Chapter Eighteen

Very subtly in the late winter and into the early spring of 1964 a change began to take place within the government and the bureaucracy. It was something which was not announced, but Vietnam gradually became a more sensitive, more delicate, and more dangerous subject. As such it became something spoken about less and less, the decisions became more and more closely held, and the principals became even more guarded with whom they spoke on the subject. They did not want to be seen with known, identified doves; they did not want to be considered soft. If they had to meet with, say, a reporter known as a dove, they would let friends know that it had to happen, as Bill Bundy did, but with an inflection in his voice of what-else-can-I-do, and a pleasure in telling aides that he was keeping the dove journalist waiting, which was what a dove deserved. Or at the White House, where the subject became more and more sensitive, Chester Cooper, a former CIA analyst who was extremely knowledgeable about Indochina, found that it was more and more difficult to reach McGeorge Bundy on the subject as the questions became graver and the failures more apparent. Cooper began to write memos to his boss expressing his grave doubts about the situation in Vietnam, but he soon found that the subject was so delicate that it was better to write them by hand so that Bundy, reading them, would know that not even a secretary had seen these words and these thoughts; such doubts did not exist except in the most private sense between two men.

Actually, changes and nuances like these were indications of which way they were going, although they were not signals that the outside public, or for that matter, the men involved themselves, could read. Part of this was the growing sense of failure over Vietnam and part of it was the new style that Lyndon Johnson had brought to the White House and the government at large, a sharp contrast to the Kennedy style, which was post-Bay of Pigs to ventilate an issue as much as possible within the government. Above all, Johnson believed in secrecy. He liked to control all discussions; the more delicate the subject, the more he liked to control it. Thus by his very style Johnson limited the amount of intragovernmental debate, partly because debate went against his great desire for consensus, whether a good policy or not, a wise one or not. The important thing was to get everyone aboard; if there was consensus there was no dissent and this was a comforting feeling, it eased Johnson’s insecurities.

So the reins of debate began to tighten and be limited, and the bureaucracy began to gear up for war. Individual doubters began to be overwhelmed by the force of the bureaucracy, the increasing thrust of it, mounting day by day, like the current of a river as it nears the ocean. And no one symbolized the force of the bureaucracy against the stand of the individual, the incapacity to be oneself because the price of being oneself meant losing one’s governmental position and respectability as a player, more than a young Harvard Law School professor named John McNaughton.

He was the least known of the major players; his life and that of his wife and a young son ended tragically in July 1967 in a freak plane accident, a light private plane smashing into the jetliner carrying the McNaughton family. Yet when the Pentagon Papers were published the impression was that he had been the leading hawk of the era. His name seemed to be on almost every other paper, and the documents were appallingly functional and mechanistic, drained of any human juices (the public reaction to the McNaughton papers was not much different from that of his staff, which after his death had had to go through his papers and came across a private file of memos from McNaughton to McNamara, so closely held that only the two had seen them, in which they had debated and measured the troop and bombing commitments, and it was, said one of his staff members who had loved McNaughton, “like finding a secret John McNaughton”). In the Pentagon Papers he seemed to symbolize the inhumane and insensitive quality of that era, undoubting, unreflective, putting the quantifying of deaths and killing and destruction into neat, cold, antiseptic statistics, devoid of blood and heart.

Yet in many ways quite the opposite was true. No one at a high level of government had served his country better on the question of disarmament than John McNaughton. He had a genuine, cold passion for arms control, and he had helped bring McNamara and the Defense Department around to the limited test-ban treaty. Equally important, no one in the high levels of government in 1964 had greater and more profound doubts about the wisdom of the policy the nation was following in Vietnam, and no one argued more forcefully with his immediate superior against the particular course. And having lost that argument, when someone else—perhaps from State, perhaps from CIA—made the same points which McNaughton had just made to McNamara, no one tore those arguments apart more ferociously than John McNaughton. Once he left Tom Hughes, the brilliant State Department official who headed INR after Hilsman, feeling that the wind had been knocked out of him. Hughes had made an extremely pessimistic appraisal of the chances for success in Vietnam and a rather positive estimate on the vitality of the enemy. McNaughton looked at him and said with disdain, “Spoken like a true member of the Red Team,” the designation for the Vietcong-Hanoi side in the war games.

McNaughton was the classic rationalist, and he prided himself on this. When he taught evidence at Harvard Law School, he specialized in defining the difference between reality and illusion. He would walk into a law class, pull out a toy pistol, shoot a student and then take sixteen different versions of what had happened. Then he would point out to his class the difference between what they thought they had seen and what they actually saw, carefully extracting the hearsay. Facts, always facts. Define what people are saying. He could come back from meetings at Harvard, or later in the Defense Department, and replay the meeting, to the delight of subordinates, not just what each person had said, but what he meant when he said it and why he was saying it. He would bring out the prejudices, and tear at the whole petty, self-protective fraud of a meeting. Thus he was a brilliant bureaucratic gossip. He was completely detached, being able to look at a situation with all his own prejudices removed. Logic and facts alone counted; if he had any prejudice at all, it was a bias in favor of logic.

Though he had been a Harvard Law School professor, he was markedly different from the rest of the Cambridge crowd. His roots were not in that Eastern establishment; instead he was the scion of Pekin, Illinois, the son of the owner of the local newspaper there. He was a man who almost flaunted his Midwestern quality, who could put on the twang at a moment’s notice and mimic his origins. Not only that, and more important, he could mimic the styles of his Eastern colleagues, playing the role of the country hick, letting the smooth Easterners know that John McNaughton was a little different, that he might in a sense be a good liberal like the rest of them, but that he had his own identity and it was a little more skeptical of their attitudes. He had once run the family paper in Pekin and also gone back once to run for Congress; it was a very good race, but he lost and returned to the East.

Tall and cool, almost brusque (was the brusqueness a cover for shyness because he was a gangling skinny six foot four?); not a particularly good teacher and not liking to teach that much (he did not intend to go back to Harvard Law after his tour in government), disliking the military and making it obvious (though he was perhaps McNamara’s most trusted deputy at the end of his life, he could never have succeeded him as Secretary of Defense; there was too much antagonism built up there, even among the younger brighter military officers who felt what they considered McNaughton’s contempt not just for the old-fashioned bombs-away generals, but for themselves as well, the men who felt they were working for the same thing as McNaughton and were hurt by his brusqueness and rudeness). Since he was not of that Eastern elite, he was not wedded to their ideas in national security, to containment in Europe, to the arms race, and to the domino theory. From the moment he joined the Defense Department he had begun to question the wisdom of some of America’s commitments, what were considered then the realities of foreign policy and now are considered the myths. The young men around him, who were schooled in the language and litany of the Cold War, regarded him with certain misgiving. Wasn’t this a kind of Midwestern isolationism showing? Wasn’t it too bad that McNaughton hadn’t taken the right graduate courses with Kissinger and the others so he would know about these things, as they knew?

Instead he brought an intuitive doubt to many of the issues; he did not, as many of them did, accept all the assumptions of the Cold War. He was perhaps the most iconoclastic member of the government, questioning privately and sometimes publicly the most sacred assumptions, and he could sit with Senate aides, this man who held such power at the Defense Department, its budget always rising, and say, “How much do we really need for the defense of the United States of America? Only the defense, to defend its shores? . . . Well I suppose the maximum for the defense of our shores is one billion dollars. So all the rest of our defense budget relates to what we regard as our responsibilities as a world power?” Probably the best definition yet of a country emerging as the new Rome, by one of the head Romans himself.

He was also totally driven and very ambitious; he projected his working hour to the minute. Roger Fisher, a Harvard Law School friend, calling him for lunch, would find that McNaughton was busy—was it that important? And Fisher said yes, and then McNaughton said, “All right, make it twelve thirty-five and we’ll have a sandwich,” and at 12:35 the door would open and Fisher went in, and a sandwich it would be, for ten minutes. The first thing that Fisher, who was worried about the direction of American policy in Vietnam, said was that McNaughton was too tied to the daily routine, that he was overworked and needed time to think, not to rush more and more papers through, but to stop and to reflect and look ahead, and in particular to think about an idea which was a favorite theme of Fisher’s, what the political objective of American policy was, what we wanted Hanoi to do. “Look at my schedule,” McNaughton said, and Fisher protested that the schedule had to be pushed aside. He didn’t care how many meetings there were, how much pressure there was, how many five-minute increments marked on that carefully kept schedule; this was the most important thing for McNamara’s chief political officer. “No,” repeated McNaughton, “look at my schedule.” Finally Fisher did and there, after all those tiny meetings and tiny increments, five minutes each, he had blocked out five hours, from 1:15 to 6:15, and noted: “What are we trying to get Hanoi to do?”

He was a man after McNamara’s heart in this, the quantifying of everything, the capacity to break things down, to do it numerically and statistically. Even when he spoke against the arms race, to limit it if not halt it, his terms often seemed curiously mechanistic, as if human beings never entered the calculations. In 1966 McNaughton was asked to meet with a group of sociologists and economists headed by Kenneth Boulding, to explain what McNamara was trying to do at the Pentagon. McNaughton agreed because some old friends were organizing the meeting, and he gave a particularly brilliant performance on the McNamara revolution, on cost effectiveness, a presentation of both force and brilliance, and yet curiously unsatisfying, so that finally one of the young sociologists got up and said, “Mr. McNaughton, I’ve had enough. All your facts, all your statistics, all your slide rules, all your decisions—you speak it all so well, and yet where is man in all this, Mr. McNaughton? Where are his needs, and where are his problems? Does all of this do him any good? Or does it do him more harm?” McNaughton rose again and said, in effect, touché: “At last someone’s made the point. All day long I’ve been talking with you and you’ve been giving me the standard left-wing stuff, and you’ve been debating whether we count better than you do, and now finally we have something, and the trip is worthwhile for me.”

In 1964 McNaughton was very unsure of his relationship with McNamara; he was newer in his position than McNamara was in his. He was almost mesmerized by McNamara; he had never seen anything like him and admired the Secretary without reservation, being almost slavish in his subservience. That and being extremely ambitious, and wanting, now that he was operating in the big and fast world of Washington, to remain there. So he became at once the man in the government where two powerful currents crossed: great and forceful doubts about the wisdom of American policy in Vietnam, and an equally powerful desire to stay in government, to be a player, to influence policies for the good of the country, for the right ideas, and for the good of John McNaughton. Though he was a Harvard law professor, there was no more skillful player of the bureaucratic game than John McNaughton, for he understood the bureaucracy very quickly and how to play at it, and he learned this, that his power existed only as long as he had Robert McNamara’s complete confidence, and as long as everyone in government believed that when he spoke, he spoke not for John McNaughton but for Bob McNamara. That, with its blind loyalty and totality of self-abnegation, meant bureaucratic power, and John McNaughton wanted power. Any doubts he had were reserved for McNamara, virtually alone, and perhaps one or two other people that he knew and trusted, who would not betray him with gossip, so that the word would not go around Washington that McNaughton was a secret dove. Nor was he at all unaware of the enormous political sensitivity of even thinking like a dove, and of doing dovish papers. In late 1964 he assigned Daniel Ellsberg to the job of looking for ways of rationalizing the American way out of Vietnam—if everything collapsed. It was in effect to be a covering White Paper along the lines of the China White Paper. The secrecy involved in Ellsberg’s assignment was paramount: Ellsberg, McNaughton made clear, was to talk to no one else about his assignment, not even his colleagues in the McNaughton shop. He was not to use a secretary on his reports but was to type them himself. In addition McNaughton wanted to make clear that this very assignment might damage Ellsberg’s career, that a repeat of the McCarthy period was possible. “You should be clear,” he repeatedly warned Ellsberg, “that you could be signing the death warrant to your career by having anything to do with calculations and decisions like these. A lot of people were ruined for less.”

Yet the doubts expressed in the Ellsberg papers clearly reflected McNaughton’s own doubts. In 1964, rather early, John McNaughton had begun thinking the darkest thoughts, touching very quickly on the central problems of Vietnam, not whether it was a question of personnel, getting better people there, or better programs or more equipment, but whether we should be there at all, whether, to use an almost isolationist term, those people wanted us there. Was it worth it, shouldn’t we perhaps just get out quickly at a lower price? He had few illusions about the ability of our Vietnamese allies, and the more he studied the war, the more respect he had for the Vietcong. He was capable, in 1964, of listening to aides brief him on the quality of Vietcong leadership and motivation, and saying almost offhandedly, in a rare off-guard moment, “If what you say in that briefing is true, we’re fighting on the wrong side.” Knowing that McNamara did not yet share these doubts, he was very careful about getting some corroboration before he went head-on to his boss with them. And in this increasingly tense atmosphere, as he looked for someone to share his doubts with, someone who knew something about Vietnam and would not talk out of turn and just might be dovish, he finally decided that he might find a co-conspirator, not at State, State was too gossipy, but at the White House, there was less bureaucratic entanglement there. The White House was safer; it was somehow a more private place. Michael Forrestal was an old friend of McNaughton’s, they had worked together on the Marshall Plan, and very early in the game McNaughton had sensed Forrestal’s own growing doubts about Vietnam. Since Forrestal was a key link in the Harriman group and had spent a good deal of time in Vietnam, he was the ideal man to talk to and would be able to confirm or refute McNaughton’s suspicions.

There was something very clandestine about their meetings, beginning in the spring of 1964. McNaughton would call Forrestal to find out if he was free for a chat, nothing formal. Then he would arrive at the White House at five-thirty, which was not easily done, the traffic was very heavy going against him but it could not be done the other way, Forrestal could not visit McNaughton at the Pentagon without causing great suspicion. People would ask, What’s Forrestal doing at the Pentagon? Isn’t he just a little bit soft? This was the cool, bureaucratic McNaughton, conspiring for the good of mankind, not about to get himself tagged as unrealistic nor for that matter his boss either, because any doubts about him would also reflect on McNamara; above all, he and McNamara would be realistic.

Yet in these private meetings all his doubts would pour out. He had done his homework and the more he did, the more it bothered him. The lawyer’s mind asked the cutting questions: If the government in Saigon was weak and probably not viable, was it worthwhile to try and bolster it? This seemed questionable because if it was weak it would probably stay that way and you simply would become more involved without having any effect on it. Do you really want to commit yourself more to something that sick? Would it make a lasting difference if we bombed or sent troops, or would that be a gimmick with a brief positive effect, which would very quickly lose its impact upon such a fatigued and divided society? Was there really anything there to build on, was it a government, or was it something we called a government because we wanted an illusion through which to enact our policy? Were we committing ourselves to something that did not exist, and if so, wasn’t it extremely dangerous? Bombing bothered him. Everyone now was planning the bombing. But could you really bring people around, change them, by punishing them? Did we know enough about their standard of living to know whether it would really affect their daily existence? It was a vintage McNaughton performance totally without passion, performed not so much by conviction or morality as by rationality. He simply hated the proportions of it, the sense that we were totally losing perspective, and that if events took their course we would be fools in the eyes of the world, victims of our ego.

McNaughton found in Forrestal a sympathetic listener and a man who largely confirmed his own doubts, and by the same token, the more McNaughton evoked from him, the more Forrestal found his own doubts crystallizing. But he was not yet as pessimistic as McNaughton; he did not think the dark picture he painted of the world of Saigon would necessarily entrap the United States. He was sure that it could be avoided somehow, that there were options, that good intelligent men in Washington could control decisions and avoid the great entanglement.

McNaughton was not so sure. “The trouble with you, Forrestal,” he once said, “is that you always think we can turn this thing off, and that we can get off of it whenever we want. But I wonder. I think if it was easy to get off of it, we would already have gotten off. I think it gets harder every day, each day we lose a little control, each decision that we make wrong, or don’t make at all, makes the next decision a little harder because if we haven’t stopped it today, then the reasons for not stopping it will still exist tomorrow, and we’ll be in even deeper.” Even as he spoke, Forrestal felt chilled, for McNaughton was not just challenging what was going on in Vietnam, there were lots of people in Washington who were doing that, what he was challenging was even more basic: the illusion of control, the illusion of options, the belief that whenever Washington really wanted to, it could pull itself together and handle Vietnam. He was challenging, then, not just the shabbiness and messiness of Vietnam, but the most sacred illusion of all, the capacity of Washington to control and manage foreign events.

Having finished with Forrestal, McNaughton would go back and pour out his doubts to one man, Robert S. McNamara, a man he was still in awe of. McNamara would override them, he would dampen them, it would be business as usual, and McNaughton, the secret dove, would emerge from the Secretary’s office and hide his doubts, because he still wanted to be a player, and he knew there was no power at the Pentagon if he differed from McNamara at all. So John McNaughton would attend meetings where some of George Ball’s people might express their doubts, the same skepticism he felt, but he would tear them apart, into little pieces, almost rudely. Later, after the war had been escalated and he had become more confident of his relationship with McNamara and more sure that the war was wrong, some of his close aides began to wonder what would happen if the President ever asked him what he, John McNaughton, thought about an escalatory move, not what the Defense Department thought, not what McNamara thought. In 1966, when the question of bombing the oil depots at Haiphong came up, and the President was going around the room trying to get a consensus, one after another they all signed on, McNamara said yes, it was time to take them out. The Chiefs and then Rostow signed on. Ball dissented. And finally Johnson turned to McNaughton, who had been arguing violently in private against this, and McNaughton said simply, “I have nothing to add, sir.”

He fought it within himself, and fought it with his chief, but already the thrust of his own institution was so strong that he could not resist it. He would become a doubter and a pessimist who also picked bombing targets and did much of the planning and supplied much of the rationale, working very closely with McNamara. There were those who knew them both who thought that McNamara must have found it very reassuring to have this eminently civilized and rational man, the flower of Pekin, Illinois, working with him as he planned the war.

 

If the thrust of the bureaucracy was becoming more obvious at Defense, then what was happening at State was more subtle. The group there which had been fighting the policies of the past on Asia, which had challenged the official estimates from Vietnam and the ability to win with Diem, always maintaining that the war was primarily a political problem, was being systematically dismantled. Although it was one of the most important developments in 1964, it went almost unnoticed; there was, for instance, no reporting about it in the country’s great national newspapers or magazines (as there had been almost no reporting on its formation). The group had jelled late in the Kennedy Administration, breaking through some of the policies of the past. Perhaps not even deliberately these men were now slowly being filtered out of the policy-making decisions, in part consciously because they had questioned the policies but to an even larger degree unconsciously, not so much because they were skeptical, but because they seemed too negative. Another reason was that both in their attacks on Diem and in their disdain for Rusk and Vice-President Johnson, they had made enemies, not powerful then but powerful now. Dean Rusk, no longer liaison man to the Hill, was increasingly becoming Secretary of State. Thus Harriman, Hilsman, Trueheart, Forrestal and Kattenburg very quickly became nonplayers. First Paul Kattenburg. He was the lowest-ranking of the players but he had perhaps been the most important because he knew the most about the country. He had been in Vietnam all through the fifties, fighting both from Saigon and from Washington for the group which wanted more emphasis on nationalism as opposed to the group which simply wanted to go along with the French and seek a military solution, a group which in 1950 and 1951 was headed by Dean Rusk. Kattenburg’s early doubts about the French had not helped him; he was separated from the issue in the fifties, moved to Latin America and then the Philippines, and it was only in 1962 that he was rehabilitated by Hilsman, who had known him as a fellow Yale Ph.D. candidate. Rehabilitated on Vietnam, Kattenburg in Washington had provided much of the expertise which Harriman and Hilsman had forced into the upper-level struggles, and as they gained some bureaucratic control of the issue, Kattenburg himself began to emerge as a player, coming to meetings, bright, nervous, not very subtle. When asked to speak, he spoke his mind freely, thus offending some of the powerful men in the room. In August 1963 he had reported that the Diem-Nhu regime was very bad, and he had gone further, he had expressed doubts about the cause even beyond Diem and Nhu and said that perhaps we ought to think about getting out, statements which in a different era, eight years later, when the Pentagon Papers were published, made him look like a prophet, but which at the time made him seem particularly dangerous and untrustworthy, and the military then marked him for later disposal.

In late November, Kattenburg had gone back for a second trip to Vietnam and he was shocked by the evidence of decay. The ARVN seemed to him a defeated army, the political situation was as fragile and divided as ever and in no way coming to terms with the reality of the problems of the society. As far as he was concerned, it was all over, the Vietcong had all the muscle and dynamism, the government side seemed weak and hopeless; time, if anything, was on the side of the Vietcong. For someone who had worked through the Indochina war, as Kattenburg had, and who knew the force of the enemy, the traditional and historic weakness of the anti-Communist side, it was all too clear; the only thing ahead other than steady deterioration was for the United States to enter with combat troops and thus replace the French.

When he returned from his trip in January 1964, he cornered Hilsman and said that the whole thing was nothing less than poison, that it would poison anybody and anything it touched, that everyone who went near it was going to be stained by future events. The war was lost, he said, had been lost for some time, in fact had always been lost. He told Hilsman that he wanted out, that there was nothing ahead but disaster. Hilsman, who felt that Kattenburg had become something of a liability, someone that the military were out to get, was ready to oblige. So Kattenburg, who was head of the Interdepartmental Working Group on Vietnam, was made a regional planning adviser, a less important job which did not entail political planning for the war itself. Before he left he said in his last report that the war was lost, that if the United States went in, it would take about 500,000 troops, five to ten years, and about 5,000 casualties a year, which was not a bad estimate, although the last figure was quite conservative. The estimate was not, however, considered conservative at the time, and at one of his last meetings he got into a furious argument with Bill Bundy, who was then Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, the job that John McNaughton would soon hold. Bundy, who was McNamara’s chief political adviser, had denounced Kattenburg and said, it was the kind of word he used, that Kattenburg was performing a disservice by his pessimism. The pessimism was unwarranted, it was not that bad, an injustice to the people working there and serving there, that they felt yes, the signs were bad, but it could be turned around. It was just as well to forget these doubts and this negative talk, Bundy said, because we were going to stand there, we were not going to let it go down the drain. Bundy had shaken Kattenburg and convinced him that the Washington direction was not good, that Defense was getting tougher and tougher, but that at least Bundy spoke for Defense, that perhaps there was some hope at State, where he was working.

In his new job Kattenburg began to concentrate on possibilities for negotiation, what it would take, what we might ask for, and in particular a scenario using Charles de Gaulle as an aid in trying to get out. It was a job he felt at ease in, particularly since his old office, the Vietnam Working Group, rather than asking long-range questions about the policy, was instead simply supplying nuts and bolts as needed by Saigon. He was working there, somewhat contentedly, if not terribly optimistic, in early 1964 when a new Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs was appointed; it was William Bundy. Shortly afterward Kattenburg was transferred from even his new job and put at the Policy Planning Council, where he stayed for two years, eventually allowed back to State proper as long as he did not touch Vietnam, and where he would finish his career. He never became an ambassador, but was eventually moved over to the Foreign Service Institute, where he taught young foreign service officers about the pleasures of their career until, in 1972, at the age of fifty he had to retire.

 

The next to go was Bill Trueheart. He had played a major part in making the estimates from Saigon more realistic, and in so doing, had angered the Saigon military command and Taylor to a point beyond recall. So had Ambassador Lodge, but Lodge was something else, a person of such prestige and independence, and with an ability to go to the press—and the opposition party—that had there been a showdown conflict between Lodge and Harkins over which of them would remain, then Harkins would have been homeward bound on the next boat, and the military realizing this, settled for Trueheart’s head. In late October 1963, Trueheart’s career had looked very good; he had taken risks, but he had powerful protectors. Hilsman was a protector who had important people working above, and he had just told Trueheart that there were good things ahead, that they would eventually like him to come back and head the Southeast Asia desk, including Vietnam, with the title of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs. It would have meant a major career promotion. Trueheart took the offer from Hilsman to Lodge and asked the ambassador what he thought. They both agreed it was a good thing for Trueheart and that he should accept it; however, since Lodge was new, Trueheart should remain in Saigon through the spring and then return to his new job at State. But it did not work out that way; in December 1963 Trueheart was told that he was wanted back in Washington immediately. It would shortly become very clear that he was wanted not so much in Washington as out of Vietnam. He had caused trouble, made enemies, angered the military, and the military wanted him out. It was McNamara who had gone to Rusk asking that he be switched; McNamara was responding to pressure from the generals because he did not like people who made trouble and cast doubt upon the assumptions.

What happened upon Trueheart’s return was even more interesting. He had been the top political officer coming back from a country where political estimates were of the essence, and by natural events he would have moved either to an ambassadorship, or a major desk job involved with Vietnam. Instead, he was now under a shadow: he would not become a Deputy Assistant Secretary, nor an ambassador, and he would not be involved with Vietnam. He was made the desk officer for all of Southeast Asia, a marvelous job if it had not been for the fact that it specifically excluded Vietnam. One more doubter had been removed. As such he was finished as a major player, and although he was outside of the main action he continued to try to be a player, working with George Ball to some degree, and more important, trying to keep the war from spreading into other countries as the military in 1965 and 1966 pushed for raids into Cambodian sanctuaries, raids which he felt would broaden the war.

What happened to his successor was even more revealing. By early 1964 the players were still at a point where they hoped to get something for nothing, that they could stave off messy decisions by sending the right Americans to influence the right Vietnamese to get with the right programs. Since personnel was the easiest thing to deal with, the principals went at the choice of a new Deputy Chief of Mission as if it were one of the crucial moves on Vietnam, perhaps a decision to turn the tide. Everyone was involved, the search was intense, and the names of the five best young officers in the foreign service were turned up, including the name of an officer named David Nes. Since Lodge was considered somewhat difficult to get along with, his approval was necessary, and the names of all five were sent to him. Lodge remembered Nes, who had several years earlier been Deputy Chief of Mission in Libya. When Lodge arrived in Tripoli late at night on a tour, Nes had won points by meeting Lodge at the airport, and instead of taxing his by then travel-fatigued mind by throwing him in with the right Libyan people or briefing him on the possibilities of Libya going Communist, Nes recommended that Lodge drive out to Sabratha if he wanted to see the most beautiful sunset in the world. Lodge did just that, finding it a rare sunset indeed, and marking Nes down as a young man of style and sensitivity. So of the five people suggested to replace Trueheart, Lodge chose Nes, he of the Libyan sunsets, and Washington, paying due attention to Lodge’s choice, took a serious look at Nes. Everyone got to look at Nes. First Roger Hilsman, Assistant Secretary for the Far East; then George Ball, the Undersecretary of State. Well and good. Then Dean Rusk himself, a bit unexpected, but then, Vietnam was no ordinary assignment; the Secretary probably wanted to give a few words of warning on the complexities of working with Lodge. Then word came that McGeorge Bundy at the White House wanted to see him, which was a little unusual, but of course, Bundy liked to keep a finger in things. He asked Nes a lot of questions, and when Nes was about to leave, Bundy said, “Now I think the President would like to see you,” which made Nes a little nervous and wondering what was up, a potential DCM being appraised by the President of the United States. He was ushered in for a surrealistic session with Lyndon B. Johnson, who asked many questions, none about sunsets. He talked about Vietnam, and then he turned from Nes to talk to Bundy, though the conversation was obviously orchestrated for Nes’s benefit: Well, it was tough out there and there were a lot of people who were ready to run and ready to give up, but they better forget that, because Lyndon Johnson did not intend to lose Vietnam. Truman may have lost China, and that had been a mistake, but Lyndon was not going to go down as a President who lost Vietnam. The words were very strong and they seemed to punctuate the meeting; the President then rose and Nes rose, ready to save Vietnam and Lyndon Johnson. The President came over to Nes, and suddenly the treatment was very physical, giant arms and hands bearing down on Nes’s slim arms and shoulders, flesh squeezed, physical and psychic messages imparted. What messages? Nes thought. Then the President turned to Bundy and said, “I hope Nes here is the kind of guy who goes for the jugular because that’s what we need out there.”

Thus branded with the Pedernales approval, Nes sped to Vietnam in search of jugulars, though the only jugular that would finally be cut was his own, for having soon found that the war was going poorly, that the military optimism was a fraud, he clashed openly, and unsuccessfully, with General Harkins. Deputy Chiefs of Mission who clash with four-star generals almost always lose, no matter how good their case. A few months after his arrival Nes was headed back to Washington, where he found very little interest in debriefing him. Hilsman was gone by then, and Bill Bundy, who seemed distinctly uncomfortable when they met, gave Nes the feeling that he was locked in, there was no give, no flexibility, no desire to learn. Rusk did not see him, nor anyone at the White House. Of the people in the government, only George Ball seemed genuinely interested in talking with him and trying to find things out. But Nes had a strong feeling that no one wanted to touch anyone who had angered the military, that if the military had turned on you, you were dead. He found that the real outlet for his dissent and disenchantment was not within the bureaucracy but on the Hill with Senator Fulbright. In the fall of 1964 he wrote a long and prophetic memo saying that trying a little harder, feeding more American officers, more programs, would have no effect, would only “hasten the day of total Vietnamese military and administrative collapse. We will then be in virtually the same position as the French in 1954—except that they had several hundred thousand veteran troops on the ground at their disposal.”

 

Roger Hilsman had been a marked man from the day of the Kennedy assassination. He had probably made more enemies than anyone else in the upper levels of government, partly because of the viewpoints he represented, partly because of the brashness with which he presented them, partly because of his constant inclination to challenge the military. He had angered Johnson because of his role in the pressures against Diem, and he had angered Rusk for two reasons: first, he had repeatedly gone out of channels, by-passing the Secretary. Hilsman’s ebullience had not bothered the Secretary when Hilsman was at INR because then it was his job to have a lot of ideas, but it had bothered him ever since Hilsman became operative at FE. Second, he was an irritant with the military and Rusk hated people who caused any friction with the military. McNamara and the Chiefs had been after Hilsman because for more than a year he had been one of the main thorns in their side. He consistently challenged their estimates and their honesty, which they were not about to forget, and now he was operating with the same enemies, minus some powerful friends, in particular John Kennedy, who had both encouraged his dissent and feistiness, and protected him and his protectors.

The loss of Hilsman would be a crucial one because as the fulcrum of the pessimistic group, he had linked the younger and less important players and political estimators with the top-level players such as Harriman. When Kattenburg was being pushed aside, Hilsman had tried to protect him. He had known that the knives were out for Trueheart, so he organized a group to write letters for Trueheart’s personnel file, countermanding the charge of betrayal entered by Nolting. Though in early 1964 Johnson was making an all-out effort to keep Kennedy people of all sizes, shapes and persuasions, Hilsman himself was an exception. Johnson did not like him, did not like his bumptiousness, the policies he had followed and the enemies he had made, among them of course Lyndon Johnson. He simply had to go. Later, after he resigned, he would say that he had resigned in protest of the policies, and some friends of his were furious with him; he was opposed to the bombing and to combat troops, but at the time he was eased out these were not yet the central issues and Hilsman, who gloried in bureaucratic infighting, would have been quite willing to weigh in. When he knew he was leaving the government, he did talk with his friend Averell Harriman about it, and he forecast a dark view of the future on Vietnam, telling Harriman that his group was being disassembled and that it was all going to be very tough. At first Harriman argued with him and then did something which was very rare for him, admit to pessimism about policies and about the future. He said yes, it was very bad, and if he were Hilsman’s age he would get out too, and they both knew what that meant, that Harriman felt if he was not operative in government he would soon die. This view was confirmed to Hilsman a few weeks later by Marie Harriman, who, still bitter about Johnson’s treatment of her husband, said that he would endure some of the humiliations because if he left the government now, it would all be over.

So Hilsman left, though Johnson—not wanting him to resign, no one quit Lyndon Johnson—knowing every man’s price, knowing that Hilsman’s father had once been Commandant of Cadets at the Philippine Military Academy, and that Hilsman had grown up there and had an enormous attachment to the Islands, offered him the ambassadorship to the Philippines, a job Hilsman regretfully turned down.

 

After Hilsman, it was Harriman’s turn. He had been an increasingly open, almost defiant critic of Rusk in the last couple of months of the Kennedy Administration, scarcely able to conceal his scorn for a man who did not seize power, did not use it and exploit it thoroughly, who seemed to withdraw from it at the last minute. Harriman was not a man to hide his scorn or his feelings, and what with his other qualities, his forcefulness and ruthlessness, no one could ever accuse him of subtlety. He had created deep-seated hostilities in Rusk, hostilities which now surfaced; and it turned out that enemies of Rusk’s were also enemies of Johnson’s, so Harriman, no matter how hard he tried, could not make it with Johnson. He had gotten along with all these other Presidents, the supreme courtier to them, and he was a great Democratic party loyalist, but here was a Democratic President who would not bite.

First Bill Sullivan, whom Harriman had promoted and used as his man in the apparatus, was removed. Sullivan had traveled with Taylor and McNamara to Vietnam, as Harriman’s eyes and ears. He had reported back to Harriman the nuances of the trips, who was moving which way, and he had cut Harriman in on cable traffic that he might have missed. Now he was put in charge of the Vietnam Working Group directly under Rusk and McNamara. Then eventually Harriman himself was moved aside. He did not lose his title at first, simply his influence; but by 1965 he was a roving ambassador again. In 1964, however, he was moved off Vietnam and given Africa, put in charge of running rescue operations there in the Congo, stopping the left-wing Congolese troops, the Simbas.

If he had once again fallen from grace, it was not for lack of trying to maintain position, this old expert on the care and feeding of Presidents. He had gladly humbled himself in the immediate pursuit of gaining the affection of Lyndon Johnson. Through small, deferential, sometimes blatant acts he had shown Lyndon that he was his man, handwritten notes fragrant with flattery of Johnson, but it had not worked (he would, in late 1965, finding that some of his liberal Administration friends were becoming critical of the policy, accuse them of biting the hand that fed them). Johnson was unbending. Why they did not connect is difficult to determine—were there too many scars inflicted in the past in Democratic party struggles? Not likely, really, because they had never been that far apart. Was it too strong a connection to the Kennedys at the end without, to the general public, Harriman’s having the Kennedy-style stamp the way McNamara and Taylor bore it, thus bearing the onus of Kennedyism without the benefits of it? Was it that Marie Harriman, sharp-tongued and outspoken, had made too many tart remarks about Johnson during his depression days as Vice-President? Or was it Harriman himself, too single-minded, too ruthlessly seeking power, too much the outsider wanting to enter the Administration in the early days to bother with the second tier of government, concentrating his affection on the top-level people only, the President, his brother, Mac Bundy, McNamara, and showing his rude and brusque side to the others, such as Johnson, forgetting that most basic rule of politics: always stay in with the outs. Probably more the last than anything else, but a combination of the forces.

However, when the war was escalated in 1965, Harriman quickly moved to make himself the unofficial minister in charge of peace, knowing that though they were not yet ready for it, when the policies failed, they would need to negotiate, and they would need the help of the Russians, and then they would have to turn to him. Which they did. And he would be the best of all possible things, an important player again.

 

And then Michael Forrestal. He had been a vital part of the Harriman group, the link between Washington and Saigon, traveling back and forth frequently, his own doubts increasing at almost the same time that President Kennedy’s doubts were growing. His position in the Administration had been more personal and social than professional. In addition to his long-standing friendship with Harriman, he was linked to the President by a newer friendship (though of course Joe Kennedy and Jim Forrestal had been friends). He was part of Kennedy’s professional as well as social life. For Jackie liked Mike Forrestal, and later, after the assassination, he was one of the people who would be an escort for her.

He was not by nature a driving, ambitious figure or particularly interested in becoming a professional bureaucrat. Although he had been weaned on the Cold War (and bore the name of the first Secretary of Defense, the classic Cold Warrior), he had a sense that something was coming to an end in Saigon; what and how he did not yet perceive. At thirty-six, he was young enough to see that the commitment was not working and would not work but old enough to be tied to the past, to believe in it, in the necessity of stopping Communism, the belief that we were better than the Communists everywhere in the world, and in addition, that it would be a terrible thing if a large part of Asia were closed off to us. Now, in 1964, with John Kennedy dead and the problems in Vietnam mounting, he felt himself less and less able to operate. Robert Kennedy seemed dazed and lost; Harriman, upon whom Forrestal depended for toughness, was functioning less and less; Mac Bundy no longer seemed to encourage his access to the President, nor to be terribly interested in sharing doubts. By mid-1964 the whole thing was getting tighter, with Johnson being aware that Vietnam was something that would not be swept under the rug, and wanting only his closest and most senior people to work on it, not junior people linked to Bob Kennedy. It became harder and harder for a known doubter like Forrestal to find senior players interested in talking about the long-range problems of Vietnam. Perhaps they did not want to hear his doubts because they had doubts enough of their own.

In July 1964 Johnson switched Forrestal’s job, moving him out of the White House to a line job at State on Vietnam where he could work on nuts and bolts, integrating the military and the civilians in the pacification program—perhaps the gravitational thrust of Vietnam would carry him along and end his doubts and he would become a team player, the way a comparable switch had changed Bill Sullivan. He spent much of the rest of 1964 working on daily minutiae on Vietnam, losing his taste for the whole thing, and losing his sense of being able to function. He worked in the late fall with Sullivan, on a plan which became known as the Sullivan-Forrestal Plan, which was a doomed attempt to buy off the military on bombing. It would give them a few things but not everything, the tempo was slower, the targets fewer, and hopefully, far from population centers. It was to be covert, and it would, hopefully, bring negotiations. It was, he realized somewhat in retrospect, aimed more at the American military than at the North Vietnamese, and not surprisingly, it did not fool the Pentagon for a minute. In late November, as part of the Bill Bundy Working Group, he wrote a paper on how we could negotiate our way out. No one seemed terribly interested. In January 1965, depressed personally and professionally, he quietly left the government.

 

Thus, without attracting much attention, without anyone commenting on it, the men who had been the greatest doubters on Vietnam, who were more politically oriented in their view of the war than militarily, were moved out, and the bureaucracy was moved back to a position where it had been in 1961, more the old Dulles policies on Asia than anyone realized. Those men had surfaced too quickly on Vietnam and fought on what turned out to be a peripheral issue, namely, whether or not to go with Diem, not whether to stay in Vietnam or get out. They had spent all of their force on it, and they won the battle but in a real sense lost the war, for in the struggle almost all of the doubters had become marked men; they would not be major players again on Vietnam because they had antagonized Lyndon Johnson with their opposition. It was as if an orange crop had bloomed too quickly during an unseasonal hot spell in Florida, only to be quickly killed off by a devastating frost that soon followed. Significantly, the only important doubter who stayed in the inner circle was George Ball, the Undersecretary of State. One of the reasons why he remained a player in 1964 and 1965 was that he had not interested himself in Vietnam very much in 1963 and had not been an important player during the Diem struggle of that year. He had been preoccupied with Europe and had allowed Harriman and his group to carry the Vietnam fight. Thus, unscarred by earlier skirmishes, he was still around to fight in 1964. Similarly, the systematic removal of the players from 1963 meant that though there was dissent and debate, some of it serious and forceful, in late 1964 and 1965 over whether to bomb, and whether to send combat troops to Vietnam, it never reached the ferocity of the preliminary struggle of 1963, when the real divisions within the Kennedy Administration emerged and when men fought on Vietnam with absolutely everything they had, not as gentlemen, but as players who intended to win and to destroy their opposition in the process. By 1964 the political side had been disassembled, the players changed, so that the balance was uneven, the odds were hopelessly on the side of force, and there was, despite Ball’s eloquence, a sense of doom about what he was doing. Though the most important question of Vietnam was whether to go all the way in or all the way out, it did not in any way provoke the greatest bureaucratic struggles of the period; rather, the first of these had taken place in 1963 over the issue of Diem. In the aftermath State’s doubters were so depleted that State easily acquiesced in the 1965 escalation; and the second great bureaucratic struggle took place in 1968, when Defense, not State, had changed, and when new and antibureaucratic civilians at the Pentagon were finally able to force another debate over the limits of escalation. Thus by late 1964 the possibilities of great debates were ebbing, and they had diminished the selection of the various players. Nowhere would the difference show more markedly than in the choice of the new Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs.

 

In February 1964 one of the most important changes of players took place with Hilsman’s resignation. His successor was William Putnam Bundy, who came over from a similar position at Defense, bringing his attitudes with him, above all both a man of force and a man of the bureaucracy. He had served in three quite different capacities under three very different Presidents, and he had risen under all three. The job of Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs is a crucial one, perhaps on the subject of Vietnam the most crucial one. If there were doubts on Vietnam, they should have been voiced first of all by State. And in the case of Vietnam the position of the Assistant Secretary for FE was particularly vital, for the skepticism, the expertise, an empathy for the origins of the insurgency, all that knowledge which dated back to the French Indochina war and which came from the various lower-level experts in the Department, would have to filter through the Assistant Secretary and Undersecretary. He was the pivot, the man who had contact with the Secretary and Undersecretary, while at the same time the lower-level men, the experts, had 90 percent of their contact with him. So if it was the Assistant Secretary’s job to implement the policies of his superiors, it was also his job to fight for the judgments of his subordinates. Thus, if the doubts and pessimism of the lower-level State people did not filter through to the principals in Vietnam (and they did not), it was primarily the fault of the Assistant Secretary. If anyone should have made the principals uncomfortable in their determination to go ahead and use force, it was a strong and uncompromising Assistant Secretary. For it was not American arms and American bravery or even American determination that failed in Vietnam, it was American political estimates, both of this country and of the enemy, and that was the job of State, and in particular of the Assistant Secretary. If, perhaps, there had been no McCarthy period, no ravaging of the precious-little expertise, the Assistant Secretary might have been someone very different.

Under normal conditions it might have been John Paton Davies, Jr.; he and John Stewart Service had seemed equal in overall ability, but those who knew them both well thought Davies was more likely to succeed in the operational aspect of government, to move up into the part of the Department where an expert begins to exercise power, while Jack Service was more cerebral, ticketed perhaps for a post as an ambassador, or for a major role at the Policy Planning Council. Had it worked out that way, with John Davies as Assistant Secretary, it might all have been different, because this would have meant that one of the principals was a genuine area expert. He would have been able to explain to his peers and his superiors the danger signals, the toughness of the fabric of the enemy, and the weakness of the friendly society. He would have been able to fight for the views of the intelligence people, in large part because those would have been his own views. But John Paton Davies was not in the State Department at the time, he was not in Washington at the time, he was, in fact, not in the country at the time. He was sitting in Peru manufacturing furniture, calling himself “an unfrocked diplomat.” He was watching American policy in Asia, and he was appalled by it.

He was not an optimist about the incumbent Administration; he regarded the excitement and the promises of the New Frontier with a considerable amount of skepticism. He had become, involuntarily, a good deal more of an expert on political and bureaucratic timidity than he had ever intended. He watched from his distant vantage point as Kennedy and Nixon ran against each other, and their banalities on Quemoy and Matsu did not bring him any great confidence that they were ready to come to terms with the irrationality of America’s China policy; the Democratic party, if anything, still seemed to be very much on the defensive, and this did not bode well either for the China policy or for John Davies. His wife had listened to shortwave accounts of the Kennedy election victory and was genuinely excited. Nixon was a reincarnation of Dulles, but these were their people, their friends coming back into office. Rose Kennedy herself was a good friend of Lucretia Grady, the mother of Patricia Grady Davies; they were both of the same generation, both of that special Catholic aristocracy in America. Lucretia Grady was a real political trooper who had worked hard for the Kennedys in the campaign, giving parties and raising money. There would be some influence there, and there was talk between the women that something would be done for John Davies, his name cleared, his security clearance reinstated, his ability to make a living restored.

A few weeks after the election Patricia Davies felt even better when she learned that the new Secretary of State would be Dean Rusk. Dean was a friend, a good friend of John’s; they had served together in the CBI theater, and what could be better than have an old friend heading the very institution that had wronged her husband? Then day by day as the other names of the Administration were announced she was even more enthusiastic: Kennan and Harriman, two old friends who knew John Davies’ real worth and had stood by him during his long and terrible ordeal. This was going to be so much better than the atmosphere of the old administration of John Foster Dulles, who had fired her husband. John Davies, however, was more cautious; he did not think the new Administration was in any great hurry to change past policies, and if they were not willing to take any political heat to change a policy of irrationality toward 700,000,000 Chinese, then it might be too much to expect them to take a great deal of heat, or even a little heat, for one fallen and easily forgotten comrade. John Davies had always viewed human nature with an abiding skepticism, and he had rarely been wrong.

They were living in their own self-imposed exile in Peru, and while he ran the furniture factory, she helped him and did some interior decorating on the side. They had recast their lives after he was fired in 1954; at that point, when McCarthy’s charges finally caught up with him, he was serving in Peru (he had been transferred from a more important job in Berlin because he was under investigation); they had remained in Peru, starting their own factory. They were not particularly good at the furniture business, at least in the financial sense (some of his designs, however, won international prizes), and they had made as many mistakes as one could possibly make, they had union problems in their tiny shop; nothing had gone easily. But they had managed to make a living since that date in 1954 when John Davies was forced out of government, and from that date on he never looked back. His past had died, the career as a foreign service officer had died, and the China he knew had died. He would not look back nor mourn the past. He spent the day after he was fired from his profession with Theodore White, but though they were old friends from China, they did not discuss the past. John Davies had walked in, carefully checked White’s apartment for microphones—he was already showing that much effect from his persecution—and then he had talked of the future. Only the future. He had unfurled a map of Peru. He was going to go to the inner slope of the Andes and carve out a new living. He would not let his life dwindle into a special kind of idleness and frustration, sitting by a phone hoping for someone else to determine his fate and his future. John Davies would not pass on his failed hopes to his children. He would instead determine his life himself. He was a man of ferocious pride; though he was practically without means, he would not, even when separated from the Department, sign a release which would have brought him several thousand badly needed dollars, because resigning would deprive him of his own professional papers and perhaps a future chance to challenge what had happened to him and to write honestly of it. He was not anxious to remain in America, it was his country and he would not criticize it, but again, he did not want his children to grow up in an atmosphere of condescension, political insecurity or fake sympathy. So Peru it would be.

There he created his new life. He moved his family away from the luxurious American ghetto of Lima into a native quarter, partly because the American section was a good deal more expensive and also because he wanted to be out of that particular all-American atmosphere, more suburban than the most antiseptic of suburbs at home. If he was going to live overseas he wanted his children to grow up in a truly cosmopolitan climate. After all, he had grown up in that kind of special atmosphere of being a poor expatriate forced to live both in and off a foreign culture, and he did not think it had hurt his childhood at all. In Peru his family became exclusively his world. He was the patriarch of a large family growing larger; though he and his wife were not young, they started a second tier of their family, three more children were born, making a total of seven. It was, thought friends of theirs, done as an act of the human spirit as much as anything else. Life centered, not as it might have under normal conditions for most successful Americans in the achieving society, on job and career, but rather on home and family. It was a special kind of childhood for the young Davieses: with a father who was very demanding of them, setting high moral, intellectual and human standards, and yet who was always there and always, for all his sternness, very gentle with them.

By contemporary American upper-middle-class standards they were reasonably poor. They wore hand-me-down clothes, yet they made the most of what was around them. They went exploring, setting off every weekend and every vacation for trips into the interior, always in the same tired old 1953 station wagon, which the children were somewhat ashamed of, always hoping that it would not break down. Slowly the children of John Davies came to realize that of them, their father was the greatest adventurer; he always wanted to try something and learn something new. By 1961 there was a touch of irony to this: John Davies living outside the fancy swish of the New Frontier, which by ability, style, charm, connections and professionalism he seemed to be bred to, but instilling in his children some of the stoicism which was part of the frontier values and virtues he had learned on another frontier as a missionary’s child in China. His children grew up uncorrupted by the plush, air-conditioned alienation of American middle-class life (when the family returned to America in 1964 Mrs. Davies believed her children were better for the hardness of their life. The family seemed to have traditional values and a strong sense of loyalty at a time when the children of most of their friends were on some kind of drugs).

While John Davies sent his children to Peruvian schools, he made sure that their education was complete. He was their unofficial tutor in the classics and in contemporary events; he made them read the New York Times and asked them questions about it, seeking not just the right answers, but answers which showed that they could think. He made them listen to classical music and quizzed them. They talked of many things, but one thing they did not discuss was his past and specifically the McCarthy investigations; there seemed to be a tacit agreement that it was not to be discussed. He did not want anybody’s sympathy, and he particularly did not want his children to feel sorry either for him or for themselves. Later, as they grew older and went off to college, they became more aware of his past and began to ask questions. They did not feel sorry for him, but became quite proud of him, particularly of the fact that he was so steadfast, that he had made the State Department people fire him rather than docilely resign and take their money and save them from embarrassment. A resignation would of course have been beneficial to him as well, giving him a decent and desperately needed pension, but he turned them down. He had done nothing wrong, and that ferocious and stern pride, product of that missionary background, did not let him compromise with his honor. He was, they thought, a linear and secular descendant of the Christian martyrs.

They became aware of the strain on him, the sacrifice, the lack of money, the loss of his beloved profession, and sometimes they wondered if he would ever show the strain. But he always seemed so gentle and so comforting, and the flashes of emotion and tensions, the break in the control, were so rare that they would stand out. When Sacha Davies was fifteen, she wanted to be a singer, and she remembers waltzing in one evening and saying that when she grew up she would be a famous singer and make a million dollars and give it all to her father, and John Davies, suddenly raging, anger flashing through him, his voice very tense and harsh: “I don’t need your money! Don’t ever mention that to me again! I don’t want anyone’s money!” And then the storm passed.

There were few reminders of China, because China, too, was part of the past. Occasionally when an old friend from those days, like Eric Sevareid, showed up, they would reminisce. Once Jack Service came down and stayed with them for a week and they were joined by C. J. Pao, the Chinese ambassador to Peru, a boyhood friend, and there were barbecues, with the three of them going off into the night singing old Chinese songs, a touch of sadness in the air, China, the real China, in the past for all of them.

 

He was not, of course, very wrong about the Kennedy Administration. Having a good many friends there meant little. He knew that Harriman and Kennan had pressed his case, and Arthur Schlesinger was working on his behalf, as was McGeorge Bundy. But his old friend Rusk seemed preoccupied; there was little word from him. Soon after Kennedy took office Harriman let his old friend know that nothing could be done in the first term; his clearance was one of the wondrous things which would take place in the second term. Davies was not surprised, but he remained even more dubious and suspicious about the integrity and brilliance of the Administration. In 1962, hearing that Sargent Shriver of the Peace Corps and the Kennedy family was in Peru, Davies looked up from his desk to see Shriver, surrounded by a phalanx of young Peace Corpsmen heading for his office. Davies simply fled out the back door, thinking it was some cheap political trick (which perhaps it was, though during the fifties Shriver, who was quite good on civil liberties, had been regarded as something of the family Communist by a more conservative Joe Kennedy and his son Robert). Shriver came and left without seeing Davies, and when his wife, Patricia, heard about it, it was one of the few times that she was genuinely angry with him.

Thus their life in exile. The rest of the nation was caught up in a mood of high style and excitement about its power and its role in the world, yet those who knew most about the price the country had paid—or had not paid—were far from the centers of power, far from the hubris of the American age. After they finally returned to America in 1964, they ran into an old friend. He asked Patricia Davies how it had been, and he would remember both the answer and the way she said it—“We’ve had a terrible time”—but she said it gaily.

 

Davies was the secular puritan. That Spartan, uncomplaining quality had its roots in his childhood, and in later years as his children grew up and learned with fascination of their father, they believed that the missionary background was more a part of him than he knew; that if he had rejected the overt Christianity for atheism he nonetheless retained the values and outlook of his boyhood, the stoic sense of accepting what life gave you.

John Paton Davies senior, who was one of nine children of a Welsh immigrant, went as a Baptist missionary to China, the most exotic and marvelous place to do God’s work (indeed his son would write of it some sixty years later: “Churchgoing Americans—and that was most Americans—had grown up believing that of all the Lord’s vineyards, China was perhaps the most beloved”). The boyhood in China during the time of World War I was a true frontier experience, hard and unsparing, oil lamps, milking cows to get your own milk, growing up with Chinese kids. “It puts iron in your blood,” his ninety-one-year-old father remarked in 1969. John Davies could recall living in the village of Chen Tu as a boy when two opposing war lords put it under siege. His mother wrote letters to both sides demanding a cease-fire, which was finally granted. Then Mrs. Davies marched out with her two sons, protected by the soldiers of one war lord, finally tipping the soldiers with what was known in China as rice-wine money, but in the families of missionaries as tea money.

In the twenties China was alive with great forces coming into conflict, one order was collapsing, a new one was rising, it was really a China afire. Death and suffering were all around him; he became inured to them. As a boy and as a young man, Davies was a knowledgeable witness to revolution; the son of Michael Borodin, there to organize China for the Comintern, was a classmate at school, as were many of the boys who would become leaders in the divided China of the thirties and forties. He grew up with China in his blood, with a kind of skeptical love for it, not a naÏve love for it. He learned to love China the hard way, for like Service and other sons of missionaries, there was a certain disillusion in realizing the futility of their parents’ work. They knew that whatever else happened, China was not going to be saved and modernized by coming to Jesus Christ; China was China, and Christ was alien, Western, white. But if this was true, then their parents, selfless, decent people, were wasting their lives in at least one sense, and friends thought this accounted for much of the skepticism and irony which marked John Davies’ outlook for the rest of his life. Growing up as a young American in China had already made him something of an outsider; now as a young man, jarred loose from the perceptions of his parents, he was even more intellectually and culturally independent at a surprisingly young age. From this would come John Davies the outsider, cool, involved intellectually but uninvolved emotionally, the perfect reporter. If anything, he was brought up with a sense of the vastness of China, resistant to outside influence, be it Western Christian or Western capitalist or Western Communist, China determined somehow to come up with its own definition of itself formed on its own terms. It was a brilliant and far-reaching vision, but it did not necessarily serve him well.

His unique intellect was honed even more by a college education which was part American, part Chinese; even the American years were unique. In the late twenties he was one of eighty students admitted to the experimental college started at the University of Wisconsin by Alexander Meiklejohn, an innovative educator who had just been fired from Amherst. Protected by the liberalism of the La Follettes, this was to be the special college, the attempt to mold the classical mind with the classical education. There were no classes as such, the emphasis was to be on education, on opening the mind. The first year was spent studying nothing but Greek civilization, the second nothing but nineteenth-century American civilization and comparing the values of the two civilizations. In a way it was a spawning ground for revolutionaries, young men who went back to their hometowns, making too many ripples; after only four years the school was closed, largely upon the protests of parents who objected to their children coming back and asking too many disturbing questions. For Davies it was a marvelous time, the best of a university flashed before him. He was a good student, intelligent, a little reserved, as though somewhat bemused by all those college hijinks around him. But the education further developed an already identifiable quality in him; it taught the students to think in terms of civilizations, not just in terms of governments. After all, governments come and go, but civilizations linger on. There were certain values, beliefs, qualities which would prevail, no matter what the outward form of the government. These were lessons which Davies later applied to the contemporary world, and it would explain why his reporting was so profound; it was always touched with a sense of history. He saw something in a country and the society far deeper than the events of the moment. His reporting intuitively reflected the past as well as the present, and it marked him as no ordinary reporter or observer.

After two years at Wisconsin he went back to China, where he spent one year at Yenching University, studying alongside those who the Chinese hoped would be their modern leadership. That year was a particularly adventurous one; he was old enough now to explore the country on his own and at one point he set off for Inner Mongolia, an area at that time ravaged by typhus and famine. His real problem there, he would write, was not revolution or war but lice, so he filled a talcum can with sulphur and sprinkled it on his food, in the hope that the sulphur fumes would exude through his pores and drive off the lice. Instead he simply became violently ill for a couple of days.

When the year was up he returned to the United States (the first leg of the trip was by the Trans-Siberian Railroad, a marvelous long journey for a young man). He graduated from Columbia and took the foreign service exam; by 1933 he was an officer in China, and for the next twelve years, with the exception of two years back in Washington, he was to watch and report from the country he knew best. But first, upon arrival, he was to become even more professional. He spent his first two years as a language attaché, honing his already unusual knowledge of the country and language to an even finer degree. For two years he was at Peking University, his own tutor working with him long hours on Chinese language, history and culture. It was, he would recall, a very serious thing, and yet an enormously stimulating time; John K. Fairbank was there doing his postgraduate work, and there were journalists like Edgar Snow and Harold Isaacs around as companions. It was the making of a genuine scholar-diplomat.

 

He was full-blown, surprisingly sophisticated, gay and erudite, but there was always the quality of the outsider about him, as though he were, no matter what the situation, always a little removed from it, bemused, listening, not unsympathetic. The journalists there, like Sevareid and White, loved him and thought that with his mind and background, he would have been a magnificent journalist. They liked being around him for his ability and also for the pleasure of his company. Once Sevareid and Davies were flying over the Hump when they had to parachute. A small group made the jump, and it was Davies who led them back through difficult and dangerous terrain, negotiated with not necessarily friendly Naga tribesmen (later during the McCarthy period after Davies had been fired, Sevareid would broadcast for CBS a brief piece entitled “Defects of Character, But Whose?” in which, describing that incident, he said: “For I thought then, as I think now, that if ever again I were in deep trouble, the man I would want to be with would be this particular man. I have known a great number of men around the world under all manner of circumstances. I have known none who seemed more the whole man, none more finished a civilized product in all a man should be—in modesty and thoughtfulness, in resourcefulness and steady strength of character”). Davies could be quite witty as well (friends would remember a ditty he wrote about Gandhi: “Nonviolence is my creed/Noncooperation in word and deed/Red hot Mahatma Gandhi is my name/I wear my dhoti up around my crotch/Drink goat’s milk instead of Scotch/Red hot Mahatma Gandhi is my name . . .”).

To his contemporaries he symbolized what the foreign service should be, expert, analytical and brave, and above all, perfectly prepared for what he was doing. He knew China, the people, the language, and he watched the revolution sweeping the country. It was, he would say then and later, an implosion, not an explosion, that is, the collapsing inward of a civilization, a nation shutting itself off from the world, determining within itself its destiny. He was with General Joe Stilwell in 1938 as the Japanese marched south, ravaging whatever was in their way. He was puzzled as to why a civilized people like the Japanese would commit such atrocities, and pondered it for some time. Part of the answer, he decided, was that the troops were simply motivated by duty to their emperor; the second reason, more interesting in the light of events thirty years later in Vietnam, was “the idealistic belief that the mission is also a crusade to liberate the Chinese people from the oppression of their own rulers.” When the Chinese peasants showed signs of resenting this liberation “it is a shocking rejection of his idealism,” and the Japanese soldier raged against “the people who he believes have denied him his chivalry.”

He would eventually become the top American political officer in China, Stilwell’s most trusted adviser. It was an extraordinary time: history flashed before them like a constantly ongoing newsreel, and they were part of it. Very early in the game, in the thirties, Davies had sensed that Chiang would never make it. He was not China, he was only a part of it, and that part was diminishing all the time. The transition from feudal China to modern was a fragile one at best, but under the pressure of the Japanese invasion it became virtually impossible; the Japanese invasion simply magnified all the weaknesses and insecurities in Chiang and made him more vulnerable. He was not big enough to use the Japanese as a means of rallying his people; thus the more the pressure against him built up, the more isolated he became. It was Chiang who bore the brunt of the Japanese attack and he was not equal to it. Years later Davies’ friend Teddy White would remember Davies’ mind, the precision of it; if he disliked Chiang it was not emotional, it was because Chiang couldn’t cut it and was therefore useless.

Davies was by this time very much in the Kennan, and what would later be the George Ball, school: the man who sees the forces of history, is dubious of using morality as a test and thinks that intelligent realpolitik is the best policy. He was as dubious of the morality of intense anti-Communism as he was of the morality of Communism. He had few illusions about the Communists and what they represented. Even in 1938 when they were nothing but guerrillas, he was capable of telling Agnes Smedley, a Mao sympathizer who wrote for the Manchester Guardian, not to commit herself as totally as she wanted to, to bear in mind that it was all very exciting and romantic now, with the revolution being on the upswing; it was idealistic, full of promise, high resolve and a warm comradeship because of mutual dangers shared against common and powerful adversaries. But if it succeeded, he warned her, the Communists would become powerful and corrupt and she would feel disillusioned and betrayed, used and cast aside. Why didn’t she just report, like the other correspondents? “I can’t,” she answered him, “there is no other way for me.” (Later, when he went through his ordeal of the McCarthy years, his attitude included no small amount of scorn for his oppressors, partly because they were accusing him of views he had always thought preposterous.)

The war years did nothing to change his mind. Events happened step by step as he had predicted. Chiang became more rigid and isolated from reality, while the Communists picked up more and more momentum, touching something deep and powerful in the country. The future of China was theirs, he would cable his superiors, and we had better come to terms with it whether we liked it or not. But he never had any particular illusions about China, about how good and pro-American the Nationalists were or how evil the Communists were; he saw them both as being primarily Chinese, seeking China’s special destiny; more Chinese than foreigners knew, more Chinese, perhaps, than they knew themselves. The United States, he believed, should let events take their own course (if only because there was no alternative; in China you could not control events, and if you tried, you were sucked into something monumentally futile). If anything, America should try and encourage independence for Communist China from Moscow, and above all, not push Mao into Stalin’s hands.

Davies was, it is an understatement to say it, ahead of his time. In October 1944 he went to the Yenan base of the Communists, along with a small group of Americans including Teddy White, to get a feel of their leaders. One day he and White were having lunch with Ch’en Chia-k’ang, who was something of a liaison officer with the Americans and in effect a foreign ministry desk chief for the United States. The lunch would soon become embarrassing for White, because of Davies’ treatment of Ch’en, which was nothing short of brutal. Davies kept picking away at his host on the subject of a solid Sino-Russian alliance, like a bullfighter going after a bull. Asking question after question, Davies forced his host to compare the Russian proletariat with the peasantry. There was such skepticism in his voice as to be almost mocking: What did they really have in common? Wasn’t there an old historical enmity that lurked beneath the surface of the new friendship? Weren’t there differences in culture, differences in race, differences over borders? Wouldn’t the Chinese have to remain subservient to Moscow as long as they were in the Soviet orbit? How could that be squared with a desire to assert China’s real destiny as a great power?

The more Davies ruthlessly pressured his poor host to admit that there were long-range differences, the calmer Ch’en Chia-k’ang remained. To him, he assured Davies, it was unthinkable that Russia and China would ever be enemies; since they were both Socialist states, there could be no problems or disagreement. Years later Teddy White would remember that luncheon with an eerie feeling; perhaps Davies had seen the future more clearly than the Chinese Communists themselves had.

If Davies saw events ahead of the Chinese Communists, he saw them ahead of his own country as well. That he, so skeptical, so tough-minded, would be blamed for ideological weakness and soft-minded reporting was ridiculous, yet it would happen; a surprise even for a man schooled to expect very little from human nature. But Patrick Hurley, whose mission to China to unite Mao and Chiang during the war had ended in failure, the same Hurley who thought that the Chinese Communists were like Oklahoma Republicans except that they were armed, needed a scapegoat after Chiang’s debacle. Old and senile, he turned against Davies and the other Chinese officers, accusing them of having deliberately betrayed Chiang (and Hurley). It was a foolish charge of a foolish man, but the nation was ripe for a little demonology and scapegoating. That there would be right-wing attacks after China fell was not surprising; what was surprising was how little the people who knew better, the Establishment, fought back.

Thus began the long ordeal of John Paton Davies and other China experts. Starting in 1948 and continuing through 1954, he underwent nine security investigations. Again and again he was cleared, but the experience itself was debilitating and destructive, poisonous, always leaving doubts. Besides newspaper charges, guilt by association, the failure of friends to stand by, even the very questioning seemed to imply his guilt. (Typically, U. S. News and World Report, December 1953: “The Strange Case of John Paton Davies. Investigated since 1945, He’s Still a Diplomat.”) His case was made more difficult by an additional tactic of the right wing. After China fell, Davies had suggested a complicated covert CIA program which would use China experts somewhat sympathetic (or at least not antagonistic) to the regime as an outlet to the new China, perhaps as a way of keeping the country open and as a means of getting American information in and Chinese information out. Instead, right-wing members of the CIA blew just enough of the program to make it look as if Davies were trying to have the CIA hire a bunch of Communist agents; it was a kind of mindlessness that was special to the period, and it was a particularly difficult charge to defend against because the program was classified, and an honorable explanation would have violated security. At first when the charges began he had not been particularly upset; it had seemed like the final rantings of a senile old man, Hurley, and though he knew things might be a little uneasy back in the States, he assumed that right would triumph. Besides, his immediate superior, Harriman, backed him 100 percent. But as it became clear that the Republican party was determined to use the China issue as a means of getting back in power, his spirits dropped and he had a feeling that it would end badly. By 1952, he remembered, it was like a rabbit being shot at in an open field.

The temper of the times was very special, notable for a kind of national timidity and dishonor. Some friends stood behind him, others did not (Rusk did). Davies, ever proud, found it hard to ask others to testify in his behalf; when someone like Teddy White volunteered to, which was rare, he was touched. But those who offered to appear paid the price themselves; two weeks after White testified in Davies’ behalf, his own passport was lifted. Davies became a particular target of McCarthy’s, linked in McCarthy’s charges somehow to Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White. In 1954, because of McCarthy’s pressures, he was investigated for the ninth and last time. This time he was accused not so much of disloyalty as of nonconformity. He was finally found guilty of “lack of judgment, discretion and reliability.” Dulles, who wanted as little conflict with Congress as possible, upheld the decision. He did not talk with Davies, but through subordinates passed the word that it would be a healthy thing if Davies resigned instead of forcing Dulles to fire him. This, it was said, would be good for Davies and save him embarrassment (it would also save Dulles embarrassment). Davies, ever unflinching, refused to resign, and sought a confrontation with the Secretary. Dulles summoned him to announce that the board had found against him. “Do you agree?” Davies asked. “Yes,” answered Dulles. “I am sorry,” Davies said. Davies’ manner at the meeting, thought one Dulles aide, was almost flippant, his jacket thrown over his shoulder like a cape; it was conduct unbecoming to a foreign service officer, though of course the aide had not been investigated nine times. Later Dulles, ever the moralist, quietly let Davies know that if ever he needed a letter of recommendation, why, Foster would be pleased to write one. It was an offer which was not taken up. By then Davies was on his way to his new life; the best of a generation of Asian experts had left his profession.

It was the end of one life and the beginning of another; more important for his country, it was the end of one kind of reporting and expertise in Asia. The best had been destroyed and the new experts were different, lesser men who had learned their lessons, and who were first and foremost good anti-Communists. If there had been a prophetic quality to Davies’ China reporting, there was no less a measure in the letter he had submitted to the final review board:

 

When a foreign service officer concludes that a policy is likely to betray national interests he can reason to himself that, as ultimate responsibility for policy rests with the top officials of the Department, he need feel no responsibility for the course upon which we are embarked; furthermore his opinions might be in error or misunderstood, or misrepresented—and so the safest thing for a bureaucrat to do in such a situation is to remain silent. Or, a foreign service officer can speak out about his misgivings and suggest alternative policies, knowing that he runs serious personal risks in so doing. I spoke out.

 

His only crime, John Finney of the New York Times would write fifteen years later, was that he had been both too honest and too far-sighted in his reporting from his area; if that had been a crime, there would be few, reporting from Asia in the next fifteen years, who would repeat it. Instead, officials became good solid anti-Communists; they told their missions, as Ambassador Nolting did, not to look at the opposition, not to meet with it, not to think of alternatives, but rather to get the job done, that was what Washington wanted. The Americans who followed John Davies would be very different, they were determined to impose American versions and definitions of events upon Asian peoples. It became easier to be operational rather than reflective. Reflection brought too many problems.

 

From Peru, Davies watched America struggle through or try to glide through the post-McCarthy period, and he observed the deepening involvement in Vietnam with a sense of foreboding. There was, he thought, a certain inevitability to it, and for him at least, there was a terrible logic to events. If with his family he seemed gentle and thoughtful, he was nonetheless not without his scars. What had seemed skeptical now sometimes seemed cynical; he seemed to bear the special pain of a man determined not to show pain. He finally decided to return to the United States, partly because he felt his children should live in their home country for a while, partly because he wanted to clear his name, not for his own sake but for that of his wife and children. Periodically old friends tried to introduce him to some of the new young men working in the Administration on Asia, some of what were known as good guys on China. The meetings went badly because Davies did not respond well to the swift young Kennedy and Johnson people, he was not linked to them and he was determined that he not show hurt. They, in turn, found it hard to choose the right words in the presence of a man who was legend and hero to them.

In 1964 he began the long process of clearing himself. He found an excellent lawyer named Walter Surrey, who was willing to fight for him. But even then, Surrey and Davies would find the State Department an ungracious and ungenerous place, less than anxious to right an old wrong. It would in fact take five years of fighting the Department to get clearance. Surrey asked for a review of Davies’ case; the State Department reviewer, Wilson Flake, a former ambassador to Ghana, looked at the record and saw no reason to reopen it. Surrey, however, persisted year after year, with little co-operation from Secretary of State Rusk. In 1966 Bill Bundy, then Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs, tried to put Davies on an advisory panel of Asian experts; Rusk rejected him. He would go as far as accepting John Fairbank, the controversial Harvard scholar, but Davies, he said, was politically unacceptable.

In 1967 Surrey wrote directly to Rusk asking for a review of Davies’ case; Rusk, preoccupied with Vietnam, never responded. Out of this would come a quiet, lingering bitterness toward Rusk, a feeling that he, more than others, had been less than he should have been. The matter might have died there, but Surrey persisted, and others in the Department, slowly, cautiously, came to Davies’ support. Months passed, years passed, and eventually Undersecretary Nicholas Katzenbach helped nudge the case along, despite ferocious efforts on the part of the Department’s security people to obstruct progress. Finally, in mid-1968, fourteen years after he had been fired, John Davies was cleared. He was cleared in the last months of the Johnson Administration, when it was too late and all the damage both to a man and to a policy had been done. But even then the State Department did not have the courage to admit that it had corrected an old injustice. Instead of issuing an honest and candid statement, it leaked the news of the reinstatement to a reporter for the New York Times; the timidity still lived.

Davies himself began to work again as a consultant and as a writer, and when the Nixon Administration recognized China a year and a half later and it reappeared on the face of the map, Davies found himself something of a celebrity. Important journalists began to talk about him as a candidate to be the first American ambassador to Peking. In the summer of 1971 his young son was getting married and the Davieses sent out invitations for a reception; in the past they had usually gotten only a 50 percent acceptance to their parties, but this time everyone showed up, including, as the children put it, “the real chickens.”

John Davies remained shy about going on radio and television and had a feeling he might be exploited now that he had been rehabilitated. In late 1971, sensing that they were being used by the people around them, and tired of having their young daughters mugged on the way home from public schools, John Davies and his wife decided it was time to pull up stakes again, that adventure lay elsewhere, and moved to Spain.

 

So John Paton Davies or Jack Service could not serve—men, extremely knowledgeable about the area, whose primary viewpoint was political. And yet the post was crucial, doubly so, because the Secretary of State himself was a man who believed in force, whose first love had been the Pentagon, and who did not like to challenge the views of the generals. So the selection for the man to fill the slot below him, to replace Hilsman, was of genuine importance. But instead of it going to a man of the area, it went to a man classically of the bureaucracy, a believer in force, and a man whose last job had been at the Pentagon under McNamara, who was in awe of McNamara, and who brought a photograph of McNamara to hang on his wall at State. As well he might, for the idea of his new job had come from McNamara; McNamara, good bureaucrat, always liked to have his people spread around the government, and it would not hurt to have Bill Bundy, his own man, at a crucial slot at State. The suggestion had gone in from McNamara and finally came back to Harriman for his response, and Harriman, who still had some control over this area, did not fight the appointment. He thought Bill Bundy was a very good bureaucrat and bright, and that he might give State some badly needed muscle. Besides, he was sure he could handle him. So he acquiesced. Consequently, by the middle of 1964 State did not have its men at Defense; Defense had its men at State. There was Bill Bundy, a classic insider’s man. His name would probably be on more pieces of paper dealing with Vietnam over a seven-year period than anyone else’s, yet he was the man about whom the least was known, the fewest articles written. There were no cover stories in the news magazines, no long profiles. A shadowy figure on the outside center of power, lowest man on a very high totem pole. In photographs of the group, the other faces were recognizable: Bob, Dean, Mac, Lyndon, and then that tall thin fellow on the side. A patrician, you could tell that, perhaps a slight resemblance to Mac. Mac’s younger brother? No, he would get tired of telling people, he was not Mac’s younger brother, he was Mac’s older brother. What was it Lyndon called him? (Lyndon always professed to have trouble with people’s names when he wanted to put them down a little. Kissinger would become Schlesinger, Dick Goodwin became Goodman, George Hamilton the actor-suitor would become Charley.) Johnson respected Bill Bundy but did not like him, spotting in him that supercilious quality which, so long in developing, was not easy to shed, even for the White House. Hating all superciliousness, but particularly Groton-senior-prefect superciliousness, Johnson would call him “that other Bundy.” That other Bundy.

William Putnam Bundy, two years older than McGeorge Bundy, had left remarkable records wherever he went, Groton, Yale, Harvard Law School (which inclined him to tell others who sometimes doubted him and his positions that their problem was that they lacked a lawyer’s training and eye). More of an ambitious mother’s hopes were invested in him, and yet always pursued by that younger meteor, always living in the shadow of Mac’s extraordinary achievements and accomplishments, which somehow dimmed the luster of his own quite remarkable career. He was not as quick as Mac, and not as open. Mac had competed in the somewhat more open environment of Harvard, where sheer brains counted, whether they were immigrant brains, blue-collar brains or WASP brains, and he had triumphed there, his connections not hurting a bit. But the process had ventilated him (Mac knew the value of a Kaysen or Wiesner), and he liked brains for brains’ sake, whereas Bill had made his way up through the more closed profession of the inner bureaucracy, particularly the CIA, where connections and birthrights were far more important. He had done very well at the CIA, at a time when it was decidedly the profession of the upper-class elite, the right people looking out for one another’s sons and friends. It was a profession and a craft which demanded considerable ability, which he had, but which also responded even less to new forces and egalitarian pressures of America. There was a tendency in Bill Bundy, when challenged, to rely, or at least to seem to rely, even more on his background, to seem more the snob and more arrogant, a belief that Bundys are just a little different and better than mere mortals.

He himself was not without his own political scars from an earlier period. He had always done well in the government, and had been a particular protégé of Allen Dulles’, an affection which he reciprocated. Dulles had been more than a boss, he had been a friend and also a protector. When William Bundy had one rather frightening run-in with Joseph McCarthy in the fifties, he had the good fortune to work for the right Dulles, who had chosen to protect his staff. The incident took place in July 1953. McCarthy went after Bundy partly as a general means of attacking Acheson, and partly because it was fresh governmental meat, the CIA this time. There were two points McCarthy used against Bundy, the first being a brief period of time in 1940 when Bundy was an employee of the Library of Congress and for four months belonged to a group called the United Public Workers of America. The second was more dramatic, McCarthy’s desire to question Bundy on $400 that Bundy had contributed to the defense fund of Alger Hiss. (He had not, Bundy explained later, known Hiss, but he had worked as a young lawyer in the same firm with Alger’s brother Donald Hiss. He sensed that the Hiss case was going to be very important and he wanted Hiss to have a very good attorney “the first time around. We had some knowledge of the Sacco-Vanzetti case in my family and I thought it important that he had a good lawyer the first time around,” the latter being a reference to his great-uncle A. Lawrence Lowell, who had upheld the Sacco-Vanzetti decision, and whose reputation was thereupon tarnished.) Bundy had told all this to Allen Dulles, who said not to worry. Then, in the summer of 1953, when McCarthy went after him, Bundy was about to leave for Europe, and there was a question as to whether McCarthy would subpoena Bundy. Allen Dulles worked out a deal with the White House by which there would be no subpoena; Bundy would be allowed to go on his European vacation, and Dulles would develop a special procedure to check all loyalty at the Agency. McCarthy tried to fight the European trip, but Dulles absolutely refused to cave in, no one on his staff was going to be exploited by McCarthy; Bundy went off, and came back to continue working at the CIA. Allen Dulles, he thought, was a very different man from Foster (on the day that Foster had let George Kennan, perhaps the State Department’s foremost intellectual of a generation, leave the service “because I don’t seem to have a niche for you,” Allen had driven into town to see Kennan and to offer him almost any job he wanted at the CIA). But it was not a pleasant experience, just as the tormenting of his father-in-law, Dean Acheson, had not been a pleasant experience; it had a profound effect on the young and ambitious career servant and made him very careful about leaving himself open for any future attacks on his softness.

He was extremely well connected in the inner traditions of American government, the Stimson-Bundy connections and the fact that he was Dean Acheson’s son-in-law, but there were also many who felt that he was Allen Dulles’ long-term choice to be the eventual head of the Agency. Though he was the nominal Democrat in the Bundy family, he had not done particularly well at the beginning of the Kennedy Administration, partly because he had mouthed the Acheson anti-Kennedy line during the 1960 period, and his father-in-law felt that he should have had the job which went to Mac. Instead he went from CIA to Defense in 1961 as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs under the Assistant Secretary, Paul Nitze, who was Acheson’s special favorite (he had been head of Policy Planning under Acheson). When Nitze was appointed Secretary of the Navy, Bundy was moved up to his job. Those who worked under Bill Bundy in those days remember an almost electric sense of power: he worked for McNamara, he had a brother at the White House, there were links everywhere to the very top, decisions were made and Bill and his shop were in on it. He liked the McNamara job, and friends there felt that when he was made Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs he left reluctantly, that there had been a virtual father-son relationship, despite the similarities in age. He was totally happy there.

While Rusk and McNaughton, both very good bureaucrats, had worked in the outside world, Bill Bundy had spent most of his adult years working within the government. After CIA and Defense, an even more successful career was beckoning. Becoming Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense or head of the CIA was a very real possibility for him in 1964 at the comparatively young age of forty-six. He was extremely adept at playing the bureaucracy, savvy, able to finesse it, there was no better interdepartmental and crossgovernmental man than Bill Bundy, cutting across lines if necessary, and then, if someone was a person to be wary of, going back later and healing a wound. He could cut through it and he could go outside it if need be. Very good at paper, just like his younger brother and like the Secretary of State, letting both sides speak their piece, and then Bill Bundy grabbing the middle position and dictating the paper, getting both sides in, and moving the paper to his view. During those years at State he was very careful to follow all the paper traffic. He was a good dictator, and knew who at State was good at taking dictation and who was not, insisting on the best clerks, a good clerk was someone who could take dictation and handle paper. He read quickly, and if anything, too quickly; there were those around him who believe that in 1967 he misread Hanoi’s answer to the San Antonio formula because he read it too quickly and was preconditioned to think that they were never going to respond.

Yet he was a puzzling man too. He had such good manners and came from such a fine tradition, yet he was the classic mandarin, abusive and rough on those who worked for him, obsequious to those above him, with almost no such thing as an equal relationship. The one eventual exception was John McNaughton, who held Bundy’s old job at Defense and was thus equal in rank and ability and toughness, although Bundy tested him out at the beginning, trying to let him know that Bill Bundy was just a little more senior, a little more superior. On the phone, with just a trifle of condescension, trying to help McNaughton really: I’m sure, John, that if you check with Bob you’ll find that it’s all okay . . . No, Bob wasn’t there . . . but Cy was there, and it’s really all cleared, John . . . I’m sure you’ll see . . . But McNaughton was just as shrewd a bureaucratic player and he soon let Bundy know that he spoke for McNamara, and thus gained a rare parity. Subordinates had to suffer what bordered on temper tantrums, as if all the contradictions of Vietnam were too much and produced resulting seething tensions: Get off that goddamn phone. . . . Where the hell is that paper? . . . This damn paper isn’t fit for an eighth-grader. Yet to his superiors it was yes, Mr. Secretary . . . no, Mr. Secretary . . . yes, Mr. President—which reminded those around him of nothing so much as the best senior boy at the old school working between the headmaster on one side and the boys on the other, or the beloved senior clerk in a great firm who anticipates every whim of his superiors and terrorizes the clerks beneath him. He was the classic civil servant really, who believes he has succeeded if he meets the demands on him from the top of the matrix, and does not represent the bottom to the top (in contrast with his eventual successor at Defense, Paul Warnke), which is all right if the top of the matrix knows what it is doing. So he was this great Brahmin, William Bundy, really a very great clerk.

He did not bring his subordinates into the play at all, and would brook no faintheartedness; in fact, it was believed by the fall of 1964 that real doubters on Vietnam could not serve in his section. Nor, and this was equally important, did he bring subordinates into any kind of discussion on Vietnam but quite the opposite; he worked to head off any serious questioning. When doubts arose among some of the younger men, he would stop them, they would not go further. “The President had already decided on that,” was a favorite line, or “We won’t chase that hare,” or “We won’t open that can of worms,” but the message was the same: don’t argue with us, we know where we are going. Since his subordinates were almost completely excluded from discussions on Vietnam with Bundy, except for minor technical matters, they found that if they wanted to pick up a trend of the direction of policy, the best way was simply to be in his office when he was talking to trusted outsiders on the phone, where he would ruminate, talk more openly, give a sense of the play. Only certain people could be trusted and they had to have certain credentials, and those credentials would turn out increasingly to be breeding and a fondness for the use of force.

Bill Bundy was extremely well read, a deeply educated man who brought a real intellectual background to his work, a bureaucrat, thought his friends, who had a secret craving to be a historian. In addition, unlike the other top players, he knew something about Southeast Asia. He had dealt with the problem in the past working with the Office of National (Intelligence) Estimates at the CIA from 1951 to 1959, where Chester Cooper, the staffman who was writing pessimistic notes to McGeorge Bundy, was charged with Far East evaluation and Bundy was doing overall general evaluation. During the French war he had read all the traffic, and had thus, unlike the others, gained a sense of the history which they were contending with. Later, in 1964, when a squadron of outmoded B-57 bombers were routed back to the Bien Hoa air base from the Philippines, some of the younger men at State and the White House argued vigorously against leaving them there, saying that they were useless and could only serve as a temptation to the Vietcong, who would be almost obligated to attack them and blow them up; besides, security was undoubtedly terrible. So the real risk was that if the Vietcong moved, we would have to make a countermove. In a rare exception to his general rule, Bundy agreed, and he even went to see Rusk and posed the problem (the B-57s would not really change the direction of the war, but they would present unnecessary risks). Rusk listened and more or less agreed, and then called McNamara, who said that the military needed the planes, and Rusk called back to his subordinates and said that the military said they needed them, and State had not given a good-enough reason not to put them there. So, foolishly, they stayed there, until in November the Vietcong did blow them up, prompting the JCS and Taylor to recommend immediate retaliation, which surely would have taken place then, except that it was Election Eve. But what the incident showed was that Bill Bundy knew something about Vietnam, and had more sophistication about the war and the enemy than most of the players. Brains were not his problem; it was a question of assumptions, and ambition.

His move to State was an important step. At Defense he had shown no doubts about the policy. He had never been for any of the pressures against Diem, his recent attitudes on Vietnam had been oriented toward the military, and he held his new job in part because he had in no way angered or irritated the hawks of the government; in fact, he had worked well with them and had their confidence. He had come to State to make sure that State co-operated with Defense, and he was perfect for the job, since he had lived through the Cold War years and believed in all the attitudes of them; he was not Acheson’s son-in-law for nothing, and was perhaps even more than his brother a man of force. He believed in covert operations from his CIA days and believed that we were justified in what we did because the Communists inevitably were worse. He was a man who, in the words of his new boss, Lyndon Johnson, would “run it in through to the hilt.” But curiously enough, though his new job at State was seemingly a promotion, his father-in-law, Acheson, always zealous of Bill’s career, was not particularly enthusiastic, and there were two reasons why. Part of it was Acheson’s doubts about Rusk; to Acheson, Rusk was a failed figure on his way out (Acheson, hearing people say that they did not know what Rusk was thinking during crucial meetings, would respond, “Did it ever occur to you that he wasn’t thinking?”), and he thought Bill would be better served by staying with McNamara, there was the real powerhouse of the Administration—perhaps McNamara would be going over to State and Bill could make the transfer then. But the second reason for Acheson’s doubts was Vietnam itself; he sensed that FE was going to be a graveyard, and that anyone working there would be charged with either liquidating the war or escalating it, and he did not want Bill Bundy caught in this particular trap. He made these reservations known to the President, but they had no effect; Bill Bundy got FE.

 

It was an odd year, 1964, the calm before the storm; the bureaucracy was, in a phrase which the Vietnam war would help create, doing its own thing, planning away, storing up options. The military were beginning to check out bombing sites, and deep in the bowels of the Pentagon, trained professional staff men who knew something about contingency plans were working on what might be needed if we decided to go to war, and if we needed ground troops, and if so, which units would go and which reserve units might be called up. All ifs, of course, but the Pentagon was ready. At the top level, through much of 1964, there was still lip service to optimism. But the advisory commitment was a passing stage; in the back-channel world of the Army, where the word was far more important than the public statement (the public statement of a military man allowed no dissent, it was built totally upon loyalty to policy, to chief, and thus was without subtlety, so that the word was the truth, the word was that it was all coming apart, and we might have to go in there with the first team). Much of the Army brass had never really believed in the advisory commitment; they had accepted that role because it was the only role authorized, but it was not a satisfactory role. It excluded more elements of the military than it permitted in, it handcuffed more than it liberated, and so American generals were quite capable of saying what a great thing the advisory role was, how well we were doing, what great fellows the little ARVNs were, Little Tigers, and believing it, and yet at the same time never believing it. They thought it was all a lie, but it was the only lie available, and you did what you were told, though with your own way of winking: Don’t knock the war in Vietnam, it may not be much but it’s the only war we have. Or on the definition of the adviser: an adviser is a bastardized man-made animal which is bound to fail. Until 1964 the war in Vietnam had not really even been a war, but now they were getting ready, just in case this country wanted to go to war.

In the country and in the government, however, there was no clear sense of going to war. Each person working around the President saw Johnson through his own special prism, and had his own impressions of Vietnam confirmed. Thus the domestic political people assumed that Johnson was committed to the programs that they were preparing, and thus what was peaceful in his rhetoric was the real thing. The national security people did not talk to the domestic people; no one walked both sides of the street. The national security people were above politics (except for their desire to protect their President and keep him in office, which would also keep them in office as national security people), and if they thought about the dark consequences of the road ahead, they were somehow sure that a confrontation could be avoided. They were, in particular, believers in the idea that the threat of force would make the use of force unnecessary. So if they played their roles properly—and they were all crisis veterans now; they wore the battle ribbons of the Cuban missile crisis and knew how to negotiate through danger, to show the willingness to use force, to convince the other side of the seriousness of their intent, to pass their messages as civilized gentlemen—they could prevent both war and aggression. As 1964 progressed and ended, it became apparent that the Cuban missile crisis had been the test run for Vietnam, that the Vietnam planning was derivative from the missile-crisis planning: enough force but not too much force, plenty of options, careful communication to the other side to let him know what you were doing, allowing him to back down. They were very confident of themselves and their capacity to wield power. The dry runs were behind them. They could handle events. They had confidence in themselves and in each other.

Perhaps if the people who knew a good deal about Vietnam (the fact that the weakness in the South would continue and grow worse, that the other side would react to force with the patient, dogged determination which had marked the French war, that there was no way to bluff Asian Communist peasants) had gotten together with the domestic political people who knew something about Lyndon Johnson, which way he would react to certain pressures, then they probably could have plotted the course of the future. But the national security people did not know Johnson, which would be part of the problem. They were all new to him, and they had little sense of his real instincts and subtleties. To foretell what would happen in Vietnam, what Johnson’s reaction would be and what the enemy’s reaction would be to Johnson’s moves required a combination of expertise which no one had. Therefore, in 1964 each man saw his own estimates as the deciding ones, pulling from the contradictions of Administration rhetoric what he wanted to believe. If a person was dovish, then he was dovish for forceful reasons, and he assumed that the principals were probably dovish too; and if he was hawkish, he assumed that he could control events. It was a time when the play became more and more closely held by the principals, and that as doubts about the future grew, the willingness to discuss them and share them diminished; as they grew more serious, the doubts became more private than public, as in the case of John McNaughton.