The Best and The Brightest

Epilogue

The whole basis of the escalation, of using ground forces, was that it would be brief. At least as far as Lyndon Johnson was concerned, but not as far as William Childs Westmoreland was concerned. In the summer of 1965, dissenting senators going to the White House, uneasy with the number of the troops there, and the rumors that more, many more were on their way, were assured by the President that they need not worry. They should just sit still for six months; all we wanted was negotiations, and these would come by Christmas. All we had to do was show them some of our muscle and give them a sense of our determination. Just six months.

If that were true, then the forbidden word in the White House speeches in the summer of 1965 was “negotiations.” It was considered a particularly dangerous word, since it would show our weakness, our lack of intent; it would undermine the already weak fabric of Saigon and it would encourage Hanoi to go against Hanoi’s best interests and continue the war. When Richard Goodwin slipped “negotiations” into a speech for the President at Johns Hopkins, he found himself assaulted in a White House corridor shortly afterward by Abe Fortas, and accused of softness. Senator Frank Church, making a major speech on negotiations, soon went to a White House dinner with a large group of senators and found himself under personal attack. The President, looking straight at him, began to attack those who were soft and fainthearted. There was once another senator from Idaho who thought he knew more about war and peace than the President, Johnson said—an obvious reference to Bill Borah’s isolationism. Church was mildly offended by the personal references, but after dinner it was even worse. Johnson singled out Church, backed him into a corner and went at him heatedly, launching into a tirade on Vietnam. It was a violent discussion, and Church thought the President seemed almost high; it was all very explosive, nostril to nostril, and twice Lady Bird, sensing the dangers, tried to separate them, but the President moved her away. Church held his ground and it went on for almost an hour. The next day another senator saw Gene McCarthy and asked how the dinner had gone. “Oh, it wasn’t too bad,” McCarthy replied, “but if Frank Church had just surrendered sooner we could have all gone home half an hour earlier.”

So negotiation was blocked out; the decisions were made, and the troops were on their way. Not just American troops, it turned out, but North Vietnamese troops as well. Though top officials of the American government would later claim that they had bombed and sent American combat troops because the North Vietnamese were escalating, this was patently untrue. By early 1965, a regiment of the North Vietnamese army had been identified as being in the South, and another was believed on its way, but no North Vietnamese had entered battle—that would come long afterward, after the Americans had bombed the North and sent in their combat troops. But with the arrival of American combat troops in the summer of 1965, Hanoi moved to match the American escalation. First-line units of the North Vietnamese army, one of the great infantries of the world, began to move down the trails, ready to neutralize the American build-up. They would not fight in the guerrilla style which had marked hostilities in the past, and they would not fight in the populous regions of the Delta. Rather, they would wait in the highlands, fight in rugged terrain favorable to them, and meet American main-force units there. More often than not, they chose both the time and place of battle. Thus as American forces would provide a shield to the ARVN, the NVA regular forces would provide a comparable shield for the Vietcong; the American force was being neutralized even as it arrived.

In mid-November 1965, regiments of the North Vietnamese army stumbled into units of the elite First Cav (the new heliborne division). The result was a bloody and ferocious battle in difficult terrain, which came to be known as the battle of the Ia Drang Valley. It was the first real testing of American men and arms in Vietnam. Official American estimates were that 1,200 of the enemy had been killed, against 200 American losses. To General Westmoreland and his deputy, General William Depuy, it was viewed as a considerable American victory; it proved the effectiveness and the validity of the new airmobile concept: that we could strike at the enemy in his base-camp areas, that we could overcome normal logistical limitations with our new technology; a range and a mobility that had been denied to the French was now available to us. So a strategy of attrition was possible. It was a battle which encouraged the American military in their preconceptions and their instincts, that the aggressive use of American force and strike power against the enemy in his distant base camps could eventually destroy his forces and his will. It was a point at which General Depuy, then extremely influential on Westmoreland’s staff, was still talking about the threshold of pain. It was something he believed in, that the enemy had a threshold, and that if we hit him hard enough he would cry out; at this very point, in fact, the North Vietnamese were testing out our threshold of pain. They would find that ours was a good deal lower than theirs, that we could not accept heavy casualties as they could. Thus Ia Drang was in a way a kind of closing of the door as far as strategy was concerned. We were convinced that we had dealt the other side a grievous blow and we were now ready to deal him more.

But there were others who took a somewhat different view of the battle. John Vann, the Army colonel who had resigned in protest of the Harkins policies, and who was now back in Vietnam as a lowly civilian official, conducted his own private investigation of the battle, and based on his considerable knowledge of enemy tactics, decided that the battle represented something very different from what Westmoreland and Depuy thought. Vann came to the conclusion that the North Vietnamese had deliberately been taking unusually high casualties in order to see where the Americans were vulnerable; in the process they had come up with the answer. The way to offset U.S. might (which was clearly technological and not based on individual bravery or superiority soldier against soldier) was to close with the Americans as tightly as possible, within thirty meters. This neutralized the American air and artillery power. Over a period of time they were able to match American losses on a ratio which was acceptable to them; after all, they were willing to accept far higher casualties in this war.

However different the interpretations of events, the battle of Ia Drang had proven beyond doubt one other factor. It had shown graphically that Hanoi would resist the American escalation with an escalation of its own. In the past, despite the prophecies of the intelligence community, the likelihood that North Vietnamese troops would come into the South had been played down. But by the early fall it was clear that Hanoi was taking its regular units, breaking them down into small sizes, and infiltrating them quickly into the South. In July 1965, when the Americans had decided to send a total of between 175,000 and 200,000 combat troops to Vietnam by the end of the year (with an additional 100,000 ticketed for 1966), the estimate had been that there were still no more than two NVA regiments in the South; by November there were six confirmed North Vietnamese regiments, two more probable and one possible in the South. The bombing, as a weapon of interdiction, had failed. As for affecting Hanoi’s will, the bombing and the arrival of American troops had affected it, but not the way the American principals had anticipated; Hanoi was now determined to send men down even more quickly than the Americans could bring theirs in. If the full implications of this were lost on Westmoreland, he nonetheless sensed the immediate one, that the manpower advantage he hoped to have in 1966 was already lost. On November 23 he reported to his superiors:

The VC/PAVN build-up rate is predicated to be double that of U.S. Phase II forces [these were essentially his 1966 forces]. Whereas we will add an average of 7 maneuver battalions per quarter, the enemy will add 15. This development has already reduced the November battalion-equivalent ratio from an anticipated 3.2 to 1, to 2.8 to 1, and it will be further reduced to 2.5 to 1 by the end of the year. If the trend continues, the December 1966 battalion-equivalent ratio, even with the addition of Phase II (300,000 men) will be 2.1 to 1.

In the past all the estimates and predictions that the other side would meet force with force had deliberately been filtered out or diluted; at best the enemy’s response was said to be unpredictable, and if anything, the use of American force would bring not counterforce, but negotiations. Now that illusion was gone; the real world was tougher than the world of doctored war games and high-level meetings. At the time that Westmoreland made his assessment, McNamara was in Paris for a NATO meeting; he immediately flew to Saigon, met with Westmoreland, and negotiated troop levels with the commander. At the end of November, when McNamara returned to Washington, he recommended to the President that projected force levels be increased to the point where the American build-up would reach 400,000 by the end of 1965, and possibly 600,000 by the end of 1967. It was clearly not going to be a short, limited war any more.

This counterescalation did not bother Westmoreland. He was not euphoric but he was confident: American force would do it. It would not be easy, but if we set our mind to it, then it could be done. We would have to pay the price. (His views throughout were quite similar to Rusk’s.) He thought he had a totality of Washington’s backing and he prepared for a long war. His MACV planners in very late 1965 and early 1966 were absolutely confident that the troop commitment would go to either 640,000 or 648,000 and there was, in addition, a contingency plan by which it could go as high as 750,000, a figure that MACV called the balloon and considered very much in the ballpark. MACV was confident; there had been tentative agreement, it thought, from Defense, and the President had never said no to any request. Westmoreland was indeed the favored child. In Saigon, Frank McCulloch, the bureau chief of Time, was repeatedly filing that MACV felt that it would get a minimum of 640,000; in Washington, his colleagues working for the same magazine and covering Defense, not privy to the kind of informal atmosphere which existed in Saigon, working through weaker sources, kept knocking the figure down, saying nothing like that was in the works. It was in the works, all right, but it was not a figure which Washington wished to give out; only four or five men knew of it in Washington and they weren’t talking. Similarly, four or five men knew of it in Saigon and a few of them were talking. Saigon, Lyndon Johnson would always find to his annoyance, was always leakier than Washington.

If MACV was candid with Time magazine, which supported the war, it was somewhat less so with Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, who arrived in Saigon in November 1965. Mansfield was traveling with his specialist on Vietnam, Frank Vallejo, and both were extremely uneasy about the policy, and in particular the open-ended quality of it. The sky was the limit, they feared, and Westmoreland was not, Mansfield felt, particularly helpful. Mansfield asked Westmoreland what kind of troop figure he was going for, and Westmoreland kept hedging, no answer was really forthcoming, he kept talking about the fact that he couldn’t handle what he already had, he had ships backed up in the harbor. The more Mansfield pushed, the less he found out, and he went back with Vallejo, convinced that if it had been a small number, Westmoreland would have been more candid. This, plus his own uneasiness about the style of open-ended policy, prompted him to write a report predicting that we would end up with 500,000 troops there. All his worst fears about American involvement in Indochina were being realized, step by step.

There were, of course, some indications that the war was changing, that it was sliding from a small combat-troop war to a big one. In late November in Saigon, after a meeting of the mission council, Barry Zorthian, the embassy public affairs officer, told a few select reporters that the strategy had gone from holding the country and preventing the other side from winning, to winning ourselves. Victory. Westmoreland, he said, had a schedule which went as high as 750,000 men. “The name of the game has changed,” Zorthian said. “Now we’re going to win.” One of the reporters he spoke to was Stanley Karnow of the Washington Post, who had an uneasy feeling that they had changed policies and objectives in midstream, that this was akin to crossing the 38th parallel in Korea, and that it might have consequences. Of course, there was a certain inevitability to it; a man like Lyndon Johnson would not invest that much for a tie game; Johnson always liked to talk in poker terms and analogies; the more you put into the pot, the more you had to take out as a winner.

If McNamara had learned some of the bitter truth during the November visit, he managed to conceal it admirably. During the trip he had gone to Danang to inspect what the Marines were doing there. While at Danang he had been given a very thorough briefing by a Marine colonel on the situation. The Marines were doing very well in pacification, it seemed. Wherever they appeared and fought, the Vietcong immediately moved back. There was, however, a problem. Once the Marines seemed to have pacified an area, they moved on, and there was a tendency of the Vietcong to come back, and do just as well as before. The result was a danger of spreading the American troops too thin.

That night when McNamara was back in Saigon, he asked Sander Vanocur of NBC, who had hitched a ride with him, what he thought of the day. Vanocur replied that he was very depressed. McNamara, surprised, asked why, and Vanocur answered that we were going to be spread too thin, that it seemed to him a bottomless pit. “Every pit has its bottom, Mr. Vanocur,” said the Secretary.

For those who had expected the other side to oblige by folding quickly, the contrary evidence was now in. For McNamara, who had already been primed by McNaughton for some time on the dangers of counterescalation, the new implications were quite obvious. Since he knew there was no easy way out, he had become a frustrated and divided man. As a weapon of interdiction the bombing had failed, and as a weapon to push Hanoi to the table it had failed; yet he had no other answers and had to recommend a steadily ascending rate of bombing—the rate of sorties went up from 2,500 a month to 10,000 a month in the next year, all of it futile. So by the end of 1965 he was already trapped. While he was negotiating with Westmoreland for more and more troops, though he sensed the hopelessness of the troop escalation, he was at the same time becoming a leading advocate of negotiations within the government. But even now he could not speak openly about what he really felt, how dark he thought it might all be; he could not lose credibility and say that he had miscalculated, that all his forecasts were wrong. That would cost him his credibility, and his effectiveness; he would be known as a dove and he would soon be out. So when he pushed for negotiations at the tail end of 1965, he sold it in a particularly disingenuous way—we could have a bombing pause and try to negotiate, and then, after we had shown that the other side was unwilling to be conciliatory, we would have far greater national support. Worse, because he was committed to force and to the war, he could only offer Hanoi what amounted to surrender. So he was pushing negotiations, but they were doomed negotiations on hopeless terms, and yet in the very effort to bring about negotiations, he was diminishing his credibility with the President.

Some of the particular dilemma of his and the American position, however, had already been seen by his trusted deputy John McNaughton. McNaughton had long feared that the North Vietnamese would respond the way they had, and along with George Ball, he was probably the least surprised member of the upper level of the government. In addition he was picking up other sounds, which bothered him, and this was the changing rationale of the military. At a dinner party in January 1966 he told Henry Brandon that in August 1965 General Wheeler had said that the American aim was victory, and therefore we were putting more men into Vietnam. Now, McNaughton said, Wheeler was using a different rationale—he was saying that unless more men were sent, then American casualties would rise. Thus McNaughton realized that the Americans were in a special kind of trap. In mid-January 1966 he wrote a memo for McNamara:

. . . The dilemma. We are in a dilemma. It is that the situation may be “polar.” That is, it may be that while going for victory we have the strength for compromise, but if we go for compromise, we have the strength only for defeat—this because a revealed lowering of sights from victory to compromise (a) will unhinge the GVN and (b) will give the DRV the “smell of blood.” . . .

McNaughton was clearly influencing McNamara, as were events. When McNamara first came back from meeting with Westy he had rather positively recommended the boost to 400,000 Americans. But two months later, in late January 1966, discussing the same subject, he was more cautious, and seemingly more pessimistic. He wrote:

. . . Our intelligence estimate is that the present Communist policy is to continue to prosecute the war vigorously in the South. They continue to believe that the war will be a long one, that time is their ally, and that their own staying power is superior to ours. They recognize that the U.S. reinforcements of 1965 signify a determination to avoid defeat, and that more U.S. troops can be expected. Even though the Communists will continue to suffer heavily from GVN and U.S. ground and air action, we expect them, upon learning of any U.S. intentions to augment its forces, to boost their own commitment and to test U.S. capabilities and will to persevere at a higher level of conflict and casualties . . .

If the U.S. were willing to commit enough forces—perhaps 600,000 men or more—we could ultimately prevent the DRV/VC from sustaining the conflict at a significant level. When this point was reached, however, the question of Chinese intervention would become critical. . . .

It follows, therefore, that the odds are about even that, even with the recommended deployments, we will be faced in early 1967 with a military standoff at a much higher level, with pacification hardly under way, and with requirements for the deployment of still more U.S. forces.

So McNamara was boxed in, seeing the darkness, recommending more troops as a means of bringing negotiations which were, given the U.S. attitude, hopeless. The real point of it all was that the civilians in Washington, those men who above all else felt they controlled events, had, by the end of 1965, completely lost control. They no longer determined policies, and they did not even know it. One set of reins belonged to Hanoi, the other set to Westmoreland. The future increments were now being determined in Hanoi by the Politburo there, and in Saigon by Westmoreland and his staff. If Westmoreland had enough troops, then Hanoi would send more; if Hanoi sent more, then Westmoreland would want more. The cycle was out of their hands; nor had they set any real limits on Westmoreland as far as his use of troops in-country was concerned (that is, inside South Vietnam as opposed to attacking neighboring sanctuaries). He was the General, he would use them as he saw fit. His projections were for a long war, larger and larger units fighting, a higher and higher rate of combat, the enemy eventually becoming exhausted. But the Commander in Chief of the enemy forces did not have to run for re-election in 1968.

The strategy of attrition would prove politically deadly for Lyndon Johnson, and yet he had slipped into it. He and the men around him did not spend weeks of painful debate measuring both our and the enemy’s resources, deciding on the best way to commit American troops, how to get the most for our men. There was in fact remarkably little discussion of the strategy. It had begun as security, had gone to enclave, and then, without the enclave ever being tested, under the pressure of events, they had gone to what would be search and destroy. It was again an almost blind decision to go with the man on the spot, Westmoreland. It was what he wanted, it was what he would get and so to an extraordinary degree Westmoreland received in-country (as opposed to hitting Cambodian sanctuaries) freedom to maneuver his troops. They were his, to do with whatever he wanted. And out of this came search and destroy, as well as the policy of attrition, a policy which would become one of the most controversial and fiercely debated decisions of the war, a decision that was virtually not even a decision; it was, like so much of the war, simply something that had happened. It was Westmoreland’s instincts for the use of power, to use it massively and conventionally, and this with Depuy’s aid had produced the policy of search and destroy. Westmoreland was after all a conventional man; his background was conventional war, and both his instincts and responses were conventional. Here, almost within sight—his intelligence was getting better and better—were these very big enemy units. The ideal way to shorten this war, to finish it off quickly, was to go after the big units, this enormous prize just within reach. Just smash their big units, teach them it was all over, and they would have to go to the peace table. Westmoreland knew all about the political infrastructure, how the enemy operated through a very clever and complicated political mechanism, and that this was the root of the war; it gave the other side its most precious asset, its capacity to replenish losses, but the conventional instinct, the temptation to go after the big units, was too much. It was, he thought, the best thing he could do for Vietnam, handle this burden for them which they clearly were not able to handle themselves. The U.S. forces would be fighting away from the population, and this would lessen racial tension. It was a strategy which appealed to the American military mind, the use of large force and large units, quicker, less frustrating. He was always particularly optimistic about the results of the operations in the base-camp areas, Cedar Falls and Junction City; to him they presaged victory, and it was the sad truth that he, like those before him, underestimated the capacity of the enemy to replenish (indeed, when the Tet offensive came, the troops came from those very base camps which Westmoreland thought he had cleaned out).

So instead of a limited shield philosophy, we would take over the war. And out of this, the search-and-destroy policy, came the policy of attrition which would prove so costly to Lyndon Johnson. The political implications of such a policy were immense, but he did not think them out, nor did his Secretary of State Dean Rusk nor his Special Assistant for National Security, Mac Bundy. It was perhaps the worst possible policy for the United States of America: it meant inflicting attrition upon the North, which had merely to send 100,000 soldiers south each year to neutralize the American fighting machine. Since the birth rate for the North was particularly high, with between 200,000 young men coming into the draft-age group each year, it was very easy for them to replenish their own manpower (the attrition strategy might have made sense if you could have gone for the whole package, applied total military pressure to the entire country, but the American strategy was filled with limitations as far as that went). So even on the birth rate, the strategy of attrition (which always was based on the belief that the other side had a lower threshold of pain) was fallacious. Add to it the fact that one side was a nation with the nationalist element of unity, and the Communist element of control, that the bombing helped unite its people, that its leadership was able and popular, that its people were lean and tough and believed in their mission, which was to unify the country and drive the foreigners out, that there were no free newspapers, no television sets, no congressional dissent, and that this war was not only the top priority, it was the only priority they had.

Against this was a democracy fighting a dubious war some 12,000 miles away from home. The democracy had long-overdue social and political programs at home, and there was such uneasiness about a war in Asia that its political leader felt obliged to sneak the country into the war, rather than confronting the Congress and the press openly with his decision. The Congress and the press would continue to be free, and doubts about so complicated a war would not subside, they would grow. Television would certainly bring the war home for the first time. The country was undergoing vast economic and political and social changes which would be accelerated by the war itself.

It was, in retrospect, an unlikely match for a war of attrition, and reflecting upon it, one high civilian said later that he longed to take the two men most involved in the strategy, who had such vastly different and conflicting problems and demands, and introduce them to each other: General Westmoreland, meet President Johnson. It was, finally, the problem of limited war which had been so fashionable in the early Kennedy days, the difficulty being that you might be a great power of 200 million people fighting limited war against a very small Asian nation of 17 million, except that unlike you, they decided, as happened in this case, to fight total war.

Yet the number of men for whom all these factors had real meaning was very small; the Administration’s policy of hiding the extent of the war, and the extent of its forthcoming commitments, was still successful in early 1966. It was not, as far as the general public was concerned, going to be a large war. The troop figure was consistently hedged so that opponents of the war did not have a firm target. The burden was still seen as being on Hanoi; we were only trying to get them to a conference table. By the time the general public realized the extent of the war, the depth and totality of it all, then the rationale in Washington would change, it would become Support of our boys out there. At first the critics were told that they should not be critics because it was not really going to be a war and it would be brief, anyway; then, when it became clear that it was a war, they were told not to be critics because it hurt our boys and helped the other side.

All of which would work for a while. Johnson had successfully co-opted the Congress and to a large degree the press. Time was working against him, but this would only be clear later. In the spring of 1965 the protests against Vietnam had begun on the campuses. In the beginning the Administration was not particularly worried about the challenge; Johnson controlled the vital center, and the campuses were not considered major centers of political activity. Yet these questions should be answered, so Mac Bundy was sent off to a televised teach-in to debate the professors, and the Administration was supremely confident about the outcome. Bundy was at the height of his reputation, the unchallenged political-intellectual of Washington, and no one there dared challenge him, for the response would be swift and sharp. But the capital was not the country; what was admired, respected and feared in Washington was not necessarily what was admired, respected and feared in the country, so the teach-in was an omen. In a surprisingly brittle performance he debated Hans Morgenthau, and Edmund Clubb, one of the exiled China scholars. Clubb quoted Lord Salisbury on the dangers of adding to a failed policy. Bundy finally seemed to be saying: We are we, we are here, we hold power and we know more about it than you do. It was not a convincing performance; rather than easing doubts, it seemed to reveal the frailty of the Administration’s policy. The teach-in did not end debate, it encouraged it. It also marked the beginning of the turn in Bundy’s reputation; up until then, serious laymen in the country had heard how bright he was, but in this rare public appearance he struck them as merely arrogant and shallow.

In the fall of 1965 Rusk, who had been less than eager for the commitment than most of the others, began to show signs of the toughness, and indeed rigidity, which would later, as the months and years passed, distinguish him from some of the other architects. He was not eager to seek negotiations, and he was uneasy with those on our side who seemed too anxious to talk, afraid they would send the wrong signal, show the Communists our eagerness and our weakness. He felt that the danger in a democracy was that people were spoiled and expected pleasures and were unused to sacrifice; one had to guard against that and he of course would be the guardian. When Adlai Stevenson in 1964 had made his first tentative approach about negotiating with Hanoi to U Thant, it was Rusk who helped keep the discussion of the peace move extremely limited (so limited that his deputy for Asia, Bill Bundy, did not learn of it until the very last moment and was extremely upset). Then, in December 1965, when McNamara began to push for a bombing pause, it was Rusk who was dubious. We should not, he thought, seem too eager for peace; since we had gone to war, we should use our force of arms properly and the other side would have to come to terms with us. A nation as great and as powerful as the United States did not seek war, did not go to war readily, but if it did, then it must be careful not to give away its goals, undermine its own military. There was a consistency to Rusk: he had been the least eager to get in because he had never seen the task as easy, and had few illusions about air power and the quick use of force. In fact, his positions from start to finish, right through to Tet, were remarkably similar to those of the Army generals. His view of the war was a serious one; if we went in we had to be prepared for a long haul, and we had better be ready for it; we had better not flash the wrong signals as soon as we started. Perhaps Rusk, more than any other man around the President, understood Lyndon Johnson, knew that once committed, Johnson would see it through, and that he would want allies, not doubters.

Rusk believed in mutual security, that this was the way to peace; South Vietnam was now linked to mutual security. Thus it must stand; Vietnam had an importance far beyond its own existence. The doubts of the men under him in State did not penetrate his confidence; he was sure of what Americans had to do and sure that they could do it. More than anyone else, more than the military people themselves, he believed what the military said they could do; he took their reports and their estimates perilously close to face value. He told the men under him at State that their job was to wait and watch for the signals from Hanoi, which would give the signal, not the United States. When the signals came, it would be a sign that they were ready to begin; then and only then State’s job would begin. “You look for that signal and you tell me when they give it,” he told aides. His fault, a deputy thought, was not insincerity, it was the totality of his sincerity. He still believed that the world was the way he had found it as a young man in the thirties, and that good was on our side. Automatically. Because we were a democracy.

His job and State’s, then, was to wait. If you were in, you were in. What was it he had told McNamara at the time of the B-52 raids? In for a dime, in for a dollar. So we were in for more than a dollar. And he was different from those around him because they were such rationalists and such optimists, whereas Rusk was always less optimistic, less the rationalist; the others believed that if things did not pan out, they could always turn them around, since they were in control. This was one other reason Rusk was different—he knew his man better.

There were many Lyndon Johnsons, this complicated, difficult, sensitive man, and among them were a Johnson when things were going well and a Johnson when things were going poorly. Most of the Kennedy men, new to him, working with him since Dallas, had only seen Johnson at his best. Moving into the postassassination vacuum with a certain majesty, he had behaved with sensitivity and subtlety, and that challenge had evoked from him the very best of his qualities. Similarly, during the planning on Vietnam, during the time he had been, as a new President, faced with this most terrible dilemma, he had been cautious and reflective. If there was bluster it was largely bluster on the outside; on the inside he was careful, thoughtful, did his homework and could under certain conditions be reasoned with.

But when things went badly, he did not respond that well, and he did not, to the men around him, seem so reasonable. There would be a steady exodus from the White House during 1966 and 1967 of many of the men, both hawks and doves, who had tried to reason with him and tried to affect him on Vietnam (in May 1967 McNaughton, noting this phenomenon, wrote in a memo to McNamara: “I fear that 'natural selection’ in this environment will lead the Administration itself to become more and more homogenized—Mac Bundy, George Ball, Bill Moyers are gone. Who next?” The answer, of course, was McNamara himself). In the late fall of 1965 Johnson learned the hard way that the slide rules and the computers did not work, that the projections were all wrong, that Vietnam was in fact a tar baby and that he was in for a long difficult haul—his commander and Secretary of Defense were projecting 400,000 men by the end of 1966, and 600,000 by the end of 1967, and even so, as 1968 rolled around, no guarantees. At that time Lyndon Johnson began to change. He began to sulk, he was not so open, not so accessible, and it was not so easy to talk with him about the problems and difficulties involved in Vietnam. McNamara’s access was in direct proportion to his optimism; as he became more pessimistic, the President became reluctant to see him alone. Johnson did not need other people’s problems and their murky forecasts; he had enough of those himself. What he needed was their support and their loyalty. He was, sadly, open-minded when things went well, and increasingly close-minded when things went poorly, as they now were about to do. In the past, during all those long agonizing hours in 1964 and 1965 when they discussed the problems of Vietnam, they had all been reasonable men discussing reasonable solutions, and in their assumptions was the idea that Ho Chi Minh was reasonable too. But now it would turn out that Ho was not reasonable, not by American terms, anyway, and the war was not reasonable, and suddenly Lyndon Johnson was not very reasonable either. He was a good enough politician to know what had gone wrong and what he was in for and what it meant to his dreams, but he could not turn back, he could not admit that he had made a mistake. He could not lose and thus he had to plunge forward. It was a terrible thing, he was caught and he knew it, and he knew he could juggle the figures only so long before the things he knew became obvious to the public at large. The more he realized this, the more he had to keep it in, keep it hidden, knowing that if he ever evinced doubts himself, if he admitted the truth to himself, it would somehow become reality and those around him would also know, and then he would have to follow through on his convictions. So he fought the truth, there were very rarely moments when he would admit that it was a miscalculation, that he had forgotten, when they had brought him the slide rules and the computers which said that two plus two equals four, that the most basic rule of politics is that human beings never react the way you expect them to. Then he would talk with some fatalism about the trap he had built for himself, with an almost plaintive cry for some sort of help. But these moments were rare indeed, very private, and more often than not they would soon be replaced by wild rages against any critic who might voice the most gentle doubt of the policy and the direction in which it was taking the country.

So instead of leading, he was immobilized, surrounded, seeing critics everywhere. Critics became enemies; enemies became traitors; and the press, which a year earlier had been so friendly, was now filled with enemies baying at his heels. The Senate was beginning to rise up; he knew that and he knew why—it was that damn Fulbright. He knew what Fulbright was up to, he said; even a blind hog can find an acorn once in a while. So by early 1966, attitudes in the White House had become frozen. One could stay viable only by proclaiming faith and swallowing doubts. The price was high; it was very hard to bring doubts and reality to Johnson without losing access. The reasonable had become unreasonable; the rational, irrational. The deeper we were in, the more the outcry in the country, in the Senate and in the press, the more Johnson hunkered down, isolated himself from reality. What had begun as a credibility gap became something far more perilous, a reality gap. He had a sense that everything he had wanted for his domestic program, his offering to history, was slipping away, and the knowledge of this made him angrier and touchier than ever; if you could not control events, you could at least try and control the version of them. Thus the press as an enemy. Critics of the war became his critics; since he was patriotic, clearly they were not. He had FBI dossiers on war critics, congressmen and journalists, and he would launch into long, irrational tirades against them: he knew what was behind their doubts, the Communists were behind them—yes, the Communists, the Russians; he kept an eye on who was going to social receptions at the Soviet embassy and he knew that a flurry of social activity at the Communist embassies always resulted in a flurry of dovish speeches in the Senate. Why, some of the children of those dove senators were dating children of Russian embassy officials. And he knew which ones. In fact, he would say, some of those dovish Senate speeches were being written at the Russian embassy; he knew all about it, he knew which ones, he often saw these speeches before the senators themselves did.

Yet if he had a sense of the darkness ahead in the ground war, he also took a negative view of negotiations; negotiations meant defeat. He had not been particularly eager for the first bombing pause in late 1965, and the results, in his mind, had justified his doubts (one reason he would turn to Clark Clifford to replace the doubting and disintegrating McNamara in late 1967 was that Clifford had seemingly shown his hawkish credentials by opposing the bombing halt in 1965). Nothing but a propaganda benefit for the other side, nothing but more pressure against him, making it harder and harder to renew the bombing. So in the future when there was talk of other bombing halts, he would react with anger and irritation. Oh yes, a bombing halt, he would say, I’ll tell you what happens when there’s a bombing halt: I halt and then Ho Chi Minh shoves his trucks right up my ass. That’s your bombing halt.

So he was entrapped. By early 1966 he was into the war and he knew it; if there was anything particularly frustrating, it was the inequity of it all. Ho did not have enemies nipping at his heels the way Lyndon Johnson did. It was an unfair fight. Yet he was locked into it, and of course it became his war, he personalized it, his boys flying his bombers, his boys getting killed in their sleep. His entire public career, more than thirty years of remarkable service, had all come down to this one issue, a war, of all things, this one roll of the dice, and everything was an extension of him. Westmoreland was an extension of him and his ego, his general. In the past, Dean Acheson had warned him that the one thing a President should never do is let his ego get between him and his office. By 1966 Lyndon Johnson had let this happen, and Vietnam was the issue which had made it happen.

If he was not the same man, then the men around him were not the same men either. In early 1966 Bundy was very uneasy with Johnson. Their relationship, which had never been a natural one, had deteriorated. Bundy was upset by Johnson’s disorderly way of running things, by his tendency—when Kennedy would have let Bundy lock up an issue—to turn, after all the normal players had made their case, to people like Fortas and Clifford for last-minute consultation, and though Bundy had been an advocate of escalation, he was enough of a rationalist to understand immediately that Hanoi’s counterescalation meant that events were likely to be messy and irrational. And he knew that with Rusk there, the chance of State was now slim. On Johnson’s part there was a feeling that Bundy was somehow, no matter how hard he tried to control it, supercilious (“A smart kid, that’s all,” Johnson later said of him), plus a gnawing belief that when things went well in foreign affairs the credit would be given to Bundy, and when things went poorly they would be blamed on Johnson. In March 1966, when Bundy was offered the job as president of the Ford Foundation, James Reston at the Times found out about it. Bundy, knowing Johnson and fearing his response if there was a story in the Times, pleaded with Reston not to run it. The news item was printed and soon there was a story out of Austin, leaked there, that Bundy was indeed accepting, going to Ford. (A few weeks later, at a reception in the White House for young White House fellows, Lady Bird Johnson approached a young man and asked him to tell her what his job was.

“Well, I don’t really know,” he said. “I used to work for McGeorge Bundy, but now I don’t know.”

“Oh,” said Lady Bird, “Lyndon and I are so sorry about Mac’s going. We’re going to miss Mac like a big front tooth.”)

If Bundy had doubts about Vietnam, and friends thought that in 1966 and 1967 increasingly he did, then they remained interior ones. Johnson, letting Bundy go, knew that he would not become a critic, that he would be available for any and all errands, that he was anxious enough to return and serve, to play by the rules. Which he did; his doubts were very pragmatic ones, whether Vietnam was worth the time and resources it was absorbing and the division it was creating. Yet they remained closely guarded doubts. There was that quality to him—ferocious pride, belief in self, inability to admit mistakes that kept him from being able to react to the war in a human sense. It was as if the greater his doubts and reservations, the more he had to show that he did not have doubts and reservations, and the more confident and arrogant he seemed (debating at Harvard during the 1968 post-Tet meetings, sessions at which he had been an important force to limit the escalation, he would begin by announcing that he would not defend those policies “because I have a brother who is paid to do that,” a statement which appalled most of his audience). In the months after he left office he seemed at his worst—glib, smug, insensitive. In March of 1966, right after he left office, he went on the Today show, a rare public appearance, and as he walked into the NBC studio early in the morning he was met by a young staff aide named Robert Cunniff, who showed him the make-up room, asked him how he wanted his coffee, and told Bundy he would be on in about fifteen minutes. Then, further trying to put Bundy at his ease, realizing that many people, even the famous and powerful, are often nervous in television studios, Cunniff tried to make small talk. In some ways it must be a great relief to be out of Washington, Cunniff said, to be away from the terrible decisions involved with Bundy’s last job.

“Just what do you mean?” asked Bundy, and there was a small tightening of the mouth.

“Oh,” said Cunniff, not realizing what he was getting into, “you know, you must be relieved, getting away from the terrible pressures of the war, making decisions on it.”

“Oh, yes,” said Bundy, “you people up here in New York take that all very seriously, don’t you?”

And Cunniff, who was stunned by the answer, looked quickly to see if it was a put-on, but the face was very cold and Cunniff realized that McGeorge Bundy was not joking.

There was no dearth of applicants for the Bundy job. Robert Komer, a Bundy assistant, deemed himself available and qualified and moved his things into Bundy’s office. Bill Moyers, anxious to have experience in foreign affairs, was a quiet candidate, knowing the President well, and knowing that you did not necessarily get what you pushed for with Lyndon Johnson. Carl Kaysen, another Bundy deputy, was an insider’s choice. And then there was the possibility of Walt Rostow, Bundy’s former deputy and now the head of Policy Planning. Komer had his problems; he was an Easterner, and the kind of Easterner that Johnson reacted to, bouncy, ebullient, almost preppy, one had somehow a sense of Komer in white bucks on his way to a fraternity meeting, and he was linked to the Georgetown boys that Johnson disliked. Moyers had his problems; he was young and from Texas and the only degree he possessed was in divinity, and in a White House already sensitive to the charge of too many Texans in high places, the idea of a young biblical Texan handling foreign policy did not go over well. Besides, Moyers had shown a lack of enthusiasm for the war in the past and that did not help him. Kaysen was too reserved, too cerebral.

Gradually the emphasis began to shift to Rostow. The key link here was Jack Valenti, the self-conscious, self-made intellectual, feverishly loyal to Johnson, desperately anxious to improve Johnson’s public image (and naturally, with his sycophancy, detracting from it). Valenti, with his desire to improve Johnson’s intellectual reputation, was impressed by Rostow, with his enthusiasm, his endless number of theories for almost any subject and situation, his capacity to bring the past into the present with a historical footnote, to make his points thus seem more valid, more historical. (Typically, in April 1966, during one of the periodic Buddhist crises, he wrote that “right now with the latest Buddhist communiqué, we are faced with a classic revolutionary situation—like Paris in 1789 and St. Petersburg in 1917 . . . If I rightly remember, the Russian Constituent Assembly gathered in June 1917; in July, Lenin’s first coup aborted; in the face of defeat in the field and Kerensky’s weakness, Lenin took over in November. This is about what would happen in Saigon if we were not there; but we are there. And right now we have to try to find the ways to make that fact count.”) Comforting words for a President, but even more comforting was his upbeat spirit, his sheer enthusiasm for the President and his policies, particularly the war policies. Rostow had started giving memos for the President to Valenti; Johnson was impressed and encouraged them, and the two got on well together.

One thing in Rostow’s favor was his enthusiasm for the war. At a time when many others were becoming increasingly uneasy about the course of American policies in Vietnam, Rostow was quite the reverse; he did not see failure, he saw inevitable victory and believed himself a prophet of events. So Rostow was a good man to have in a White House under attack—he would not turn tail, he would hunker down with the best of them. Which was precisely why a good many of his colleagues from Washington and Cambridge began a quiet, discreet campaign, not so much for the other candidates as against Rostow. As Jack Kennedy had once said somewhat ruefully of Rostow: Walt had ten ideas, nine of which would lead to disaster, but one of them was worth having. So it was important, the President added, to have a filter between Rostow and the President. Now it looked like he would be right next to the President. Phone calls were made, doubts about him expressed, enthusiasm for others emphasized. But it did not work against Rostow; if anything, it enhanced his chances and increased his attractiveness. If some of the Kennedy insiders were against him, this was not necessarily a demerit; if Rostow was a little outside the Kennedy circle, his loyalty more likely to be first and foremost to Lyndon Johnson, then so much the better. When Rostow got the job, Johnson told one Kennedy intimate, “I’m getting Walt Rostow as my intellectual. He’s not your intellectual. He’s not Bundy’s intellectual. He’s not Galbraith’s intellectual. He’s not Schlesinger’s intellectual. He’s going to be my goddamn intellectual and I’m going to have him by the short hairs.”

So it was that Walt Rostow moved to the White House and for the second time became a major figure on Vietnam. In the past he had been an advocate and an enthusiast of the war, but he had not been taken altogether seriously; his ideas on the bombing were adapted only when there was nowhere else to go. Now he was to move into an important role, the man who was the Special Adviser to the President on National Security, who screened what the President heard and whom he saw, and who gave a special tonal quality to incoming information, an emphasis here and a de-emphasis there, the last man to talk to the judge after all the other lawyers had left the courtroom each day. Whereas Bundy had been careful not to emphasize his own feelings, Rostow had fewer reservations on many issues, particularly Vietnam. It was not deliberate, and indeed much of it was unconscious; he was a believer and a supporter and his enthusiasm showed through. To a President coming increasingly under attack, he was strong and supportive, someone whose own enthusiasm never wavered, who could always find the positive point in the darkest of days. Thus as the policy came under increasing challenge in 1966 and 1967 Rostow helped hold the line; as the President became increasingly isolated, Rostow isolated him more. He was firm and steadfast, and helped load the dice in 1966 and 1967 and 1968 against members of the inner circle having their own doubts. To a Johnson isolated and under attack, Rostow was, said one of his aides, “like Rasputin to a tsar under siege.”

In a way George Ball had been counting on the 1966 off-year elections to help him make his case and turn back the American commitment. By mid-1965 he realized he had lost the first part of his battle; from then on he changed tactics. He moved to a fall-back position—to limit the involvement, to hold the line as much as possible, to keep the United States from any miscalculation which would bring in the Chinese. The latter tactic proved particularly effective with Rusk, but it also hurt Ball in the long run; some of his warnings about Chinese entry (that prolonged bombing of the North would lead to war with Peking in six to nine months) proved false. He was opposing the war, yet kept his legitimacy inside, and he was playing what was essentially a delicate game. He wanted to dissent on the war without provoking emotional resentment on the part of the President or on the part of Rusk. Yet he wanted to make his opposition clear enough to the President, so that if Johnson needed to change Cabinet officers after the midterm election, Ball would be the clear choice. To George Ball, good policies and good politics went together.

He thought that the signs of the war as a major miscalculation would be obvious by mid-1966, and that it would be self-evident that we were bogged down there. Thus the President, in order to prepare himself for the 1968 elections, would have to cut back on Vietnam and rid himself of its architects, which would mean the likely promotion of Ball. He told friends that he thought the President might lose between forty and fifty seats in the 1966 election, largely because of Vietnam. If this happened he would have to react politically. On this judgment Ball was premature, and curiously enough, like Rusk, he was guilty for the first time of using Korea as his precedent. In Korea the stalemate quality of the war had been visible early; but Vietnam was not like other wars, and the kind of frustration which a war of attrition would produce was not yet evident. In the fall of 1966 American troops were still arriving, it did not yet seem like a war where half a million Americans would be involved unsuccessfully, and there was still a general confidence that the war was winnable, a willingness to accept the prophecies offered from Saigon and Washington. The real malaise which the war was to produce was still a year off. The Administration’s credibility—that is, its version of the war—had not yet been shattered. Johnson’s capacity to slice the salami so thin had worked, but the victim in a way would be Johnson; for this premature success, this absence of political reaction, gave him the impression that he could deal with doves, that the population, caught in a war, would rally to the side of its President. The people of the United States were giving the President of the United States the wrong signal because the President had given the people the wrong signal. Someone with a sense of what was coming in Vietnam, a higher level of violence and then a higher stalemate, might have predicted the dilemma for Lyndon Johnson in 1968; but for the moment the war was a hidden issue. (One politician did correctly see the future, and that was Richard Nixon. Campaigning for the Republicans in 1966, he told reporters that there was a very good chance Johnson was impaled by the war, and if so he would be extremely vulnerable in 1968, and his own party would turn on him. So Nixon saw a chance for his own political resuscitation. Knowing that the party did not want to go to its right wing after the Goldwater debacle and that the liberal wing had vulnerable candidates, Nixon busied himself in 1966 speaking all over the country for Republican congressional candidates, building up due bills among them and among local Republican chairmen, due bills which he intended to cash in during 1968 in what struck him as what would be a less than futile run against Lyndon Johnson.) But the 1966 election results did not show any resentment against the war and Ball’s dissent was premature; whether, in fact, it might have changed Johnson, even if there had been evidence of dwindling public support, is debatable. Perhaps even with the loss of forty seats, Johnson might have hunkered down just a bit more.

So Ball eventually slipped out of the Administration in September 30, 1966, to be replaced by Nicholas Katzenbach (a typical Johnson move; Johnson wanted Katzenbach out of Justice so he could place Ramsey Clark there, and by moving Katzenbach to the number-two job at State, he was hopefully tying up Robert Kennedy just a little bit more. Thus when in 1967 Robert Kennedy came back from Paris, having possibly heard of a peace feeler there, Johnson could tell Kennedy, critical of State, that it was Kennedy’s State Department). Later after Ball left, friends like Galbraith and Schlesinger talked with him about resigning, using his departure as something of a protest against the policies and the direction. But Ball shrugged it off; a resignation would be a gesture of singular futility in this case, he said, particularly with this President. It would mean a one-day splash in the newspapers, one headline perhaps, and then business as usual, with the President just a little more antagonistic than before to their common viewpoint.

Of the original architects, only one man was undergoing great change, and yet continued to stay in the government to fight for his newer definition of reality—though in a deeply compromised way—and that was Robert McNamara (Bundy had some doubts and from time to time he would pass messages to the President, but his role was in no way comparable to that of McNamara). In a way McNamara was better prepared for the new darkness, since John McNaughton had been preparing him for more than a year on the likelihood of the North Vietnamese responding and stalemating the Americans. The NVA build-up in the South had proven to McNamara, first, that the other side would respond despite the pressure of bombing, and second, that the bombing was hardly an effective way of stopping infiltration. So by March 1966 he was in touch with a group of Cambridge scientists and intellectuals who were trying to design an electronic barrier for Vietnam as a means of stopping infiltration. The link between the Cambridge people and McNamara was Adrian Fisher, a Harvard Law School professor and a close friend of McNaughton’s, and the scientists working on the barrier included men like Jerome Wiesner and George Kistiakowsky. The ostensible reason was to stop supplies from coming into the South, but the real reason was to take the rationale for bombing away from the military. McNamara discussed the proposal with the scientists, trying to find out what they would need for specifications and to develop plans for it. Between $300,000 and $500,000, they answered. “All right,” he said, “go ahead, but remember one thing. We’re talking in very specific terms. This is to stop infiltration, not the bombing. I don’t want any talk about bombing.” Which they understood, of course, and which the Joint Chiefs understood as well, and they had very little enthusiasm, estimating that the construction and defense of such a barrier would require seven or eight divisions. So they dragged their feet, and they kept putting the price up, until in one classic confrontation McNamara, the same McNamara who was always after the Chiefs to cut costs, to save money, exploded and said, “Get on with it, for God’s sakes, it’s only money!”

So McNamara, too, was caught in a trap of his own making. Even as he was feeding men and matériel into the pipe lines, he doubted more and more their effectiveness, and he was becoming in effect a critic of his own role. If he had had doubts about the bombing by January 1966, they would grow even more during the next few months in the controversy over the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong’s petroleum reserves and oil-storage facilities. The Chiefs, increasingly frustrated with the limits placed on them by the civilians, had been pushing for these targets for some time, and wanted them included in the May bombing lists. Now they had a new and powerful advocate within the White House in Rostow, who not only believed in bombing but had a particular affection for the bombing of electric grids and petroleum resources. Rostow argued that the bombing of petroleum storage had sharply affected the German war machine in World War II (a dubious proposition according to other students of the bombing): “With an understanding that simple analogies are dangerous, I nevertheless feel it is quite possible the military effects of a systematic and sustained bombing of POL [petroleum, oil and lubricants] in North Vietnam may be more prompt and direct than conventional intelligence analysis would suggest. . . .” Rostow was right that the intelligence community would not understand the real effectiveness and significance of hitting POL; the CIA estimated in early June that bombing POL would have little effect.

Despite this the President gave the okay, and on June 29 the strikes were launched. At first it appeared that the raids were extraordinarily successful, with all of the Hanoi storage and 80 percent of the Haiphong facility destroyed. McNamara had gone along with the POL raids; it was the last major escalation that he recommended. What became clear in the months that followed was that the air campaign against POL, although seemingly successful, had, like the previous bombing campaigns, failed. The North Vietnamese had learned to adjust to American power, and dispersed their reserves to areas invulnerable to American attack. So at an extremely high cost in American men and planes, we destroyed the surface storage while the North Vietnamese were able to pressure the Soviets into larger and larger petroleum commitments. For McNamara, it helped seal his doubts; he later criticized the Air Force and the Navy for the gap between the optimistic estimates of what the raids could do and what the actual results were. It meant that he would push harder and harder for the barrier, and that he would begin to work to limit bombing. In effect from then on, and particularly in the fall of 1966, he was something of a dissenter, but a dissenter operating under considerable limits. For one thing, Rusk was not given to the same doubts, and thus the Secretary of State was to the right of him. In addition, if he was fighting from within, he was accepting the assumptions of his opponents, fighting them on a tactical level, not on a deeper one; this made him particularly vulnerable to the counterproposals of Westmoreland and the Chiefs. He began to give up combat troops to hold down on the bombings, dissembling to a degree within the bureaucracy so it would not be too obvious within the government that he was a dove. As such, his half measures always failed.

In October 1966, with the military asking for troop increases which would bring the American commitment to a minimum of 570,000, McNamara went to Saigon again. This time his sense of pessimism was very real; he was convinced that the other side would match us, that in effect Hanoi was now waging its own special kind of attrition, psychological attrition, against us, slowing down the pace of the war slightly, believing that time was on their side. He was affected considerably by reports by one of his own people there, Daniel Ellsberg, whose own gloom was growing and who told McNamara that most of the official optimism was false. On the way back to Washington McNamara talked with aides about the developments, and he seemed very down: things were, he said, worse than a year before. With him was Robert Komer, once the White House aide who had been sent to Vietnam by Johnson to head pacification, a man constantly enthusiastic and upbeat (Komer was liked by journalists, who were amused by his constant optimism. “Do you really believe all that stuff you put out and send back to Washington?” one reporter asked him. “The difference between you and me,” he explained, a lovely insight into the semantics of Saigon, “is that I was sent out here to report on the progress in the war”). Komer disagreed with McNamara and insisted that the war was certainly no worse than a year before. McNamara asked Ellsberg whether it was better or worse than a year before. “Pretty much the same,” Ellsberg answered.

“You see,” said Komer, “at least it’s no worse.”

“But it is worse,” insisted McNamara, “because if things are the same, then they’re worse, because we’ve invested so much more of our resources.” (On that same plane ride McNamara asked Ellsberg for an extra copy of his report, entitled “Visit to an Insecure Province,” and then asked him, in the interests of not straining civilian-military relationships, if he would mind not showing it to General Earle Wheeler.)

McNamara began to be increasingly appalled by the war itself, what we were doing with our power, the pain inflicted on the civilians. He paid particular attention to stories about the destruction caused by the bombing. When Harrison Salisbury of the Times visited Hanoi at the end of 1966, his articles were violently attacked by the Administration, particularly Defense Department spokesmen, but McNamara was fascinated by them and followed them closely. He and Robert Kennedy had remained close friends and in 1966 they began to feed each other’s dissent, McNamara confirming to Kennedy that the war was not going well, Kennedy confirming McNamara’s impressions of what the war was doing to this country. He was an intriguing man in this period; almost as if there were a split personality caught between two loyalties, and more, caught between two eras. In those days he could still be part of the planning of the bombing, but be a very different man in the evening, going to dinner parties, raising a glass to someone like Moyers with the toast “Bless the doves—we need more of them.” He was able to head the war machine, give the Montreal speech, and then regret giving it. It was as if there were a Kennedy-McNamara who said one thing to Kennedy-type people, and a Johnson-McNamara who said another to Johnson-type people. He was able to come back in October 1966 and report to Johnson that things did not look good in Vietnam (“I see no reasonable way to bring the war to an end soon”), commenting on how tough and resilient the enemy was, and then conclude that the United States should press on harder militarily and get into a better military position which would make a war of long duration less attractive to the enemy. The word swept through Washington about his unhappiness; some thought he was being disloyal to Johnson, others began to think he was coming apart. In late 1966 he ran into Emmet Hughes of Newsweek, who had just written a hand-wringing piece on Vietnam, and McNamara was very sympathetic about the piece, it certainly wasn’t a good situation, was it? “I never thought it would go on like this. I didn’t think these people had the capacity to fight this way. If I had thought they could take this punishment and fight this well, could enjoy fighting like this, I would have thought differently at the start . . .” Washington watched his dilemma, the split personality, with fascination. A brilliant Defense Secretary, went the Washington line, but no taste for being a War Secretary. His whole ethical and moral structure made him at ease in the job at Defense, but when he became a War Secretary his values were threatened and he could not come to terms with his new role. It was, he sometimes said, the system which had produced the war; yet he was one of the men who was supposed to control the system.

In despair and frustration over the war, in 1967 he ordered a massive study of all the papers on Vietnam, going back to the 1940s, a study which became known as the Pentagon Papers. When it was handed in he read parts of it. “You know,” he told a friend, “they could hang people for what’s in there.” His own behavior seemed increasingly erratic as the pressures on him mounted, and close friends worried about his health. In 1967 when there was a possibility of peace negotiations being worked out through the British, Kosygin was in London and a bombing pause had gone into effect. Acting on his talks with the British, Ambassador David Bruce recommended strongly that we not resume the bombing until Kosygin had left London. Bruce pleaded to State that if it valued the alliance at all, it must observe the British request. Rusk, a great chain-of-command man, accepted the Bruce thesis and pushed it. McNamara argued forcefully against it and tore into it at the meetings, but Bruce and Rusk held the day. A few minutes after the last discussion, McNamara was on the phone to Bruce, congratulating him on his victory, how well he had presented his case, and how proud McNamara was of him. At first Bruce was touched by McNamara’s warmth and courtesy, but later he was appalled when he learned that McNamara had been his principal adversary, and the story spread through both American and British diplomatic circles in London.

If by 1966, and increasingly in 1967, McNamara was beginning to move away from the policy, then Rusk was, if anything, more steadfast than ever. He not only believed in the policy, he had a sense of profound constitutional consequences if the President, already at loggerheads with one of his chief advisers, was separated from the other. If Rusk too dissented, if that gossipy town even thought he was a critic, then in Rusk’s opinion the country would be in a constitutional crisis. There must be no blue sky between the President and the Secretary of State, he told aides. Besides, he believed the war could and should be won. So he became a rock, unflinching and unchanging, and absorbing, as deliberately as he could, as much of the reaction to the war as possible. The abuse he took was enormous; he who had been the least anxious of the principal advisers to become involved but who had never argued against it, now became the public symbol of it, a target of public scorn, his statements mocked, so that he would once say in exasperation that he was not the village idiot; he knew that Ho was not Hitler, but nonetheless, there was an obligation to stand. In a pay phone booth in his own State Department someone in 1967 scratched the graffito: “Dean Rusk is a recorded announcement.” As he became a rock, so his own Department was immobilized; the best people in State, increasingly unhappy about the policy, felt they could make no challenge to it, and that they had become parrots, that and nothing more, and departmental morale sank to a new low.

For Rusk, the job of the Secretary of State seemed to be to absorb pain. That and nothing more. Though there was much to challenge the military on—particularly the political mindlessness of the attrition strategy—State’s challenges were few, infrequent, mild and usually on minor matters. Occasionally there would be quick flashes of the hurt, as when he talked about the journalists who covered the war—which side were they on, were they for their country or against it? Years later, when the ordeal was over, he would tell friends that he did not know how he had lasted through it—if he had not been able to have that drink at the end of the day he could not have survived. There were moments when he did not conceal the anger and the rage, though they were few. Tom Wicker of the Times was at a dinner party with Rusk at the Algerian embassy one night in 1966 at a time when there had been a Buddhist crisis in Hué, when suddenly Rusk turned to him and started screaming—there was no other word for it: Why can’t the New York Times get things right? Why does it always print lies? Which side is it on? Wicker, whose own relations with Rusk had always been pleasant, was stunned by the anger and ferocity of the attack, and it was minutes before he could even understand what Rusk was talking about—a report in the Times that day saying that Buddhist dissidents had taken over the Hué radio station. Rusk had read the story and had been so upset by it that he had personally called the American consulate in Hué, where of course the American officials had denied the report, and on the basis of this he had proceeded to lecture Wicker on the perfidy of American journalism. The entire episode, particularly the sudden savagery of Rusk’s attack—after all, it is not fun to be assaulted by the Secretary of State of the United States of America over coffee and cognac—stayed with Wicker, and six months later when he was in Vietnam he dropped by the American consulate in Hué and asked a young man on the staff there about the Buddhist crisis. Oh yes, said the young man, the Buddhists had captured the radio station, and Wicker, thinking of Rusk and his obvious sincerity, had decided then that the real problem was that they had created an elaborate machine to lie to them, only to become prisoners of their own lies.

But generally Rusk bore the brunt of it well. He did not complain. He was a proud man and at times it seemed as if he took sustenance from the criticism. In the great clubs of New York and Washington his old friends, his sponsors, men like Lovett and McCloy, were worried about Dean being the target of all the nation’s anger. One day McCloy stopped Lovett and said that he wished Dean would fight back, answer his critics or yell for help—they would like to get in the fight and help him. But Lovett, who knew Rusk well, said that Dean would never do that, he was too proud. Yet proud or not, at the end the taste, which should have been so good—eight years at the job that he and every other serious young man coveted—was sour, and he was exhausted financially, physically and spiritually. At the small farewell party for him given by some State Department reporters, the atmosphere was suitably pleasant; these men who had covered Rusk for that long recognized in him qualities of grace, decency and modesty which were not always obvious from a distance. And Rusk, who had always held together so well, finally broke. He went over to British correspondent Louis Heren and asked why the British had not sent any troops to Vietnam. Rusk knew of course well enough, as they had all known from the start, that this was a war that no one else had wanted, that except for a genuine effort by the Australians and a semimercenary effort by the Koreans, it was virtually a unilateral war. As gently as possible, Heren began to stumble through the usual rationalizations when Rusk, whose own allegiance, whose own lessons of mutual security were derived from England, suddenly cut him off. “All we needed was one regiment. The Black Watch would have done. Just one regiment, but you wouldn’t. Well, don’t expect us to save you again. They can invade Sussex and we wouldn’t do a damn thing about it.”

Many of the people around Lyndon Johnson and many of the people at State had been relatively pleased when Walt Rostow replaced McGeorge Bundy. In contrast to Bundy’s cold, haughty style, Rostow was warm, pleasant, humble, almost angelic, eager to share his enthusiasm, his optimism, with all around. He had time for everyone, he was polite to everyone, there was no element of put-down to him. The real Johnson loyalists were particularly pleased because they had not liked the Bundy-Johnson relationship, and here was Rostow, bearing the same credentials as Bundy, with far more serious books to his credit, a man far more pleasant to work with, and who was joyously, unabashedly pro-Johnson. It was not fake enthusiasm, it was genuine; Johnson had rescued Rostow from the Siberia of Policy Planning, and Rostow was properly grateful, but more important, Rostow genuinely admired Lyndon Johnson. They saw eye to eye on both domestic and foreign affairs, and Rostow thought Johnson the smartest, toughest man he had ever dealt with. As for Johnson, if he had liked about Bill Bundy his willingness to run it in up to the hilt, then Rostow was a man after his own heart.

But the enthusiasm of others for Rostow soon floundered on Rostow’s own enthusiasm. He became the President’s national security adviser at a time when criticism and opposition to the war were beginning to crystallize, and he eventually served the purpose of shielding the President from criticism and from reality. He deflected others’ pessimism and rewarded those who were optimistic. It was not contrived, it was the way he was. Perhaps, too, it was a symptom of the war: a President in a hopeless war did not need, could not accept a chief adviser wringing his hands, an adviser who seemed to reflect the gathering doubts. Maybe the job required a positive thinker. There was no more positive thinker in Washington than Walt Whitman Rostow.

His optimism was almost a physiological thing, organically part of him. He always believed in the war and in particular in the bombing. He believed early in what the bombing would do, that it was something quick and dramatic and that the other side would have to give in. Year after year, as the failure of the bombing became apparent, it did not faze him; just a little more bombing. And enthusiastic himself, he was anxious to pass on his enthusiasm. He headed the Psychological Strategy Committee, which met at the White House to think of psy war, a strategy which, it turned out, would be largely aimed at the American people. If any of the incoming reports indicated any kind of progress, Rostow immediately authorized a leak. Business Week got computer data charts of attacks by Vietcong (if they were down); the Christian Science Monitor got computerized population-control data from the Hamlet Evaluation Survey; the Los Angeles Times received data on the searches of junks and hamlets secured. He could always see the bright side of any situation, and in that sense he became legend. In the thousands of items flooding in from Saigon as part of the information glut he could find the few positive ones, pounce on them and bring them to his boss, as for instance one morning in 1967 when he told the President that never had the Boy Scouts of Vietnam gone out to clean up the rubble as they had just done in Danang. He made his predictions and nothing bothered him. He could grab Dan Ellsberg in July 1965 and excitedly pass on the news about the bombing (which to most experts in the CIA had already proven itself a failure): “Dan, it looks very good. The Vietcong are going to collapse within weeks. Not months but weeks. What we hear is that they’re already coming apart under the bombing.” They did not come apart in a few weeks, but neither did Rostow, and Ellsberg went off to Vietnam, where for two years he became something of an authority on the failure of the Vietcong to collapse. Two years later, tired, depressed, and thoroughly pessimistic about the lost cause in Vietnam, he returned to Washington, where he found Rostow just as upbeat as ever.

“Dan,” said Rostow, “it looks very good. The other side is near collapse. In my opinion, victory is very near.”

Ellsberg, sick at heart with this very kind of high-level optimism which contrasted with everything he had seen in the field, turned away from Rostow, saying he just did not want to talk about it.

“No,” said Rostow, “you don’t understand. Victory is very near. I’ll show you the charts. The charts are very good.”

“Walt,” said Ellsberg, “I don’t want to hear it. Victory is not near. Victory is very far away. I’ve just come back from Vietnam. I’ve been there for two years. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to see any charts . . .”

“But, Dan, the charts are very good . . .”

He had a great capacity not to see what he did not choose to see; in Washington at a dinner given for Everett Martin, a distinguished Newsweek reporter expelled from Vietnam for the pessimism of his reporting in late 1967, Rostow managed to pass the entire evening without ever acknowledging that Martin had been in Vietnam. Within the bureaucracy the word went out among those who briefed him that if they wanted to get his attention they had to bait their news with sugar, get the positive information in first, and then before he could turn off, quickly slip in the darker evidence. (Once in 1967 after a somewhat pessimistic briefing by John Vann, Rostow, slightly shaken, said, “But you do admit that it’ll all be over in six months.” “Oh,” said Vann somewhat airily, “I think we can hold out longer than that.”)

With the White House under siege, with increasing evidence that the American military commitment to Vietnam had been stalemated, Rostow fought back; in the White House basements, aides culled through the reams of information coming in from Saigon and picked the items which they knew Rostow was following, particularly the good ones. They would send this up to Rostow, and he would package it and pass it on to the President, usually with covering notes which said things such as—this would give confirmation to the statement which the President had so wisely made to the congressional leadership the day before. The notes were similar—there were little touches of flattery: The record of your success indicates . . . Your place in history will bring you . . . The theme was the greatness of the cause and the immortality of Lyndon Johnson. Later, as McNamara’s doubts became more evident, there would be references to the need to stop McNamara’s wickedness, and when Clark Clifford replaced McNamara and began to fight the policy, there were verbal references to the need to “combat Cliffordism.”

He fought evidence which was contrary. He encouraged George Carver, the CIA man who was assigned to brief the White House, to be more optimistic, and by 1967 there was a major split within the CIA. Most of the pure intelligence analysts were much more gloomy than Carver (in fact, in savvy Washington circles it was said that there were two CIAs: a George Carver CIA, which was the CIA at the top, generally optimistic in its reporting to Rostow; and the rest of the CIA, which was far more pessimistic). Rostow himself, drawing on his experience as a World War II intelligence officer, was not above reanalyzing and challenging some CIA reports and somehow making them, upon revision, more optimistic than they had been. He fought elements of the government which he considered unworthy and disloyal. When officers at State put out a weekly summary called the “Evening Reading Items,” a one-page sheet which attempted to show how American moves in Vietnam looked to Hanoi (showing in effect that we were more aggressive than we thought we were and reflecting Hanoi’s determination to keep coming), Rostow was appalled. He hated the sheet and got into bitter conflicts with State over its right even to publish it. It’s very pessimistic, he would argue, and it’s all supposition. All supposition. Nothing hard in it. But the State Department people argued back that the President had to see it, we had to know how we looked to the other side.

He also played a form of gamesmanship with Rusk and McNamara, particularly McNamara. He would pore over the voluminous amount of incoming military information, make his selections, and come up with one or two positive pieces of news. Then he would call Rusk and McNamara, very cheerful, very upbeat: Have you seen the new captured documents? They’re terrific! Have you seen the stuff about the battle at An Xuyen? Great victory. A civil guard company stood off a VC regiment. The body count in Chau Doc is marvelous! . . . It was always minuscule stuff in a broad vast war with hundreds of other items far more pessimistic, but it kept McNamara and Rusk busy wasting long hours culling the material themselves so they would be prepared for his calls. Thus valuable time was wasted and the great men of the government went through material checking out platoon ambushes lest they be ambushed themselves. And Lyndon Johnson, already isolated because of the war and because of his office, was kept even more remote.

By the nature of his office, a President is separated from his natural constituency and from the art of his profession, politics. The office restricts his movements, his access to events and reality, since few want to bring the President bad news. If a politician is a senator, a friend can sometimes tell him the honest truth in a gentle manner. If he is a President there is no such equality, no way of gently and honestly bearing bad tidings. Respect for the office demands that bad news be filtered down. At first Johnson was isolated involuntarily by the nature of the job, but then as the war progressed, the isolation became voluntary. He saw enemies everywhere. He became a figure of scorn. A scurrilous play, MacBird, was written about him and enjoyed remarkable critical success. He became a cartoonists’ delight: he bombed Vietnam and wept crocodile tears, and the tears turned out to be maps of Vietnam; he showed his famous abdominal scar and the scar turned out to be a map of Vietnam.

The liberal intellectual community, crucial to the success of a Democratic liberal President, was turning on him. The first signs had come in 1965 when he gave a major Festival of the Arts—what he hoped would be an intellectual ratification of his great electoral triumph. Instead it turned out to be an intellectual rejection of his Vietnam policies. Some of the writers and artists invited wanted to boycott, others wanted to come and picket and read protests. “Half of those people,” Johnson said, “are trying to insult me by staying away and half of them are trying to insult me by coming.” But the art festival was the beginning: rather than crowning his legislative victories, it symbolized the intellectual community’s rejection of the war. More radical voices, fueled by the war, came to prominence, and in so doing, moved the traditional liberal intellectual center over to the left. The liberals had to move to the radical position on the war or lose influence. The Fulbright hearings came in early 1966, and further legitimized opposition; gradually opposition became increasingly centrist and respectable. Opposition mounted on the campuses; Norman Mailer in 1966 could dedicate a book of essays to Lyndon Johnson with gratitude for having made young Americans cheer at the mention of Mailer’s name.

With liberal pressure mounting, with Robert Kennedy making the first uneasy gestures toward opposition, Johnson turned ever more inward. He dared not venture out; isolation begot isolation. When in mid-1967 he decided to defend his policies, the site and the group he chose was significant—the annual Junior Chamber of Commerce meeting. If a liberal Democratic President, needing a friendly and respectful audience, had to choose the Jaycees, then he was in trouble (as was his protégé Hubert Humphrey; Mrs. Humphrey, questioned about antagonism of American youth to her husband in 1968, answered that it was not true that the Vice-President was not keeping up with youth—the Humphreys, she said, kept in touch with many of the Jaycees). Someone like Martin Luther King, Jr., could not be a friend on civil rights and a critic on the war; he became in effect an enemy, he had to be kept away. (Of course the price for those who stayed friendly to Johnson was quite considerable, it moved them increasingly away from their own people and their own constituencies. At one Negro meeting in March 1967, Whitney Young of the Urban League defended the war and ended up in a bitter confrontation with Dr. King; Young told King that his criticism of the war was unwise, it would antagonize the President and they wouldn’t get anything from him. King, genuinely angry, told him, “Whitney, what you’re saying may get you a foundation grant, but it won’t get you into the kingdom of truth.”)

The protests turned uglier and more personal, neoviolent, and then violent. Attitudes and passions long concealed by the two-party system were now unleashed. More and more trusted staff people left, including some of Johnson’s own people—Reedy, Moyers and even Valenti. The departure of Moyers in 1966 was considered crucial; though he had been the White House press officer and thus a spokesman for the war, he was known on the inside as a doubter, and he had worked to make other doubters available to the President. When Moyers left, feeling himself locked in by the growing inflexibility around him, James Reston wrote that he was a casualty of the war, that he had been wounded at Credibility Gap. Johnson himself was furious when Moyers left. He hated it when anyone left him, anyway, but Moyers was special, he was the proxy son. Johnson raged after he departed—that boy had been using Johnson all this time, out there having dinner with the Kennedys, advancing his own career. Well, Lyndon Johnson wasn’t stupid, he knew what Moyers had been doing, he read the clips, and why was it that his press secretary’s image kept getting better and better, but Johnson’s image got worse and worse?

As the temper in the country grew uglier, the White House became more of a fortress, and security arrangements became more and more stringent. Johnson, aware of the mood and the criticism of him, the highly personal nature of it, told friends, “The only difference between the Kennedy assassination and mine is that I am alive and it has been more torturous.” Inside the fortress Johnson’s aides pleaded with him to go out more, to leave the office; they wrote memos saying that even if demonstrators attacked or humiliated him, it would rebound to his credit, and that it was extremely unwise for him to stay locked up in the White House. But the Secret Service people would have none of it; it was far too dangerous, they said, they had never seen the anger and the instability in the country focused as it was on the Chief Executive. They would not permit it.

Nor could Johnson plead effectively for his war. Wars are supposed to unite nations, to rally divided spirits, and Johnson had counted on this in his private political estimates. But this war was different; rather than concealing or healing normal divisions in the society, it widened them, and gaps became chasms. Presidential aides, looking for comforting precedents, had gone back to the World War II speeches of Franklin Roosevelt and were startled by how bloodthirsty it all seemed; the Jap was to be smashed like the animal he really was. In contrast, Johnson had to be restrained, he had to announce every few minutes that he did not intend to overthrow Hanoi. Nor could he bring a Medal of Honor winner to the White House for a speech without acerbic editorial reaction. He was boxed in. He could not unleash the dogs of war without creating dreams of winning; it was impossible to unleash them partway. The pressures now seemed to come from both sides, Westmoreland and CINCPAC asking for more troops and greater bombing targets, the civilians asking for greater controls. Limited war was not limited in the pain and dilemmas it brought to a President. In late 1966 the military began to build up pressure for the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong, blocking the harbor, taking apart the industrial capacity of both cities. The military brought with it evidence that this way the war would be won quicker; that, though drastic, in the long run this would save lives. Doing the hard thing was often doing the right thing. As a way of dramatizing this last point, one of the senior officers brought along projections for what the invasion of the Japanese mainland might have cost the Americans in lives had we not used the atomic bomb. They even had the figure: 750,000 lives saved. Johnson was fascinated and asked the senior military how they had arrived at the figure. The answer was quite simple, they said: some of their bright young men at the Pentagon had fed the right information from previous landings and battles into a computer, and thus come up with the figure. The President seemed duly impressed and asked to meet the young men who had made the projection. When they were eventually ushered into his office, the President feigned interest in their methodology for a while and then told them, “I have one more problem for your computer—will you feed into it how long it will take five hundred thousand angry Americans to climb that White House wall out there and lynch their President if he does something like that?” Which ended for a time the plan to bomb Hanoi and Haiphong.

But this did not abate the military pressure, which continued to grow. In April 1967, with support for the war fast dwindling, he brought General Westmoreland home to speak before the Congress and the Associated Press Managing Editors Convention. But the Westmoreland appearances did not ease the pressures against him; if anything, the criticism of Johnson for using Westmoreland, for bringing the military into politics, mounted. Nor did Westmoreland reassure the President in private messages. At this point Westmoreland had 470,000 Americans, and he was asking for an increase which would bring the total to 680,000 men by June 1968, or at the very least a minimum increase of about 95,000 to 565,000. But even with this increase his forecasts were not optimistic. Without the top figure, he told Johnson, the war would not be lost, but progress would be slowed down; this, he said, was not encouraging but realistic. Then Westmoreland noted that every time we took an action, the other side made a countermove. At this point the President asked him, “When we add divisions, can’t the enemy add divisions? If so, where does it all end?” Westmoreland answered that the NVA had eight divisions in the country and had the capacity to go to twelve, but if they did, the problems of support would be considerable. He did note, however, that if we added more men, so would the enemy. But we had finally reached the crossover point, Westmoreland insisted, a crucial point in his war of attrition: we were killing men more quickly than they could add them. Even so, the President was not entirely put at ease. “At what point does the enemy ask for [Chinese] volunteers?” he asked. Westmoreland answered, “That’s a good question.”

Johnson then asked his commander what would happen if we stayed at the already high figure of 470,000 men. It would be a meat-grinder war in which we could kill a large number of the enemy but in the end do little better than hold our own, Westmoreland said. The limitations of troops (this country already regarded it as too unlimited a war) meant that he could only chase after enemy main-force units in fire-brigade style. He foresaw the war then going on in the current fashion for five more years. If the American force was increased to 565,000, Westmoreland saw the war going on for three years; with the full increment of 210,000 it could go on for two years—which would take Johnson into 1970. General Wheeler was there (anxious for Westmoreland to get the troops as a means of also getting a reserve call-up) and the President asked him what would happen if Westmoreland did not get the full 210,000. Wheeler answered that the momentum the Americans had would die, and in some areas the enemy would recapture the initiative; it did not mean that we would lose the war, but it would certainly be a longer one. For Lyndon Johnson, a year away from an election, already besieged, already sensing the growing restlessness in the country, hearing these rather dark predictions of his generals, it was hardly a happy occasion.

Two years too late the civilians were finally learning how open-ended they had made the war, and how little they had determined the strategy. Ten days later John McNaughton wrote in a memo to McNamara:

I am afraid there is the fatal flaw in the strategy in the draft. It is that the strategy falls into the trap that has ensnared us for the past three years. It actually gives the troops while only praying for their proper use and for constructive diplomatic action. Limiting the present decision to an 80,000 add-on does the very important business of postponing the issue of a Reserve call-up (and all of its horrible baggage) but postpone it is all that it does—probably to a worse time, 1968. Providing the 80,000 troops is tantamount to acceding to the whole Westmoreland-Sharp request. This being the case, they will “accept” the 80,000. But six months from now, in will come messages like the “470,000-570,000” messages, saying that the requirement remains at 210,000 or more. Since no pressure will have been put on anyone, the military war will have gone on as before and no diplomatic progress will have been made. It follows that the “philosophy” of the war should be fought out now so that everyone will not be proceeding on their own premises, and getting us in deeper and deeper; at the very least, the President should give General Westmoreland his limit (as President Truman did to General MacArthur). That is, if General Westmoreland is to get 550,000 men, he should be told “that will be all and we mean it.”

The government was now clearly divided, and the President was caught in the middle. The Chiefs and Westmoreland wanted an ever larger war and ever greater force, but this time McNamara was in effect able to hold the line. Westmoreland would not get the minimal 70,000 he wanted; rather, there would be a compromise and he would get about 50,000, bringing the U.S. troops to a ceiling of 525,000.

It was a special irony that the burden of making the case against the war now fell to the civilians at Defense. Nominally the reaction should have come from the White House, from aides to the President anxious to protect their man from false estimates from the military; or from State, a place supposedly sensitive to the political dilemmas of the war. But Rostow made the White House staff supportive, a hotbed of cheerleaders, and at State, Rusk kept his people from analyzing failures (thus the erratic behavior of Bill Bundy in all those years; he jumped around from position to position, he seemed to be saying that we were doing the right things, but we weren’t doing them well enough; he was never able to use his intelligence and that of his staff on the real issues. His intelligence went in one direction, but his responsibility to his superior, Rusk, turned him in another. As a result he became increasingly irritable and harsh to those under him).

By mid-1967 McNamara was moving to try and cap the war, particularly the bombing. In October 1966, for the first time, he had let Systems Analysis loose on the issue of the war, asking them to check on projected increases the Chiefs wanted for bombing in 1967. The willingness to bring in Systems Analysis was significant not so much as an attempt to prove that the war was not working, but as a willingness to surface more and more as a critic. He knew that the use of Systems Analysis would anger the military and cause him political problems, that it would be evidence of his own pessimism, but at this point he was willing to take additional heat in order to get the facts. The Systems Analysis people of course recommended against the bombing. They reported that the bombing did not cause Hanoi great problems, that these losses were readily made up by the Soviet Union and that thus an increase in bombing placed a greater burden not on North Vietnam, but on the United States. For example, CINCPAC’s expanded bombing requirements would generate 230 aircraft losses in 1967 and cost us $1.1 billion while doing only negligible damage to the other side. (At the end of 1967 Systems Analysis would do another estimate on the war and find that despite the bombing, the GNP of North Vietnam had managed to go up in 1965 and 1966, and had fallen off only in 1967, and that North Vietnam’s allies had given Hanoi over the war years $1.6 billion in economic and military aid—that is, four times what it had lost through bombing. “If economic criteria were the only consideration, NVN would show a substantial net gain from the bombing, primarily in military equipment,” it reported.)

But by 1967 McNamara had not yet made the case against the bombing. He had made an early appeal for limiting the bombing, and his appeal, pressed at a very high level in the government, had resulted in a ferocious argument—sharp and furious. Word of it did not leak out, because it had been held at such a high level, and because McNamara himself was so closemouthed about it and operated so close to his vest. But John McNaughton later told friends that had it gone through, there would have been at least two senior military resignations.

McNamara lost that first round, but he had decided to continue fighting. He wanted to win within the bureaucracy because that was the battlefield he knew best. He wanted above all to make the case that the bombing could not win the war, that it was a subsidiary part of it at best, and that the limits were greater than the effectiveness. He thought of using the material in a press conference but decided that was too limited a forum; he thought of giving a single speech but decided that the complexity of his points might be lost; it was too much for a one-shot presentation. So while he was looking for a forum, he prepared his case. He pushed the CIA very hard for judgments on how effective the bombing had been and received in return what were considered some of the best reports ever done by the Agency. In August, when the Stennis committee, primed by frustrated and unhappy generals, was holding hearings on the air war, McNamara was asked to testify. It was exactly what he wanted. He knew about committee hearings by now, and how to make points and make news. He worked mostly by himself with very few aides right up until the last minute, deliberately not clearing his presentation with the White House, knowing that clearance would not come through.

In testifying, he recognized the impact of what he was doing and saying. He did not attack previous bombing; rather, what he sought was to remove bombing as a means of attaining victory. He knew it would infuriate the President, and it did; afterward he was summoned to the White House to receive a full blast of presidential anger. It was a rare moment for McNamara; he, the compleat corporate man, had broken the corporate rules, and he had acted as an individual, as a man with his own rights and privileges. In a way he lost; eventually the fifty-seven targets which the JCS wanted and which the Stennis committee had criticized him for not authorizing were cleared by the President with, of course, no appreciable change in the war. But he had written into the record a powerful official argument against the bombing and this would have greater effect in the coming year. In doing this, he paid the price; he separated himself from the military publicly, and he undermined his long-range usefulness. From then on the President made sure that Earle Wheeler was at the Tuesday lunches. A few months later the President, wanting to make some minor point on the war to a senator, suggested that the senator go by and see Bob McNamara. And then he caught himself: “No, don’t go see Bob—he’s gone dovish on me.”

But a dovish Secretary of Defense in control of a military empire was a political problem for Johnson. It meant that his own house was divided, almost openly so after the Stennis hearings. McNamara annoyed the Chiefs, caused problems on the Hill, and was a constant reminder to Johnson himself that perhaps it did not work, that it was all lies. By mid-1967 Johnson had turned on McNamara (it was not enough that McNamara’s earlier 1965 projections had been wrong; what was worse was that he was now trying to act on a new set of calculations); the President still described his Defense Secretary as brilliant, but there was a new sarcastic touch to it. In mid-1967, when McNamara proposed limiting the bombing, gradually reducing it in scale as a means of getting negotiations started, Johnson took the proposals, handed them to an aide, and said, “You’ve never seen such a lot of shit.” Clearly, McNamara was no longer an asset; he was a man caught between conflicting loyalties, and Johnson was aware of his very close relationship with Robert Kennedy. Nineteen sixty-eight being a political year, Lyndon Johnson was not about to enter a campaign with a vital member of his official family publicly dissenting on the most important issue. Without checking with McNamara, Johnson announced in November 1967 that his Secretary of Defense was going to the World Bank. The move came as a surprise to the Secretary and he did not know whether or not he had been fired. The answer was that he had been.

But not everyone had gone dovish on the President, neither General Westmoreland nor another important member of the team in Saigon, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker. When this kindly, gentle New England patriarch with perhaps the most enviable and least assailable reputation in American government—everyone spoke well of Ellsworth Bunker—had arrived there in 1967, the doves had all felt a surge of optimism. Bunker’s record for sensitivity and integrity were impeccable; at State a certain excitement had been kindled by Bunker’s appointment. But Bunker, who had been so open-minded in the Dominican crisis, was very different in Saigon; the American flag was planted now, American boys were dying, and though he was freed of the mistakes of the past, he felt the need to justify the past American investment. So he bought all the military estimates and assumptions; he was the bane of some of the younger men on his staff who worked desperately to bring him together with doubters, to tell him that the whole thing was hopeless and that we were stalemated. But Bunker was confident, and in the next five years he became one of the two or three most important and resilient players, in particular standing behind Thieu and Ky at the time of Tet, when most people were ready to write them off. So in 1967 if the military were optimistic, Bunker was optimistic. When members of his staff and journalists brought him unfavorable estimates, he turned away. He could not understand why they were so pessimistic, he said, when generals as able as Bruce Palmer were optimistic. Why, Bruce Palmer was one of the finest and most intelligent officers in the U.S. Army, they had worked together in the Dominican crisis, and General Palmer had assured him that things were going well in Vietnam. So how dare these young reporters be pessimistic? It was something he simply could not understand. Indeed, at one dinner party for journalists in late October 1967, Bunker began to talk confidently about how well things were going, and how bright the immediate future looked; what he really wanted was to set the ARVN free in Laos, a plan close to the hearts of the American military. When he answered that, a reporter sitting next to him began to laugh. “Why are you laughing?” Bunker asked. “Because if you send them into Laos they’ll get their asses whipped, sir,” the reporter answered. Bunker looked somewhat offended and said that this was not what he understood from his talks with our generals; some four years later he finally got his chance and sent the ARVN into Laos, and sure enough, they got their asses whipped. But even that did not faze Ellsworth Bunker, and he continued as the most consistent, influential and rigid hawk in the country, and he would continue to stay on in Vietnam, a friendly and gentle visage on a deteriorating policy.

Yet for all the optimism of men like Bunker and Westmoreland, talk of stalemate, of the war being unwinnable, continued to appear, driving the President into spirals of rage. What was all this goddamn talk about stalemate? What stalemate? What the hell did a bunch of journalists know about war? Yet, curiously, the source was his own military machine. Some of his generals were sick of what was to them the half-hearted quality of the whole thing, the attempt to win on the cheap. General Wallace Greene told some reporters at a background briefing that the war was in fact stalemated in Vietnam, that we needed mobilization and were paying too light a price. We needed to get on with the job. Six hundred thousand men would do it. “In 1964 I told them it would take four hundred thousand men and they all thought I was crazy,” he said. “I was wrong. We needed six hundred thousand men.”

At almost the same time a young Army officer was sent over to the Pentagon to attend a briefing of the Air Force Chief of Staff, John McConnell. It was the normal daily briefing, and in the figures the substance became clear: great personal risks on the part of American airmen for very small gains. Just like yesterday and the day before. Day after day of risk to make toothpicks on the Ho Chi Minh Trail; no absence of danger but a real absence of targets. This time the frustration showed and McConnell just sat there after the briefing ended, holding his head in his hands, saying, “I can’t tell you how I feel . . . I’m so sick of it . . . I have never been so goddamn frustrated by it all . . . I’m so sick of it . . .”

If Saigon was headed by men who had no doubts, who exuded confidence, and Washington and the United States were filled with men beginning to turn on the war, then there was only one thing to do: bring Saigon to Washington. In 1967, as a means of generating new enthusiasm for his policies, the President brought Westmoreland and Bunker back to America for major speeches designed to polish up the war’s image and remove those mounting doubts. But the visits had little effect; Westmoreland’s appearances simply inspired more protest, more charges that the President was manipulating the military for political gains. For Bunker and Westmoreland it was perhaps the first glimpse of how serious the President’s domestic problems were. The protests against the war were no longer voiced by some small strident minority; there was a deep and growing frustration of vast segments of American society. But that society had little link to the special world of Saigon, where so many of the decisions which affected American life were now being made. American domestic problems did not matter to the officials in Saigon; the idea that American society might actually turn on the war was alien. So Saigon was the separate organism: upbeat, confident, optimistic. For the New Year’s Eve party at the American embassy, the invitations read: “Come see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

Whose light at the end of the tunnel? If Lyndon Johnson knew increasingly in his gut that it had all gone wrong, that the other side had not folded, then he had one thing working for him: the other side’s victories were never clear, never tangible. The NVA and the Vietcong were resilient, but their successes never showed; they did not hold terrain, they faded into the night, their strength was never visible. Even the NBC and CBS camera teams, frustrated by the fact that they usually arrived at a battle after the other side had already slipped away, had a title for the film of most battles: “The wily VC got away again.” So if the enemy and his gains were invisible, it was hard for domestic American critics to make the case against the war, to make the case for the success of the enemy. Instead it was the word of General Westmoreland against the word of a bunch of snot-nosed kids.

The Tet offensive changed all that. For the first time the patience, durability and resilience of the enemy became clear to millions of Americans. In the past, the Vietcong and NVA had always fought in distant jungle or paddy areas, striking quickly and slipping into the night, their toughness rarely brought home to the American people. In the Tet offensive they deliberately changed that. For the first time they fought in the cities, which meant that day after day American newspapermen, and more important, television cameramen, could reflect their ability, above all their failure to collapse according to American timetables. The credibility of the American strategy of attrition died during the Tet offensive; so too did the credibility of the man who was by now Johnson’s most important political ally, General Westmoreland. If Westmoreland’s credibility was gone, then so too was Johnson’s. The Tet offensive had stripped Johnson naked on the war, his credibility and that of his Administration were destroyed. Indeed, Johnson and Rostow made it even easier for Hanoi; almost as soon as the offensive started they moved to combat the full force of a military push with words, a technique which had, after all, worked in the past. The Tet offensive began in earnest on January 31 and it would be felt for weeks; but within two days of its beginning, on February 2, Johnson held a press conference saying that the offensive was a failure, that the Administration had known all about it, in fact the Administration had the full order of Hanoi’s battle. It was demonstrably untrue, and the public was aware of it. Rostow had been warned by aides before the press conference not to do this, not to commit the Administration’s credibility into one more battle, that it might backfire, but he did not listen and the President went ahead. Thus, in the following days as the sheer fury of the offensive mounted, as the frailty of the defenses became more evident, the Administration simply looked more foolish, as evidenced by a February 6 Art Buchwald column, datelined Little Big Horn, Dakota:

Gen. George Armstrong Custer said today in an exclusive interview with this correspondent that the battle of Little Big Horn had just turned the corner and he could now see the light at the end of the tunnel. “We have the Sioux on the run,” Gen. Custer told me. “Of course we will have some cleaning up to do, but the Redskins are hurting badly and it will only be a matter of time before they give in.”

So with Johnson’s involuntary co-operation, Hanoi had managed to make the White House look particularly foolish; now the President faced an election year suddenly more vulnerable than ever . . .

The protection of the President in an election year of course had been an unwritten, unspoken goal among his principal aides. Even Westmoreland, in wanting larger troop commitments, had seen it as a way of expediting the war, and thus helping the President. In Saigon in the fall of 1967 Robert Komer, the chief of pacification, bumptious, audacious, anxious to show everyone in town how close he was to the President (six photographs of Lyndon Johnson on his office wall, a Saigon record), had gone around dinner parties telling reporters that he had assured the President that the war would not be an election issue in 1968. It was not one of his better predictions.

The President was in fact extremely exposed. The war had become the one issue of his Presidency; it had burned up not just his credibility but his resources as well. He had initiated the Great Society but never really built it; he had been so preoccupied with handling the war that the precious time and energy needed to change the bureaucracy, to apply the almost daily pressure to make the Great Society work, those qualities were simply not forthcoming. As far as the Great Society was concerned he was a father, but finally an absentee father. Nor had he been a very good practicing politician; he had let the Democratic party disintegrate, had not kept in touch with its principal figures, in part because of lack of time, in part because a genuine rapport might have necessitated listening to their growing doubts about the war. So he was isolated from even moderately loyal politicians. Inflation was rampant, and inflation certainly was not easing racial tensions as the country hurtled through racial change. It made vulnerable blue-collar workers feel even more vulnerable, even more resentful of the increasing protest going on around them. Nor was Johnson’s position with blacks solidified; he had pushed more and broader civil rights legislation through the Congress than any President in history, and had endeared himself to a generation of older, middle-class blacks. But that was not a visible thing; what was visible was the potent anger of younger, more militant blacks, restless not only with Johnson’s leadership, but with their own traditional black leadership, and they were busy linking the peace movement with what had once been the civil rights movement. The country in late 1967 seemed to be more and more in disarray; protest seemed to beget protest. Lyndon Johnson, who above all loved to control events, even little events, had lost control of the country, and he had immobilized himself on the one issue that might allow him to regain it. In 1963 Paul Kattenburg, the young State Department expert on Vietnam, had returned from Saigon to tell Roger Hilsman that Vietnam was poison, and it would poison everything it touched. Now, four and a half years later, the poison was very deep in the bloodstream.

Part of the frustration and bitterness, of course, was the feeling in the liberal community—the political segment most aggravated and most offended by the war—that it was powerless, that Lyndon Johnson was a liberal Democrat and could not be beaten, that they had no real political alternative. For the mythology lived; one could not unseat the sitting President of his own party. Eventually, however, despite the protests of older liberals (some of whom wanted to fight Johnson only on the platform at the forthcoming convention), younger liberals went looking for a candidate. They had only one choice, they thought, and that was to take the issue to the country and make the challenge to the President within the party. Robert Kennedy was the logical choice, but he was torn by the idea. Part of him wanted to go and was outside the system; part of him was still a traditionalist and believed what his advisers said, that you could not challenge the system. In the end he turned it down. Then they went to George McGovern, who was sympathetic and interested, but he faced a re-election race in South Dakota and that posed a problem. But if no one else would make it, then he told them to come back. So they turned to Gene McCarthy of Minnesota, and he accepted. There comes a time, he told reporters, when an honorable man simply has to raise the flag. “What will you do if elected?” a reporter asked, and borrowing from Eisenhower in 1952, he answered, “I will go to the Pentagon.”

But if a Robert Kennedy challenge frightened Johnson, one by Gene McCarthy did not; he did not seem a formidable candidate, he had a reputation for being a little lazy. Johnson saw McCarthy enter the race and viewed it as one more way of demonstrating how frail the left really was.

But even as McCarthy was making his lonely way through the small towns of New Hampshire, General Vo Nguyen Giap was moving his men down the trails for what would be called the Tet offensive. It began on January 31, 1968; day after day as the battle continued it became clear that the optimism from Saigon had been premature, that the enemy was tough and durable, that journalistic critics had been more correct in their estimates about the war than the government spokesmen. The Tet offensive destroyed Westmoreland’s credibility; what crumbled in Saigon now crumbled in Washington and crumbled in New Hampshire. The people of this country were already sick of the war and dubious of the estimates of the government; reading as they did in early March that the generals in Saigon wanted to send an additional 200,000 men, it seemed to symbolize the hopelessness and endlessness of the war. American politics and the war were finally coming together. In New Hampshire, Gene McCarthy took more than 42 percent of the vote, pushed Robert Kennedy into the race, and a race by Kennedy was no longer a joke to the President. It was a serious threat.

Nor was the President entirely in control of his own house. He had purged McNamara because he was no longer on the team and because he was a walking reminder of failure, but McNamara’s successor, Clark Clifford, was turning out to be even more difficult. Clifford was the prototype of the rich man’s Washington lobbyist, the supersmooth, urbane lawyer who knows where every body is buried, the former high official who works for the government just long enough to know where the weak spots are; to Johnson he seemed a reassuring replacement for the idealistic, tormented McNamara. But Clifford was proving to be a new kind of high official for Lyndon Johnson; whatever else, he was not the corporate man. Instead he had a great sense of his own value, and did not believe that anyone hired Clark Clifford except to gain the full benefit of Clark Clifford’s services. A great lawyer is paid for telling a rich and powerful client the truth, no matter how unpalatable. (The story is told of Clifford’s being called by a company president who explained a complicated problem and then asked for Clifford’s advice. Clifford told him not to say or do anything. Then he sent a bill for $10,000. A few days later the president called back protesting the size of the bill, and also asked why he should keep quiet. “Because I told you to,” Clifford answered and sent him another bill, for an additional $5,000.) He knew that if he went to work for the President he would be making a considerable financial sacrifice, so he fully intended to weigh in with the best of his wisdom, not simply to lend his name to a dying cause for the sake of being congenial. Earlier he had edged away from being the head of CIA under Kennedy and had rejected tentative offers by Johnson to become Attorney General and Undersecretary of State. When he took office at Defense he was already bothered by the growing domestic turbulence over the war and his own feeling that perhaps it was indeed hopeless. Also, he had just finished a tour of Asia for the President during which he and Max Taylor worked to drum up additional troops for the war from Asian allies. Their report at the end of the trip had been properly supportive, but Clifford was bothered by the fact that the other Asian nations showed no great interest in sending additional men. Oh yes, they thought standing in Vietnam was a marvelous idea, and they certainly gave us their blessing, but it just so happened that they had very little in the way of resources. The threatened dominoes, Clifford discovered, did not seem to take the threat as seriously as we did. Since he was a man of compelling common sense, this offended his sense of reality and proportion.

In addition, he was privy to the forces that McNamara had unleashed at Defense in the last year and a half, the dovishness now prevalent there. John McNaughton was dead, in an airplane crash, but his replacement, Paul Warnke, was a Washington lawyer with no previous experience in foreign affairs, and thus marvelously irreverent and iconoclastic toward all the myths of the period. He was, in fact, a heretic by the era’s standards. (Once asked by a reporter when his own doubts about Vietnam had begun, Warnke said, “At the beginning, in 1961. I could never understand why a smart politician like Jack Kennedy was always talking about being against insurgencies when we should obviously have tried to be for them.”) Warnke was more open in dealing with his subordinates than McNaughton had been, and the young civilian defense intellectuals therefore felt themselves encouraged in their doubts. These were unlikely doves; they were all men who had entered the Defense Department convinced that the world hinged on the great struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. They had been among the most militant Cold Warriors of the period, but now the evidence in the decade was going the other way, and they were for tempering the arms race and limiting the Pentagon’s power. Nor were they professional bureaucrats; most were men with Ph.D.s who could go back to universities and thus did not feel that their careers depended upon subservience to existing myths. So a curious struggle developed as the battle began over the limits of war: State, which was supposed to set the political limits, had no doubts because of Rusk and neither did the military under the Chiefs, and they became allies against the civilians at Defense. (Daniel Ellsberg symbolized the conversion—or reconversion—of the Defense intellectuals, though of course there were others. But Ellsberg seemed to dramatize the great currents of an era. At Harvard he had seemed at first the normal humanist student; serving as president of the literary magazine, more humanist and aesthete than warrior. But he had gone from Harvard to the Marine Corps and had drifted, during the years of the fifties, into the world of defense studies and theories, believing that the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union was the key to the survival of all values. He had ended up in Washington in the Kennedy years, one of the bright stars in John McNaughton’s constellation of young intellectuals, and he had done some of the early planning on the war. In 1965 he went on assignment to Vietnam and gradually turned against the war; year by year both his doubts and his outspokenness had grown. In 1969 he publicly criticized President Nixon’s policies on Vietnam, statements which expedited his departure from Rand, and which were picked up in the New York Times. An old friend named John Smail read in the Times of Ellsberg’s statements and wrote asking: “Are you the Dan Ellsberg I used to know in college?” Ellsberg answered back, in what was an epitaph for many in that era, “I haven’t been for a long time, but I am again.”)

The Defense civilians had in the past year turned up increasing evidence on the futility of our commitment. Studies made by Systems Analysis showed that the bombing did not work, that for much of the war, North Vietnam’s GNP had risen at the prewar rate of 6 percent. If the bombing was failing, so, too, claimed the civilians at Defense, was the strategy of attrition. We had, despite three years of ferocious fighting, barely touched their manpower pool. Defense estimates showed that no more than 40 percent of the males between seventeen and thirty-five had served in the Army, that more than 200,000 North Vietnamese became of draft age every year, and that only about 100,000 had been sent off to the war. Indeed, their main-force army had grown during the war from 250,000 to about 475,000. The war of attrition had barely touched them; we were not keeping up with their birth rate.

All of this had a profound effect on Clifford. Being a good politician and a Democratic party loyalist (he was the principal architect of Harry Truman’s election in 1948, which was one additional reason why Johnson had now chosen him), he also knew the political limits of what was going on. He wanted, friends thought, to turn Johnson around on the war; perhaps, separated from the war, Johnson could run again. But whatever else, Clark Clifford did not intend to see his own reputation destroyed by either Lyndon Johnson or Vietnam. So in the months of February and March 1968 as the Tet battle raged, as the Joint Chiefs reopened the old Westmoreland request for 206,000 more troops, Clifford fought ferociously to turn the tide, to limit the number of troops and to reduce the bombing. In that battle he was usually alone. Rusk, Taylor, Bill Bundy, Rostow were no help. Nick Katzenbach, Undersecretary of State, worked quietly to help him, but he was limited with Rusk as his superior. Nor did Clifford find the President receptive or pleased by this lonely struggle. Their relationship, once so warm and easy, turned cool and distant. The President did not seek his advice, and Clifford’s phone did not ring. He was even cut off from important cable traffic by the White House in ensuing months. But he posed a special problem: when McNamara had gone soft on the war, that could be ascribed to McNamara’s idealism, his distaste for blood, his friendship for the Kennedys. But none of this could be said of Clark Clifford; he was no Kennedy enthusiast, no kook, there was nothing soft about him. Slowly, cautiously, painfully, Clifford forced Johnson to turn and look honestly at the war; it was an act of friendship for which Johnson could never forgive him.

And slowly Clifford found allies. Not men in government so much as men outside it, men who had Johnson’s respect. In late March, Johnson summoned his Senior Advisory Group on Vietnam, a blue-chip Establishment group. These were the great names of the Cold War: McCloy, Acheson, Arthur Dean, Mac Bundy, Douglas Dillon, Robert Murphy. And over a period of two days they quietly let him know that the Establishment—yes, Wall Street—had turned on the war; it was hurting us more than it was helping us, it had all gotten out of hand, and it was time to bring it back to proportion. It was hurting the economy, dividing the country, turning the youth against the country’s best traditions. Great universities, their universities, were being destroyed. It was time to turn it around, to restore some balance. At one of the briefings of the Wise Men it was Arthur Goldberg, much mocked by some of the others, who almost single-handedly destroyed the military demand for 205,000 more troops. The briefing began with the military officer saying that the other side had suffered 45,000 deaths during the Tet offensive.

Goldberg then asked what our own killed-to-wounded ratios were.

Seven to one, the officer answered, because we save a lot of men with helicopters.

What, asked Goldberg, was the enemy strength as of February 1, when Tet started?

Between 160,000 and 175,000, the briefer answered.

What is their killed-to-wounded ratio? Goldberg asked.

We use a figure of three and a half to one, the officer said.

Well, if that’s true, then they have no effective forces left in the field, Goldberg said. What followed was a long and very devastating silence.

Acheson had told the President earlier that the Joint Chiefs did not know what they were talking about, and the switch in this group, which was saying in effect that the war had to be de-escalated, had a profound effect on the President. Did they know things he didn’t know? He demanded to be briefed by the same three officials who had briefed them on the war. Events, and pressure, it was clear, were closing in. He was cornered now. Even in the last days he had fought off those who wanted to stop the bombing, telling Arthur Goldberg angrily, “Let’s get one thing clear. I am not going to stop the bombing. I have heard every argument on the subject and I am not interested in further discussion. I have made up my mind, I am not going to do it.” He had in late March given particularly belligerent speeches, but now he was caught and he knew it. The Wise Men, as they were called, were telling him what the polls and the newspapers had told him: that the country had turned on the war.

New Hampshire had not been an isolated test. The next primary was in Wisconsin, and the President was entered there as well. The early reports from Wisconsin were very bad. No workers, no volunteers, no enthusiasm. Cabinet members went to Wisconsin in the President’s behalf, and drew small crowds. The President himself could not speak in his own behalf—it was too much of a security problem. The polls were bad and getting worse. One night in mid-March there was a sign which the President, hoping against hope, noticed and which he thought might mean there was some change—an upswing. A meeting in one town seemed jammed and enthusiastic. It was actually a small room, but the way the television camera flashed around it made the hall seem like the Roman Coliseum. The President, watching the meeting, called Larry O’Brien, his political operative, to congratulate him and say that it all looked very good. O’Brien, hearing the enthusiasm and excitement in the President’s voice, tones and emotions missing now almost four years, thought Johnson was being a little carried away, so O’Brien cautioned him. “Mr. President, it was a good meeting and we had a few hundred people here, but it was in Clem Zablocki’s area and he worked hard and the union people worked hard, but it doesn’t mean much. To tell you the truth, we’re in real trouble here.” Later he would tell Johnson not to expect more than 35 percent of the Wisconsin vote, and that it might even be below 30. Lyndon Johnson knew then that he was beaten. He knew he was locked in; he could not do what he wanted on Vietnam and run for re-election. Rather than absorb one more defeat, he withdrew from the race on the eve of the Wisconsin primary and announced that he was pulling back on the bombing. The war was finally turning around; it was time for de-escalation. For Lyndon Johnson it was all over.

In November 1968, after the election, a group of executives from a New York publishing firm went to the White House to talk with Walt Rostow about publishing his memoirs. The three were important men from the house and the prospect of Rostow’s book was tempting—big figures were in the air. The meeting was pleasant, and Rostow was very friendly. There was some small talk, some reminiscence about the war and the past, and at one point Rostow mentioned that he did not think that the war had been a factor in the 1968 campaign, and he turned and asked his visitors what they thought. One of them, James Silberman, said that he could not vouch for other states, but in the state he lived in, New York, it most certainly had been an issue, most likely the decisive issue. Silberman noticed that Rostow immediately changed the subject, and also that he did not direct any more questions his way. In fact, when the meeting broke up a few minutes later the editors noticed that Rostow shook hands pleasantly with two of them and completely ignored Silberman.

Lyndon Johnson had lost it all, and so had the rest of them; they had, for all their brilliance and hubris and sense of themselves, been unwilling to look to and learn from the past and they had been swept forward by their belief in the importance of anti-Communism (and the dangers of not paying sufficient homage to it) and by the sense of power and glory, omnipotence and omniscience of America in this century. They were America, and they had been ready for what the world offered, the challenges posed. In a way Lyndon Johnson had known better, he had entertained no small amount of doubt about the course he was taking, but he saw, given his own instincts, his own reading of American politics, his own belief in how he had to look to others, no way of getting off. He and the men around him wanted to be defined as being strong and tough; but strength and toughness and courage were exterior qualities which would be demonstrated by going to a clean and hopefully antiseptic war with a small nation, rather than the interior and more lonely kind of strength and courage of telling the truth to America and perhaps incurring a good deal of domestic political risk. What was it Jack Kennedy had said about Adlai Stevenson during the Cuban missile crisis when he had mocked Stevenson’s softness—that you had to admire the way Stevenson was willing to fight for his convictions when everyone else in the room was against him. The irony of that statement was missing for Kennedy and it was missing for Johnson as well.

Nor had they, leaders of a democracy, bothered to involve the people of their country in the course they had chosen: they knew the right path and they knew how much could be revealed, step by step along the way. They had manipulated the public, the Congress and the press from the start, told half truths, about why we were going in, how deeply we were going in, how much we were spending, and how long we were in for. When their predictions turned out to be hopelessly inaccurate, and when the public and the Congress, annoyed at being manipulated, soured on the war, then the architects had been aggrieved. They had turned on those very symbols of the democratic society they had once manipulated, criticizing them for their lack of fiber, stamina and lack of belief. Why weren’t the journalists more supportive? How could you make public policy with television cameras everywhere? The day after he withdrew from re-election in 1968 Lyndon Johnson flew to Chicago for a convention of broadcasters and he had placed the blame for the failure squarely on their shoulders, their fault being that the cameras had revealed just how empty it all was. A good war televises well; a bad war televises poorly. Maxwell Taylor was the key military figure in all the estimates, and his projections—that the war would be short, that the bombing would be a major asset—had proven to be false, but he had never adjusted his views to those failures; there was no sense of remorse, nor concern on why they had failed to estimate correctly. Rather, even in his memoirs, the blame was placed on those elements of the society which had undermined support for the war; when his book was finished, friends, looking at the galleys, cautioned him to tone down criticism of the press. What was singularly missing from all the memoirs of the period—save from a brief interview with Dean Rusk after the publication of the Pentagon Papers—was an iota of public admission that they had miscalculated. The faults, it seemed, were not theirs, the fault was with this country which was not worthy of them.

So they lost it all. There was a sense of irony here, as if each player had lost, not just a major part of his personal reputation, but much of what he had truly believed in and wanted, much of what he had manipulated for in the first place. Johnson of course had never wanted to go to war, he had become a war President reluctantly, in large part because he feared that otherwise he would lose the Great Society. He had instead gotten the war, but the Great Society was stillborn, it lacked his time, his resources, his second term to bring it to any genuine effectiveness. Which he was bitterly aware of. (In 1969 when a former Pentagon official named Townsend Hoopes wrote a book on how Clark Clifford had turned the war policy around, Johnson was furious with the book. “Hoopees! Hoopees! Who the hell is Hoopees? Here I take four million people out of poverty and all I ever hear about is Hoopees.”) The one thing he could not admit was that he had miscalculated on Vietnam, that Clifford had subsequently turned him around, and that the war had driven him out of office. The knowledge that this was true led to the suspension of his friendship with Clifford for several years, and the closer anyone came to telling the truth, the more Johnson bellowed in anger. He had, it seemed, in his version of events always been in control; everything had worked out as he intended it to.

For McNamara, the great dream had been of controlling the Pentagon and the arms race, but the war had ruined all that. War Secretaries do not limit the power of the military, and to a large degree he had lost control. The war absorbed so much of his time, his energy, his credibility, that he had little to give to the kind of controls he might have wanted. It was not by accident that his name would come more to symbolize the idea of technological warfare than it would civilian control of the military.

McGeorge Bundy was a rationalist in an era which saw the limits of rationalism and which rekindled the need for political humanism; the man of operations and processes in an Administration which seemed to undermine the limits of the processes without moral guidelines. But above all he was a man of the Establishment, the right people deciding on the right policies in the right way, he believed in the capacity and the right of an elite to govern on its terms. The war changed all that; it not only tarnished his personal reputation so that his endorsement of an idea or a candidate had to be done covertly, but it saw a major challenge to the right of the elite to rule. In the Senate, the leading doves believed they had been wiser than the executive branch, and they were beefing up their staffs and playing a larger role in foreign policy. Too, the years had made all the other political groups in the country aware of just how little a part they played in foreign policy, and by the end of the decade the outlanders, Negroes, women, workers, were determined to play a greater role; they had reached the moat and were pressing on.

Dean Rusk had believed not so much in the class as in the policies, mutual security, strong political and military involvement everywhere in the world to stop totalitarians. The war, of course, had brought on a new sense of the limits of power, and with that a growing attitude about the need for the United States to roll back its commitments, which Rusk and others deemed to be a new isolationism. If anything, to a new generation of Americans the war had blurred the differences between the democracies and the totalitarian states. Thus the war, rather than setting the precedent of what the United States had done in the past and would continue to do in the future in the world, had symbolized to growing numbers of Americans what the United States must never do again. It reversed all the traditional directions of American foreign policy, and for Rusk this was a far more bitter thing than the personal abuse which he had suffered.

Max Taylor had always believed in the liberal society and the citizen-democratic Army, a professional army respected by its citizenry, the best kind of extension of a healthy society. The Army would contain the finest young men of the society, well-educated civilized young officers, and this very fact would temper old civilian suspicions and alienations. The war of course had ravaged the Army; the kind of officer Taylor sought for the Army suffered because of it and was increasingly driven out of service. A bad war means a bad system; the wrong officers are promoted for the wrong reasons, the best officers, often unable to go along with the expected norm, the fake body count, the excessive use of force, wither along the way. And the gap between the Army and the society as a whole did not close, it widened; there was a growing sense of antimilitary feeling in the country, and the Army was of course selected as a scapegoat.

The Democratic party too was damaged. It had been hiding from its past at the very beginning of the Kennedy era, unwilling to come to terms with China and what had happened there, and in large part it had gotten into trouble in Vietnam because it accepted the Dulles policies in Asia. But Dulles policies or no, it was the Democrats who had brought us into Vietnam, and the sense of alienation between the party and not just the young but millions of other nominal Democrats was very large. American life was changing very quickly and the party was adjusting very slowly; it seemed increasingly an outmoded corroded institution, its principal spokesmen figures of the past.

Such as Hubert Humphrey, who was one more victim of the war. He had of course always wanted to be the Democratic nominee for the Presidency and he had finally received the nomination one terrible night in Chicago, but by that time it was no longer worth anything (there was a certain irony in this too, because he had sought it so long and feverishly and promiscuously as to be unworthy of it). He was nominated in Chicago on a night when police hacked the heads of the young, and Humphrey’s only response was to kiss the television set. He had gained the nomination and in so doing lost most of what was left of his reputation.

But it was Lyndon Johnson who had lost the most. He had always known this, even in the turbulent days of 1964 and 1965 when the decisions on the war seemed to press on him; even then he was more dubious than those around him, knowing that of them, he had the most to lose. And he lost it, so much of his reputation, so much of his dreams. He could not go to the 1968 Democratic convention, it was all too painful and explosive; nor did he attend the 1972 convention either. There at Miami Beach the Democrats had hung huge portraits of their heroes of the past in the main hall, photos of Presidents and national candidates. But Lyndon Johnson’s photo was not among them, rather it could be found in a smaller room where photos of past congressional leaders hung. He had always dreamed of being the greatest domestic President in this century, and he had become, without being able to stop it, a war President, and not a very good one at that.