September 1964: SIGMA I-64 and SIGMA II-64, with National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy representing the President. The Red Team (representing Hanoi) included the Far Eastern expert Marshall Green of State and General Earle Wheeler, Taylor’s replacement as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Blue Team had Curtis LeMay, William Bundy and John McNaughton, the academic recently appointed assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. Honestly conducted, the war games made it apparent that bombing had little or no deterrent effect on Red Team’s ability to escalate infiltration of South Vietnam, while every Red Team counter-move exposed new US vulnerabilities. LeMay found it all too much to bear, and in an aside to McGeorge Bundy snarled, ‘We should bomb them back to the Stone Age.’ ‘Maybe they’re already there,’ replied Bundy.
The games continued with the dice loaded to produce the desired outcome. Even so, the chimera of victory could be achieved only by switching the more able players and raising the levels of what the US was prepared to do, up to and including use of tactical nuclear weapons. ‘Mac’ Bundy was not impressed, and resolved that if a bombing campaign were unleashed, it would have to be subject to stringent limits.6
Getting with the Programme
Planning activity went ahead despite countervailing opinion regarding its assumptions. McNamara believed that the fall of South Vietnam would result in dominoes toppling throughout the rest of South-east Asia, affecting not only Cambodia and Laos, but also Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, India and even Australia and New Zealand, not to speak of the Philippines, Korea and Japan. The CIA, which understood what was unique about the Vietnamese Communists, contradicted that view, not least by pointing to the thousand years of antipathy between Vietnamese and Chinese. A report drawn up by the State Department’s Policy Planning Council also concluded that bombing the North would have very little impact on its support for the South. Indeed, it might escalate its activities by reconstituting North Vietnamese Army (NVA) forces for deployment in the southern campaign. It would also frustrate, rather than encourage, any will to negotiate in Hanoi. Rostow suppressed the report, on the grounds that State had no business meddling in military affairs. Similar warnings from the Pentagon’s internal Defense Intelligence Agency were also ignored.
Unfortunately Secretary of State Rusk did not fight his corner and endorsed McNamara’s views, claiming that US credibility in Europe or elsewhere would be undermined if a stand were not taken in Vietnam. That was a lie. Britain and France opposed escalating the war, and de Gaulle was a firm advocate of Vietnam’s neutralization. In a growing atmosphere of ‘getting with the programme’, any dissenting voices found themselves shut out of decisions being taken by fewer and fewer principals. Only George Ball, who had opposed American involvement in Vietnam from the time Kennedy first sent 16,000 ‘advisers’, was left as a licensed devil’s advocate, a designation indicating that he was not to be taken too seriously, like Adlai Stevenson over Cuba. Earlier lobbying to oust Diem undermined the authority of State Department dissenters such as Ball.7
Johnson was torn between competing pressures, hoping that all the bright, can-do men he had inherited from Kennedy would get him off the hook of his own private agonies. He feared that inaction in Vietnam would result in his political opponents (especially in the Southern states) derailing his ambitious domestic programmes. It would be like Truman and China all over again. ‘If I don’t go in now and they show later I should have gone, then they’ll be all over me in Congress. They won’t be talking about my civil rights bill, or education or beautification. No sir, they’ll push Vietnam up my ass every time. Vietnam. Vietnam. Vietnam. Right up my ass.’8 Johnson could not grasp how what he called ‘a piss-ant’ or ‘raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country’ could defy the will of a technologically advanced superpower. To negotiate or withdraw would represent a massive loss of face, a concept whose importance to Asians was sneered at by Americans deeply concerned about prestige. In pushing on with the war, Johnson was powerfully supported by America’s union bosses, men like AFL-CIO president George Meany who said: ‘I would rather fight the Communists in South Vietnam than fight them down here in Chesapeake Bay.’9
Contrary to the image of brutality projected on to him by the Kennedyites, Johnson agonized over the human tragedy of war in a way alien to the man he had replaced. Unlike Kennedy he had no schoolboy enthusiasms for special ops or covert warfare. Among the half-million photos of LBJ taken by the White House photographers – he was very vain – there are some with his head slumped down on his desk. In a recorded telephone conversation with McGeorge Bundy in May he said:
I’ll tell you . . . I just stayed awake last night thinking about this thing. The more I think of it, I don’t know what in the hell it looks to me like we’re getting into another Korea. It just worries the hell out of me . . . I don’t think it’s worth fighting for and I don’t think we can get out. And it’s just the biggest damn mess that I ever saw . . . I was looking at this sergeant of mine [his valet] this morning. Got six little old kids over there and he’s getting out my things and bringing in my night reading . . . and I just thought about ordering his kids in there and what in the hell am I ordering him out there for? What the hell is Vietnam worth to me? What is Laos worth to me? What is it worth to the country?
Bundy replied: ‘It is. It’s an awful mess.’ ‘Of course, if you start running from the Communists, they may just chase you right into your own kitchen,’ Johnson continued. ‘But this is a terrible thing that we’re getting ready to do.’ ‘Yeah, that’s the trouble,’ Bundy replied, ‘and that is what the rest of that half of the world is going to think if this thing comes apart on us . . . That’s exactly the dilemma.’10 Despite all the doubts, Bundy pressed ahead by commissioning target folders, for the magic bullet of bombing had its own momentum. And the ‘thing’ did indeed come apart.11
In Your Guts You Know He’s Nuts
Vietnam had a domestic political context, not exhausted by oppositional babyboomer students who by now were listening to ‘California Girls’, ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’, and ‘Stop! In the Name of Love’ by respectively the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones and the Supremes, should one care to remember. In reality, those most disillusioned with the war were the poor whites and poor blacks who had to fight it, not draft-dodging students. Johnson also faced threats from the Republican right and hawkish Democrats. Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate for the presidential election of 1964, answered the question what he would do in South-east Asia with: ‘I’d drop a low-yield atomic bomb on the Chinese supply lines in North Vietnam or maybe shell ’em with the Seventh Fleet.’ Democrat strategy was to depict him as a maniac, countering Goldwater’s slogan ‘In Your Heart You Know He’s Right’ with ‘In Your Guts You Know He’s Nuts.’12 But Johnson also simultaneously feared that the Kennedy clan would use weakness in Vietnam to launch a challenge within the Democrat Party. Against that backdrop came the Tonkin Gulf Incident.
On 2 August 1964, two covert US missions got their wires fatally crossed in the Gulf of Tonkin. The first was a raid by South Vietnamese commandos on islands off the North Vietnamese coast (OPLAN 34A, authorized by McNamara in December 1963). The second was a ‘DeSoto’ electronic-warfare operation involving the destroyer USS Maddox, whose tasks included identifying the positions of North Vietnamese radars as they lit up in response to the South Vietnamese raids. North Vietnamese torpedo boats, chasing the South Vietnamese intruders, naturally assumed that the Maddox – lurking ten miles from shore – was part and parcel of the same operation. When they attacked, Maddox returned fire, with planes from the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga joining in to cripple two enemy boats and sink a third. Washington ordered the Maddox to resume operations accompanied by the destroyer USS Turner Joy.
On 4 August initial reports from the two ships claimed they were under attack from North Vietnamese torpedo boats, having mistaken disturbances on sonar and radar screens on a stormy night for enemy ships. Even as the administration resolved on retaliatory air strikes against the torpedo-boat bases, urgent messages from the Maddox spoke of ‘freak weather effects’ and excitable radar and sonar operators. At the same time McNamara received decrypted North Vietnamese reports of an attack on US ships, but either failed or chose not to note that they referred to the attacks on 2 August rather than two days later.
The President knew instinctively what was going on: ‘It reminds me of the movies in Texas. You’re sitting next to a pretty girl and you have your hand on her ankle and nothing happens. And you move it up to her knee and nothing happens. You move it up further and you’re thinking about moving a bit more and all of a sudden you get slapped. I think we got slapped.’13 Nonetheless he authorized Operation Pierce Arrow, involving air strikes on the torpedo-boat bases and neighbouring oil-storage facilities at Vinh, which were deemed highly successful.14
Johnson seized the opportunity to secure a Congressional resolution authorizing him ‘to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attacks against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression’. This involved lying about what the Maddox was doing, and failing to mention the initial South Vietnamese commando raids to which the North Vietnamese were responding. Since a leak ensured that the press had already reported a second attack, there was no turning back. But that was judged a small price worth paying in what was a successful attempt to neutralize Goldwater, whose robust call to do what the administration was secretly planning to do was unfavourably contrasted with Johnson’s apparently moderate and proportionate response to Communist aggression in international waters. After Johnson had won the greatest electoral landslide of modern times, domestic constraints on him were fewer, especially since stopping Communism in South Vietnam was massively popular with the public. Eight months after the incident, Johnson wryly conceded, ‘For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.’
At this point, the Chinese took a much keener interest in Vietnam, beyond the huge quantities of weapons they had supplied to Hanoi in the previous seven years. After the 1954 Geneva Accords they had advised North Vietnam to focus on socialist reconstruction rather than revolution in the South. This agenda changed because Mao saw the utility of miring the US in a conflict in South-east Asia, to distract it from the South China Seas and specifically what Mao was doing at Lop Nor in the Gobi Desert, where his technicians were developing a Chinese atomic bomb. Since Kennedy had vainly consulted Khrushchev about whether they could jointly destroy the site, Mao had good reasons to divert the Americans elsewhere. Vietnam was ideal for this purpose. Ostentatious support for North Vietnam would also promote China’s claims to be leading global revolution and draw attention away from the disastrous Great Leap Forward.
In joint meetings held in 1963–4 the Chinese committed themselves to defend North Vietnam in the event of a US invasion. Mao chided his North Vietnamese comrades that they were ‘just scratching the surface . . . Best turn it into a bigger war.’ He reassured them that ‘if the United States attacks the North, they will have to remember that the Chinese also have legs, and legs are used for walking’. He did not add that he was quite capable of sending his troops into North Vietnam without Hanoi’s permission.15 The PLA initially moved air and anti-aircraft artillery forces into the vicinity of the border with North Vietnam, and used the British to communicate to Washington the circumstances in which they would certainly be used. At the same time Mao reduced China’s own vulnerabilities by relocating arms industries from the coast to the interior, diverting four million people to the endeavour.
Hanoi had no intention of becoming a Chinese puppet and proved adroit at exploiting the deepening animosities between Beijing and Moscow. After the fall of Khrushchev the Soviets delivered $670 million in mainly military aid.16 Even before the US bombing of the North began, the Soviets supplied SAM-75 missile batteries and 2,500 men to defend Hanoi, while the Chinese sent 100,000 combat engineers to improve and repair roads and railways more rapidly than the US could bomb them. These were followed, from August 1965, by 150,000 Chinese troops to man an enormous number of anti-aircraft artillery batteries. Vast quantities of food and war materials flowed south too, as well as everything from harmonicas to ping-pong balls. The result was a competition to see who could support Hanoi most, with Hai Phong harbourmasters juggling which fraternal nation’s ships could dock first. After the Chinese Red Flag was shot up by US aeroplanes as a result of being left loitering offshore while priority was given to Soviet ships, Beijing belatedly realized what was going on. By that time the massive reinforcement it had received permitted North Vietnam to launch a major offensive to topple the Saigon regime before the US intervened on the ground.17
On 1 November 1964 the Viet Cong struck a US Air Force base at Bien Hoa, where a squadron of old B-57 bombers was parked, destroying six planes and killing five US personnel. Seventy-six more were wounded. Although this incident, two days before the US election, brought no overt response, it did finally tip Ambassador Maxwell Taylor into recommending a major bombing campaign. The idea was to create a greater sense of stability in the South, enabling General Khanh and his colleagues to clean up their act. Although Johnson had declared that he had had enough of ‘this coup shit’, when Khanh made overtures to the Buddhists to form a broader coalition government he had to go because the Buddhists wanted the Communists included with an eye to a negotiated conclusion to the war, which would end with the US being requested to withdraw its forces. In January 1965 Khanh was forced to resign by Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky and General Nguyen Changh Thi, who overthrew the trappings of civilian government. Ky in turn pushed out Thi. ‘Mac’ Bundy thought them the absolute bottom of the barrel, but they were not. Still to come was General Nguyen Van Thieu, who outmanoeuvred Ky to become the Americans’ final man on horseback at the end.
In a last attempt to grasp the situation, on 4 February 1965 ‘Mac’ Bundy paid his first visit to Saigon, though he had been in post for four years. Everything seemed in a state of atrophy and, of course, the Viet Minh kidnapped a senior embassy official to coincide with his arrival. Three days into his visit, the Viet Minh attacked a US helicopter base at Pleiku, killing eight Americans and wounding 126 more. The base hospital resembled a charnel house. The Viet Minh used captured US mortars to destroy ten helicopters on the ground. They must have been sure the US would not respond since Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin was in Hanoi at the time. They were wrong.
All the big local players, Taylor, Westmoreland and Deputy Chief of Mission Alexis Johnson, assembled in the MACV command centre to review the attack. Bundy contacted the White House, where Johnson summoned an expanded NSC meeting including the leaders of the House and the Senate. They overwhelmingly approved Bundy’s request for retaliatory bombing, and 132 planes were launched from carriers and headed for North Vietnam. After a visit to Pleiku, where he was moved by a very young wounded US soldier, Bundy flew back to Washington drafting a recommendation for a policy of ‘sustained reprisal’ that had been in the works for months. As he said to a reporter, attacks like Pleiku were ‘like street cars’ – it was just a matter of which one you chose to board.18
Johnson opted for Operation Flaming Dart, which targeted select North Vietnamese regular army barracks. The Viet Minh responded with an attack on a US base at Qui Nhon, killing twenty-three Americans, for which more retaliatory sorties were flown to demolish further barracks. The Soviets were infuriated that the attacks had begun while Kosygin was in Hanoi, and on 10 February Kosygin and the North Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong issued a joint communiqué that condemned the attacks and committed the Soviet Union to giving ‘all necessary aid and support’ to North Vietnam to resist US aggression. This was followed in April 1965 by a further agreement signed in Moscow to provide and maintain what was to become the most comprehensive missile defence in the world.
The reason for the second agreement was that, realizing that Flaming Dart was having no deterrent effect, the Joint Chiefs unfurled Operation Rolling Thunder, a much more sustained campaign involving hitting ninety-four designated targets two days a week over two months. It was a compromise, a calibrated campaign to force the North Vietnamese to negotiate rather than Curtis LeMay’s wish for an all-out offensive against the Red River irrigation dykes and other crucial economic targets.
The first planes struck on 2 March, against communications links between Hanoi and southern Vinh, part of a wider effort to destroy transportation choke points and supply dumps. While US planes usually destroyed the targets, the problem was that the enemy soon repaired the damage, or simply found other routes for a logistical effort that relied more on beasts of burden and on human porters. Only thirty-four tons of supplies a day were required for the 6,000 men they were moving south each month. North Vietnamese logistical dispersion meant that an air campaign that was supposed to be under strict civilian control soon involved giving pilots the freedom to bomb targets of opportunity, and the greater use of napalm to inflict horrifying human casualties.
As was already evident from the attacks on Bien Hoa and Pleiku, increasing the number of air bases in Vietnam would require further ground troops to defend them. One general estimated 15,000 more soldiers just to defend a greater-than-mortar-range perimeter around Pleiku. On 8 March Johnson acceded to Westmoreland’s request for two battalions of Marines to defend the air base at Da Nang, and they came ashore with howitzers and tanks. Johnson believed he could control future escalation until he found the force levels that broke North Vietnam’s will to fight. As he put it, ‘I’m going up old Ho Chi Minh’s leg an inch at a time.’19 The seventy-five-year-old Ho, meanwhile, had become a largely symbolic figurehead, living in a simple stilt house in Hanoi, where he did his morning calisthenics and fed carp. While careful to never fall out with the Soviets, Ho spent more time in China, including his birthdays, as, whatever his private distrust of the Chinese, Mao’s oft-repeated willingness to unleash a third world war was the ultimate guarantor that Johnson would not invade the North.
The Chinese successfully tested their first nuclear bomb on 16 October 1964. Zhou Enlai urged 3,000 comrades to rejoice in the Great Hall of the People, while Mao penned celebratory verses: ‘Atom bomb goes off when it is told / Ah, what boundless joy!’20 Johnson’s military advisers reported that nothing short of a nuclear strike on Lop Nor would be certain to degrade China’s atomic capacity in perpetuity.21 Instead, Johnson pressed on with combating nuclear proliferation in conjunction with the Soviet Union. The price included reassuring regional allies from Australia to India that the US would defend them against a nuclear-armed China. If the US abandoned South Vietnam, it was believed, then either China would become a Pacific hegemon or else nuclear weapons would proliferate among US allies anxious to prevent this outcome. These considerations were a largely unspoken and usually overlooked reason for the decision to pound North Vietnam with conventional ordnance.22
Before March 1965 had passed, Westmoreland sought two divisions of infantry to protect Saigon, and the Joint Chiefs said why not send three? On 1 April Johnson approved a further 18,000–20,000 increase in military support personnel, plus two more battalions of Marines and a Marine air squadron. US forces were now to be deployed in offensive counter-insurgency operations for the first time, venturing forth on fruitless patrols that became carelessly routinized until, on the twentieth such patrol, they were ambushed and shot to pieces. On 19–20 April, key US policy-makers convened in Honolulu, where they recommended a 150 per cent increase from 33,500 troops in the country to 82,000. CIA warnings that such an increase would fail to impact significantly on the Viet Minh were ignored. At the same time, Operation Rolling Thunder was extended from eight weeks to six months or a year ‘at the present tempo’, turning Vietnam into ‘a lush tropical bombing range’. In June, Westmoreland requested a further 93,000 troops – bringing his force to 175,000 – for there was still no sign that the Viet Minh were prepared to throw in the towel.23
None of this involved a declaration of war, nor had Congress sanctioned anything beyond what had been conceded in the wake of the Tonkin Gulf affair. Mounting opposition to what was afoot by influential columnists spread to a few brave Congressmen. When Senator George McGovern, who had flown thirty-nine bombing missions in the Second World War, tried to remonstrate with him Johnson replied, ‘Goddamn it, George, you and [Senator William] Fulbright and all you history teachers. I haven’t got time to fuck around with history. I’ve got boys on the line. I can’t be worried about history when there are boys out there who might die before morning.’ Not for the last time, personalizing wars in this way as a ‘blood sacrifice’ by boy soldiers ensured that they continued. Johnson made a few concessions to the idea that bombing was related to negotiations, and Bundy suggested that he announce a South-east Asia Development Corporation designed to pump money into the region and to make South Vietnam as prosperous as South Korea.24
But the only money being pumped into Vietnam was the $700 million Johnson requested in May for US military operations. Instead of bolstering South Vietnamese military performance, increased US involvement was matched by a rising frequency of ARVN defeats whenever they encountered Viet Minh forces, now augmented by NVA regulars. Like a primitive man first encountering a screw in a baulk of wood, the US response was to apply more force. The number of fighter-bomber sorties over the North rose from 3,600 to 4,800, while B-52s were used to carpet-bomb enemy-held areas in the South. By the end of 1968, the US had dropped a million tons of bombs on South Vietnam and 643,000 tons on the North. The war had become one of attrition and endurance, though television reported only a sanitized version of helicopters landing and taking off, not the terrifying reality out in the jungles.
Final Straw
Marine Lieutenant-General Charles Cooper’s 2002 memoir Cheers and Tears contains a unique account of a row between Johnson and the Joint Chiefs after they had requested a private meeting, a rarely exercised right to speak to him directly about their differences of opinion with their titular superior McNamara. Cooper was the junior officer required to hold up the large map brought by Admiral David McDonald. Johnson did not invite the Chiefs to sit while their Chairman General Earle Wheeler spoke for them. Wheeler briefly recommended mining Haiphong harbour, blockading the North Vietnamese coast and unleashing B-52s against Hanoi as an alternative to raising the stakes in the losing land war in the South. McDonald spoke in support of the navy and General John McConnell for the air force. Johnson quietly asked Generals Harold Johnson (army) and Wallace Greene (Marines) if they, whose services had the most to gain or lose, fully supported these ideas. After they had said they did:
Seemingly deep in thought, President Johnson turned his back on them for a minute or so, then suddenly discarding the calm, patient demeanor he had maintained throughout the meeting, whirled to face them and exploded . . . He screamed obscenities, he cursed them personally, he ridiculed them for coming to his office with their ‘military advice’. Noting that it was he who was carrying the weight of the free world on his shoulders, he called them filthy names – shitheads, dumb shits, pompous assholes – and used the F-word as an adjective more freely than a Marine in boot camp would use it. He then accused them of trying to pass the buck for World War III to him. It was unnerving, degrading.
Then came the crucial test of moral courage, which even after nearly forty years Cooper did not appreciate that the Joint Chiefs had failed. Johnson asked each in turn what they would do if they were the president of the United States. Each in turn echoed Wheeler’s reply to the effect that they could not put themselves in Johnson’s shoes and that it was his decision and his alone. ‘President Johnson, who was nothing if not a skilled actor, looked sad for a moment, then suddenly erupted again, yelling and cursing . . . He told them he was disgusted with their naive approach, and that he was not going to let some military idiots talk him into World War III [and] ended the conference by shouting “Get the hell out of my office!”’ Cooper concluded that ‘the Joint Chiefs of Staff had done their duty’. Not so. After a scene like that they should have resigned. By clinging to office they confirmed Johnson’s low opinion of them.
The result was that Johnson insisted on being briefed on military operations in real time as well as concerning each US combat death. The phone buzzed throughout the night, reducing the limited rest of a man who worked eighteen hours a day. Locked into what became a personal conflict, the President lost sight of the whys and wherefores of so much effort. Deep depression set in. He hammered the bottle. Any impact that bombing had on North Vietnamese industrial output was neutralized by massive Soviet resupply and the presence of Chinese troops who helped with reconstruction. Including $6 billion in lost planes, every dollar of damage the US caused was costing it $9.60 to inflict.25
Nothing the Americans did could stop the Viet Minh from using the 600-mile Ho Chi Minh Trail, on which huge quantities of supplies were moved, loaded on backs both human and animal and on modified bicycles. The war came to be seen in terms of US material versus Vietnamese spirit, a line that proved potent propaganda. But what the Bay of Pigs had done to American prestige in its Latin American backyard, Vietnam did in the wider global neighbourhood. Everything the US did damned it as an imperialist power and, however harsh that verdict may seem, since Vietnam it has stuck, being duly attached even to administrations as leftist (in the American context – centre-rightist in the costive spectrum of British politics) as those of Presidents Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.
This is not to be wondered at. If this book has achieved no other purpose, I hope it has illuminated the fact that the perceived imperatives of world power shaped the foreign policy of the USA quite as much as they did its European imperialist predecessors. The central contradiction addressed by this book has not been between Americans ideals and practice, but the fact that, unlike the British, French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese empires, the USA profited little and lost much from its misconceived adoption of liberal imperialism. For the Europeans it was an alibi adopted to prolong their imperial delusions; the ‘best and the brightest’ of the American liberal establishment were confident that they could do it better, and in that hubris lay their own and their nation’s tragedy. That antipathy to empire was in America’s DNA was not the least of history’s ironies, a lesson it is relearning even as the writing of this book paralled the withdrawals from contemporary Iraq and Afghanistan, and popular Western domestic disenchantment with improving small wars in what are no longer faraway places, but have become some of the most dynamic economies of the twenty-first-century world.