The Columbia History of the Vietnam War

In his inaugural address on January 20, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson reaffirmed John Kennedy’s commitment to sacrifice in fulfilling the nation’s international obligations: “If American lives must end, and American treasure be spilled, in countries we barely know, that is the price that change has demanded of conviction and of our enduring covenant.”¹ Two days after this speech, Johnson summoned congressional leaders to the White House to receive an updated foreign-policy briefing from Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. He intended to have frank and candid discussions with them on all matters, Johnson told the legislators. And their views would be given full consideration. He wanted to return to the practice of Eisenhower bipartisanship: “The Administration has no mortgage on patriotism.”²

When they assembled in the Cabinet Room, LBJ asked that they keep the details of the briefings confidential. If the information provided in these sessions found its way into the newspapers, he warned, real damage to the national interest could result. Johnson had developed his political strategy over the years of mixing an emphasis on loyalty with a promise of rewards. Making people feel part of the inner circle, LBJ knew full well, ensured support ahead of time, as did the ritualized photo ops with the president. What better proof could there be that the legislator enjoyed a special relationship with the nation’s leader? The hometown newspaper then sold the president’s program along with the image of an intimate handshake.

This tactic had worked well with Congress in the past, and the president would now try to apply it to foreign policy. Johnson had always had an instinctive reaction against “running away from” Vietnam, and, with the help of advisers, he developed a complicated rationale for “staying the course.” He used—and was used by—the Kennedy mystique. Indeed, it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. As the war deepened into a morass that all but engulfed his presidency, moreover, Johnson could not have said himself whether he was the author of American policy or simply an actor speaking lines memorized from a script. One way to look at the Johnson policy is through the lens of a bombsight. No policy became more controversial than the Operation Rolling Thunder bombing campaign, begun in February 1965. And in this first foreign-policy briefing of the Johnson administration, there was a foreshadowing of the dilemmas the president would find himself struggling to reconcile over the next three years.

Johnson began the briefing by declaring that his objective in this first meeting was to put the Vietnam problem right out on the table so all those present could see what he faced. Since their previous meeting just before the election, he said, he and his advisers had been studying the situation “intensively.” Rusk and McNamara would go into the details, “but the basic fact is that we need to have in Saigon a stable government as a base for further actions.”

Johnson had promised to be frank with them, but he approached Vietnam from an oblique angle, suggesting that his first concern was what to do about American dependents in South Vietnam. He had been anxious for more than a year to have them evacuated because “the Viet Cong might attack U.S. citizens in Saigon in the event we carry out air strikes in North Vietnam.” He did not announce that he had decided to bomb the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), but he was talking about the possible consequences. What he said next confirmed his intention to carry the war to the DRV. “The North Vietnamese might react by dropping bombs on Saigon,” he cautioned, or even take some other “irrational action” that would result “in the loss of many American women and children.”

Letting the image of women and children running for their lives hang over the deliberations, the president called on Secretary of State Rusk to present the Vietnam “case.” Our greatest problem, Rusk repeated, was political instability in Saigon. LBJ immediately interrupted to elaborate. Allied and friendly nations hesitated to send aid to South Vietnam because of the turmoil, he noted; “they fear[ed] that they might appear foolish if, after they send aid, the country goes to pieces politically.” Resuming, Rusk assured the congressional leaders that lines were being kept open to the “other side”—that is, Hanoi—to see if there were any interest in a settlement based on the 1954 Geneva Agreements or the 1962 Laos Accord. “If the communists will not negotiate with us on a return to the earlier agreements,” he warned, “we are in for a very difficult time in Southeast Asia.”

Rusk’s nod in the direction of the Geneva Agreements was something of a risk itself, but no one asked for an explanation. Since 1956, the year when the United States blocked all-Vietnamese elections, Washington officialdom had kept a very low profile about Geneva, seldom even mentioning the agreements out of fear that any serious discussion of the provisions undermined the legitimacy of the government in Saigon. Rusk’s bringing up the agreements in this context was meant to reconfirm the idea of an “international” struggle and not to suggest a desire to reconvene Geneva with all the uncertainties for the southern “state” so carefully nurtured from the dark days after the fall of the French fortress at Dienbienphu.

Secretary McNamara followed Rusk with a military rundown of the forces opposing one another in South Vietnam. Guerrilla strength was up, he admitted, as infiltration from North Vietnam had now reached an annual rate of 10,000. South Vietnam’s military strength had also improved—just not enough yet: “On the basis of extensive experience we [have] concluded that a numerical advantage of 10 to 1 is required to win a guerrilla war.” This statement caused some murmurs, as it was intended to do, about striking at the source of the infiltration. The ten-to-one ratio would become something of an albatross in later years when McNamara tried to defend the search-and-destroy strategy, but for the moment he could avoid that burden.

“We need currently more South Vietnamese troops but not more U.S. forces,” the secretary said. Johnson backed him up with a second assurance that went back to something he had said during the presidential campaign: “We have decided that more U.S. forces are not needed in South Vietnam short of a decision to go to full-scale war.” True, the ratio was now only five to one, but no one could expect American soldiers to fill the whole gap. In the end, the war had to be fought by the South Vietnamese. “We cannot control everything that they do,” Johnson remarked, “and we have to count on their fighting their war.”

One or two of the congressional leaders still wondered about that ratio—given what McNamara had said about the figures—and whether more could be done to cut down on the infiltration, such as by making better use of the U.S. Navy. The problem was over land, McNamara said, not on the sea. What a tangle of troubles lurked under that admission, but these troubles went largely unnoticed as the meeting came to an end. After all, the president was very popular at this moment and commanded a huge majority in Congress, so the legislators left the White House content with their morning’s appointment with the president.

They might have thought more later about what had been so casually revealed as if it were really no change in policy or military strategy. Johnson and his chief advisers had announced, albeit it in backhanded fashion, that a bombing campaign was about to begin. The primary purpose of this campaign was not to destroy Hanoi’s war-making or defense capacity, but to improve stability in Saigon so that other actions against the Vietcong (National Liberation Front) guerrillas could then rest on a firmer political foundation. Or, as the argument appeared in policy papers, the South Vietnamese were waiting to see if the United States would act. Until that happened, according to this analysis, the countryside would not rally around Saigon, and the war would be lost. For good measure, Johnson even added in the idea that America’s allies were also waiting to see if Washington planned to do anything before committing themselves to the cause.

Looked at another way, bombing was now being touted as the only way to avoid sending American boys to fight the Vietcong in the jungles and rice paddies. Although the common understanding was that Johnson had promised during the campaign that he would not send American boys to do the fighting for the Vietnamese, he had also said something about bombing as well. “Some of our people—Mr. Nixon, Mr. Rockefeller, Mr. Scranton, and Mr. Goldwater—have all, at some time or other,” he had said earlier, on September 28, 1964, “suggested the possible wisdom of going north in Viet-Nam. Well, now, before you start attacking someone and you launch a big offensive, you better give some consideration to how you are going to protect what you have. And when a brigadier general can walk down the streets of Saigon as they did the other day, and take over the police station, the radio station, and the government without firing a shot, I don’t know how much offensive we are prepared to launch.” Johnson had continued:

As far as I am concerned, I want to be very cautious and careful, and use it only as a last resort, when I start dropping bombs around that are likely to involve American boys in a war in Asia with 700 million Chinese. So just for the moment I have not thought that we were ready for American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys. What I have been trying to do, with the situation that I found, was to get the boys in Viet-Nam to do their own fighting with our advice and with our equipment. That is the course we are following. So we are not going north and drop bombs at this stage of the game, and we are not going south and run out and leave it for the Communists to take over.³

What had changed in the few months between September 1964 and January 1965? What made it appear that the Saigon regime could survive only if the United States started bombing the DRV? Ever since the 1963 coup, American policymakers had hoped that some government or leaders would appear who could bring an end to the confusion and turmoil in Saigon. For some time, there had been a fear that unless the United States did something dramatic, the government in Saigon might seek independent negotiations or simply collapse as its authority was increasingly circumscribed within a few cities. The biggest threat was to American “credibility.” Once shattered, it could not be glued back together. So it had to be protected like a fine porcelain vase. The idea that credibility existed only in such a museum-like atmosphere seemed to rule out questions about the wisdom of the original American intervention as the French departed the scene after Dienbienphu.

Two weeks after the January 22 briefing, an attack by Vietcong guerrillas on an American base at Pleiku in the northern part of South Vietnam on February 6, 1965, caused the death of eight Americans and the loss of ten planes. Johnson immediately sent bombers to attack barracks and suspected staging areas for training and infiltration. The White House announced that the strike had been requested by the South Vietnamese government and had been carried out only after congressional leaders “had been informed.” Would there be more strikes? “The key to the situation remains the cessation of infiltration,” the statement continued, “and the clear indication by the Hanoi regime that it is prepared to cease aggression against its neighbors.”⁴

From that statement on, nothing changed in American rhetoric even after more bombs were dropped than in World War II. What finally happened more than three years later, however, was that Johnson accepted vague promises that attacks on South Vietnamese cities would be halted while negotiations went on. Dean Rusk had insisted as well that the Vietcong would not be allowed to shoot their way to the peace table, but Johnson ultimately had to settle for much less—that Saigon would be at least one of four “parties” engaged in the talks. Because so little was accomplished in the three years following Pleiku, arguments continue to swirl not about bombing, but about whether Rolling Thunder was “a strategy for defeat,” as one military commander termed Johnson’s approach.⁵

The place to begin such an inquiry is with the original statement about the retaliation for Pleiku. The politics of the first air strikes on North Vietnam required the administration to pretend that the request had originated with Saigon, as if the latter really were a solid government fully capable of deciding on such a weighty matter, but there could be no doubt about the decision’s true origins. No one was fooled. As National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy famously said, “Pleikus are like streetcars. One came along every ten minutes or so.”⁶

This bombing decision was a special moment in the history of the Vietnam War. Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin was in Hanoi. Why he was there prompted the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to speculate that he had come to be in on the kill, so as to steal credit from Beijing the moment the Saigon government fell. An intelligence memorandum prepared by the CIA’s Office of National Estimates on February 5, 1965, declared, “We accordingly believe that the Soviet leaders seek to share—and guide—what they believe to be a Communist bandwagon.”⁷ As Moscow read the auguries, the memorandum argued, the United States had decided not to intervene, and a Communist victory was drawing near. The Soviets expected that Washington was close to being ready to negotiate a face-saving exit.

The CIA memorandum thus suggested there would be bonus points for an American air strike at this moment. Besides offering assurance to Saigon that the United States was determined not to allow the guerrillas to win, it would send the same message to the Soviets, who presumably would convey that warning to Kosygin’s hosts in Hanoi and to leaders in Beijing. If that was what was expected, the result would be disappointing. Although the Soviets feared confronting the United States over Vietnam, the bombing campaign only increased Hanoi’s leverage with both Moscow and Beijing, making it easier to obtain needed aid. As the joint communiqué said when Kosygin left Hanoi, the DRV was now formally recognized as the “outpost of the socialist camp in Southeast Asia” in its struggles with “American imperialism.” Whether Russia’s efforts to work behind the scenes for a negotiated solution—however ambiguous—would ever have had a chance for success, the bombing campaign dealt them a serious blow at the outset. Even Dean Rusk admitted that the Russians were made captive to Hanoi by the American bombing.⁸

The Soviets did not show any less eagerness for diplomatic negotiations with Washington about European issues or atomic proliferation because of the bombing, and therein lies one of the greatest ironies of the Vietnam War. The idea that the bombing would be “accepted” as long as ground troops did not cross over into the DRV obviously pleased American policymakers. Johnson told congressional leaders that he now intended to use the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and “the legal power of the Presidency” to carry out “at a manageable level an effort to deter, destroy and diminish the strength of the North Vietnamese aggressors and to try to convince them to leave South Vietnam alone.”⁹

The bombing attacks did stir the first visible signs of dissent on Capitol Hill, followed by the teach-in movement on college campuses. “The views of a few Senators,” Johnson assured the group in the White House, “could not control his actions.”¹⁰ But it was not quite so easy to dismiss what came to the White House in telegrams and mail. National Security Adviser Bundy reported to Johnson that around 1,500 telegrams had been received so far, considered a medium to heavy response, and they were running about twelve to one against the “retaliatory action.” The biggest fears expressed were that the government was trigger happy and that “there will be escalation.” Probably, he said, the telegrams simply revealed that Americans were reluctant to think about places far away from home, but, he cautioned, “the statistics, in general, indicate that we have an education problem that bears close watching and more work.”¹¹

Better news came from public pollsters, who found that the air strikes were approved by 67 percent of those asked, only 15 percent opposed the government outright, and 18 percent were undecided. Furthermore, and this response became LBJ’s mantra, 64 percent said U.S. efforts should continue.¹² In the ensuing weeks, however, the teach-in movement on college campuses began at the University of Michigan and spread quickly across the nation. United Nations ambassador Adlai Stevenson urged Johnson to make a statement welcoming some form of negotiations. Bundy was dead set against the idea: “Your answer,” he cautioned the president, “is that you believe in all necessary statements of our policy and objectives.”¹³

“Both the Communists and our friends in Saigon would interpret such a proposal as a sign of weakness and readiness to withdraw,” Bundy warned in this same memo to Johnson. Even less appealing to the national security adviser was a suggestion for a new international conference patterned after Geneva. The votes would be weighted against us, he said, and France could not be allowed to put itself forward in a mediator’s role. The bombing campaign had barely gotten started. It was too soon to offer negotiations of any sort. The ante now having been upped, there was something slightly ridiculous about folding. “The situation in general is bad and deteriorating,” read a Defense Department memorandum of March 24, 1965. It warned: “The VC [Vietcong] have the initiative. Defeatism is gaining among the rural population, somewhat in the cities, and even among the soldiers…. GVN [Government of (South) Vietnam] control is shrinking to enclaves, some burdened with refugees.”

It was essential, the memorandum concluded, that the United States emerge from this imbroglio as a “good doctor,” one who kept his promises, took the necessary risks, had gotten bloodied, and had hurt the enemy very badly. Vietnam was being closely watched to see how the United States would behave in future cases: “In this connection, the relevant audiences are the Communists (who must feel strong pressures), the South Vietnamese (whose morale must be buoyed), our allies (who must trust us as ‘underwriters’) and the US public (which must support our risk-taking with US lives and prestige).”¹⁴

Johnson believed that he had to start with one man. If he could bring newspaperman Walter Lippmann around, others would follow. Lippmann enjoyed an almost mythical place in the hierarchy of Washington’s political commentators. It was even said that the State Department read Lippmann every morning to see what American policy was or should be. At the moment, the pundit was flirting, so to speak, with French president Charles de Gaulle’s proposal for “neutralizing” Vietnam. So Bundy invited Lippmann to the White House to hear what LBJ proposed to offer in response to de Gaulle and to others’ demands that he set forth a negotiating position. “Walter,” the president remarked, “I’m going up to Baltimore tomorrow to give a speech, and I’m going to hold out that carrot you keep talking about.” “This isn’t going to work, Mac,” Lippmann told Bundy when they were alone; “it’s just a disguised demand for capitulations.”¹⁵

On April 7, 1965, nonetheless, Johnson went to Johns Hopkins University to make Ho Chi Minh his offer. If Hanoi would give up aiding the Vietcong and sending troops south, he would establish a multinational effort to develop the Mekong River system into something like the Tennessee Valley Authority, which had brought power and light to millions of rural Americans during the Great Depression. It would be a New Deal for Southeast Asia. Otherwise, Hanoi would have to face the full brunt of American military force. “We will not be defeated,” Johnson intoned and emphasized: “We will not grow tired. We will not withdraw, either openly or under the cloak of a meaningless agreement.”¹⁶

The following month, Johnson approved a one-week halt in the bombing of North Vietnam, but the ploy only suggested that “crisis-management” techniques would not work as they had during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Such gestures only had downsides to them, observed political advisers such as Clark Clifford and Abe Fortas. They raised false hopes at home, and when they failed to bring results, they increased pressure for an all-out effort. Far from helping Johnson keep the war at a manageable level, the push-pause scenario promised only trouble and a credibility gap. “If you accept the hypothesis that there is no chance of success, others will know it too,” Clifford warned, and “it might end up being viewed as a gimmick.”¹⁷

In this first instance, the pause was by way of a final warning of what was to come if Hanoi persisted. It was abundantly clear by July 1965 that Rolling Thunder had failed either to bring stability to Saigon or to scare off the DRV from aiding the guerrilla war. There was apparently no option left but to send in American ground forces. With that decision, however, the debate over the bombing campaign became more and more heated as the prospect of sending American soldiers, especially draftees, to fight and die in what was already an unpopular war roiled both hawks and doves on Capitol Hill.

Begun not as a strategic effort to destroy the DRV’s war-making capacity, but to aid morale in the South, gradually escalating the bombing campaign still in “crisis-management” style never had much appeal in the Pentagon outside the defense secretary’s suite of offices. Now, so it appeared, the civilians were making a second mistake regarding the bombing, seeing it as an accompaniment to ground troops without really “punishing” the enemy at a level that would break his will to continue the struggle. “The logical course would have been to unleash that airpower against the homeland of the aggressor,” later complained Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, commander in chief in the Pacific. “Instead we wasted our air strength on inconsequential targets while planning to commit still more of our men to the ground battle.”¹⁸

It is not easy to get a full reading of Johnson’s mind as he began this perilous journey deep into the jungles and across the rice paddies of Southeast Asia in search of fulfilling America’s obligations to the world. LBJ always kept his own counsel, and woe be to the person who revealed any decision before LBJ himself signed off. We can say, nevertheless, that Johnson sought to protect the Great Society from Vietnam blowback for as long as he could, in part by pretending that his decisions were not going to force hard choices on Congress or give the conservative bloc reasons for denying funding to his ambitious domestic programs. As he prepared to send nearly 100,000 troops to Vietnam, Johnson absolutely refused to allow his aides to request even a $1 billion supplemental appropriation. He talked constantly about keeping control of the situation, providing only what was immediately needed to stave off a defeat until after the monsoon season, and then taking another look at the situation. One comes to feel after studying the documents of the fateful decisions at the end of July 1965 that Johnson was even keeping from himself the possible consequences of his actions. ¹⁹

However that may be, the real irony of the bombing campaign turned out to be the basic nonreaction of the Russians and Chinese—beyond rhetorical condemnation—at the time of Kosygin’s visit. Although the administration now felt that it could carry out the bombings with relatively little concern about a “bigger” war with the major Communist powers, it already faced harsh criticism in congressional committees for considering a large-scale troop intervention without making “proper” use of airpower, the supposed apotheosis of American technological civilization. Testifying before the House Armed Services Committee, the Joint Chiefs equivocated, except for Marine commandant Wallace Greene, who boldly accepted committee chairman L. Mendell Rivers’s premise that really important targets were being left alone for “political” reasons. Why, demanded Rivers, were surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites and air bases in the DRV still untouched? Greene responded that he had advocated hitting the SAM sites “from the day the first shovel had been struck into the ground to construct them.”²⁰

Such divisions among his military advisers infuriated Johnson, but he warded off criticism of this sort by dividing up the political spectrum, essentially the same method he attempted to use on Lippmann and dovish opponents of the war. Producing and interpreting polls, LBJ would argue that the American public supported his course of action in Vietnam and not any other plan. It was only the extremes who wanted to go north or, at the other pole, to run out on America’s solemn obligations. Portraying himself as an executor of the public will and nothing more, LBJ challenged his dovish opponents to “take back” the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution if they dared try. Did the generals and other hawks know all about the treaties that might exist between Russia and China, on the one hand, or between the Communist powers and Hanoi, on the other? If they did not know, he would say, then maybe they ought to be a little more careful about what they advocated.

When Johnson met with the Joint Chiefs on July 22, 1965, they all expressed the opinion that the bombing campaign had to be changed if the war were to be won. Sending the number of troops the president wanted would do little beyond hold the lines, but it had to be done, and not without a different approach to the bombing. Won’t the other side put in 100,000 if we do? the president challenged Admiral David McDonald. The admiral started to reply, “No. If we step up our bombing …,” but Johnson did not let him go on. The Joint Chiefs chair, General Earle Wheeler, answered for McDonald that the military could handle anything Russia or China could put into Vietnam. Air Force general John P. McConnell came back to the bombing and the need to hit “all military targets available” in North Vietnam. Johnson replied that there were risks involved any way he went in Vietnam, but he also reminded the chiefs of all those millions of Chinese just over the border.

General Greene had had enough of Rolling Thunder. It was more like Rolling Blunder, he thought. There were no lightning strikes in it. We had to destroy everything in North Vietnam, he said. First we take out the airfields, then the SAM sites, and then go after the “industrial complex.” “They can be told by pamphlet drop why we are doing this,” he added, but the problem was that no one in the room was actually sure “why we are doing this.” Clark Clifford, an old political stalwart who had given Harry Truman advice about how to sell the Cold War to the public in 1948, asked General Wheeler what the results would be if the military plan was successful. Wheeler retreated to the bombing campaign rationale: “If we can secure the military situation, it seems likely that we can get some kind of stable government.”²¹

When the generals and admirals left the Cabinet Room, Johnson and the civilian advisers went over what they had heard from the military. For one thing, the war was going to cost more—a great deal more—and, as Secretary McNamara said, the problem was to stay away from the idea that this escalation costing $10 billion or more was a change of policy. Undersecretary of State George Ball added, “We always lose on this.” The really tough questions, however, were put by two “establishment” figures, Arthur Dean and John J. McCloy. LBJ had asked them to be present because of their potential as interlocutors in armchairs at the Century Club or around the table at the Council on Foreign Relations, where important policy matters went down with a swallow of single malt scotch.

McCloy led off with a question about whether the Vietcong would ever “let go” if they still had a “sanctuary” in North Vietnam. This query was another way of putting General Greene’s point, of course, and all Rusk could say was that the sanctuary was only one-fifth of the country—the area where bombing had not yet been approved. Dean picked up the ball. “What do you do if the war drags on—with mounting casualties—where do we go? The people say if we are not doing what is necessary to end it, why don’t we do what is necessary?” McNamara then let the cat out of the bag—or something like that. “If we bomb Haiphong [the main harbor for Hanoi] would this end the war? … The answer is ‘No.’” The war-making potential was in areas where bombing was permitted, he added, without saying that would end the war either.

Dean jumped on that response: “If this carries on for some years, we’ll get in the same fix we were in Korea and the Yalu.” McCloy also feared the Korean example, where negotiations dragged on for nearly two years. “If we could define our objectives specifically, what are our objectives in a discussion? What do we have to negotiate?” Rusk rehearsed all the old points, mentioning the 1954 “agreements” in a way that brought National Security Adviser Bundy into the conversation:

BUNDY: If we really were the ones for free elections, it would be good. It is difficult for Saigon to sign on.

MCCLOY: Would we be willing to take a Tito government or a VC victory [in the elections]?

BUNDY: That’s where our plan begins to unravel.

Johnson really did not want to go down that path and intervened to end the discussion with some vague comments about the need for the United States, like a good boxer, to have both hands going all the time: “Our right is our military power, but our left must be our peace proposals.” How the right was going to score a knockout blow or the left find anything to negotiate about if the only issue was the war in the South, he could not explain. “We need Ernie Pyles out there,” he closed with a reference to the famous World War II correspondent who had boosted morale at home, “interviewing soldiers who can tell how proud they are to do their duty.”

When Johnson announced that he was sending 100,000 troops to Vietnam, he did it at noon on July 28, 1965, presumably the least dramatic way of keeping the nation informed. In succeeding months, the Joint Chiefs kept pressing McNamara to take certain military targets off the restricted list, and air force intelligence officers insisted that the psychological effect on North Vietnam would eventually produce results. The influx of American soldiers did seem to halt the progression toward an early disaster, but at the end of the year McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara joined in urging Johnson to authorize another pause in the bombing. There had been strong indications that Moscow would do what it could to persuade the DRV to negotiate a truce, but the Russians were hardly in a position to suggest that the only real issue, as it had been in July and, indeed, for all the years since 1956—who would rule in Saigon—could be settled that way.

McNamara’s role in this endeavor was particularly ambiguous because he knew that the soaring costs could not be finessed any longer. If nothing else, he told the president, it was essential to have a peace initiative before the administration asked Congress for these funds and before more troops were sent. Johnson had promised in July that he would send General William Westmoreland whatever numbers of men he needed to prevent the loss of South Vietnam. A suspension might bring some sort of North Vietnamese response, McNamara argued at a meeting on December 18, 1965. It might cause a rift between Russia and China, and it might satisfy the public that everything was being done to avoid a bigger war.

McNamara had saved the “bad news” for last, though. He advocated a pause because a military solution to Vietnam was not certain. The chances of success were “one out of three or one in two,” he estimated and added that “ultimately we must find a solution, we must finally find a diplomatic solution.” Johnson seemed not to be surprised or, at least, not too much surprised: “Then, no matter what we do in [the] military (field) there is no sure victory.” McNamara agreed: “That’s right. We have been too optimistic. One in three or two in three in my estimate.” Dean Rusk demurred, but not without expressing his own doubts: “I’m more optimistic, but I can’t prove it.”

McNamara continued to press, however obliquely, for considering a diplomatic alternative to the decision to escalate, commenting at a cabinet meeting in December 1965: “This seems a contradiction. I come to you for a huge increase in Viet Nam—400,000 men. But at the same time it may lead to escalation and undesirable results. I suggest we look at other alternatives.” Rusk then assumed leadership of the hawks, having been encouraged by Clifford and Fortas’s worry that a pause would demonstrate weakness. He picked up that thread and warned that the peacenik faction in the United States might seize on a “failed” pause to push for a settlement on less than minimally acceptable terms. His approach emulated that of Charles Dickens’s character Wilkins Micawber, offering a you-never-know-what-might-turn-up assurance that the Communists were unpredictable: “For example, lifting of the Berlin blockade [in 1949] came as a surprise. In the Pusan peninsula [at the outset of the Korean War], we thought we couldn’t hang on—and we did.” “I have a feeling that the other side is not that tough,” he finished, “and it does not follow [that] in a year or two we won’t be in the far more favorable position. I think the other side is hurting just as we are hurting.”²²

In the end, Johnson accepted the pause and faced a debate inside his inner circle in January 1966, just as Clifford and Fortas had predicted would happen, when Hanoi refused the idea of negotiations. The arguments against resuming made unpleasant reading because they challenged the very premises of the bombing campaign. McNamara tried to downplay the argument between himself and the Joint Chiefs over the way the campaign was being waged against targets in the North. The defense secretary said that the bombing was not fundamental to “what we do in the South.” Johnson wanted to know, therefore, if a higher level of bombing in the DRV would bring the Chinese into the war.

McNamara did not think so, but he took little comfort in the thought. He answered: “This month we’ll drop twice the level of bombs as in peak Korea period [sic]. We will expand this further.” And what would be the result? “By end of year,” he predicted, “we’ll be in roughly [the] same balance with VC as we are now.” The discussion rambled on, with McNamara conceding that all the military men insisted that the bombing must be resumed. They were “even getting emotional,” he noted, because “they see North Vietnamese actions to reconstruct bridges, moving substantial units through Laos.” There was certainly a buildup by the other side, he conceded, but he doubted it would make much difference. “My own appraisal,” he summarized, is that “they over-estimate the effect of North bombing in stopping infiltration.”²³

McNamara had “hidden” allies in the intelligence community, but not in Saigon in the headquarters of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), or in the Defense Intelligence Agency. The secretary’s comments at the key meetings in December 1965 and January 1966 indicated that he felt he had good reason to doubt the intelligence products he was receiving from the military as he began a torturous path toward disillusionment. For example, in an Office of National Estimates special intelligence estimate in February 1966, vigorously contested by the air force, CIA analysts had concluded that even with bombing the ports and other attempts to interdict the movement of supplies for the Vietcong into South Vietnam, Hanoi could still move “substantially greater amounts than in 1965.”²⁴

But the “vote” among Johnson’s advisers was for resumption. Former CIA director Allen Dulles had been brought into the conversations, and at a January 28 meeting he summed up the near fatalistic tone of the meeting: “I would resume the bombing—but we have left [the] impression that bombing has been ineffective.” General Wheeler, when asked how he knew the bombing was hurting the North Vietnamese war effort, cited the complaints Hanoi made about it and evidence from defectors that they feared bombing more than anything else.²⁵

“On the theory that ‘a hit dog howls,’” Johnson probed at this same meeting, “is that evidence that we are hurting [them]?” “Yes, sir,” snapped Wheeler. But the general could not promise any significant decrease in the enemy’s activity for one or maybe two years. Time was running out, obviously, before the next presidential campaign. The enemy’s losses on the battlefield, Wheeler insisted, would eventually destroy his will to persist because the “morale of troops won’t stand up to it.” No one could say when this would happen, he added, but “within the next two years we ought to get favorable results.”

Arthur Dean expressed the administration’s dilemma with regard to the bombing: “I would resume without question. If you don’t the American people won’t support you—and casualties will rise.” In effect, Johnson had trapped himself. He had bought the argument that Hanoi would desist from aiding the Vietcong as the bombing patterns spread northward, but, more important, that the bombing was essential to stabilize politics in the South. It now appeared that the bombing was essential to stabilize the political situation in the United States as well. The military chiefs asserted that the bombing could interdict the supply lines, cut off the guerrillas from outside help, and force the North to divert its energies to reconstruction. The debate inside the administration would soon center, therefore, on the “crossover point”—that moment in real time when American troop reinforcements and the bombing made it impossible for the enemy to keep a sufficient number of troops in the field to win the war. If the bombing was considered a success, its advocates would have to propose such a moment or, as Wheeler did, a time frame within which that point would be reached.

Johnson ended this January 28 meeting in a cadence almost Shakespearean as the curtain fell on act II of the Vietnam Tragedy: “I was the first Congressman to speak up for the Truman Doctrine. I am not happy about Vietnam but we cannot run out—we have to resume bombing.” As the number of troops edged up to more than 400,000, Johnson’s closest advisers appeared in the scenes, talking among themselves as such side characters do in the Bard’s tragedies. McNamara and W. Averell Harriman—longtime Democratic counselor and government official—confided to each other their fears after a presidential trip to the Far East in late 1966. Harriman worried that Johnson had become enthralled by his experiences with the Koreans and Thais, who, he said, were warlike and “wanted to finish up China, while we were at it.” But the world did not agree. “Of course they don’t,” replied McNamara; “the world doesn’t agree with escalation.” Harriman should tell the president that, according to McNamara, and he should tell him that the war must be settled in the next few months.²⁶

The president’s power was such, nevertheless, that these confrontations never took place or, at least, did not occur until after the 1968 Tet Offensive. In the meantime, Harriman put on the memorandum of this conversation: “Absolutely No One to See.” McNamara’s own private quest for better “intelligence” about the war led him to request an assessment from the CIA about the enemy’s will to persist. In August 1966, the CIA supplied him with a three-hundred-page memorandum. Full of tables and statistics—the language McNamara knew best—the memorandum covered every “measurable” aspect of the war conceivable.

As no other paper had done before, it detailed how the North Vietnamese coped with interdiction. It described the speed with which roads and bridges were repaired. In one section, for example, it discussed the imaginative ways the North Vietnamese dealt with bombed-out railroad bridges by using large barges with tracks installed on the decks.²⁷ In contrast to the mobilization of civilian resources in the North, American military forces in the South used a supply-and-support system that required up to 80 percent of their manpower.

With a dark sense of irony about current policy, the authors noted that ambushes of American troops were taking place in exactly the same locations where the Vietminh had once emerged out of hiding to attack the French in the early 1950s. Eighteen months of bombing, it said, had not reduced North Vietnam’s ability to send supplies to the South through alternative routes in Laos, and the number of enemy forces had very likely been underestimated. Destruction of North Vietnam’s small industrial base would not mean much because Russia and China supplied the necessary war materials. It might, in fact, make it easier to divert manpower resources to other tasks in support of the war.²⁸

Like other CIA papers, “The Vietnamese Communists’ Will to Persist” did hold out some hope that if American military successes continued, the enemy might feel the need to reconsider its strategy in about a year’s time. But McNamara certainly found little here to confirm the stream of optimistic reports emanating from military headquarters in Saigon. In a conversation about the study with analyst George Allen, however, McNamara revealed little about his own misgivings. He said he found it very interesting and asked “what we might be doing wrong in the war.” The question came as a shock from the man who presumably should know what was being done, right or wrong. Allen thought a moment and decided that he must not play games. He gave the secretary his candid answer, even if doubting what the purpose behind the question really was.

“I said I would stop the buildup of American forces, halt the bombing of the North, and negotiate a cease-fire with Hanoi,” Allen later wrote. McNamara continued to draw him out as if he, the secretary, were a committed supporter of the war posing an unanswerable challenge to a naive dove: Wouldn’t that lead to the rapid takeover of South Vietnam by the Communists? It would, acknowledged Allen, over time. Well, then, said the secretary, what about Cambodia and Laos? Was Allen ready to risk the subversion of those countries and allow the dominos to fall there because of a negotiated settlement? Allen later wrote: “I replied that the risk of Communist domination in that fashion seemed no greater than under our present course of action, because there was no guarantee that our present efforts would produce victory; indeed, I was not convinced a military victory was possible. I suggested that if our aim was to destroy North Vietnam that was a different matter, because we had the means that could be used toward that objective that we were not then employing.”²⁹

As the secretary continued to search for answers and to reassess the entire situation, including his past confidence that quantitative measurements showed the war being won, the Joint Chiefs stepped up the pressure in May 1967 for an expanded bombing campaign. They added additional warnings that invasions of North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia might become necessary, involving the deployment of forces to Thailand and, “quite possibly, the use of nuclear weapons in southern China.” The bombing campaign would take the United States to the place that Allen had hinted the military wanted to go if all else failed. “Their continued willingness to risk a nuclear confrontation appalled me,” McNamara recorded in his memoirs.³⁰

The intra-administration debate over Vietnam reached a climax in the fall of 1967. At the center of the dispute were estimates of the enemy’s order of battle (O/B), the supposed key to progress or stalemate. If the military’s argument about the bombing was correct, as Wheeler and the other Pentagon chiefs insisted it was, then the enemy forces’ morale should be falling, and, more important, their numbers should be falling. The CIA’s estimates of what remained of the enemy and, hence, of his potential were far too high, however, for MACV to accept and still claim that the war was being won. A series of meetings were held, culminating in a CIA retreat under extreme pressure. General Westmoreland’s deputy commander, General Creighton Abrams, had warned his boss that “we have been projecting an image of success,” and if a much higher O/B figure were released, news reporters would “draw an erroneous and gloomy conclusion as to the meaning of the increase.”³¹

Robert Komer, President Johnson’s special adviser in Vietnam on military-civil affairs and on the so-called other war for hearts and minds, told the CIA delegation to Saigon that was assigned to work out the O/B figures: “You guys simply have to back off. Whatever the true O/B figures [are], is beside the point.” If a much larger figure than the 300,000 Westmoreland wanted to cap enemy strength at were accepted, within hours “some dove in State will leak it to the press; that will create a public disaster and undo everything we’ve been trying to accomplish out here.” Under directions from Director Richard Helms, the CIA delegation backed down and accepted a “compromise” that gave official sanction to the MACV view.³²

McNamara, however, refused to buckle under to the Joint Chiefs on bombing policy. At a hearing held by Senator John Stennis (D-Miss.), one of the most hawkish members of the Armed Services Committee, the defense secretary declared: “A less discriminating bombing campaign against North Vietnam would, in my opinion, do no more. We have no reason to believe that it would break the will of the North Vietnamese people or sway the purpose of their leaders. If it does not lead to such a change of mind, bombing the North at any level of intensity would not meet our objectives. We would still have to prove by ground operations in the South that Hanoi’s aggression could not succeed.”³³

McNamara’s testimony through a six-hour session caused a sensation. Johnson called him to the White House immediately after he left Capitol Hill, where he received the full LBJ treatment. He was upbraided and roared at for three hours. Over in the Pentagon, meanwhile, Wheeler summoned a Joint Chiefs meeting in which the sole item on the agenda was whether they should resign en masse in protest of McNamara’s claims. They decided that it would be a useless step and bordering on mutiny. Besides, Wheeler pleaded, “give it some time. You never know, maybe we can pull it out.”³⁴

CIA director Helms, something of an old Vietnam “hand,” ordered a memorandum, meanwhile, that revisited the “domino theory” one last time in the Johnson administration. “I believe that you will find it interesting,” he wrote in his cover letter to the president.³⁵ In his memoirs, Helms notes that he sent the memo, “Implications of an Unfavorable Outcome in Vietnam,” in a sealed envelope with a blunt warning: “The attached paper is sensitive, particularly if its existence were to leak.” He wanted LBJ to be responsible for any further dissemination of the document. “The mere rumor that such a document existed,” he added in his memoirs, “would in itself have been political dynamite.”³⁶

Even so, Helms closed his cover letter with an ambivalent nod to Oval Office convictions about the war: “It has no bearing on whether the present political-military outlook within Vietnam makes acceptance of such an outcome advisable or inadvisable.” Helms maintained as well that the memo was not an argument for or against getting out: “We are not defeatist out here [at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia].” But he argued that gradual withdrawal might be managed to minimize damage to the nation’s position abroad and lessen the domestic political fallout. The letter ended: “If the analysis here advances the discussion at all, it is in the direction of suggesting that the risks [of an unfavorable outcome] are probably more limited and controllable than most previous argument has indicated.”

For Lyndon Johnson, however, the analysis offered very little political help because the proposed timetable would work out “to Communist advantage within a relatively brief period, say, a year or so.” The memo conceded the impossibility of disentangling such a process from the “whole continuum of interacting forces.” It also cautioned: “The view forward is always both hazy and kaleidoscopic; those who have to act on such a view can have no certainties but must make choices on what appears at the moment to be the margin of advantage.” Helms’s “secret” memo to Johnson apparently remained a deep secret.³⁷

McNamara then sent Johnson a memorandum on November 1, 1967, that he said filled out the arguments for his “belief that continuation of our present course of action in Southeast Asia would be dangerous, costly in lives, and unsatisfactory to the American people.” McNamara proposed a fifteen-month program designed to convince Hanoi that the United States could not be driven out of South Vietnam, but he also argued for freezing the troop level and ending the bombing of the DRV, which had not in the past and could not in the future “cut off the men and ammunition needed to continue to inflict the present casualty rate on our forces.” He then turned the “will to persist” argument on its head. It had been an article of faith (not evidence) that the DRV had a breaking point and that the bombing would eventually find it. Instead, it was the American public, frustrated by the slow rate of progress, that apparently did not have the will to persist. “There is, in my opinion,” McNamara argued, “a very real question whether under these circumstances it will be possible to maintain our efforts in South Vietnam for the time necessary to accomplish our objectives there.”³⁸

Johnson asked several of his Vietnam advisers to comment on McNamara’s paper. General Maxwell Taylor’s response was typical of them all because it went back to the original January 1965 briefing and then elaborated on all the rationales that had grown out of the notion that Saigon could be propped up by bombing across an imaginary border. “The South Vietnamese would be deeply discouraged,” he wrote, “by this lifting of the penalty which the bombing imposes on the North.” Notably absent here was any assertion that the bombing was anything more than a “penalty.” McNamara’s arguments had at least ruled out the idea that it could ever bring victory. Taylor went on through the catechism to the final argument: “The large majority of our citizens who believe in the bombing but who thus far have been silent could be expected to raise violent objections on the home front, probably surpassing in volume the present criticisms of the anti-bombers.”³⁹

McNamara had sacrificed a great deal for Lyndon Johnson, and he would continue to display his loyalty to the president even as he was removed from the Pentagon and put into the World Bank, where his dissent on the bombing and any further escalation would no longer matter. To prove that the crossover point was just beyond the next rice paddy, Johnson brought General Westmoreland back to Washington to reassure all those who might think McNamara’s departure signaled the need for a fundamental change of policy. The general made speeches, gave television interviews, and attended a congressional briefing with Johnson. “We feel that we are somewhat like the boxer in the ring,” Westmoreland told congressional leaders, “where we have got our opponent almost on the ropes. And we hear murmurs to our rear as we look over the shoulder that the second wants to throw in the towel.”

“Tell them the story about the company that came down the other day and over 38 years of age and 20 of them didn’t make it,” Johnson prompted. Westmoreland was eager to oblige. “I talked to the President today about this, and made the point that North Vietnam is having manpower problems.” The general then related how his intelligence—not the intelligence created 12,000 miles away from the scene—had learned from a captured prisoner about a company of 120 men who left North Vietnam to head south to battle. Of this group, 20 men fell out sick or deserted, and 40 of them were older than thirty-eight. “And 38 for a Vietnamese is an old man, I can assure you…. So, they are having to go now to the young group and to the old group.”⁴⁰

Johnson pinned his hopes on such microcosms to see the light at the end of the tunnel even as the enemy assembled its uncounted forces outside the cities to prepare for a massive attack. Westmoreland had told other audiences that the situation was similar to the “Winning of the West,” when the cavalry had routed the Indian enemy by getting an ink spot to spread. The situation in Vietnam was actually something of the reverse. The bombing had not prevented infiltration, it had not shut off areas of South Vietnam from the enemy, and it had not broken down the enemy’s will to persist.

On January 31, 1968, the North’s Tet Offensive began and prompted a reevaluation of the American role from the beginning. The significance of the Tet fighting has been debated ever since. In an unsigned memorandum of February 9, 1968, probably written by the CIA’s chief Vietnam analyst George Carver, the argument was made that Tet was a military failure for the enemy. The Communist effort to rally people to the Vietcong cause had failed, it began. Tet could not be considered a “final allied ‘victory,’ but certainly represents an initial Communist defeat.” No one had claimed the O/B conclusions were absolutely accurate, but the memo explained away the consequences of the O/B debate in an uncertain tone: “The 250,000 figure is not our estimate of total enemy strength.” Whether the figure of 60,000 enemy casualties was also not absolutely accurate, it concluded, “total enemy strength (as opposed to main force strength) has indeed declined.”⁴¹

Someone leaked Westmoreland’s request for another 200,000 men to pursue the Tet “victory” to a final conclusion. But there would be no more troops for Vietnam. Only a few months after Johnson’s advisers and a group of Cold War stalwarts, the Wise Men, had agreed that McNamara’s alternative course could not be considered, there was a new meeting to discuss the aftermath of Tet and what it foretold. The financial and social costs of the struggle, former secretary of state Dean Acheson, unofficial chair of the Wise Men, told Johnson on March 26, 1968, would be as hard for the United States to sustain as the force levels would be for the enemy to maintain.

The CIA briefer for the Wise Men was George Carver. “You can’t tell the people in Keokuk, Iowa, you want to get out and tell the North Vietnamese you’re going to stick it out for two decades and make them believe you,” Carver reasoned. He made two substantive points, however, that went far beyond wit and clever expressions: whatever losses the Vietcong and North Vietnamese military forces had suffered, the pacification program was in shambles, and the enemy had been underestimated and undercounted by half.⁴²

On March 31, 1968, Johnson addressed the nation and told the television audience that he was ending the bombing of North Vietnam except for areas nearest the so-called demilitarized zone. He surprised even his closest advisers with a closing statement that he would not be a candidate for reelection in order to take the presidency out of the search for peace. The final American withdrawal did not come for five more years, however, and there would be another round of bombings and incursions into Cambodia and Laos along the way to a peace agreement, which gave the United States something of a “decent interval” before Saigon finally fell in 1975.

1. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1968), 73.

2. President’s Meeting with Congressional Leaders, January 22, 1965, National Security File (hereafter NSF), Congressional Briefings, box 1, Lyndon Baines Johnson Papers, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, Tex. All quotations from this meeting come from this source.

3. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1965), 1122–28, 1160–68.

4. Text, February 7, 1965, NSF, National Security Council (NSC) Histories, box 40, Johnson Papers.

5. Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, Strategy for Defeat: Vietnam in Retrospect (San Rafael, Calif.: Presidio, 1978), 70.

6. Quoted in Lloyd C. Gardner, Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam (Chicago: Dee, 1995), 170.

7. Special Memorandum No. 7-65, “The Dimensions of Kosygin’s Trip,” February 5, 1965, in Estimative Products on Vietnam, 1948–1975, edited by John K. Allen Jr., John Carver, and Tom Elmore (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2005), 1 (CD-ROM). This source contains other Vietnam intelligence estimates.

8. Ilya V. Gaiduk, The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War (Chicago: Dee, 1996), 29–33.

9. Summary Notes of the 547th NSC Meeting with Congressional Leaders, February 8, 1965, NSC File, Meetings, box 1, Johnson Papers (emphasis added).

11. “Memorandum for the President,” February 9, 1965, NSF, NSC Histories, box 40, Johnson Papers.

12. “Vietnam Air Strikes Get 67% U.S. Approval,” Washington Post, February 16, 1965.

13. Bundy to Johnson, “Answer to Adlai Stevenson’s Memo,” February 19, 1965, NSF, Agency Files, box 66, Johnson Papers.

14. Unsigned memorandum, “Proposed Course of Action in Vietnam,” March 24, 1965, NSF, NSC Histories, box 41, Johnson Papers.

19. Bundy to Johnson, with LBJ comments, July 19, 1965, NSF, NSC Histories, box 43, Johnson Papers. For the general mise-en-scène, see H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 313–21.

21. “Cabinet Room,” July 22, 1965, Meeting Notes File, box 2, Johnson Papers. All quotations from this meeting come from this source.

22. “Meeting in Cabinet Room,” December 18, 1965, Meeting Notes File, box 2, Johnson Papers.

23. “Meeting in the Cabinet Room,” January 22, 1966, Meeting Notes File, box 2, Johnson Papers.

24. Memorandum, “Reactions to Continuation or Termination of the Pause in Air Attacks on the DRV,” January 19, 1966, 3–4, and Special National Intelligence Estimate 10-1-66, “Possible Effects of a Proposed US Course of Action on DRV Capability to Support the Insurgency in South Vietnam,” February 4, 1966, both in Allen, Carver, and Elmore, eds., Estimative Products on Vietnam, 3 (CD-ROM) or 313–14, 330 (printed book).

25. “Meeting in Cabinet Room,” January 28, 1966, Office of President Files, box 13, Johnson Papers. All quotations from this meeting come from this source.

26. “Addition to McNamara Conversation of November 26, 1966,” W. Averell Harriman Papers, box 486, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

27. Memorandum, “The Vietnamese Communists’ Will to Persist,” August 26, 1966, in Allen, Carver, and Elmore, eds., Estimative Products on Vietnam, annex I, 20–31 (CD-ROM).

29. George W. Allen, None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam (Chicago: Dee, 2001), 215–17.

30. Robert S. McNamara, with Brian VanDeMark, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 275.

31. Quoted in Harold P. Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes, 1962–1968 (Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1998), 96.

33. Quoted in William Conrad Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War: Executive and Legislative Roles and Relationships, part IV, July 1965–January 1968 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1994), 750.

35. Helms to Johnson, September 12, 1967, NSF, Country File: Vietnam, box 259, Johnson Papers.

36. Richard Helms, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), 314–15 (emphasis added by Helms).

38. McNamara, “Memorandum for the President,” November 1, 1967, NSF, Country File, Vietnam, box 127, Johnson Papers.

39. Taylor to Johnson, November 3, 1967, NSF, Country File: Vietnam, box 127, Johnson Papers.

40. Congressional Briefing by General Westmoreland, President Johnson, and Mr. Rostow, November 16, 1967, Congressional Briefings, box 1, Johnson Papers. I have reversed the order of the last two sentences quoted from the minutes of the briefing.

41. Helms to George Christian, enclosing unsigned memorandum, February 9, 1968, Files of George Christian, box 12, Johnson Papers (emphasis in original).

42. Quoted in Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (New York: Knopf, 1979), 192–93.

Allen, George W. None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam. Chicago: Dee, 2001.

Gardner, Lloyd C. Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam. Chicago: Dee, 1995.

Gibbons, William Conrad. The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War: Executive and Legislative Roles and Relationships. Part IV, July 1965–January 1968. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1994.

McMaster, H. R. Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam. New York: HarperCollins, 1997.

McNamara, Robert S., with Brian VanDeMark. In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. New York: Vintage Books, 1996.