McNamara, Harriman, Johnson, Rusk at the White House
“I told the President he was wholly right”
Lyndon Johnson had learned the lessons of the Cold War too well. He had been conditioned by the hyperbole used by Acheson and others to persuade Congress to pay for the overseas commitments of the Truman Administration. As a congressman in the late forties, he had voted for the Marshall Plan, he explained, to “keep Stalin from overrunning the world.” He subscribed to all the maxims that Acheson had made “clearer than the truth” and John Foster Dulles had hardened into dogma.
He knew the Lesson of Munich. Appeasement equaled weakness to Johnson; he would be “no Chamberlain umbrella man.” It was a question of manhood; according to Johnson, “If you let a bully come in your front yard, he’ll be on your porch the next day and the day after that he’ll rape your wife in your own bed.” He believed the domino theory. When President Kennedy sent LBJ to Vietnam, the Vice-President declared, “The basic decision in Southeast Asia is here. We must decide whether to help these countries to the best of our ability or throw in the towel in the area and pull our defenses back to San Francisco.” He remembered the Loss of China. Upon taking over the White House, LBJ told Ambassador Lodge, “I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.” He feared the Ghost of McCarthy. When the new left began protesting against the Vietnam War in the mid sixties, LBJ told George Ball, “Look, George, it’s not those punks in the street that worry me, it’s the right wing. That’s the real beast if it ever gets unleashed.”
Along with these fixed principles, Johnson brought to foreign policy the sophistication and subtlety of a Texas state legislator at a lobbyists’ barbecue. Warned by the State Department before leaving on a tour of Southeast Asia not to shake hands with the Thais, who recoil from physical contact, Johnson exploded, “Dammit, I always shake hands and they love it!” When he took office, he thought he could buy off the North Vietnamese with a water project for the Mekong Delta, “bigger than the whole TVA.” He was scornful when the State Department said pork barrel would not work as a tool of diplomacy. Why the hell not? Johnson demanded. It worked in Congress, didn’t it? It worked with George Meany, didn’t it? Why wouldn’t it work with old Uncle Ho?
Johnson’s attitude toward the foreign policy Establishment was “tremendously ambivalent,” recalled Walt Rostow, who undertook to “explain” the Establishment to him. He was both possessive and deeply insecure. He bragged about his Rhodes Scholars and Harvard men as “my intellectuals” and exclaimed, “Goddamn it, I made it without their advantages and now they’re working for me!” Yet he was afraid the “eastern lawyers” would trick him. “If something works out, Joe Alsop will write that it was Bundy that brilliant Harvard dean who did it,” Johnson whined, “and if it falls flat he’ll say it was the fault of that dumb ignorant crude baboon of a President.” He solemnly told Hugh Sidey of Time, “I don’t believe I’ll ever get credit for anything I do in foreign affairs, no matter how successful it is, because I didn’t go to Harvard.”
In front of Sidey and other journalists, Johnson would mock Dean Acheson, raising his chin and affecting an imperious air. Dean Rusk recalled watching an “uproarious pantomime” of LBJ imitating Acheson testifying before a congressional committee. Johnson hated effeteness; he called where Acheson often vacationed, “that female island,” and denounced professional diplomats like Chip Bohlen as “cookie pushers.” He delighted in trying to overwhelm the Socially Registered with his earthiness, sticking his face in theirs, cracking scatological jokes, summoning them to his bathroom to converse while he grunted on the toilet.
Yet he badly wanted their loyalty and respect. He craved consensus in his advisers and devotion among his followers. He wanted to be admired by Dean Acheson as much as he wanted to be loved by poor blacks. He wanted the Establishment’s imprimatur, and he wanted the world to know that he had it.
During his 1964 campaign, Johnson told McGeorge Bundy, his National Security Adviser who was “one of them,” to round up the usual Establishment luminaries and demonstrate that they were on his team. With his usual efficiency, Bundy set about putting together the President’s Consultants on Foreign Affairs (Peace Panel).
In August, Bundy wrote a memo entitled “Backing from the Establishment.” Bundy ridiculed journalists for using the term “Establishment” yet apparently did not hesitate to use it himself. “I think the key to these people is McCloy,” he wrote to LBJ. “He is for us, but he is under very heavy pressure from Eisenhower and others to keep quiet. I have told him that is no posture for a man trained by Stimson.” Bundy wrote McCloy a long letter on September 3 beseeching him to rally behind his President in the name of a bipartisan foreign policy. On September 4, McCloy wrote back resisting the whole affair as a political setup, and adding that Bob Lovett was also “most allergic.” But Bundy brought McCloy around with a second long missive on September 7, and both McCloy and Lovett, as well as Acheson and a dozen other foreign policy elders from the private sector and academe, signed on. The announcement of the President’s “Peace Panel” made page one of The New York Times on September 10, which was the main objective. Later that month, Bundy wrote Johnson, “In an effort to get a good story out of your meeting with this group tomorrow . . . the object would be to get a headline on Johnson, bipartisanship, peace, together with a picture of you meeting these men.”
In his memoranda over the next year, Bundy began referring to Acheson, McCloy, Lovett, and other old statesmen brought in to counsel the President from time to time as “the Wise Men.” The term was not altogether reverent. When C. Douglas Dillon, for instance, was unable to attend a meeting on January 28, 1966, Bundy headlined a memo to the President “Another Wise Man Bites the Dust.” The committee appointed in the summer as a campaign ploy was considered too unwieldy to actually advise the President; when LBJ really wanted to hear what the Wise Men had to say, he summoned them in small groups or alone.
Johnson had begun calling on Dean Acheson, the acknowledged Chief Wise Man, immediately after taking office. On December 6, two weeks after Kennedy’s assassination, Bundy wrote Johnson a memo:
Re your lunch with Acheson: He is a determined believer in the “hard line.” He sees Germany as the center of our policy and believes in paying no attention to General de Gaulle. . . . Acheson believes in action even during an election year (he remembers what Truman accomplished in ’48) and he has little patience for less-developed countries, the UN, Adlai Stevenson, George Kennan, etc. He got on well with President Kennedy, although the President seldom took his advice but found him deeply stimulating. . . . After you have seen him, you may want to see Averell Harriman, who is at the opposite pole, if only to hold the liberals in line.
Over the next five years, LBJ repeatedly called on Acheson, whose law office was a short walk across Lafayette Park from the White House. He enlisted the old statesman to mediate a Greek-Turkish dispute over Cyprus, handle the troublesome de Gaulle on NATO problems, make peace with the Germans, and counsel him on the Vietnam War. The frequency of these missions is indicated by a note LBJ wrote Acheson on September 20, 1965: “I haven’t seen you for much too long, and feel in need of a good talk. . .” LBJ had not seen Acheson for all of two months.
Johnson’s other favorite was McCloy. “He called McCloy at the slightest provocation,” recalls former CIA director Richard Helms. Among other assignments, Johnson put McCloy on the Warren Commission to investigate Kennedy’s assassination, enlisted him to resolve a monetary crisis with Europe, and used him as an informal ambassador to Egypt and Iran (McCloy, as the chief representative of the world’s oil companies, had better access to Middle Eastern leaders than the State Department). From time to time, Johnson did feel compelled to remind himself that McCloy was only a Wall Street lawyer and banker, while he was President. When George Ball suggested sending McCloy to reason with de Gaulle when the French were rebelling against NATO, Johnson retorted that “de Gaulle might well conclude that there was no government operating in the United States, just bankers from New York.” According to the meeting notes, Johnson continued, “De Gaulle certainly was not going to succumb to a bunch of errand boys. He might react the way President Johnson would if de Gaulle started sending French bankers over here as his personal emissary.”
To the Wise Men, however, Johnson was fawning. Even as a senator, he had begun stroking Acheson, writing him on September 11, 1957, “There is no keener intellect on the American scene than yours.” A few months later the Texas senator told Acheson he was “the most respected adviser I have.” Acheson could not resist twitting Johnson for claiming him as a camp follower. When a reporter called him in 1960 to ask about his role as Johnson’s “foreign policy adviser,” Acheson replied, “Lyndon Johnson? Six months ago I had a drink with him at Kay Graham’s.”
LBJ became even more effusive after he took over the White House. He showered Acheson with autographed pictures (“To Dean Acheson, a master logician and dedicated patriot”; “To Dean Acheson, a man of peace”; “To Dean Acheson, an American I admire most”). Acheson was wise to Johnson’s glad-handing style; he knew, for instance, that LBJ handed out plastic busts of himself to world leaders in three sizes (small, medium, and large), depending on their stature. Writing a friend in December of 1963 Acheson made light of “my budding reputation as an ‘elder statesman,’ a sort of Barney Baruch, junior grade.” He was wary of advisory panels of Wise Men; he told Dean Rusk they were “just a bunch of S.O.B.s from out of town.” Yet he could not help but be a little flattered; more importantly, he longed to reassert his voice in policy making, even in the role of éminence grise. His daughter Mary recalls that when LBJ called on Acheson he would be “a little bit puffed up to be asked,” but then “disillusioned” when he saw that his power was illusory after all.
Writing Anthony Eden in 1965, Acheson compared Johnson to the other Presidents he had served: “It is very hard to move from a majority leader of a small body—a purely manipulative job—to a position of world leadership. . . . It takes all of our Presidents a good deal of time to learn about foreign affairs.” While FDR “never got a real grasp,” Truman “caught hold pretty quick, perhaps in 18 months . . . Ike never learned much of anything. Kennedy was just catching on in 1963. LBJ tends to concentrate where the most noise is coming from.”
Increasingly, the noise was coming from Vietnam. Kennedy’s question to George Ball on the evening he authorized a coup against Diem—How can we be sure Diem’s successors won’t be worse than Diem?—had been prophetic. When Diem was finally murdered in November, Vietnam stumbled along, through coup after coup, seven changes of government in less than a year, until power rested with the likes of Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky. Flamboyant and corrupt, Colonel Ky fancied jump suits, purple scarves, and pearl-handled revolvers. He arrived at his first high-level conference with U.S. officials dressed in a white jacket, tight black pants, and red socks, looking like, one diplomat remarked, “a saxophone player in a second-rate night club.”
Johnson watched the turmoil in Saigon with growing impatience. “I’m fed up with this coup shit,” he declared. He wanted a strong ambassador in Vietnam, a proconsul who would restore order and bring the locals to heel. In an election year, he wanted someone who could neutralize the Republicans, keep them from making Vietnam a campaign issue. The obvious choice was Jack McCloy.
McCloy knew little about Johnson at the outset. He thought of him as a backbencher on foreign affairs in Congress and doubted that LBJ had learned much by kissing foreign babies on his occasional overseas forays as Vice-President. McCloy was dubious about Vietnam as well. He feared a ground war in Asia and saw Vietnam as a distraction from Europe. He had complained to Dean Rusk that Europe was, after all, “the Big Leagues.” Nor did McCloy have any desire to re-enter government; he was extremely busy representing oil companies as a Wall Street lawyer.
Saying no, however, proved difficult. In the early summer of 1964, Johnson summoned McCloy into a little sitting room off the Oval Office, where he liked to do his serious arm twisting, and just about tore McCloy’s arm off. He told McCloy that he had looked over all the candidates for the job, “the most important job he had to offer in the U.S. government,” and he had decided that McCloy was the “finest proconsul ever.” Embarrassed, McCloy pictured himself in a toga with a laurel wreath on his bald head. He politely said no, he wanted to stay on Wall Street. What is more, he had a very strong feeling that a heightened presence for the U.S. in Vietnam was the wrong step, that Vietnam was about the last place the U.S. should become involved. Johnson rode right over his objections. “We’re organizing for victory over there, McCloy, and I want you. You are the only one now who is going to lead us to victory.” He would not take no for an answer. McCloy, however, would not say yes. Johnson put his hand on top of McCloy’s head and breathed close to him. He was not asking him to do it, he was urging him, directing him, ordering him. Still McCloy begged off. Johnson said it was a matter of patriotism; he said that McCloy must be afraid. McCloy protested that he had been through two world wars and served in and out of government for three decades. Johnson called him “yellow.”
At this point, even McCloy, normally the calmest of men, became upset. He backed out of Johnson’s sitting room, overwhelmed by being subjected to LBJ’s Full Texan. He was repelled by Johnson, wanted nothing to do with him or his job. The post went to General Maxwell Taylor, a good soldier.
Dean Acheson shared McCloy’s doubts about Vietnam. He had always regarded Asia as a nuisance, a distraction from Europe, a right-wing obsession, a dangerous spawning ground for General MacArthur’s apocalyptic dreams. He was not happy when his son-in-law Bill Bundy was chosen in early 1964 as Roger Hilsman’s replacement as Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs. He had seen the job ruin too many other careers. Acheson himself preferred to think about Vietnam as little as possible.
Yet Vietnam was becoming harder and harder to ignore. In the summer and fall of 1964 and on into 1965 the U.S. faced provocations (real and imagined) in the Gulf of Tonkin, Bienhoa, and Pleiku. The demand for retaliation grew. In the late winter and early spring of 1965, the great escalation began, first with air strikes (Operation Flaming Dart, Operation Rolling Thunder), then with ground troops, though at first just marines to protect the American air bases.
In April 1965, six weeks after the first marines had stepped ashore at Danang, George Ball gave Dean Acheson a call. The two knew each other well from foreign policy debates in the Democratic Advisory Council during the fifties and from the Berlin and Cuban missile crises in the Kennedy Administration. Acheson and Ball represented opposing wings of the foreign policy Establishment, yet they were friends who respected each other. What is more, they were both Atlanticists. Ball was counting on his similarities with Acheson overcoming their differences when he asked, “Can I come talk to you?”
As Under Secretary of State, Ball had become a kind of in-house dove in the Administration, a designated “devil’s advocate” who wrote memos that were duly read and rejected at the time and which now seem as prescient as George Kennan’s best thinking in the 1940s. “Once on the tiger’s back, we cannot be sure of picking the place to dismount,” he had warned in the autumn of 1964. Watching with anxiety as the U.S. plunged into military engagement, he had gone to Johnson on April 20 to plead for the opportunity to offer a political alternative. The President gave him twenty-four hours to “pull a rabbit out of a hat.” Ball hastily drafted a memo suggesting a cease-fire, general amnesty for the Viet Cong, and a coalition government. Johnson was not persuaded, but he was at least interested; for all his hawkish bluster, he too could sense the terrible cost of war. “I desperately needed at least one high-level confrere on my side,” Ball wrote in his memoirs. “How could the President be expected to adopt the heresies of an Under Secretary against the contrary views of his whole top command? . . . I decided to seek help outside.” He went to Acheson.
Together with Lloyd Cutler, another powerful Washington lawyer, Acheson reworked Ball’s memo into a thirty-five-page plan for a political solution: a bombing pause and a general amnesty leading to local elections with VC participation, coupled with the withdrawal of all foreign troops. The plan required no negotiations (Acheson did not believe in them) but rather the unilateral action of the South Vietnamese government. With the carrot came a stick: if the Communists did not cooperate, the U.S. would resume bombing and insert ground troops.
The plan was presented on May 7 and was discussed by LBJ, Rusk, McNamara, Ball, and Acheson on May 16. Judging from the meeting notes, all the principals were willing to give it a try, though the discussion dwelled more on what Congress and The New York Times might say about ending a week-long bombing pause then in effect than on any long-range plans for peace. Moreover, the Acheson-Ball plan needed to be sold to the South Vietnamese government. This quickly proved impossible; in Saigon, Ambassador Taylor was resolutely opposed even to suggesting it. The plan was stillborn. It is perhaps an indication of the seriousness with which the proposal was taken that Robert McNamara, who can recall many details about the 1965 escalation, has no memory at all of the Acheson-Ball peace plan.
The spring of 1965 was a nostalgic time for Acheson. He christened a nuclear submarine for the Navy, the George C. Marshall; made a speech at the Truman Library about his old “Boss”; and went to his fiftieth reunion at Yale. Chronic stomach troubles that had plagued him for years had grown worse, however. He was stoical about his ailment; he wrote his old classmate Archie MacLeish that his “battered and shabby frame” could not spoil the fun of a Yale reunion, even though his doctor had gently advised him that “a well-adjusted man” would be reduced to a “psychological wreck” by “acute and perpetual trots.” In truth, his growing infirmity depressed him, according to his daughter Mary; it slowed him down, affected his mood, made him less buoyant. His determined stoicism made him more rigid, more impatient with weakness in others.
Lyndon Johnson was likewise suffering from bouts of depression that early summer, over the war in Vietnam. The Pentagon wanted to go in all the way, with at least 200,000 ground troops; the Bundy brothers preferred a more gradual, but firm escalation, starting off with 85,000 troops. Johnson sensed that he would put as many as 600,0000 men in Vietnam before the war was over, and he felt trapped. He could not just cut out without arousing the right wing, and he could not escalate without getting caught in an Asian land war. Either way, he would drain off the political capital he needed to win his real cause, his Great Society social programs, up for congressional vote during the summer. He began to have nightmares about “that bitch of a war.” He badly needed to be told he was doing the right thing; as always, he craved approval. So he called on the Wise Men, the architects of containment, the men who had bequeathed him this terrible burden.
They were assembled at the State Department on July 8, almost a score of them, mostly veterans of the Wall Street-Washington revolving door, like Lovett and McCloy. Hosted by the Secretaries of Defense and State, they perched their aging frames on the antiques of the formal eighth-floor meeting rooms overlooking the Potomac, and deliberated for most of a day on the hard questions before the President.
McCloy had deep qualms about the war. He spoke at length about how “impressed” he was with the “toughness of the situation.” He doubted that merely “blunting the monsoon offensive” would bring Hanoi into a “negotiating mood.” He predicted that the situation would remain “critical” for a long time. Yet after carefully laying out his doubts, he proclaimed that there was really no choice. America’s credibility depended on her meeting her obligations and honoring her commitments. To Rusk and McNamara, he was adamant: “You’ve got to do it,” he said. “You’ve got to go in.”
Bob Lovett’s doubts about the war were, if anything, greater than McCloy’s. As he slouched uncomfortably in a Queen Anne chair, he frankly told McNamara and Rusk that he suspected that the government was painting too rosy a picture of the situation.
Years later, Lovett would remark that “getting into Vietnam was one of the stupidest things we ever did. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing there.” Yet like McCloy, he believed that once committed, the U.S. had to stick it out. He also recalled from his days of trying to bomb Japan and Germany into submission that no force should be spared. Once engaged in Vietnam, he held, the U.S. had to go in all the way.
Thus his ultimate conclusion was no different from McCloy’s: the U.S. must send in ground troops, and enough to do the job. He cautioned only that it was not useful to speak in terms of “victory.” What was really involved was preventing the expansion of Communism by force; in a sense, avoiding defeat.
Listening to these old sages, men he had admired all his life, Bill Bundy, the Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs who had line duty for Vietnam at the State Department, was impressed by their resolution and firmness. In his report to the President, he stated that most of the Wise Men assembled “felt that there should be no question of making whatever combat force increases were required. Several members of the group thought that our actions had perhaps been too restrained, and had been misconstrued by Hanoi that we were less than wholly determined.”
To Bundy, it seemed that the Wise Men endorsed all the Cold War verities that underpinned U.S. engagement. He concluded in his report to Johnson that the group subscribed to the domino theory, that they believed if Vietnam fell Thailand would fall, and Japan and India would be in jeopardy; that if the U.S. backed out, Europe would lose faith in U.S. commitments; that Vietnam was a crucial test of U.S. willingness to stand up to “wars of national liberation”; that withdrawal was an “unacceptable” alternative.
At the end of the day, Johnson asked to hear from a few of the Wise Men directly. He chose a small group that included Lovett, McCloy, and Acheson to come to the White House for a drink and a chat at six-thirty that evening. Fortified with a cocktail, the elder statesmen were arrayed around the long mahogany table in the Cabinet Room to hear out the President’s dilemma firsthand and to impart their wisdom.
Johnson came in, shook hands, and immediately launched off on a long tirade about the war. The effect on Acheson was not to make him share his own doubts about Vietnam, but to provoke him to tell the President to stop whining. Acheson described his reaction—and that of his colleagues—in a letter to Harry Truman.
We were all disturbed by a long complaint about how mean everything and everybody was to him—Fate, the Press, the Congress, the Intellectuals and so on. For a long time he fought the problem of Vietnam (every course of action was wrong; he had no support from anyone at home or abroad; it interfered with all his programs, etc., etc.). . . . I got to thinking about you and General Marshall and how we never wasted time “fighting the problem” or endlessly reconsidering decisions, or feeling sorry for ourselves.
Acheson fidgeted impatiently as he listened to Johnson wallow in self-pity. Finally, he could stand it no longer. “I blew my top and told him he was wholly right on Vietnam,” Acheson wrote HST, “that he had no choice except to press on, that explanations were not as important as successful action.”
Acheson’s scolding emboldened the others. “With this lead my colleagues came thundering in like the charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo,” Acheson exulted to the former President. “They were fine; old Bob Lovett, usually cautious, was all out. . . . I think . . . we scored,” he concluded.
They did. On July 10, Johnson wrote Acheson, “I am particularly strengthened by your support of our work in Vietnam, and I continue to feel that anything men of your standing can say to the country will be of great help.” At a National Security staff meeting the next day, McGeorge Bundy smiled tightly and commented on Acheson’s performance: “The mustache was voluble.”
It is somewhat difficult to reconcile the Acheson-Ball Peace Plan, delivered only two months earlier, with Acheson’s rousing war cry at the July 8 meeting of the Wise Men. Acheson’s private letters to friends at the time show more ambivalence than he revealed to the President. Two days before the meeting, he took a hard line in a letter to Desmond Donnelly, a British member of Parliament: “Hanoi does not want a settlement and won’t have one until convinced that they cannot win the war and will suffer from continuing it. We are not looking for a face-saving surrender.” The next day, however, he expressed strong practical concerns to Erik Boheman, former Swedish ambassador to the U.S. and an old friend: “The Vietnamese problem is delicate, often infuriating, very hard and puzzling for the soldiers and others on the spot, but not basically obscure. By that I mean what needs to be done is not obscure. How to do it with the human material available in the God-awful terrain and against foreign-directed and supplied obstacles is very hard indeed.” Significantly, Acheson added, “If we take over the war, we defeat our purpose and merely take the place of the French.” Acheson had severe doubts about the ability of the South Vietnamese to sustain the fight themselves. These concerns were reinforced by a conversation he had with Henry Cabot Lodge, who was returning to Saigon for a second tour as U.S. ambassador. “He sees many problems of method because of the characteristics of our little brown brothers,” Acheson wrote Lloyd Cutler.
Acheson’s advice to Lyndon Johnson came at a crucial juncture of the Vietnam War. It was the moment that “America committed to land war on the mainland of Asia,” Bill Bundy later wrote. “No more critical decision was made.” It is hard to escape the conclusion that Acheson served his President poorly by telling him, in effect, to keep a stiff upper lip.
Bundy later wrote in his private unpublished memoir of the war that he left the White House after the Wise Men meeting on July 8 with a “slightly queasy feeling” that the group had been briefed too quickly and superficially, that there had been no real time to deliberate, and that “quickie” consultations were a bad idea. He did not share these reservations in his report to Johnson, however. LBJ had no reason to doubt the sincerity and conviction of the elder statesmen. Indeed, as Bundy himself later wrote: “The President probably expected that most of the Panel would be generally in favor of a firm policy. What he found was that almost all were solidly of this view, and this must have had a distinct impact on his personal and private deliberations.” Bundy continued:
There can be no doubt that a large strand in the President’s make-up [was] that he should not fall short of the standards set by those who had played leading parts in World War II and throughout the period of American successes in the Cold War. Now a fair sample of these men, of the American “Genro,” if you will, had advised him to see this one through.
Dean Acheson, Bob Lovett, and John McCloy, like the ancient Japanese genro, the wise elders who conducted affairs of state, had a historical perspective. Throughout the 1940s they had seen the folly of engaging in Asian land wars and had resisted. They had among themselves distinguished between interests that were vital, such as Western Europe, and those that were not, such as Formosa. Even in 1965, they harbored serious doubts about committing U.S. troops to the defense of the government of South Vietnam. Why did they fail to convey those doubts to the President?
Acheson, in particular, was betrayed by instincts that had served him well in other times. His penchant for action, his impatience with self-doubt, possibly exacerbated by age and bad health, interfered with his pragmatism. The example of Korea had weakened his long-standing inhibition against involvements in Asia. If it had been necessary to fight in Korea to save NATO, how was Vietnam any different? “Vietnam really rang his Korea bell,” Bill Bundy later recalled. What is more, Acheson was not well informed; “quickie consultations” deprived him of the facts he needed to fully engage his lawyerly acuity.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, American men were dying in the field in July 1965. It was awfully hard not to rally behind them and their embattled leader in Washington. The situation on the ground had markedly deteriorated between April, when Ball approached Acheson about his peace plan, and July, when Johnson asked his support for sending in more troops. The effect on Acheson was not likely to make him sound retreat.
Johnson was no better served by the “next generation” of foreign policy advisers, many of whom had learned their lessons, in some cases almost literally, at their elders’ knees. Robert McNamara, the handpicked choice of Bob Lovett, came to office with almost no grounding in foreign affairs. He was, however, given on-the-job tutoring in the school of global power politics by Dean Acheson, who saw him frequently from 1961 on. “I looked to him as a God,” McNamara recalled of his relationship with Acheson during those years. “I was tremendously sensitive to his thoughts. He was the wisest foreign policy adviser I worked with during seven years in government.”
McGeorge Bundy, the true heir to Acheson, mirrored many of his views. The critical issue in Vietnam, the National Security Adviser believed, was “the confidence of America’s allies and America’s self-confidence.” This was precisely the reason that Acheson intervened in Korea—not to rescue the South Koreans, but to convince America’s allies that the U.S. stood firm against aggression. Bundy was, like the older generation, deeply affected by the lesson of Munich, that weakness in the face of aggression invites more aggression. His Harvard lecture on Munich in Government 180, “The U.S. in World Politics”—a course taken over by Henry Kissinger when Bundy left for Washington—was an annual event in Cambridge in the 1950s. Students would flock to hear Bundy tell, with verve and emotion, of the Nazi tanks rolling in, of the price of appeasement.
Bundy devoutly believed that it was America’s duty to oppose aggression in its role of world leader. Writing in response to Archibald MacLeish, Acheson’s classmate and Bundy’s fellow Bonesman who had publicly questioned the morality of the war, Bundy declared in July of 1965 that during “that terrible spring of 1940,” America had accepted the “responsibility of holding and using power.”
Dean Rusk was not only heir to the Acheson-Truman days, he was a veteran of them. He had been with Acheson during Korea, had urged him to stand up to MacArthur’s defeatism. No matter how badly the war seemed to be going in Vietnam, Rusk would stoically say, “We were in tougher spots in Korea.” He retained from those years less the pragmatism of his mentors than their clichés. Without self-consciousness, he used terms like the “Free World” and the “Communist Menace,” not just in speeches but in private conversation. Seared by the Chinese pouring over the Yalu, he feared that Peking would come crashing in on behalf of the North Vietnamese, even though the Chinese and North Vietnamese people had been enemies for a thousand years, and even though the Chinese were at the time totally wrapped up in their Cultural Revolution. The lessons of the past for Rusk were too literal: if China intervened in Korea, it would in Vietnam; Vietnamese aggression was no different than Soviet or Nazi aggression; appeasement in Vietnam was like appeasement at Munich.
In retrospect, it seems that these second-generation members of the foreign policy Establishment were the victims of a strange process of acculturation, by which the propagandists began believing themselves. They had been “clearer than the truth” so many times with congressmen and journalists that they had began to take literally their own overstatements about the global threat of Communism, and more particularly the American commitment to resisting aggression wherever it occurred. In his private memoir, William Bundy, trying in an honest way to sort out the roots of involvement, wrote:
President Johnson and the men in his policy circle would not have thought of themselves as ideologues in the world outside America’s borders. But this core of common belief they did have, less perhaps than American leaders in the ’50s but very much more than sophisticated intellectual opinion in the ’70s. No account of the mental map of those who made decisions in mid-1965 would be complete without noting this point. Aggression and its dynamics, far more than communism as such, were the focus. But the communist element did contribute to the sense of threat and unfolding consequences that guided their actions, mine included.
This mind-set was by no means confined to the best and the brightest in 1965. In that same year, New York Times reporter David Halberstam, later the author of the best-selling chronicle of American hubris in Vietnam, declared, “Vietnam is a strategic country in a key area. It is perhaps one of only five or six nations that is truly vital to U.S. interests.” In August of 1964, Neil Sheehan, the reporter who later broke the Pentagon Papers story, had written a Times story headlined “Much Is at Stake in Southeast Asia.” It reported: “The fall of Southeast Asia or its denial to the West over the next decade because of the repercussions of an American defeat in Vietnam would amount to strategic disaster.”
In The Best and the Brightest, Halberstam vividly portrays the hubris of Kennedy’s and Johnson’s lieutenants as they blindly, arrogantly, plunged into the quagmire. Yet the self-portrait of one of Halberstam’s chief villains—William Bundy—offers a rather different, if no less tragic, view.
In February of 1965, as the U.S. began bombing the North, Bundy wrote that there was among Johnson’s advisers “a sense of disaster avoided or postponed and there was the lift of action. But on the whole it was a period when no move seemed right, and the outcome remained wholly murky.” In June, when the critical decision to send in large numbers of troops was being made, Bundy described himself “in a small state of personal crisis. Agreeing with his [George Ball’s] view on the difficulties, I still could not accept the idea of American withdrawal.” This ambivalence led to his recommendation of the gradual escalation, a compromise “middle way.” Torn by conflicting instincts, unsure of the outcome, Bundy, of Groton and Yale and the Establishment, was left in exactly the same spot as Lyndon Johnson of San Marcos State Teachers College: trapped, not wanting to do too much or too little, but just enough to get by.
How the image of Bundy, groping and unsure, contrasts with Dean Acheson’s own self-description in Present at the Creation, clear-eyed and exhilarated through crisis and war! The confidence, the sense of destiny and self-assurance that had so marked the men who had rebuilt the postwar world, were slowly stripped away by the corrosive acid of Vietnam. In the end, all that was left was a sense of duty.
In his class-day oration to the other Yale seniors in 1939, on the eve of World War II, William Bundy had earnestly declared, “If we are to consider ourselves as a group and a class of special significance, we must get right down to earth and perform special services, for it is only on that basis that the idea of class can be tolerated in a democracy.”
Bundy shouldered the burden of his class at terrible cost. With growing anguish, his wife, Mary—Dean Acheson’s daughter—watched her husband’s career and life be consumed by the war. He, stoic, got ulcers. She, uncomplaining, got shingles. One night, when her husband returned home quietly ravaged by the daily ordeal, she gently asked him, “Should you go on?” Drained and miserable, yet feeling that he should see through what he had begun, he simply answered, “I’ve got to go on.” While others were bailing out (some, like his brother Mac, with a shove from LBJ), Bill Bundy grimly hung on, a last exhausted link to a vanishing age.
Averell Harriman tried hard to become interested in the problems of Africa. Alarmed that the Soviet presence in Zanzibar threatened Tanganyika, he suggested to his State Department superiors that more attention be paid to this festering trouble spot. George Ball, Harriman’s boss as Under Secretary, wrote back that “God watched over every little sparrow that fell,” and that the U.S. “could not compete with Him.” Harriman, Ball recalled, did not think the response was funny.
He was, as always, restless to work his way back into the inner circle. When Rusk instructed State Department officials to remain nonpartisan during the 1964 elections, Harriman responded by advising Johnson’s staff that if the Secretary refused to act as department spokesman, then he was available. Harriman did not feel “that the department should be a eunuch incapable of defending itself,” a Johnson aide, Douglass Cater, reported to the President. The offer was declined. Still, he continued to raise his hand like an eager schoolboy, even sending Johnson clippings about his speeches and travels. “Harriman is a good soldier,” another Johnson aide, Jack Valenti, told the President.
Russia had always been Harriman’s best card, and in the summer of 1965, he played it. It had become his idée fixe, almost an obsession, that Russia was the key that would free the U.S. from the bondage of Vietnam. Laos was his model: He envisioned, in a memo to Mac Bundy in April 1965, an agreement between the superpowers to honor a “neutral and independent” South Vietnam. A diplomatic solution was preferable to a military one, he told Bundy; any further escalation would provoke antiwar dissent in the U.S. He followed up by fishing for, and receiving, an invitation from the Kremlin to visit the Soviet Union in July.
Preoccupied with the escalating war, the Administration considered Harriman’s trip a long shot at best. Johnson’s aides doubted that Harriman would even be received by the Soviet leaders, much less make any progress toward a peaceful solution.
On July 10, two days after Acheson and the other Wise Men had met with Johnson at the White House, Harriman left for the Soviet Union. He was greeted at the Kremlin by Aleksei Kosygin, at the time Leonid Brezhnev’s coequal as Soviet ruler. Harriman had first met Kosygin in 1942 and had renewed his acquaintance with him in 1959. He found him more serious and sober than Khrushchev, less blustery, but just as unyielding.
The Russian leader began on a hopeful note. The Soviets wanted an end to the Vietnam War. It interfered with U.S.-Soviet relations. Worse, Kosygin was worried that North Vietnam would become a Chinese puppet and further Peking’s expansionism in Southeast Asia. He repeatedly said to Harriman, “Don’t you realize that this war only helps the Chinese?” Kosygin gave Harriman more encouragement when he stated somewhat mysteriously, “In all confidence, I can only report that our Vietnamese comrades do not rule out a political settlement. That is all I can say, but this, it seems to me, is very important. “
Then came the bad news. The Soviets were not eager to help persuade Hanoi to come to the peace table. They were loath to be seen by other Communist countries as collaborators with the U.S. They were unwilling, in other words, to play the role of mediator that Harriman envisioned for them.
Reading Harriman’s cables, McGeorge Bundy shrugged off the exchange as “rather routine” in a report to the President. “While there has been more noise than substance in Harriman’s visit, I think it has been worthwhile,” the National Security Adviser concluded after he had debriefed Harriman upon his return from Moscow. Harriman had stopped in on other foreign leaders in Europe and reassured them that the U.S. was pursuing diplomatic alternatives. The trip had at least received some good press, Bundy noted. “And if such travels obviously give Harriman himself an unusual amount of personal pleasure, what is the harm in that?”
Harriman began to lobby almost shamelessly for a role to play in the Vietnam War. “I do feel I am more experienced and can be of more value to you than at any time since I have been working on international affairs,” he wrote President Johnson in August. “I am still surprised when I think back to the time when President Roosevelt sent me on those extraordinarily responsible political and military missions during the war.” FDR could afford to, Harriman pointedly explained, because he had “complete confidence in my personal loyalty to him.”
Harriman also continued to push for a rational diplomatic approach to the war. The U.S. should have “realistic” negotiating goals, he wrote Walt Rostow at Policy Planning in August, i.e., a neutral South Vietnam instead of a client state.
No one in the Administration paid much attention, with one important exception. In the fall of 1965, Robert McNamara was beginning his long, bitter journey of disillusionment with the war. Slowly realizing that all his statistics about U.S. strength and firepower had marginal relevance to a jungle guerrilla war against a fanatic enemy, he began to cast about for a political solution. After chatting with Harriman at various Washington functions and Georgetown dinner parties, he later recalled, he became aware that the old Cold Warrior was on the same path, only farther along.
Before Christmas, McNamara visited Johnson alone at the LBJ ranch in Texas and urged a bombing pause as a peace feeler. Johnson was at first reluctant, but then embraced the idea of a “peace offensive,” a giant public relations campaign to convince the North Vietnamese (and, perhaps more importantly, other nations around the world) that the U.S. was not a warmonger. McNamara suggested that Johnson appoint Harriman as his peace ambassador, to visit other countries and enlist their help in persuading Hanoi to come to the bargaining table.
Harriman got the call from Johnson that very week. “Averell, have you got your bag packed?” the President asked. “It’s always packed,” the aging diplomat answered. “Where do you want me to go?”
Johnson told him to “talk to some of your Eastern European friends and see what they’ll do.” Harriman asked him which ones. Johnson replied that was up to him, but that there was a plane warming up for him at Andrews Air Force Base. When Harriman called Rusk at the State Department, the Secretary had almost nothing to say. He was suspicious of back channels to the President in general and of Harriman in particular. McNamara, on the other hand, was warm and encouraging. The Defense Secretary told him to spread the word: the U.S. wanted peace negotiations.
Harriman ended up traveling for seventeen days, not just to Eastern Europe but to India, Pakistan, Egypt, Iran, Thailand, Japan, Australia, Laos, South Vietnam, and the Philippines. He dutifully lobbied dour Communists in dreary ministries, foreign princes in their palaces, even the Shah on his Peacock Throne. He received effusive expressions of sympathy and support and little real help.
Still, Harriman at last felt that he had a foothold in Johnson’s war council. He was determined to keep it, to show the President that he could be just as assured of his personal loyalty as FDR had been. He proved his fealty by behaving like a stern uncle to the wayward liberals of the party, especially Robert Kennedy, whom, as Harriman well knew, Johnson greatly feared. In early February, he acted as emissary to a group of liberal senators, including RFK, who opposed the resumption of the bombing after Johnson’s New Year’s peace offensive. Assembling the dissident senators at his home in Georgetown, Harriman argued that the North Vietnamese would only come to the bargaining table under the duress of force. “Harriman is first rate in placating a good number of liberals,” Jack Valenti wrote the President in March. He added that “Bundy tells me [Harriman] spoke like a Dutch uncle to RFK.” Harriman publicly denounced a speech by Bobby Kennedy suggesting that the Viet Cong’s National Liberation Front be brought into a coalition government in South Vietnam. That night, Johnson personally called Harriman to thank him.
Harriman was equally convinced of the success of his efforts, and told LBJ as much, though the worth of this judgment is revealed by his suggestion that Eugene McCarthy be recruited to front for the war effort in the Senate cloakroom. “I had the impression that he could be persuaded to take a leadership role in supporting the President’s policies,” Harriman wrote the President, who was soon to discover precisely the opposite.
Harriman’s scoldings began to disturb his old liberal friends, who were becoming more outspoken against the war. At a party at Senator John Sherman Cooper’s in Georgetown, Harriman bluntly said to Arthur Schlesinger, “People like you are causing the death of GIs.” Schlesinger concluded that Harriman had truly become a hawk, until a year later when the two talked at a meeting at the Truman Library. Harriman summoned Schlesinger to his suite at the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City at three in the afternoon, poured himself a drink (highly unusual behavior), and unburdened himself. To Schlesinger’s relief, he said that he was still very much against the war, that he was working for a political solution, but that he was doing it from within. To maintain his credibility, he had had to publicly mouth the Administration line. Harriman explained himself to John Kenneth Galbraith the same way: “Inside influence depends on outside loyalty.”
In later years, Harriman would grumble about “the old Cold Warriors who saw Vietnam as a Munich or Berlin.” Yet in 1965, the Associated Press quoted him as declaring, “The Communists in Southeast Asia have to get it in their minds that South Vietnam is not a ripe plum that will fall to them. We cannot appease them. It would be like letting Hitler march into the Rhineland in the 1930s.” In February of 1966, he complained to Cy Sulzberger that he was “bewildered” by RFK’s “foolish” statements on the war, that he was irked at Walter Lippmann and The New York Times for their dovishness, and angry that press photographers refused to take pictures of Viet Cong atrocities. Even privately he was taking a tough line. In a memo to his personal files in May of 1966, he denounced RFK for “sounding like the worst of Arthur Schlesinger and Dick Goodwin on the subject of Communism—that it is quite different than it used to be and inferred we didn’t have to worry so much.” Could it be that Harriman still really believed in the Cold War verities in 1966? Or was he perhaps practicing the time-honored bureaucratic practice of writing rear-covering memoranda to files?
In truth, Harriman did not fit easily into “hawk” versus “dove” distinctions, at least as they came to be popularly understood. He did indeed favor a political solution and was from the first highly skeptical of trying to win the war by force of arms. But he abhorred the idea of simply withdrawing from Vietnam. “Cut and run” was his term for withdrawal, and he spat out the words with distaste. Harriman’s dovishness should not be confused with the “Out Now” sentiments chanted by the antiwar movement. He emphatically differed with the isolationism implicit in the stands of liberals like George McGovern who argued that the U.S. had no business messing about with the destinies of other countries. The U.S. had to play an active role in opposing aggression, Harriman continued to believe, not just in Europe but in the Third World. After two decades, America’s duties as defined by the Truman Doctrine were at the core of his world view, though not with the military emphasis others had attached to it. Though the sweeping commitments of the Truman Doctrine are blamed for U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Harriman argued in one oral history interview, it says “nothing about sending in troops.” He distinguished between economic and military aid to allies—necessary and plausible steps, in his view—and unilateral military intervention.
During the early days of the Cold War, Harriman’s views on dealing with the Soviets seemed, at times, hard to categorize. In his private counsel to Roosevelt and Truman, and in his public pronouncements, he was the foremost advocate of firmness. Yet he always believed in a businesslike and pragmatic approach to problems, in sitting down and bargaining with an adversary rather than letting rigidity and dogma lead to fruitless showdowns. That is why he urged sending Harry Hopkins to Moscow in 1945, why he favored a summit with Stalin, and why he even supported a postwar American loan to the Soviets. Those who were more ideological and less subtle saw this as waffling; yet for the man who had learned to deal firmly and pragmatically with Wall Street competitors and Trotsky’s mining concession committee, there was no internal contradiction in this businesslike approach. Likewise, on Vietnam, Harriman deeply believed that the U.S. must stand firm for its interests. He disdained those who doubted the rightness of America’s cause or were eager to retreat “to the movies and drink Coke.” But it was important to have a sense of balance about goals, to be pragmatic in pursuing them. Ideological fervor would lead only to a deepening military morass. Like his father, he knew the value of sitting down and dealing with an adversary on a personal basis, of bargaining and negotiating and trying to find a solution to a difficult situation.
Convincing Lyndon Johnson that he was the diplomat who could best step in and settle the Vietnam War was exceedingly difficult. In his desire to become involved, Harriman not only had to bury his own doubts about the feasibility of military involvement; he also had to hide his own personal feelings toward Johnson, whom he heartily disliked. In confessing these sentiments to Sulzberger in early 1966, Harriman added that he did like Lady Bird, especially for her efforts to “beautify America,” even if he hated the word “beautify.”
The Texas politician and the ex-polo player were hardly easy company. Harriman tried to be a good sport when he was subjected to various initiation rituals at the LBJ ranch, such as driving ninety miles an hour in a Cadillac down dirt roads. One can picture them careening along side by side, Johnson in a loose-fitting cowboy shirt, drinking beer and telling off-color stories, Harriman buttoned up in a tie and jacket, dour-faced and silent. “I am sorry I disappointed you by not being surprised when you took to the water in your car,” Harriman wrote the President after a trip to the ranch in November 1966. “By that time, I had become immune to your overcoming every obstacle.” Harriman gamely responded to Johnson’s patronage with flattery; when LBJ sent him a plastic bust of his head, Harriman wrote him, “It means a lot to have your bust, which now parallels FDR’s in our library.” Though Harriman did not much like LBJ, he was actually unperturbed by Johnson’s crudeness, according to friends. LBJ was no more crass than Khrushchev, after all, and Harriman could get on with the Soviet dictator. The old diplomat also frowned on members of his own family disparaging the President. He would hush Marie when she sarcastically referred to LBJ as “der Fuehrer.”
Johnson, for his part, was wary of Harriman. He felt he could not ignore him, that Harriman was a force both within the liberal wing of the party and the old foreign policy Establishment. But he was never convinced of his loyalty. To aides, he said the same thing about Harriman that he said about J. Edgar Hoover: “I’d rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.” He was highly suspicious of Harriman’s ties to the Kennedys; he referred to RFK in his presence as “your friend Bobby.” Harriman’s Dutch uncle role backfired; Johnson began holding Harriman accountable for Kennedy’s statements, which grew increasingly antagonistic to the Administration as Kennedy’s dovishness grew. The day Harriman returned from a round-the-world peace trip for Johnson—during which he established a record of sorts by breakfasting in India, lunching in Pakistan, and supping in Italy—he attended his seventy-fifth birthday party thrown by the Kennedys at Hickory Hill. The papers gushed about the costume ball (Bob McNamara went as a silver bullet; RFK went as Harriman, dressed in a long leather trench coat he wore on his missions to Moscow) and marveled that the onetime polo-playing playboy was still dancing at 2 A.M. When Johnson saw Harriman, he ignored the fact that his envoy had just finished a grueling 27,570-mile trip to seventeen countries on behalf of peace and instead muttered darkly, “I understand you were at Hickory Hill again.”
It became increasingly difficult for Harriman to keep a foot in both camps. He gave parties for Luci and Lynda Bird Johnson before their weddings, followed each time by a buffet dinner to which he invited the Kennedys and their friends. The first wedding parties, in August of 1966, seemed to go off smoothly, but by the time of the second round, in December of 1967, there was almost no overlap in the guest lists. Harriman lost far more points with Johnson for holding the Kennedy “after” party than he gained by hosting the prenuptial lunch.
In the summer of 1966, Johnson did grant Harriman his wish and put him in charge of all diplomatic efforts to secure an end to the war. But little real power came with the job. Harriman was given no more specific mandate than to look for diplomatic alternatives, recalled Chester Cooper, Harriman’s chief aide. Nothing was in writing, and it was not even clear that Johnson had consulted with Rusk and McNamara before creating the “Peace Shop,” as Harriman’s office was somewhat mockingly known. Cooper suspected that Johnson was engaging in some protective camouflage, so that he could say he had “given peace a chance.” Harriman was not invited to the “Tuesday lunches,” Johnson’s inner council on the Vietnam War, and his initiatives were not taken very seriously. “He was a lonely guy sitting over there at State crunching out proposed negotiating papers,” recalls Morton Halperin, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in ISA, the Pentagon’s “little State Department.” “They were sent to me at the Pentagon. I just filed them in a filing cabinet and that’s as far as they got.”
Harriman continued to enjoy the support of the Secretary of Defense. McNamara urged Harriman to go to Moscow in May of 1966 and enlist Soviet aid in a settlement; he indicated to Harriman that he saw no value in further military escalation. A year later, as his agony grew, he told Harriman outright that it was “impossible to win militarily,” that the U.S. must seek a negotiated settlement. Harriman said that the Soviets could not “deliver” Hanoi, but that they could be helpful if the U.S. agreed to stop bombing the North. The former governor and Democratic stalwart also raised political considerations, an increasingly important factor in his views on the war. He told McNamara that the Democratic Party would be “split in a way I’ve never seen it” if the war continued. By September 1967, McNamara was completely unguarded with Harriman. “Our record is appalling,” he flatly stated. If the U.S. did not extricate itself from the war, he feared that the “country will tear itself apart.”
By September of 1967 McNamara was in full dissent within the Administration. His wife was sick with bleeding ulcers and he appeared to be nearing collapse; in April of 1968 he would become president of the World Bank. Johnson’s inner circle grew tighter and more hawkish. Both Rusk and Walt Rostow, who had replaced Mac Bundy as National Security Adviser, were skeptical of diplomatic solutions.* Rostow was an indefatigable optimist about the military situation; Rusk was merely stoic.
All along, Harriman continued to push the Russian card. “The only real chance is Russia,” he had told LBJ in October of 1966. Seven months later he would again urge, “I believe we can get with careful handling Soviet cooperation to end the conflict in Vietnam.” Johnson, Rusk, and Rostow were not much interested; neither, it appears, were the Russians. Harriman knew from his conversation with Kosygin in 1965 that the Soviets were not eager to help pull the U.S. out of its quagmire, despite their desire for stability in the region. Still he had faith in his own powers of persuasion. “He was not unrealistic about Moscow’s role in any peace negotiations,” Cooper recalled. “But he may have overestimated his ability to get Russia to exert maximum leverage.” The Soviets undoubtedly knew how little leverage Harriman himself had at the White House. The veteran Soviet ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, was close to Harriman, recalled Cooper, and he also “knew who sat where at dinner” in the Washington pecking order.
Though the Soviets took a low profile, an odd assortment of statesmen, politicians, journalists, and plain charlatans surfaced as go-betweens in a frustrating three-year search for peace. It was a halting diplomatic minuet that was marked by mixed signals, missed chances, bureaucratic infighting, false hopes, and a total lack of success. At one time or another the disparate cast included the Italian ambassador to Saigon, a Canadian diplomat, a Polish diplomat, two newspapermen associated with a California think tank, a pair of French intellectuals, Indira Gandhi, Anthony Eden, Harold Wilson, and Henry Kissinger. The initiatives, with code names like Sunflower and Marigold, all seemed hopeful and all failed. A Polish initiative (Marigold), for instance, seemed to have negotiations in the offing in Warsaw in late 1966. North Vietnam sent word first, however, that the U.S. had to pause in its bombing. Harriman pleaded for the pause, with the backing of McNamara. But Rostow suspected a trap and persuaded LBJ not to order the bombing pause. The talks collapsed—if they were ever destined to go anywhere. A Communist defector later said the whole operation was a sham.
In his memoirs, Johnson cites 17 peace initiatives either undertaken or explored by the Administration as proof of the great effort he made to find a peaceful settlement. Yet Johnson himself remained skeptical. “If I were Ho, I wouldn’t negotiate,” he would say.
In the end, Johnson’s judgment was probably shrewd. Hanoi was probably never interested in any negotiated settlement except for one that would guarantee it victory. Diplomacy was merely a tool to get a united Vietnam under Hanoi’s control. If anything, the North Vietnamese may have regarded U.S. peace initiatives in this period as signs of weakness, of indications that the U.S. was unwilling to sustain a war.
Harriman himself did not doubt Hanoi’s toughness. Indeed, he had been the very first U.S. negotiator exposed to North Vietnamese intransigence, back in 1962 at his unpleasant meeting with the brutish North Vietnamese Foreign Minister Ung Van Khiem. Unlike many liberal intellectuals, he never thought a peaceful settlement was there for the asking. “I don’t agree with you that these people are dying to negotiate,” he told an aide. “They are dying to accept an honorable defeat on our part.” Even if the Communists did sign an agreement, he doubted they would keep it for long; Laos had taught him that. “These fellows don’t live up to an agreement for even one day,” he growled.
At times, recalled Chester Cooper, Harriman seemed to accept that a negotiated settlement was only another term for a “decent interval,” a way of buying face-saving time before Hanoi accomplished its ultimate war aim of total domination of the South. Yet the idea of just abandoning South Vietnam to the Communists appalled him. He had to believe that if only the Russians would lend a hand and apply some pressure on their comrades in Hanoi, then the North would agree to some sort of neutral coalition government in the South. It was admittedly a long shot. But he felt that he was the only man who could possibly pull off such a deal. Not unlike the North Vietnamese, Harriman was dogged, patient, and single-minded. He was willing to labor away without recognition or success, waiting for his chance.
The father of containment, George Kennan, was noticeably absent from the Administration’s deliberations on Vietnam. With his usual foresight, he had warned against engagement in Vietnam as far back as 1948, and his views had only grown stronger since then. But he preferred to silently harbor them in the anonymity of academe.
Kennan’s enthusiastic return to government under President Kennedy in 1961 had quickly soured. He was in many ways the ideal ambassador to Yugoslavia, a diplomat who had been among the first to foresee and encourage splits in the Soviet bloc, an envoy who could understand and get on with Tito. But as usual, he was baffled and frustrated by politics at home.
Congress had gone on record in 1959 with a Captive Nations Resolution pledging the U.S. to seek the “liberation” of all Communist countries, including Yugoslavia. Before leaving for Belgrade, Kennan won McGeorge Bundy’s assurance that the new Administration would not observe Captive Nations Week as called for by the resolution, but the National Security Adviser’s decision was reversed under congressional pressure. Kennan’s discouragement turned to horror when Congress cut Yugoslavia out of the foreign aid bill. The final insult came when Wilbur Mills, the all-powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, decided to strip Yugoslavia of its “most favored nation” trading status, a basic staple of international comity.
Kennan immediately flew back to Washington and, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, descended on Capitol Hill. Trying and failing to conceal his distaste, he dutifully lobbied congressmen. Informed that Yugoslavia was not a member of the Warsaw Pact, one Midwestern representative regarded him suspiciously and commented, “Aw, go on.” Another legislator told him, “Well, Mr. Ambassador, you may be right, but I still can’t see why we have to go on giving aid to a lot of damn Communists.” Chairman Mills flatly rebuffed Kennan’s entreaties. “So far as I can tell, he is a law unto himself in such matters,” Kennan wrote his sister Jeannette. “[Mills] cares nothing for our opinions or those of anybody who knows anything about it, and is at liberty to create as much havoc as he likes in our foreign affairs, without being called to account or even obliged to offer any explanation. That,” Kennan gloomily concluded, “is the way our system works.”
Disgusted, Kennan resigned and once again retreated to Princeton. So world-weary was he that he told Robert Oppenheimer, his employer at the Institute for Advanced Study, that he did not even want to teach students and thereby risk getting caught up in the “chitchat” of world events. He wanted to be left alone, to research and write.
Knowing his opposition to the Vietnam War, peace activists tried to lure him into appearing at demonstrations and teach-ins. But Kennan, who loathed the rabble, begged off. “My views are known,” he wrote William Sloane Coffin in August of 1965. “Now that they have been stated, and overwhelmingly rejected by influential American opinion, I can do no more, it seems to me, than to fall silent.” He informed the activist Yale chaplain that he was in the midst of a “period of withdrawal and historical writing.”
Kennan broke silence only when summoned by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to testify in February of 1966. Congress at the time was faithfully funding the war, but a few doves were beginning to emerge, led by Foreign Relations Chairman William Fulbright (Johnson, borrowing a pun from Truman, called him “Halfbright”). Fulbright held the televised hearings with the hope of stirring dissent among opinion makers and influential citizens. His star witness was Kennan.
“An unusual hush fell over the pre-lunch drinkers at the Metropolitan Club,” reported The New York Times, as Kennan’s image flickered onto the television screen above the bar. The regulars at this Establishment oasis still had respect for Kennan. Yet Kennan’s voice at these hearings carried far beyond the Metropolitan Club or the circulation of Foreign Affairs. Identified as the author of the Containment Doctrine, he reached into middle-class homes with his reasoned arguments against the war. His language was moderate; about the strongest pejorative he used to describe Administration policy was “unfortunate.” But he made clear why he felt the war was wrong—because Vietnam was not a sufficiently vital interest to warrant several hundred thousand American combat troops—and what to do about it: “liquidate the involvement just as soon as this can be done.”
Chain-smoking under the Klieg lights, Secretary of State Rusk offered the Administration’s rebuttal, inveighing against the “steady extension of Communist power through force and threat.” The message was familiar, but the domino theory was beginning to have a tinny ring to many Americans, not just to student protesters in the streets but to their parents at home watching these two old disciples of General Marshall debate on the evening news.
Rusk called Kennan after the hearing and strongly remonstrated against his former colleague’s willingness to help out the antiwar movement. He told him that his dissent was “too late” and that the North Vietnamese were refusing to negotiate. Kennan related this unpleasant conversation in a letter to Llewellyn Thompson and reasserted his opinion that “we should detach ourselves” from the “parochial ambitions of General Ky and his associates.” Yet Kennan was hardly sanguine about the alternatives. “I have a feeling of miserable unhappiness about this whole situation. I see a series of catastrophic possibilities and no favorable ones,” he wrote Emmet John Hughes, a former Eisenhower adviser, in May. He said it was “shocking to see the President and Secretary of State doing all in their power to stimulate the most violent sort of American patriotic emotionalism.”
Kennan was realistic about the war. The hope that the North Vietnamese would eventually give up was “chimerical,” he wrote Arthur Schlesinger. He actually agreed with Dean Acheson that the North Vietnamese were not likely to negotiate a peaceful settlement. But rather than try to bomb the North into submission, as Acheson “with his usual penchant for unconditional surrender” proposed to do, Kennan favored just letting the war “simmer down.”
Bob Lovett hated advisory committees. He had refused to serve on any for JFK, joking that “a committee is a group of individuals who, as individuals, can do nothing, but who, as a committee, can meet formally and decide that nothing can be done.” (Ever mindful of Congress, Lovett added that he exempted from this definition the committees of the House and Senate.)
Kennedy had been perfectly happy to use Lovett as a private adviser and exempt him from sitting on formal panels. The two men shared such an easy, informal relationship that the President did not hesitate to just call him on the phone.
Lovett did not get on nearly so well with Lyndon Johnson. The coarse Texan was too much of showman, too heavy-handed and overbearing for the polite banker, who had long since cut his own smalltown Texas roots. Under pressure from Mac Bundy, Lovett did agree to serve on the President’s Panel of foreign policy advisers, but he was happy to avoid its occasional meetings, usually pleading ill health or business commitments. He sent Jack McCloy a picture of the two of them sitting at a White House meeting of the “Elder Statesmen” at which everyone looks distracted or sleepy. “Bored of Advisers” read the inscription.
Lovett was almost as wary of the Vietnam War as he was of committees. But he continued to believe that once committed to South Vietnam, the U.S. had to honor its commitment. Though unhappy about the war, he approached it from the point of view of production and military capacity, just as did his protégé McNamara. Lovett differed from the Defense Secretary, however, in one critical respect: he thought the idea of a limited war was absurd. “If we stay in, we must stay in with a hell of a lot of firepower,” he told Fortune magazine in October 1965. “You cannot skimp on power, you cannot fight half a war. And no quartermaster was ever hanged for ordering too much of what was needed.”
Asked by LBJ in January of 1966 whether the U.S. should resume bombing the North after the Christmas pause, Lovett was all-out. Ducking a meeting of Johnson’s senior foreign policy advisers, he gave his views to McGeorge Bundy by phone. “Lovett wishes we never got into Vietnam because he has such a painful memory of Korea,” Bundy reported to the President. “He says he was a charter member of the Never Again Club. But now that we are in he would go a long way. He was against the pause in the first place, and he would favor a prompt and fairly massive air action in the North. He thinks we simply have to give adequate support to the massive forces we have placed in Vietnam.”
The drafter of NSC-68 was, ironically, a dove on Vietnam. Paul Nitze did not believe that Vietnam was a vital interest, and he had a healthy and abiding aversion to Asian land wars. He had told Walt Rostow that his idea of sending twenty-five thousand men into Laos was “asinine” and had vehemently argued against the Taylor-Rostow recommendation of sending at least eight thousand combat troops to Vietnam in 1961. He doubted that the U.S. commitment could be limited (it was like being “a little bit pregnant,” he argued), and after a trip to South Vietnam in late 1964 came home convinced that the war could become an “American Dien Bien Phu.” Because of his experience with the Strategic Bombing Survey in World War II, he had little faith in the efficacy of bombing.
In early 1965 he warned McNamara that winning would require the commitment of at least 700,000 troops. “Are you recommending that we withdraw?” McNamara asked. “I guess that is what I’m recommending,” Nitze answered. “Certainly not that we reinforce it with two hundred thousand men.” McNamara asked him, “Well, if you were to withdraw from Vietnam, do you think that the Communists would test us somewhere else?” Nitze answered that he did. “Can you predict where they would test us?” He could not. “Under those circumstances, I take it that you can’t be at all certain that the difficulty of stopping them there won’t be any greater than the difficulty of stopping them in South Vietnam?” Nitze answered that he could not. “Well, Paul,” McNamara said, shrugging, “you really don’t offer me an alternative.”
Nitze had been trapped by his own Cold War logic. Others began to notice that Nitze’s opposition to the war became increasingly muted, that he seemed to waffle, denouncing the war in one conversation, grudgingly supporting it in another. “I could never figure out where he stood,” remarked Leslie Gelb, the head of the Policy Planning Staff at Defense.
Nitze was acquiescent when Lyndon Johnson sought his advice in July of 1965, the time of the first great escalation. Nitze, by then Secretary of the Navy, had been summoned to the White House with the other service Secretaries and the Joint Chiefs to give their opinions on the necessary number of reinforcements. The record shows that Nitze, who now had the interests of the Marine Corps to look after, expressed no qualms about escalation. Asked by the President, “Would you send in more force than Westmoreland requests?” he answered, “Yes, sir. It depends on how quickly.” LBJ cut in, “Two hundred thousand instead of one hundred thousand?” Nitze: “We would need another one hundred thousand in January.”
Chip Bohlen was quite content to have as little as possible to do with the Vietnam War. He spent the middle years of the decade doing what he did best, serving as a senior career diplomat in a sensitive post, as ambassador to France.
“Moscow was his habitat as a specialist, but Paris was the city of his dreams,” wrote Harrison Salisbury. Bohlen’s love of France dated from the Grand Tours of his childhood, during which he had been instructed by his Francophile mother to admire everything about the country, even the cows. He had returned to Paris again and again over the years, often as a respite from Moscow’s gloom.
French-American relations were in crisis during Bohlen’s tour of duty. Chafing under U.S. dominance, de Gaulle was acting up and asserting his independence, thereby jeopardizing the Western Alliance. He refused to participate in a multilateral nuclear force, vetoed Great Britain’s entry in the Common Market, and then in the winter of 1966 delivered the real blow: he walked out of the military command of NATO and demanded that U.S. forces be withdrawn from France.
Bohlen was characteristically low-key in his approach to Le Grand Charles. He advised Johnson not to overreact to the French leader, to preserve America’s long-term relationship with its historic ally by riding out the squalls of the moment. To the French, NATO did not mean much, he told Johnson; Paris still regarded itself tied to the U.S. by a mutual security pact.
Personally, Bohlen got on well with de Gaulle, shooting with him at his weekend retreat and conversing with him easily and fluently. Somewhat indiscreetly, however, Bohlen enjoyed mocking de Gaulle’s grand manner at dinner parties in Paris society, where anti-Gaullism ran high. His cutting remarks made their way back to the proud general and further exacerbated tensions between Washington and Paris.
The diplomatic rough spots did little to interfere with Bohlen’s great pleasure in the City of Light. The embassy was run smoothly by his old St. Paul’s and Harvard roommate Cecil Lyon, his deputy chief of mission. There was plenty of time for diversion: he relished finding small, unknown, and superb restaurants, and he happily argued into the night with the French, who enjoyed passionate debate as much as he did. He gambled at Monte Carlo and tried to hide his losses from Avis. Short on funds as usual, he had to borrow Cecil Lyon’s silk hat, which was much too small for him, when he went to call on de Gaulle. (Indeed, he had been able to accept the ambassadorship only after Kennedy dipped into a special presidential fund to augment his entertainment allowance.) But the American dollar went far in Paris in the mid-1960s, and the Bohlens entertained often and well—two or three formal dinners a month and innumerable small parties. They held off on large splashy affairs, like dress balls, Bohlen recalled, only because the Vietnam War was raging, and ostentatious celebration would have been unseemly.
Bohlen had growing doubts about the Vietnam War. On the eve of the Geneva conference in 1954 that split Vietnam into North and South, he had been fairly hawkish, advising Dulles not to concede too much to the Communists.* But he correctly foresaw that the North Vietnamese would never give up and sue for peace. The notion that the North Vietnamese could be bombed to the conference table, he wrote Tommy Thompson in 1966, “is a very fallacious argument since it seems to me that all Communist history shows that they will never yield to external pressure of this kind.”
Bohlen did not volunteer this opinion to Johnson until he was asked. “What would you do about Vietnam if you were in charge of the country?” the President finally queried him in 1967. Bohlen replied that the bombing was “the worst thing the United States had done.” It had forced the Soviets to render greater assistance to the North Vietnamese and alienated public opinion in Europe—all without having any effect on Hanoi. “None of these arguments were new,” recorded Bohlen. Johnson had heard them before; he stopped asking Bohlen’s advice.
Like Lovett, McCloy was called upon by LBJ in 1966 to give his opinion on whether the U.S. should resume bombing the North after the Christmas pause. Like Lovett, McCloy said yes. The pause “hasn’t been conducive to bringing about talks,” he said at a meeting with Johnson at the White House. “We’ve been too excited, too panicky—an indication of weakness to the enemy.”
Though McCloy had always doubted American involvement in Vietnam and came to oppose it, he hated to see the U.S. appear “weak.” Even as late as 1972, McCloy grumbled to Louis Auchincloss at a dinner at the Century Club that U.S. troops were about to “scat out” of Vietnam. Auchincloss remarked that McCloy must still be a hawk at heart, or otherwise he would have used the term “withdraw.” McCloy nodded, and glumly admitted that Auchincloss was right.
The antiwar movement that began welling up in the mid-sixties also distressed McCloy. The demonstrators seemed to McCloy damnably disloyal; what is more, the anti-elitist passion of the young was an affront to his very way of doing business, his conception of how government ought to be run. The effect was to make him appear more hawkish than he really felt. At a meeting on Vietnam at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in 1967, a member, Cass Canfield, worried aloud that the war was alienating the public, particularly the young. McCloy seemed irked at the suggestion, and growled that the British had experienced dissent during the Boer War too without just giving up.
McCloy was much happier dealing with Europe. Along with Acheson, he was called in by Johnson to keep the Western Alliance from splitting apart when de Gaulle exited from NATO. McCloy agreed to help out with NATO’s financial woes—U.S. dollars and British pounds were draining into Germany, where the troops were actually stationed, causing a currency crisis. Both Britain and the U.S. Congress were threatening to withdraw the troops. After two months of negotiations, McCloy was able to work out a complex deal that preserved the alliance he had so carefully nurtured through its infancy.
Acheson was deeply worried that NATO was being allowed to wither while the Vietnam War mushroomed. In 1965 he had written an article in Foreign Affairs “to prod LBJ into some consciousness that Europe exists and that some action is needed from the United States,” he wrote Desmond Donnelly, a British MP. Acheson even faulted Mac Bundy; in a later letter he told Donnelly that he did not regret Bundy’s departure as National Security Adviser because he was “anti-German and believes we can make a deal with de Gaulle.”
Acheson was furious at de Gaulle’s defection from NATO. “What a tiresome creature that man is,” he wrote Anthony Eden. At President Johnson’s request, Acheson came over to the White House in March of 1966 to help salvage NATO and tame Le Grand Charles. After a few months, he was almost as exasperated by Johnson as he was by de Gaulle. He wrote Eden:
In acting as chief of staff for the France-NATO crisis, I have found myself in the middle of a whole series of intra-U.S. Government vendettas—Defense v. State, White House v. State, JCS v. McNamara, Semitic-Gaullists v. European integrationists, and LBJ turn-the-other-cheekism v. DA let-the-chips-fall-where-they-mayism. This finally led to a press leak campaign, conducted out of the White House, directed against George Ball, Jack McCloy and me as anti-de Gaulle extremists. This all blew up at a White House meeting when, at some crack of LBJ’s, I lost my temper and told him what I thought of his conduct and that I was not prepared to stand for any more of it. Rusk and McNamara dove for cover while Ball and I slugged it out with Mr. Big. . . . It was exhilarating and did something to clear the air.
Ball, for one, was delighted with Acheson’s forthrightness and willingness to stand up to Johnson. “I shall miss your urbanity and disillusion when the cocktail hour rolls around,” he wrote him after the old statesman had returned to his law firm in June. Yet Acheson’s cyncism was not just an air he feigned. He wrote Harry Truman that the experience was “most disillusioning” about both Johnson and Dean Rusk. He regretted that he had ever recommended Rusk as Secretary of State. “He had been a good assistant to me, loyal and capable, but as number one he is no good at all. LBJ is not much better. . . . He creates distrust by being too smart. He is never quite candid. He is both mean and generous, but the meanness far too often predominates.”
Acheson failed to persuade Johnson to pressure de Gaulle back into NATO. “So Europe is forgotten,” Acheson lamented, “and a good deal that you, General Marshall, and I did is unravelling fast.” Acheson was growing ever gloomier. “I am so depressed about the world that I do not trust my pen,” he wrote Donnelly. “Who added the sapiens to homo? He ought to get his tail back—and be kicked.”
Acheson was unable to persuade Johnson to take a hard line against de Gaulle, he believed, because the President was too distracted by the Vietnam War. But then everyone in Washington was preoccupied with the war by the summer of 1966. It had become all-consuming. Acheson could no longer shrug off Vietnam as an irritating nuisance, a noisy sideshow. Like the country at large, he had to face up to America’s involvement in Southeast Asia, and decide whether to support it—or not.