Chapter Twenty-two

But the Saigon years would not be happy ones. After all those years learning control, discipline, making those the touchstones of his life, Max Taylor was now confronted by the wild irrationality, the deviousness, the maliciousness and venality of the South Vietnamese. It was somehow unfair; people who are about to be saved from the Communists should feel some element of gratitude, and at the very least that gratitude should surface in the form of knowing they were being saved, and more important, wanting to be saved. There he was in Saigon, in mid-l964, proconsul of a great empire which had a firmer sense of its mission than its ally; the Americans more committed, more willing to die than the South Vietnamese. It was all very puzzling. No common cause. No consensus. Could there be anarchy when the Communists were at the gates of the city? Remind them, Dean Rusk, Taylor’s new chief at State, would cable him, of Ben Franklin’s statement that they would either hang together or hang separately. All those years in the military, where there were certain standards and rules; where young men treated their superiors with respect; where you gave an order and it was obeyed; where a uniform meant you were all on the same side. Now here in Saigon, all of that meant nothing, medals won on the plains of Europe against the world’s second mightiest army meant nothing; he was dealing with these boys, most had never heard a shot fired in anger. Everything went so badly; Nguyen Khanh, who had appeared so dramatically on the scene in February as the new prime minister, and whom the Americans had seized upon, the first American-style leader, had turned out to be not American style, but Vietnamese style, with Diem’s weaknesses without Diem’s strengths—neurotic, paranoiac, disliked by both older officers and younger officers, and like his predecessors, totally overwhelmed by the political problems he faced. Khanh and Taylor argued regularly, ever more bitterly, until by the end of his tour Taylor, representative of the mightiest nation in the world, was virtually persona non grata in the weakest nation in the world.

It was always like that; Max was so organized, disciplined, trying to transfer that rationality and logic to this Alice-in-Wonderland world. When he complained to one of his civilian aides about a propaganda program they were using which the Vietnamese did not like and wanted to drop, the aide suggested it be dropped. Was it logical that it should be kept? asked Taylor. Yes, said the civilian. Was it a sound program? asked Taylor. Yes, answered the civilian again. “Well, if it’s logical and sound, we’ll keep it,” Taylor said. And later, during a period of revolving-doors governments, when Air Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky had come to power, Taylor would take two New York Times reporters aside and tell them that if Ky got the premiership he would give up the air force, the vital power balance in any coup, since government troops, unlike the Vietcong, were not used to being strafed. Jack Langguth, one of the reporters, was somewhat startled by the suggestion and asked, “Do you really think he’ll give up the air force, which is the only power base he has?” Taylor said he did. “Why?” asked Langguth. “Because he promised me,” answered Taylor.

The worst thing for him was of course that nothing worked. It was a roller coaster—more advisers, more gear, more threats to the South Vietnamese, more threats to the North. He was at the confluence of it now, the architect of limited war, and particularly this limited war, caught between the failure of it and the threat of a greater war, between his vanities and his beliefs that the United States would not be defeated here, that the loss of prestige for a great power in the face of a small guerrilla army would be a major catastrophe. It had all come home to him, Max Taylor, who had always been able to control things. Now control was getting away from all of them. What they had held on to, the counterinsurgency, was slipping away, and in early August 1964 he began to grasp almost desperately at solutions. Since the Vietcong could not be defeated in the South, the answers would have to be found elsewhere, and for the first time he began to change on the bombing. It now became a possibility; significantly, he did not recommend bombing for military reasons (he was, as Westmoreland also was, dubious about the military effectiveness of bombing, knowing as he did the reluctance of his kind of civilian superiors to use the kind of bombing that the real hawks, the LeMays and the Wally Greenes and the McConnells wanted. They wanted total bombing, they were ready to annihilate the opposition. Taylor was too civilized a general for that, and he served too civilized a set of superiors to believe that they would permit something like that; the whole point of the new strategy had been to get away from total force, be it nuclear or nonnuclear force).

Taylor wanted it for political reasons. In the past he had opposed bombing because he was unwilling to commit the United States to the use of greater power against the North, which meant greater involvement; otherwise, he felt, the United States would find itself at war with the North with a very weak government in the South. Now he was changing. In his August 18 message to the President he said: “Something must be added in the coming months.” That something would be bombing; the right time for starting a campaign of reprisal, he suggested, would be January 1, 1965, a time conveniently after the election. Ideally, we should tell Khanh that we would begin to bomb for him and the South Vietnamese if he could show the United States that he was ready for it and brought a new era of stability to Saigon. Thus the bombing was a political lever, a reward; if they were good and cleaned up their house, we would bomb, and show our greater willingness to commit ourselves. Of course the one lesson the Vietnamese leaders had learned over a decade was that the United States was more desperately anti-Communist than they were, and that the more the Vietnamese failed, the more the United States was willing to put in. As if to confirm this, the same Taylor message also told Washington that perhaps January 1 would be too late, in which case the United States would go ahead anyway and simply hope that Khanh would come around.

Eventually Taylor and George Ball would be on opposite sides of the same great question, whether to bomb or not, while presenting identical evidence, the almost total weakness and instability of Saigon. There was another reason, which would move the others, the idea that bombing was a card, you played it, it was not necessarily a final act. Everyone else seemed to think that Hanoi valued its industrial base so much that it would do almost anything to protect it, including calling off the war in the South. Why not try it and find out? At the very least it would punish Hanoi, which was something; there was a feeling that Hanoi deserved it, it had been punishing them and Saigon without paying any price. The change in Taylor was that of a key man in the key slot—a strong ambassador in a divided or uncertain bureaucracy has enormous power—something that symbolized the gradual transformation of the other players: it was not so much that Taylor was stupid or inept, though he was far from brilliant; he was, and this was symbolic of all of them, a desperate man in a desperate situation, unable to turn back, having come this far.

Events in the fall would turn him completely toward the bombing. Just as the pre-Tonkin covert operations had led to the Tonkin incident and the sense in this country and among many of the principals that the other side had provoked us, the principals triggered the situation at Bien Hoa which, when it exploded, filled them with righteousness against the enemy. On November 1 the squadron of obsolete B-57 bombers which had been moved from the Philippines to the air base at Bien Hoa (over State’s objections) was hit by the Vietcong; five Americans were killed, seventy-six wounded and six of the bombers destroyed. Thus the Vietcong had matched their symbols against our symbols; anyone wanting to know what their attitude toward the bombing would be in the future had his answer right there. They would meet our air power with increased pressure against targets in the South.

What was most important about the Bien Hoa attack, however, was not the fact that the United States had left the planes there, or that the VC had hit them, or that the ARVN security was predictably inept. What was remarkable was the reaction of Max Taylor. The attack infuriated him, and his cables back to Washington, which had always in the past been restrained and almost conservative in tone, were now strikingly different, angry, reflecting almost outrage that they could do this to the symbols of the United States of America, of which he himself, as ambassador, was the great symbol. A sign of arrogance on the part of the other side, tinkering with the giant. He wanted to retaliate and retaliate immediately, and he was surprised and a little angry when Johnson, facing an election in two days, did not respond, and he complained openly to friends in the mission and to journalists. But this, as much as anything else, pushed him over on the bombing. From then on he was committed. He was angry at Hanoi and eager to punish, and he wanted not just tit for tat but the major bombing program as well, using as his argument that it would improve morale and give us more influence in the South, since the South would now have to prepare for greater pressure from the North. So with Taylor, as with some of the others who advocated bombing, the attitude was not particularly one of belief but rather one of why-not. This would after all buy time for Saigon; we would not take over the war.

But as he switched in the late fall of 1964, it was a decision which had a powerful effect on the principals within the bureaucracy; if Max was getting on board, then there was little else holding them back and it was more evidence than ever that this was the way they would have to go. Besides Taylor’s protégé William C. Westmoreland there was, however, one key member of the top mission staff who had grave doubts about the bombing: the CIA station chief, Pier de Silva, a West Point graduate himself, and a man who, friends thought, had an almost pathological distrust of the military. He accurately forecast that the bombing would have virtually no effect other than provoke Hanoi into sending more troops down the trails; it would not invade in the classic military sense. This was somewhat unusual, since the military assumption in 1964 was still that if the North came down, it would come down in traditional division formation, making a good target for American power. When Robert Kleiman of the New York Times interviewed generals in February 1965 about what Hanoi would do, he was told by a member of the Joint Chiefs that if they came down, it would take “eight U.S. divisions, just like in Korea” to stop them and we did not need to worry about getting the U.S. troops in advance because we could fly them there faster than the North Vietnamese could march. A civilian with military experience in Saigon estimated that it would take four divisions; another high-ranking member of the Saigon command said two divisions; and one of Saigon’s top planners said one U.S. division, then added prophetically, “I don’t think they’re going to do it that way. As a matter of fact, we just picked up a broadcast report on how they took a division, broke it down into smaller component parts, and then practiced infiltrating it and reassembling it in the South. I don’t think they’re coming down Korean style, the country’s just not right, the narrow coastal plain, no good routes—they just couldn’t conduct a conventional advance in force.”

Even as Taylor was recommending bombing, he knew that this in itself was not enough, that if you bombed you would need troops. But he was bothered about sending combat troops, and he did not want to cross that bridge if necessary, partly because of the problems of Americans fighting in a political war and turning the population toward the Vietcong, but even more because he felt there was a crossover point at which, as the Americans put in men, the South Vietnamese would let down even more on the job, and the process of Americanizing the war would be accelerated. It was a question which bothered him a great deal in the fall of 1964. What was the Plimsoll line, as he called it, was it 75,000 or 100,000, or was it 150,000? At which point did they quit and turn it over to us, requiring more Americans? But if it bothered him, he was still convinced that whatever happened, he could influence American decisions, that he could apply the brake if necessary, that he was at the crucial spot, the ambassador, with Westmoreland somewhat under his wing and thus under his control. This illusion tempted him, as it would eventually tempt other principals, to believe that they could control events and decisions, determine and check the flow. Which would not turn out to be entirely true: as ambassador he was the senior American only as long as there were no American troops; the moment the troops arrived the play would go to Westmoreland.

But if the question of troop levels bothered Taylor, he was sure of his ability to keep it down. So it was in late November 1964, right before Thanksgiving, before his crucial trip back to Washington, where they would, now that the President was elected in his own right, make some critical decisions, that Taylor gathered his senior staff together in Saigon. It was, thought one witness, a momentous occasion, Max aware of it, somehow more aloof than other men. Standing there, handsome, reserved—somehow those four stars seemed visible even when he was in civies—he had turned to them, this man who had been a charter member of the Never Again Club, and said, “I am going to see the President and I am going to advise him that the way things are going we will need American troops here. I intend to tell him this anyway, but I think it will help, it will make my position stronger, if I could tell the President that all of you here agree as well. I think I should warn you, however, that we may ultimately need as many as one hundred thousand.”

 

The election on November 3, 1964, had gone just the way Johnson wanted, perhaps more so. He had received 43 million votes and Goldwater 27 million; he had 61 percent of the vote, the greatest percentage any American President had ever received. He had the Congress, a gain of thirty-seven seats in the House and with an enormous Democratic majority of sixty-eight Senators in the upper chamber. He had carefully camouflaged the question of Vietnam, removing it from debate, from the public eye and from the journalistic eye (Theodore White’s coverage of the 1964 campaign, The Making of the President, a series known for its thoroughness in backgrounding major issues as well as men, is quite revealing: there are eighteen references to Bill Moyers and fourteen to Kenny O’Donnell, both of whom worked in Johnson’s political process during that period, and no references to Bill Bundy or John McNaughton, who were carrying the burden of the preparations for war. Max Taylor, who as U.S. ambassador was the central figure in Saigon, was mentioned only twice, a reflection not on White’s journalistic ability, but on Johnson’s ability to separate the issue of the war from the political process and to hide the decision making). Yet Vietnam had not gone away; even while the President was in the final, hectic, joyous weeks on the campaign, receiving a kind of adulation rarely accorded a political figure, the bureaucracy was grinding away methodically, coming to its positions. The principals had been ready to bomb at the time of the Bien Hoa attack; the pressure to do something, almost anything, was growing. Almost immediately after the election they moved toward the decision on bombing, and on November 8 Dean Rusk sent a crucial cable to Max Taylor in Saigon saying that the working group was intensively preparing alternatives to the present policy:

 

Our present tendency is to adopt a tougher program both privately and publicly against them. We propose to decide very soon that if there is no change in Hanoi’s position we would start in January a slowly graduating military action on Hanoi, in conjunction with negotiating moves. Such course of action would be less drastic than a course of full attacks. The working group is going to get everything in order.

 

Rusk asked Taylor to comment on the Saigon side, the idea being that it would be in order when the bombing took place, and he had also urged that Taylor impress the South Vietnamese with the importance of holding together. On November 10 Taylor answered Rusk, beginning with a rhetorical question:

 

What is the minimal level of government stability before we go in? I would describe it as maintaining law and order in the cities, securing vital areas from Vietcong attacks, and working effectively with the U.S. We don’t expect such a government for three or four months. It is highly desirable to have this kind of minimum government before accepting the risk inherent in any escalation programs.

 

But, Taylor pointed out, if the government faltered we would still consider attacking the North “to give Pulmotor treatment for a government in extremis.” As for the instability, Taylor reported:

 

I know of no words of eloquence or persuasion that have not been tried in the past. At the moment the problem is not with the government, but with major outside groups such as Buddhists, Catholics and politicians . . .

 

For the Joint Chiefs of Staff it was an unsettling time, just as it was at the other extreme, for the intelligence community. If the intelligence community had a sense that events were getting out of control and that the restraints were being lifted, the Chiefs had something of a similar feeling from an entirely different viewpoint. They thought it was all moving toward their business, their profession, and yet, even as events progressed, as the inevitability of combat neared, they had too little sense of play, too little sense of control. They had assumed that they would move into a larger role, their advice, their professionalism summoned; the civilians around the President moved aside, the Chiefs moved to center stage.

But it did not happen that way; instead they found the President, if anything, more nervous than ever about being with them, as if somehow afraid of giving the impression that he was getting into a shooting war, and thus listening to the military, and influenced by the military (they would learn about Lyndon Johnson that he was far more willing to be seen with them and photographed with them later when he was de-escalating the war and when he needed their coloration to protect him from the right; whereas in 1964 and 1965 the last thing he wanted was the impression that he was under their spell and influence). They found themselves moving closer and closer to a real war, and yet more and more separated from the President, and among some of them grew a sense that this would again be another frustrating bitter war, a civilians’ war, and that they would be isolated once more. They did not feel at ease with the President, largely because they were sure he felt uncomfortable with them; they sensed his distrust, the fact that he wanted to keep them at arm’s length, and his desire to use both McNamara and Taylor to filter them out.

They neither liked nor trusted McNamara (nor McNaughton, McNamara’s chief aide in working with them, who made even less effort to conceal his contempt for them) and they felt that the Secretary was constantly manipulating them, that he did not really represent their position to the President, although he claimed he did. They were sure that he denigrated them, that somehow when he talked with the President they were the enemy, people to be fended off, and that he tried to keep them from seeing the President. (“It’s your constitutional right,” he would tell them, “but if I were you I wouldn’t do it. He doesn’t like you to come over and I can do it better for you.”) So they saw the President only twice in the months right before the President made the decision to escalate. Many of them would come to despise McNamara; as the war progressed and the problems mounted he would symbolize their frustrations, the embodiment of all evil. (In August 1966, at Lynda Johnson and Chuck Robb’s wedding, McNamara approached General Wally Greene, Commandant of the Marine Corps, a man who loathed him, and said that he was puzzled, he was losing his influence with the President and he wondered why. Did General Greene know why? Greene thought to himself, You’re losing your influence because you’ve lied to him and misled him all these years. Greene would feel somewhat the same way about Lyndon Johnson by the end of his tour. Asked by a historian to consent to an interview for the Lyndon Johnson Library, he said yes, if they had asbestos tape in the recorder.) The only general that McNamara had trusted as late as mid-1964 was Max Taylor, a man the other Chiefs did not necessarily trust, feeling that Taylor was not one of them and that he represented Taylor, not them, to the politicians. Earle Wheeler, who had replaced Taylor as Chairman of the JCS, they liked better; he was, they felt, more honest, but they also thought Wheeler was overwhelmed by the problems of the civilians who were always playing politics.

So there was a strong feeling, even as events were moving ahead toward escalation, that they were on the outside looking in. They were General Curtis LeMay of the Air Force, Admiral David McDonald of the Navy, and Wally Greene of the Marine Corps (not a statutory member of the JCS, but an important figure within the group because of his forceful views and because of the fact that the Marines would be the first troops to go), and they were all very hawkish. The Air Force believed in air power and bombing, old-fashioned, unrelieved bombing; the Navy, anxious to show that the carrier still worked and to get its share of roles and missions in what had been largely an Army show up to now, was hawkish; and Greene was hawkish. They were simple men, products of their training, environment and era, and they believed in the old maxims of war. If you had to go to war you used force, and if you used force, you used maximum force. If we were going to bomb, then it had to be saturation bombing of every conceivable target, and they would pick the targets. Obliteration of the enemy.

The closer they got to a decision, however, the more they sensed that it was going to be nervous, inadequate, half-hearted bombing, starting slowly and working their way up. It was exactly the reverse of everything they believed, it signaled the enemy that more was coming, it allowed him to move his resources around and protect himself from bombing, to decrease his losses and increase American ones. All the Chiefs were signed on to a heavy bombing campaign, but LeMay and Greene were the most aggressive; they wanted to hit the irrigation dikes as well. Hit everything there. If it wasn’t worth hitting it wasn’t worth going to war. If you sent troops in, you sent in enough to do the job, 600,000, 700,000 perhaps, and not spaced out over a couple of years, allowing him time to build up his own logistical base, you did it immediately; and you went on a wartime footing, you called up the reserves and you let the nation know it was into something. War, they felt, was a serious thing, and not just the Marines and a few Air Force pilots should have to pay for it. They were in that sense old-fashioned men. Not every one of the Chiefs was quite so hawkish; General Harold K. Johnson, the Army Chief of Staff, was dubious about the whole thing, including the bombing, and to all intents and purposes he had voted against the bombing, raising such doubts for so long that it was in effect a negative vote. Wheeler himself was more modest in what he felt could be done; his own views were probably closer to those of the more hawkish generals, but he also considered himself a representative of the President and committed by the Constitution to understand the President’s problems, even if deep in the recesses of his own heart he did not really sympathize with them.

So at the end of 1964 the Chiefs felt they were left out, that the civilians were making the decisions. The military moved the civilians over in the play—because of the military, the civilians were more hawkish. But they were still civilians, and they held the levers of power, and deep down they were contemptuous of the Chiefs. It was years later, when the decision making on this war was analyzed, that the names and faces of the civilians came easily to mind, but the names and faces of the Chiefs remained a mystery. Was it Earle Wheeler or Harold Johnson at Army? Curtis LeMay or John McConnell at the Air Force? David McDonald or Thomas Moorer at Navy? When General Harold Johnson, Chief of Staff of the Army, was having lunch in February 1965 with two New York Times reporters, he said that he had no great desire to go to war in Vietnam. He knew too well what it would be, Korea all over again, only worse, an enemy using sanctuaries, the United States unable and unwilling to use its full power, all the old frustrations again. He was not anxious for it. Not at all.

If General Johnson was not hawkish, and was worried about another ground war in Asia, his colleague Wally Greene was far more hawkish. In late 1964 Greene was going around to the various service schools, Army and Marine Corps, and talked to the officers, giving a very militant lecture, saying that we should go in there and get the job done, use everything we had. This was the job to do and we ought to do it. It was all very upbeat and at the end he would turn to his audience and ask who was with him, and there would be a roar. A show of hands, he would say, let’s have a show of hands of those who want to go. Lots of hands up. And those who don’t want to go? Always fewer hands. And always, it turned out, the hands of men who had served there recently as advisers.

 

What was most striking about this period as events closed in on the principals was how little exploration there was of the consequences of their route, what might happen if the more pessimistic appraisals were accurate (which were the appraisals of the intelligence community) and what it might do to the country. And in the same sense, there was a refusal to consider what the alternatives to escalation really were. A question that was almost never raised was whether the Vietnamese might or might not be better off under Ho, and to what degree the success of the Vietcong was a reflection of this. The kind of men who might have the doubts, who might at the top level of players have the insight and knowledge of some of the men in the intelligence community had long since been winnowed out. The men who had been politically inclined in their view of the war had also been filtered out. Only one man was left at the top level who had open doubts on Vietnam, and that was George Ball. He had not been a participant in the earlier bureaucratic struggles; he was something of an outsider as far as the Kennedy circle was concerned; he was a man of Europe and he had not considered Vietnam that important. Now, starting in 1964 and through the crucial months of 1965, he argued compellingly, forcefully and prophetically against the escalation, so prophetically that someone reading his papers five years later would have a chilling feeling that they had been written after the fact, not before. Later it would be said of Ball that he was a devil’s advocate, the house dove, a safe dove trotted out by a shrewd President for the record, so that later when the historians came to dissect the record they would find that Johnson had been careful, thoughtful and had listened to all sides. (The devil’s advocate story originated with Jack Valenti in 1964 when word started getting out that Ball was fighting against the policy. It was a deliberate attempt to show that there was no opposition, that it was all one big happy consensus within the government, when in fact Ball was making a strong dissent.)

In arguing against the escalation, Ball was saying that it was doomed. He was alone among the foreign policy people saying this, which did not bother him; he felt he needed only one of Johnson’s domestic people to argue for the domestic side, to say that the American people didn’t want war, that anti-Communism was ebbing as an issue. If only one more voice . . . If. If. He had spent the year working it out on paper, writing long memos, twenty pages or more, giving them to Johnson, feeling this was the best way to approach him rather than seem to debate him in small meetings, and each time he did, Johnson would study the memo all night and then question him very carefully. Johnson would show up the next morning without the memo, but able to cite page and paragraph without looking at it: “George, you say on page fourteen . . .” and “George, here on page eighteen . . .” George Ball had the strong opinion that in late 1964 and early 1965, Lyndon Johnson was a very troubled man.

 

George Ball seemed an unlikely man to make a case for the doves and against the Establishment. He was first and foremost a Europeanist; perhaps more than any man in that government, even more than McGeorge Bundy, he was a man of Europe. His career had always been involved in Europe and in economic matters; he was an American disciple of Jean Monnet. He possessed a singular lack of concern, some of his colleagues in State thought in the early days of the Kennedy Administration, for the problems of Africans and Asians. Those in State who in 1961 and 1962 wanted to move American policy away from the old Europe-oriented colonial-power view of the underdeveloped world felt that Ball was the main antagonist in the Department, the man most likely, for instance, to take the French-Belgian-British-Union Minière view of sustaining the Katanga secession rather than the new-forces people’s view of ending it, thus gaining love and affection elsewhere on the African continent. It was one more irony of the war that George Ball would make his first national reputation—something he had always wanted and had been somewhat denied—as a man who had been prophetic on Asia, since he had been concerned about Vietnam in the first place because he feared (as did many Europeans) that it was going to divert America from its prime concern in the world, which was the European alliance.

Ball was a more iconoclastic man than the Eastern group that Jack Kennedy had gathered around him; he was a Stevenson loyalist, a Democratic party worker, a good New Deal lawyer from Chicago who during the height of the McCarthy period was willing to represent Henry Wallace, a former Vice-President of the United States, when no one in Washington would. Ball had come to Washington with a cold and skeptical eye and a willingness to challenge assumptions. He did not, for instance, consider it a particularly bad thing for most of Africa to go Communist, thinking in fact that it might serve the Communists right to wrestle with the enormous problems of new countries; it might bog them down a little, and perhaps not win them many new friends. The exception, of course, would be an underdeveloped country particularly rich in minerals like the Congo, in which case the attitude of the European patron country might change (and as it changed, so would Ball’s). He had a certain unorthodox view of the world and a lack of preconception, except of course for an almost automatic instinct toward anything which promoted traditional European unity (he was the foremost advocate of the implausible MLF, a cartoonist’s delight and a politician’s nightmare). It was not easy to pin him down in the old split between the Acheson hard-liners and the Stevenson-Bowles faction in the Democratic party; there was a certain allegiance to Stevensonian liberalism, perhaps with a line a little harder and a little less idealistic in foreign policy. (“George,” noted a friend, “has a certain moral framework to his ideas, but he would be absolutely appalled if someone ever said that he did. George is very careful to camouflage his moral concerns—so he can be a better and more realistic player.”)

Ball was a devotee of traditional nineteenth-century power politics; he felt that power is real, something that is almost tangible and has to be dealt with: thus, stay out of Vietnam; do not dissipate power in a situation where it is not applicable; nothing destroys power more than the misuse of it. He liked to look ahead and think of the United States in ten years: his dream was of an alliance of the great industrial powers of the world. There were only a few of them that were truly important, he felt, that had genuine power: a United Europe, one great power with primacy over Africa; the Soviet Union with primacy over Eastern Europe; Japan with primacy over Asia, including China; the United States with primacy over Latin America. If he was more hard-line than Stevenson and more power-oriented, he was less anti-Communist than Acheson, sensing that economic and industrial power rather than Communism and anti-Communism would divide the world. He was more like George Kennan than Acheson (though with his sense of Europe and his strong commitment to stronger links there, he was by 1963 the Acheson candidate for Secretary of State, Acheson being disenchanted with Rusk for not being stronger and more forceful, and sensing that Ball would be a driving force, seizing the initiative and pushing McNamara somewhat into the background).

His pre-election relationship with Kennedy had been marginal, and he had not been in line for a particularly good job. Ball, himself uneasy about entering a somewhat anti-Stevenson Administration, never became a part of the inner Kennedy group; rather, he existed in something of a no man’s land for those first years. He was a man of immense pride, and he regarded much of the Kennedy style and dash with considerable skepticism; those snappy young men running around in the White House did not necessarily strike him as brilliant. He was a man of considerable zest, enthusiasm and egocentrism, and he did not defer to those around him in Washington. He was probably the most traveled man of that group in Washington, the best read, and certainly the most elegant in speech. He was also a good deal more worldly than the others. He wrote well and took a special pride in the language. Where others in high places were fascinated by having subordinates who were doers, activists, finely tuned young men, Ball was quite different. The young men he brought to him were decidedly intellectual; he judged them, it seemed, not so much on their ability to move paper and make phone calls, as on their wit and literary style. He was not in awe of McGeorge Bundy, thinking Bundy too much the pragmatist (Bundy in turn would call Ball “the theologian” because of too much belief, and occasionally irritated by Ball’s independence and individualism, once said to him, “The trouble with you, George, is that you always want to be the piano player”). Part of the tension between them, of course, was that each saw the other as a possible successor to Rusk. He was less than admiring of McNamara, sensing quite early the weaknesses in him, doubts which had been intensified by the Skybolt affair.

A man of genuine intelligence and force, Ball rose at State on his ability, and because he was acceptable to all factions. Independence and ability, rather than being the good corporate man, he felt, should bring success in government, and besides, he simply was not constituted to be a good, obedient corporate figure. He got on particularly well with Rusk during the Kennedy years. The friendship survived remarkably well, despite the vast disagreements over Vietnam. (Years later, when Rusk’s reputation was at its lowest, a reporter, interviewing Ball about the war, would mention Rusk and would be stunned by Ball’s almost vehement answer, “I love Dean Rusk.”) Ball had a sense for Rusk as a human being that few others had in that era. Perhaps since both were outsiders in the Kennedy years, Rusk opened up more to Ball than to others. That, plus a certain gratitude to Rusk for permitting him as Undersecretary to dissent so strongly on Vietnam (“I cannot,” says one member of that Administration, “imagine McNamara letting Ball dissent like that. Nor, for that matter, can I imagine George letting Rusk dissent if Ball had been Secretary and Rusk Undersecretary”). The men could not have been more different. Rusk had a certain skillful knowledge about a vast number of problems, but was relatively thin and not too deep in any of them; Ball was interested in few things, but when he became involved in a subject—Vietnam, the Kennedy Round tariff negotiations, Cyprus—he would tear into it, break it down into component parts, master it, overwhelm it. Rusk served as Secretary of State with an overpowering sense of being a civil servant, a superclerk, an attitude which placed strong limits on his individual rights, whereas Ball, with a fierce sense of his own ability and prerogatives, felt that he was there to say what he believed. Rusk seemed ill at ease with power; Ball sought it avidly.

He was a strong and forceful figure in all those years; in an Administration where too many of the figures were corporate men or gilded clerks, Ball was something surprisingly unique and old-fashioned, an independent man. He had enjoyed a good relationship with Jack Kennedy, and without demeaning himself at all, he enjoyed perhaps an even better one with Lyndon Johnson. He had come away impressed with the force and sense of vision of Johnson, the desire to commit human energy to human good, the almost naÏve belief in the powers of education. As Johnson slipped into his war Presidency, Ball was sometimes reminded of a story about Woodrow Wilson arriving for his inaugural, getting off at Union Station on a rainy day, talking to a friend about the forthcoming years, Wilson saying that he started his Presidency that day; all his life he had prepared himself for it, for the real problems of domestic reform. Then pausing and adding, “Wouldn’t it be a great irony if I had to spend my time dealing with war.” He liked Johnson and sensed the forces at work in the man, and he liked his job, and even when he made his dissent on Vietnam it was done not as an adversary of the court, but as a friend; there was no threat of resignation. George Ball had worked too long and too hard to get where he was to stomp out in anger. Ball believed he was doing the wise thing, and he did not think that in the long run it would necessarily hurt his chances of becoming Secretary of State. He was at ease on the inside; the harsh criticism which later fell upon the architects of the war was completely alien to him. In 1971 when the Pentagon Papers were published and Ball’s dissents were made public he was very low-key about it, he played down his wisdom, if anything he seemed the major defender of his old antagonists.

Ball had been a member of the Strategic Survey team which studied the effects of the Allied bombing on Germany during World War II, a study which revealed how surprisingly ineffective the bombing had been, that it had rallied German morale and spurred industrial production. Since bombing had not worked against a major industrialized state like Germany, which abounded in tangible targets, Ball had immediate doubts about Vietnam (doubts which were not assuaged by conversations with his friend Thomas Finletter, Secretary of the Air Force during the Korean War, and an early Vietnam dove who had pointed out the limits of bombing during the Korean War); Vietnam was after all a peasant nation with very limited industrialization. In addition to his doubts about bombing, Ball had doubts about the war in general. He had served as France’s American legal counsel during the fifties, years which had given him a deep and continuing feeling of uneasiness about entering the Indochinese swamps as well as a sense of distrust for any Western military estimates from Saigon and somehow a belief that there were always more of them (the enemy) than any Westerner ever figured. He had watched the French military over eight years, always asking for a little more matériel, a little more time, and always running into more Vietminh. To him, the war was unwinnable, or at least it was for a civilized government, and it might have profound domestic consequences; the French democracy had almost collapsed under its weight. Ball did not foresee the full extent of the negative fallout of the war, that it would drive out the President and virtually destroy the Democratic party as an operative institution, sharpen generational and racial conflict in the country (alienating the best of a generation from the institutions they were by tradition supposed to enter and serve), but in a more vague sense he knew that if something like this was tried and failed, the consequences would be very serious. In addition, Ball, more than anyone else in official Washington, sensed that once started, the course had a certain inevitability to it: each day it would be more difficult to bail out; the idea of options was all an illusion. Years later he would tell friends that two things had done incalculable damage during the 1964 and 1965 period; the first was the ease with which a democratic government moved into covert operations and let its highest men become stained by participation in such operations; the second worst thing was the idea that there were options which could be kept open. Quite the reverse was true, he would say. Events were always changing, inaction closed off alternatives; when events were going badly, time worked against you, and when events were going well you did not need options. Thus the time when there had been the most choices was in 1946; the time when there were the fewest, in 1965. He was an insider with something of an outsider’s viewpoint in 1965, and one of the reasons he had not been in awe of the Kennedy people was that for all their flash and reputation he considered himself, by his own estimates, wiser and more a man of the world than they. And he was right.

Bothered by the direction of the war, and by the attitudes he found around him in the post-Tonkin fall of 1964, and knowing that terrible decisions were coming up, Ball began turning his attention to the subject of Vietnam. He knew where the dissenters were at State, and he began to put together his own network, people with expertise on Indochina and Asia who had been part of the apparatus Harriman had built, men like Allen Whiting, a China watcher at INR; these were men whose own work was either being rejected or simply ignored by their superiors. Above all, Ball was trusting his own instincts on Indochina. The fact that the others were all headed the other way did not bother him; he was not that much in awe of them, anyway. He would, knowing there was a meeting the next day, stay up all night working on a paper, questioning the men around him, going through books on Indochina, and then he would write and rewrite his papers, and have his staff play the part of the opposition as he went through the dry run. And he would go off to battle, taking genuine delight in it, and his aides could sense the excitement, the adrenaline was really pumping. He would often return, not depressed, but almost exhilarated, Johnson was listening. He was getting to him. We’re getting through, he would say, and then he would start talking about the next paper. To him, Johnson was the most sympathetic man in the room, a real listener, and he had the feeling that Johnson was not so much ill prepared for foreign affairs as he felt that he was ill prepared, made insecure by all these intellectuals around him. Even Ball himself. “George, you’re an intellectual too,” Johnson would say. “I know it, and you know it.”

Since Ball had not been in on any of the earlier decision making, he was in no way committed to any false hopes and self-justification; in addition, since he had not really taken part in the turnaround against Diem, he was in no way tainted in Johnson’s eyes. While some of the others, implicated in the origins of the commitment, were either psychologically involved (in the case of Taylor) in trying to make their estimates come true, or (in the case of McNamara) having miscalculated earlier and thus feeling they must protect the President and share the responsibility (a belief which sucked many good men farther into the quagmire, and would help account in part for the peculiar behavior of Robert McNamara), Ball was freed from the mistakes of the past. He had, at the time of the original Kennedy commitment, warned that 15,000 men would become 300,000; that was his own prediction, and it was not a bad one.

And so now he began, first by writing a memo to Rusk, McNarama and Bundy expressing his doubts, and expecting that Bundy would pass the memo on to the President. But to Ball’s surprise the memo did not reach Johnson, so the next time Ball passed his memo to Bill Moyers, the bright young assistant of Johnson’s who showed his own doubts on Vietnam largely by encouraging other doubters to speak and by trying to put doubters in touch with one another. Moyers passed the memo to the President, who encouraged it, and so, beginning in the early fall of 1964, Ball emerged as the voice of dissent. Ball argued that the ground troops would not work, that the United States would repeat the French experience, soon costing us what few friends we had in the South, that the situation “would in the world’s eyes approach that of France in the 1950s.” But he also argued vigorously against the bombing, saying that if the United States used air power, Hanoi would feel the need to respond, and failing to have air power, they would respond with increased ground forces. He cited U.S. intelligence estimates that if Hanoi chose to, it could infiltrate two divisions through Laos and the demilitarized zone in two months. What he was in fact doing was systematically compiling all the evidence that the intelligence community, the real experts on Southeast Asia, had compiled, all the stuff which normally had been filtered out, and was using it at the level of the principals.

A copy of the Policy Planning study which Robert Johnson had put together was smuggled to him. He was in effect choosing to see that which everyone had decided not to see. He argued that the bombing would not, as its advocates were claiming, have very much effect on South Vietnamese morale. Rather, he said, it might affect the upper level of the government, and even that rather briefly and impermanently; it would never take root in the country. While the others kept talking about South Vietnam as if the government and the people were somehow linked, for Ball, South Vietnam was not even a country. As for the effectiveness of the bombing on morale, he was suspicious; he cited a post-Tonkin CIA study made by Vietnamese-speaking Americans which showed that of about two dozen Vietnamese questioned, all but one disapproved (the one being an American-trained airborne sergeant). He denied all the peripheral arguments, that we had to stand in Vietnam because if we did not, our allies in Europe would be nervous and unsure of us (an argument which McGeorge Bundy was to become fond of). He submitted, quite accurately, that this was the official view, that our allies formally said things like this, but the reality was quite different, even among the Germans: they did not consider the South Vietnamese to be the equal of themselves in legitimacy, and the real fear in Europe was that the United States was going to be diverted from its primary concern in Europe by less important adventures in Asia. And to Ball, the arguments of Mac Bundy and Taylor that we must bomb to shore up the morale of the South Vietnamese because the government was so frail that it would otherwise collapse was foolishness of a high order. It was all the more reason not to commit the power and reputation of the United States to something that weak. The South Vietnamese were, he noted, allegedly a people about to be overrun by their sworn enemies, and if they really cared about the freedoms we were so anxious to protect, why did we have to make a gesture like this to convince them to save themselves?

He looked farther down the road, warning that we were essentially dealing from a position of weakness despite what we thought, and perhaps almost most important of all, he challenged that greatest of American assumptions, that somehow, whatever we did, the other side would lie down and accept it. He pointed out that we did not necessarily control the rate, the intensity and the scale of the war. The enemy, he noted, was not entirely without the means of response. In October 1964 he had written in answer to McNamara and Mac Bundy: “It is the nature of escalation that each move passes the option to the other side, while at the same time the party which seems to be losing will be tempted to keep raising the ante. To the extent that the response to a move can be controlled, that move is probably ineffective. If the move is effective it may not be possible to control or accurately anticipate the response. Once on the tiger’s back we cannot be sure of picking the place to dismount.” Here he was prophetic again, as Johnson, once committed, would find himself in a terrible squeeze, the military pushing relentlessly for more force, for escalations which they claimed would end it quickly; yet each of these moves would seem to bring in the Chinese. Thus nothing that could be truly effective against the North Vietnamese could be tried without the fear of a much larger war which Johnson wished to avoid. The things which could be done against Hanoi without bringing in the Chinese were always, accordingly, ineffective.

So Ball made his dissent, and he made it powerfully, and if he was not changing the men around him he was certainly affecting the President, touching those doubts which already existed in the President’s mind. Ball was making the President very unhappy, and thus he was slowing down the process. Was the President waffling? Might he turn back? Sometime in the fall of 1964 Joe Alsop feared that he was, and set out to help clarify the way for the President. Hearing that George Ball was making a major dissent on Vietnam, Alsop wrote on November 23 that Ball’s “knowledge of Asia could be comfortably contained in a fairly small thimble.” What Ball was not telling the President, even though he was European-minded, was, Alsop wrote:

 

The Ball memoranda further assert that the trouble in Vietnam is damaging the United States in Europe without bothering to note that a gigantic United States failure in Vietnam will virtually give the European game to General Charles de Gaulle. . . . A majority of President Johnson’s chief advisers are certainly on the do-something side and the more able and courageous appear to favor doing something pretty drastic.

 

Alsop, still uneasy about the lack of decision and possible portents, wrote on December 23:

 

There are plenty of discouraged Americans in Saigon who think the President is consciously prepared to accept defeat here. They believe that he cannot bring himself to take the measures needed to avert defeat, and they therefore suspect that he is simply planning to wait until the end comes and then to disclaim responsibility. But since the President has the means to avert defeat he cannot disclaim responsibility. It will be his defeat as well as a defeat for the American people and for millions of unhappy Vietnamese. It does not seem credible that Lyndon B. Johnson intends to accept and preside over such a defeat. But the alternatives open to him are narrowing very fast.

 

It was another example of something that Alsop did brilliantly; he was an odd man, sophisticated, talented, arrogant; his real talent and perhaps his real love lay not in writing about politics but about archaeology. If his political writing did not last long and did not read well years after, it was not a fault of intellect, it was something else: it was that Alsop was a man of Washington and its power, and he wrote to the power play of the day, he wrote not to enlighten but to effect, to move the principal players on decisions like this. And in that sense there was a brilliance, for he had an unerring sense for the raw nerve of each player, for knowing how to couch his arguments in terms which would make them most effective, not on the general readership but on the individual himself. He knew intuitively that the thing Johnson feared most was that history would write that he had been weak when he should have been strong, that Lyndon Johnson had not stood up when it was time to be counted, that his manhood might be inadequate; and in late 1964 and early 1965 he played on that theme masterfully; the Alsop columns on Johnson were part of a marvelous continuing psychodrama. For instance, on December 30, again noting that Johnson might be too weak to take the necessary steps, Alsop wrote:

 

The unpleasantness of making the required effort does not need underlining. But it must certainly be underlined that the catastrophe now being invited will also be remarkably unpleasant. For Lyndon Johnson, Vietnam is what the second Cuban crisis was for John F. Kennedy. If Mr. Johnson ducks the challenge we shall learn by experience about what it would have been like if Kennedy had ducked the challenge in October, 1962 . . .

 

And so there it was, posed again: Did Johnson have as much manhood as Jack Kennedy? In Washington, Walter Lippmann would read those columns with a sick feeling and tell friends that if Johnson went to war in Vietnam, at least 50 percent of the responsibility would be Alsop’s; at the White House, Johnson, who never liked or trusted Alsop (later, when the latter was virtually the only columnist in town still supporting the war, he would read the columns and rage against Alsop for closing off his options, for trapping him in, and he was deeply suspicious that the Bundys, who were old Alsop friends, were the sources of the leaks), was very angry about the columns, but he was not unaffected by them. They posed the question as he knew it might be posed out in the hinterland, as he, Lyndon Johnson, might pose it himself against a political adversary.

 

While the bureaucracy in Washington was working on escalation, Taylor was negotiating the Saigon mission to virtually the same position: it would be bombing, but limited bombing.

The Bill Bundy working group, the people immediately under the principals, had formulated the policy in the late fall, and their proposals were discussed at the late-November meetings. The group had been instructed to come up with various options, but those concerning negotiation had been moved aside, and the options were all ones of force (there had been one proposal of the civilians, which was a fraudulent use of force, and was based on the instability in Saigon and the fear of McCarthyism here at home. It was to launch a short, intense bombing campaign, show that it had no effect on the South, then to blame the South for its own instabilities and to get out. It was in effect a flash of power and a retreat. The Chiefs immediately vetoed it).

The Bundy group had presented the President with three options. Option A was light bombing, more reprisals and more use of covert operations, essentially more of the same with light bombing thrown in. Option B was the Chiefs’ suggestion, minus the dikes—very heavy massive bombing right from the start, including the Phuc Yen airfield at Hanoi and cutting the rail links with China. And Option C, the moderate solution (it was typical of the bureaucracy to present its predetermined position by putting one option to the left of it and one to the right of it, thus it was recommending the just and moderate position), the slow squeeze, which allowed the United States to put increasing pressure on Hanoi while “keeping the hostage alive” while still permitting it to pull back if it wished to. This was the McNamara position, the moderate one, designed to give the Chiefs something of what they wanted, yet give the civilians the opportunity to control it, to turn it down, turn it up, turn it off; it was the solution which allowed the civilians presumably the most control. One reason why the Chiefs, who did not like it and believed it was a false use of force, did not fight it more vigorously was their assumption that if it failed, which it probably would, the civilians would have to turn to more and more force. The civilians always thought they were smarter than the military and understood them better than the military understood the civilians; the reverse was true, in fact; the military always read the civilians better. The minimal force necessary to keep the Chiefs on board had been worked out between McNamara and the Chiefs, and the architect of it was that most curious combination of human being and bureaucrat, the divided man, John McNaughton, who was quite capable of doing the most precise kind of planning and paper work for the bombing and then coming back, and almost with pleasure, telling a few chosen aides that it had not yet jelled, the President had not yet bought it, Johnson was still referring to it as “this bombing bullshit.”

It also was a more political kind of pressure; it allowed more possibilities for negotiation, and this was an argument McNamara liked. The JCS position did not allow flexibility, and with its greater use of force might bring too great and too premature an international pressure for negotiation, whereas the moderate solution, McNamara believed, deflected pressure. It was more civilized, it would be easier to fend off both friends and enemies at the UN, and besides, it was more political in its aim, which was to get the North Vietnamese to the table. So even as the government seemed to be turning unanimously toward bombing, it was in fact very far from unanimous. The civilians wanted the bombing almost as a feint, a card to play; the military essentially wanted it as an instrument of war, a lever of force, an end in itself. Thus the seeming unanimity on bombing was a very thin conditional agreement of very different men who would momentarily come together for sometimes very conflicting reasons.

What was significant about the proposals the Bundy group presented to the President was that all three of them included bombing; there was really no political option at all. What was also significant was that the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs was recommending and pressing options that went markedly against the beliefs and instincts of the men below him and of the intelligence community. Thus the man in charge of political estimates for an area was going ahead even though the political expertise was largely against him, particularly since the intelligence estimates within his working group were, if anything, seemingly more oriented toward force and the success of force than they were in reality, the actual view being somewhat clouded and compromised by the presence of the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) people, who were not about to say blandly that bombing would not work. In the final recommendation to the working group, the experts forcefully challenged the Rostow thesis that Hanoi would succumb to the bombing in order to protect its new and hard-won industrial bases. It said:

 

We have many indications that the Hanoi leadership is acutely and nervously aware of the extent to which North Vietnam’s transportation system and industrial plant is vulnerable to attack. On the other hand North Vietnam’s economy is overwhelmingly agricultural and, to a large extent, decentralized in a myriad of more or less economically self-sufficient villages. Interdiction of imports and extensive destruction of transportation facilities and industrial plants would cripple D.R.V. [Democratic Republic of (North) Vietnam] industry. These actions would also seriously restrict D.R.V. military capabilities and would degrade, though to a lesser extent, Hanoi’s capabilities to support guerrilla warfare in South Vietnam and Laos. We do not believe that such actions would have a crucial effect on the daily lives of the overwhelming majority of the North Vietnam population. We do not believe that attacks on industrial targets would so greatly exacerbate current economic difficulties as to create unmanageable control problems. It is reasonable to infer that the D.R.V. leaders have a psychological investment in the work of reconstruction they have accomplished over a decade. Nevertheless they would probably be willing to suffer some damage to the country in the course of a test of wills with the U.S. over the course of events in South Vietnam.

 

Thus, even with the sweeteners thrown in for DIA—the idea that the military pressure would hurt them more than the CIA and INR people believed—it was a clear warning against bombing. Nonetheless, it had no effect, other than feeding Ball’s dissent.

If the Washington bureaucracy had decided on a course and veiled serious discord in an aura of consensus, the matching part, Taylor representing the mini-organism of American Saigon, was surprisingly similar. He again represented what seemed like a consensus for modified bombing (starting with low-level flights in Washington’s Option A and then switching after thirty days to Option C, a relatively similar conclusion), but it was a false consensus, and he was, like his counterparts in Washington, playing down the estimated North Vietnamese reaction that his own intelligence community was giving him. He was discussing possible U.S. actions, and more by silence than anything else, implying that the North Vietnamese response might be somewhat different from what he was being warned (he would soon go further and deliberately downplay pessimistic estimates of his intelligence people rather than frighten Washington off a course he wanted). But his consensus was thin; his top CIA man, Pier de Silva, thought the bombing futile; his top military aide, William C. Westmoreland, did not think the bombing would be militarily effective. He thought the real problem was in the South, and thought it would take ground troops. Yet Westmoreland was willing to go along for the political reasons specified by Taylor, who was the chief political officer. Westmoreland was also willing to go along because he wanted troops and he sensed that this was simply one last bench mark on the way to the inevitable decision to send troops, indeed the troops that would be needed to provide security for the air bases would be the beginning of an American combat commitment. So though Taylor seemed to bring unanimity, much of it was a sense of signing on despite great doubts or signing on for quite different and unexpressed reasons.

 

The two sides were supposed to mesh in the late-November meetings. They did not. Lyndon Johnson was still not satisfied that bombing was the answer. Rusk did not doubt the necessity of holding South Vietnam and denying it to the Chinese and Hanoi (which was his view of the origins of the pressure), but he was not sure bombing was the answer, nor did he think it would be easy to turn it on and off as the proponents argued. Johnson was on the fence, and Rusk, uneasy in his own right about the bombing, was waiting to see which way the President wanted to go. Johnson’s own fairly strong political instincts had been stirred by Ball’s dissent, and he was discovering that despite the seeming unanimity of his principals, their belief and confidence in what they were proposing were not exactly convincing. Under questioning it developed that they were proposing it more because they did not have anything else to offer. So it was not entirely reassuring. Of the principals, McNamara and Taylor seemed the most confident, and McNamara, who had a remarkable ability to present answers in terms a superior wanted, was arguing that bombing was not final, it was political, and finally, at a relatively low cost; at the very least it would buy time. There, that was reassuring: it was not final, not irreversible and it bought time (for a President who clearly did not want to make decisions and who wanted to buy time). The President, who had earlier seemed ready to go on Vietnam once the election was over, was now becoming skittish again; he told associates that the war was in the South. Ball was making him nervous, and the turmoil in Saigon was making him uneasy. How could he bomb the North when some colonel or corporal in a tank might take Saigon the next day? he asked. Couldn’t Taylor make it clear to those people that the President wanted to help them, the United States was prepared to play its role, but not unless they got together? Why couldn’t they get together? he asked.

So the Taylor mission to Washington, which was supposed to sew everything up, did not; the decisions were still open. Events were closing them down, but the President was unhappy about the trap he found himself in. He was still looking for a way out; if Ball was not changing the direction of the play he was slowing it down. And there would be moments, when after a particular dissent by Ball, the President would turn to him and say, “All right, George, if you can pull me a rabbit out of a hat, go ahead,” meaning trying to settle it without losing.

As it got darker, the play became more tightly held in Washington, with the bottom-ranking players being Bill Bundy and McNaughton. There were little signs that it was getting tougher: Bill Bundy went to the Council on Foreign Relations and gave a talk on Vietnam; he seemed to say that there would not be a wider war, and then, when the Council sent the notes on his speech back down to Washington to be cleared, they had to be rather heavily edited. The line was hardening, the winds were blowing in a different way, it was clearer and clearer that they were going to go North. Little signs. A high State Department official who was working on one policy paper and trying to get a drift of the play was by chance invited to the White House in December. He found the President surprisingly relaxed; stories of his boyhood came flashing out, stories of the Senate, slipping it by them, all punctuated by colorful language, and then suddenly, knowing why the State Department man was there, slipping in the phrase very quickly, as though it were almost unimportant, “Well, I guess we have to touch up those North Vietnamese a little,” and then he was back again regaling his audience, all in the vernacular.

 

Allies were being summoned to sympathize with, if not join, the American commitment to Vietnam. The least sympathetic of all was Charles De Gaulle, who was opposed to American policy for a vast variety of reasons, the first being that it would not work, and the second, that he saw a chance, as America moved back from Saigon, for a greater role for France in linking up with underdeveloped countries, an alternative for the underdeveloped world between the American, the Soviet and the Chinese possibilities. De Gaulle, who had been through the whole bitter thing before, had seen what it had done to France; and if he was not the fondest American friend in the world, he was nevertheless wary of seeing a Western power once more mired down in a guerrilla war. As early as 1963 he had begun to advocate neutralism for South Vietnam, and he had also discussed an American withdrawal. It was a suggestion which Washington regarded as being distinctly unfriendly and representing, rather than French good will toward the United States, French designs to re-establish primacy in this area. Rusk had been particularly uneasy about the specter of neutralism, and with the support of the mission in Saigon, believed that it would tend to weaken the resolve of the Vietnamese government. So in December 1964, Johnson dispatched George Ball to talk with De Gaulle, to try and win him over on our side, and failing that, to make him at least a little more sympathetic to the U.S. mission in Saigon, and to give him a sense of which way the play was going.

In sending Ball, the President had of course chosen the foremost dissenter within his government, thus following a familiar formula of using a dissenter to speak for the policy. It would tie Ball more to the policy, even if his dissent failed, and it would lessen the unlikely possibility for Johnson that Ball might stomp out of the government in anger over the policy. So as far as Johnson was concerned, he was the ideal man to make the representations to De Gaulle, which he did, reflecting the Rusk and to a lesser degree the Johnson view of the reasons for going ahead.

Ball told De Gaulle that in the past both the United States and France had wanted a viable South Vietnam, but since it was becoming increasingly difficult to sustain the government in the South “within a reasonable time,” the United States might have to take action against the North, even though this might entail the risk of involving the Chinese in the war. The United States did not want to do that, Ball said, but Hanoi would have to learn that we were serious. Though some people talked about a diplomatic solution, the United States had grave reservations. Perhaps some other time, but not now; it was all too fragile in the South, and even talk of negotiation might undermine the South Vietnamese government and lead to its collapse and a quick Vietcong victory. As for negotiating with the North Vietnamese and the Chinese, there were limits there, and they were not known for keeping their word. The United States believed in talking with the Communists, but only when it had some balance of force there, enough to make them want to talk. Right now the U.S. position was too weak. Thus the United States would have to make a stand, it had to teach the Chinese Communists to stop pushing their neighbors around; the United States considered China to be similar to the Soviet Union in 1917, primitive, and aggressive toward its neighbors. With this Ball finished; he had given the pure Rusk line, a view that he could not in his own heart disagree with more.

De Gaulle, in turn, told Ball he did not agree with anything he had said. China was in no way comparable to the Soviet Union as a power, even the Soviet Union of 1917. It was a nation without real power; it lacked the real base for it, the military, industrial and intellectual resources which even 1917 Russia had. It would have to consolidate its own power and would not be aggressive for a long time. As for Vietnam, he said he understood the problem; France had once held the same illusion and it had been very painful. It would be nice if the U.S. position was correct, but he felt that he knew something about Vietnam; it was a hopeless place. He was obliged to say that he did not believe the United States could win, that the more it put in militarily, the more the population would turn against it. The United States could not force its position by power; rather, it must negotiate. Ball said that this would not be understood in South Vietnam, that if the United States approved a cease-fire, Ho Chi Minh would exploit it. But De Gaulle interrupted him: it was hopeless, and France would not be part of any escalation; the United States would fight alone. Vietnam was a filthy place to fight, France knew only too well. But, he added, as the meeting broke up, France would be glad to serve as a friend any time the United States was looking for negotiations. (In a blunter sequel to this, in June 1966, the Administration sent Arthur Goldberg, once again the dissenter within the government, to France, giving Goldberg strict instructions to tell De Gaulle the American position, but he was under no circumstances to ask De Gaulle’s opinion, instructions which fazed neither Goldberg nor, of course, De Gaulle. So Goldberg gave once more the complicated and fragile rationale for American policy, and when he was through, De Gaulle smiled and said, “Are you finished?” “Yes,” answered Goldberg. “No one has asked me my opinion, but there are some things I would like to say. First of all, you must pull out,” the French leader said. “But won’t it go Communist?” Goldberg asked, playing his part. “Yes, it will go Communist,” answered De Gaulle. “But isn’t that against us?” said Goldberg. “Yes,” answered De Gaulle. “But it will be a messy kind of Communism.” A hint of racism, Goldberg thought. “Not a Russian or even a Chinese kind of Communism. An Asian kind. It will be more of a problem for them than for us.”)

 

December 1964 was not a happy month for the man who had dispatched George Ball, Lyndon Johnson. There were of course moments of euphoria, when he loved being President as he had enjoyed the landslide. When he was at his most expansive he was as sure as the men around him that the situation in Vietnam could be dealt with, that the men around him were every bit as wise as their biographies claimed, that in fact they knew more about Vietnam than he did, that their confidence was real. He had unleashed the bureaucracy during the entire year; now it had crystallized its positions and he was having trouble keeping up with it. The men around him were responding to what they thought he wanted (plus their own instinct to use force), and he was responding to what they wanted. But he was never at ease, he sensed that it was never going to be as simple as they said, and there were darker moments when the doubts did not go away. He told them to stop the provocative naval acts around the North because, as he said, “I have every right in the world to let Lady Bird and Lynda Bird walk in that park out there”—and he pointed at Jefferson Park—“without fear of being mugged. But that doesn’t mean I have to send them out there unescorted at four in the morning.” And he could complain to those who came to see him, liberals mostly, that all the Chiefs did was come in every morning and tell him, “Bomb, bomb, bomb,” and then come back in the afternoon and tell him again, “Bomb, bomb, bomb.”

He was beginning to wrestle with himself, aware of what escalation might do to his domestic programs, wary of the military’s promises, knowing that it might be easier to start than to finish, that it was his record and his Presidency which were at stake, and aware also of the charge that might be made against him if things went sour—that he was soft, and that he had lost a country. His enemies, he knew, were lying in wait out there to turn on him if he went wrong on Vietnam, to destroy him for other reasons. What good would it do, he told friends, not to spend American resources on the war if you lost the war, and in losing the war, lost the Congress? Yet knowing also that if he went ahead he might lose the Congress, too, and might lose the Great Society. He would say to friends, talking about his dilemma, “If we get into this war I know what’s going to happen. Those damn conservatives are going to sit in Congress and they’re going to use this war as a way of opposing my Great Society legislation. People like Stennis and Gross. They hate this stuff, they don’t want to help the poor and the Negroes but they’re afraid to be against it at a time like this when there’s been all this prosperity. But the war, oh, they’ll like the war. They’ll take the war as their weapon. They’ll be against my programs because of the war. I know what they’ll say, they’ll say they’re not against it, not against the poor, but we have this job to do, beating the Communists. We beat the Communists first, then we can look around and maybe give something to the poor.” It was, said a man who was with him that night, eerie listening to him speak, like being with a man who has a premonition of his own death.

 

So in January it still hung in the balance; the President had decided but was unwilling to put his decision into practice. But there seemed to be consensus: If the South could get itself together they would probably bomb the North; it would be a smaller, almost covert bombing at first and then it would move into the Bundy-McNaughton slow squeeze; the paper work should go ahead, Bill Bundy should start notifying the various interested allies, and Max Taylor should get the South Vietnamese in line, letting them know that if they could shape up we would bomb the North to help them. And so the bombing decision seemed to have been made, made but not committed, and it was one of the marks of the breakdown in the entire decision-making process that because the bombing was going to be an instrument to prevent the use of combat troops, to win the war cheaply, to flash American technology and will without really using them, the decision was a piecemeal one. Lyndon Johnson liked slicing the salami thin, he could slice a decision as thin as any man around, so he and his decision makers sliced this one very thin: they made the decision on the bombing, and only on the bombing, in a vacuum. The subject of the troops, of the inevitability of them if the bombing failed, was rarely discussed. Even the subject of troops for perimeter defense was barely mentioned. It did not come up for a variety of reasons; for one thing it was not a subject that Lyndon Johnson wanted to hear. It made him very uneasy and unhappy and so he did not encourage it, nor did the people around him, like Mac Bundy (who did not necessarily fully understand the inevitability of it). As for the men who should have known better—that one step might well lead to the other, that there was a Rubicon and that with bombing they had to assume that they were crossing it—men like Taylor and the Chiefs, they were in no hurry to bring it up and make the President live with it. They sensed that if the full magnitude of each decision hit him, that the bombing decision might well be a bombing-troop decision, then they might be somewhat less likely to get the first go-ahead (in Taylor’s case, talking about troops meant not getting the bombing, which he wanted, instead of the troops, which he did not want; in the case of the other Chiefs, it meant not getting more bombing and more troops). The entire bombing decision was complete and full as far as bombing went, and almost totally unrealistic as far as the true implications went, the implications of getting into a real war. There was an unofficial decision on the part of the principals not to look at the real darkness, to protect the President from what might be considered unpleasant realities, not to ask the hard questions. (If anything there was almost a deliberate attempt to avoid thinking and looking at the larger consequences, and above all of the likelihood of the North Vietnamese reaction, which was quite predictable. In Saigon in early 1965 the CIA completed two massive intelligence estimates on the situation in Vietnam and the possibilities for the future. The man in charge of them for the Agency was an experienced analyst who had spent more than ten years working on the country and who had been consistently prophetic about events. Now in his estimates he predicted that the Vietcong, and in particular the North Vietnamese, had an enormous capacity to escalate if the United States bombed. Not only that, but on the basis of everything known about them in the past, their responses to Western pressure, it was likely that they would use that capability. These estimates were sent back to Washington as part of an overall U.S. mission report, but by the time they left the office of Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, the paragraphs which told of the North Vietnamese response were missing. Thus in effect the mission was in the position of asking for bombing, while concealing comparable estimates that this would expand the war. It was said that an unexpurgated version went back to the CIA.)

So instead of returning to Saigon with a completed bombing package, Taylor had returned with instructions in which Johnson complained about the lack of progress in pacification and instability in the government. The President said that he wanted a “stable and effective” government in Saigon before he moved against the North; this was necessary in the South, he wrote, even if Hanoi cut off its aid to the Vietcong. “Since action against North Vietnam is contributory, not central,” he continued, providing a revealing insight into how the government really regarded the problem, “we should not incur the risks that are inherent in such an expansion of hostilities until there is a government which is capable of handling the serious problems involved in such an expansion and of exploiting the favorable effects which may be anticipated from an end of support aid directed by North Vietnam.” The President then said the United States would be willing to use minor bombing raids in the Laotian area and sea patrols against the North while the Vietnamese pulled themselves together and stabilized their government. Then, once the government was stable (“firmly in control”) and in command, the United States would be willing to start steadily mounting air attacks on the North, and “the U.S. mission is authorized to initiate such planning now with the GVN [Government of (South) Vietnam] with the understanding that the U.S. Government does not commit itself now to any form of execution of such plans.”

This explained Taylor’s fury two weeks later when Nguyen Khanh and the young Turks, including Air Marshal Ky, dissolved the High National Council, a group of civilian elders, and made a large number of political arrests during the night. The timing could not have been more inauspicious: Washington was finally getting itself revved up; the exact plans for the bombing were being determined; Bill Bundy had flown to New Zealand and Australia to alert them to the fact that the United States intended to bomb (the New Zealand government answered that it did not think it would break Hanoi’s will and thought that it would in fact heighten infiltration); Harold Wilson had been briefed (and received the news with less than enthusiasm). Everything finally was falling into place.

All it took was for Max Taylor to hold the line in Saigon to keep the Vietnamese military in line, to get the surface stability which Washington required. And once again the Vietnamese had blown it; they aided their enemies in Washington who said they were not worth American lives, and who said they were not a government, and not a nation and not worth fighting for. Taylor was in a rage; they had, he felt, gone against him personally; he had given his word to President Johnson that he could handle them, provide the stability, thus it was a personal insult. He summoned the young generals and lined them up against the wall in his office. When they tried to sit down, he did not permit it, and they were dressed down like West Point cadets. They were lieutenants at best, these young kids, running around playing at governing a country. All the veneer, the idea that they were really sovereign, had disappeared and he treated them as he really felt, that they were junior officers in a kids’ army, and he read them out. “Do all of you understand English? I told you all clearly at General Westmoreland’s dinner we Americans were tired of coups. Apparently I wasted my words. Maybe this is because something is wrong with my French because you evidently didn’t understand. I made it clear that all the military plans which I know you would like to carry out are dependent on governmental stability. Now you have made a real mess. We cannot carry you forever if you do things like this. Who speaks for this group? Do you have a spokesman? . . .” (The idea of Taylor thinking he could speak like this to the Hanoi leadership is inconceivable and shows the difference between the American view of the South and the North. Air Marshal Ky was furious, later telling friends, “He must have thought we were cadets. I’ve never been talked to in my life like that. I wouldn’t let my father talk to me like that.”)

Although they were warned that America would stand for no more, that they could not toy with a great power like this, that American support was becoming more difficult, they did not believe it. They had already learned that the worse things got and the more the Americans threatened them with disengagement, the more the Americans coughed up; that they had sunk the hook deeper into the Americans than the Americans had sunk it into them. As if to convince them that for all the fury, it would be business as usual, Taylor said as they were leaving, “You people have broken a lot of dishes and now we have to see how we can straighten out this mess.”

In spite of Taylor’s invectives, it had not been completely one-sided; they had talked back to him as well. Later that day a high CIA official came across one of the young officers, General Nguyen Chanh Thi, who seemed to be in a jovial mood, an enormous grin on his face. Why the big grin? the CIA man asked Thi. “Because this is one of the happiest days of my life. Today I told the American ambassador that he could not dictate to us.” It was a small sad footnote to the South; the only way genuine anti-Communist nationalism could surface was in talking back to the American ambassador.

 

The Brinks Hotel was another American symbol in Saigon. It was a bachelor officers’ quarters, an American world that Vietnamese need not enter unless of course it was to clean the rooms or to cook, or to provide some other form of service. It stood high over Saigon and its poverty and its hovels, a world of Americans eating American food, watching American movies, and just to make sure that there was a sense of home, on the roof terrace there was always a great charcoal grill on which to barbecue thick American steaks flown in especially to that end. This lovely American symbol was named not for the Dulles policy of toying with war, but for General Francis Brink, chief of MAAG (the Military Assistance Advisory Group) during the fifties, a man not known for his insight into the new Asia. In the early fifties, while the French war was still going on, there had been an American mission meeting and someone had said that there were increasing reports that the Chinese Communists were giving aid to the Vietminh. And they had all turned to General Brink to see if he had any confirmation, but he didn’t seem worried. “I’ve been in the Far East for much of my life and I worked for Stilwell and there’s one thing I know and understand and that’s the Chinaman and I’ve never known the Chinaman to give anything to anybody.”

The Brinks being a symbol of the American presence, it was perhaps not surprising that on Christmas Eve 1964 the Vietcong planted a bomb there, blowing it up, killing two Americans and wounding fifty-eight others. The incident seemed to those already committed to bombing one more tweaking of the giant’s nose; Taylor in particular wanted to retaliate, and so did the Chiefs. But Johnson was still hesitant, particularly about bombing during the Christmas season. He cabled Taylor that he did not want to move against the North unless he was sure that American security was faultless (“I have real doubts about ordering reprisals in cases where our own security seems at first glance to be very weak”). Then he pointed out that he wanted the American mission in greater “fighting trim.” He wanted dependents out. And Johnson, the man who felt he could reason with anyone, was unhappy about the political situation in Saigon. Why couldn’t we line them up better, and get them on the team? Why did we have this “lack of progress in communicating sensitively and persuasively. I don’t believe we are making the all-out effort for political persuasion which is called for. I don’t know if we are making full use of the kind of Americans who have the knack for this kind of communication” (which of course infuriated Taylor, who was already fed up with trying to deal with Vietnamese politicians). Then with pressure for bombing and possibly even combat troops constantly upon him, he added:

 

In regard to recommendations for large-scale bombing: I have never felt that this war will be won from the air and it seems to me that what is much more needed and would be more effective is a larger and stronger use of rangers and Special Forces and Marines or other appropriate military strength on the ground. I am ready to look with favor on that kind of increased American effort directed at guerrillas and aimed at stiffening the South Vietnamese. Any recommendations that you and General Westmoreland make in this sense will have immediate attention from me although it may involve an acceptance of larger American sacrifices. We have been building our strength to fight this kind of war since 1961 and I am ready to substantially increase the number of Americans in Vietnam if it is necessary to provide this kind of fighting force against the Vietcong.

 

It was an interesting insight into Johnson: the pressure was building on him all the time to bomb, the bureaucracy had reached a consensus, and yet he had not yet joined it; he was a good listener to what George Ball was saying because he believed what Ball was saying, that the bombing would not provide any great answer. So even this late he was dubious about the bombing and he was not recommending combat troops; what he was suggesting was in fact more of the same, more irregular American units trying to stop guerrillas. It was, in effect, a suggestion that they do more of the same, but do it better.

They had turned to the bombing out of their own desperation, because what they were doing no longer worked and because bombing was the easiest thing. It was the kind of power which America wielded most easily, the greatest technological superpower poised against this preposterously small and weak country. (“Raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country,” Lyndon Johnson called it during the great debates, complaining to John McCone of the CIA about the lack of information coming out of Hanoi. Wasn’t there someone working in the interior of their government who would slip out with a stolen paper saying what they were going to do? “I thought you guys had people everywhere, that you knew everything, and now you don’t even know anything about a raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country. All you have to do is get some Chinese coolies from a San Francisco laundry shop and drop them over there and use them. Get them to drop their answers in a bottle and put the bottle in the Pacific . . .” McCone, who was not noted for his sense of humor, sulked for several days.) Since, after Korea, this country was sensitive about ground wars, bombing would not seem like going to war, but combat troops would. Besides, the decision makers were men from the successful areas of American life, they believed in the capacity of American production and technology to satisfy human needs; therefore the deprivation by bombing would have effect. It was particularly hard for them as a group to understand how very little effect something like bombing would have on revolutionary Asian Communist-nationalists, other than to make them more determined. They were all private men, and thus the idea that the 1964 election mandate might be quite different from going to war had very little effect, except on George Ball, and to some degree on Lyndon Johnson.