The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 non-combatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.
—ROBERT MCNAMARA
ARTHUR SCHLESINGER JR., ADVISER TO and sympathetic biographer of the Kennedys and a critic of President Johnson’s policies in Vietnam, claimed that “Kennedy had no intention of dispatching American ground forces to save South Vietnam.” Schlesinger argued that President Kennedy’s 1962 instruction to Secretary of Defense McNamara to start planning for a phased withdrawal of U.S. military personnel from Vietnam, originally only a precautionary contingency plan, “was turning in 1963 into a preference.”1 This was consistent with the recollection of National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy—who at the time was a supporter of direct U.S. military involvement—that from as early as 1961 “Kennedy firmly and steady refused to authorize the commitment of ground combat troops.” In that “quite decisive sense,” reflected Bundy, “he [the president] never made Vietnam an American war.”2
Nor did Kennedy regard keeping any other part of Indochina out of communist hands worth “an American war.” Indochina was no longer strategically vital—as it had been when invaded by Japan in 1941—as a source of rubber and tin, both now supplanted by synthetics. And although near the East-West maritime choke point of the Strait of Malacca, the Indochina peninsula itself did not abut the strait; Malaysia did, and that country, as a result of the British counterinsurgency effort, had been and could continue to be defended against a communist takeover.
Thus Kennedy, no believer in the “domino theory” articulated by Eisenhower, did not consider the prospect of the Laotian communists, the Pathet Lao insurgents, taking power in Vientiane as worth a major war to prevent. He did, however, regard the prospect of a Pathet Lao victory in Laos as a potential reputational loss for the United States in its rivalry with the Soviet Union for influence in the Third World and consequently, like Eisenhower, decided to bluff the Kremlin as to his willingness to commit U.S. forces to Laos—in reality, a bargaining ploy to get Khrushchev to accept a neutral government in Vientiane.3
Kennedy’s serious contemplation of a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam was the product of his growing disillusion with the policies of the Diem regime in Saigon—especially Ngo Dinh Diem’s ruthless suppression of the civil liberties of opponents, including the jailing of prominent Buddhist leaders. “In the final analysis it’s their war,” said Kennedy publicly, in September 1963, reserving his option to scale U.S. assistance up or down depending upon the extent to which the Diem government demonstrated the political as well as the military capability of sustaining its counterinsurgency effort. “We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men there as advisers, but they have to win it—the people of Viet Nam—against the Communists.”4
The option of withdrawal, however, was effectively removed three weeks before Kennedy’s death when the U.S. ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, and other U.S. officials in Saigon conspired with anti-Diem elements in the South Vietnamese military who engineered the November 1, 1963, coup in which Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu were deposed and murdered.5 Kennedy and the other top officials who plotted the coup now felt, like traditional imperialists, implicated in the fate of their wards. After the coup there could be no U.S. pullout before the new regime was given a chance, with augmented U.S. aid, to put the counterinsurgency effort back on track. Still, according to Robert McNamara, the president was determined that “in the end, the South Vietnamese must carry the war themselves; the United States could not do it for them.”6
In any event, however, a pullout would have to await the conclusion of the 1964 U.S. presidential election. As Kennedy told his political adviser Kenneth O’Donnell, “If I tried to pull out completely [before then] … I’d be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser … we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare … but I can do it after I’m reelected. So we had better be damned sure that I am reelected.”7
This too was the predicament Lyndon Johnson perceived he inherited on November 22, 1963, as he assumed the presidency after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Although he asked for briefings on Vietnam right away and lectured his aides on the absolute necessity of making sure his opponents could never say that the Johnson administration lost Vietnam like the Truman administration was accused of losing China, Johnson left the direction of Vietnam policy largely in the hands of Secretary of Defense McNamara until the Gulf of Tonkin crisis of August 1964.
Yet during the spring of 1964, well into the election season, LBJ worried about the slide to war that seemed to be inexorably occurring. Anticipating that whether and how the United States got more involved could become an issue in the campaign, and also that as president he would rightly be held responsible for harms suffered by the country either by staying out or more actively intervening, he anxiously probed the foreign policy experts in the administration and the Congress as to what he should do. Typically, they tossed the hot potato back at him. His old Senate colleague Richard Russell of Georgia admitted in a phone conversation with Johnson that if the president were to authorize him to deal with the situation as he saw fit, “I would respectfully decline to undertake it. … It’s the damned worse mess I ever saw. … I just don’t know what to do.” Johnson’s response: “Well, that’s the way I’ve been feeling for six months.” The president’s telephone exchange with his national security adviser Bundy is particularly revealing:
LBJ: I just stayed awake last night thinking about this thing—the more I think about I, I don’t know what in the hell … it looks like we’re getting into another Korea. It just worries the hell out of me. I don’t see that we can ever hope to get out of there once we’re committed. I believe the Chinese Communists are coming into it. I don’t think that we can fight them 10,000 miles away from home and ever get anywhere in that area. I don’t think it’s worth fighting for and I don’t think we can get out. And it’s just the biggest damn mess I ever saw.
BUNDY: It is, it’s an awful mess. …
LBJ: What the hell is Vietnam worth to me? What is Laos worth to me? What is it worth to this country? … Now, of course if you start running [from] the Communists, they may just chase you right into your own kitchen.
BUNDY: Yup. That’s the trouble. And that is what the rest of that half of the world is going to think if this thing comes apart on us, That’s the dilemma. That’s exactly the dilemma. …
LBJ: What action do we take, though?
In response to that question, Bundy only offered to prepare some briefings and “folders” for the president, whose frustrated comment was, “It’s damned easy to get into a war, but it’s going to be awfully hard to ever extricate yourself if you get in.”8
Still, LBJ’s own principal preoccupation was with America’s domestic social and economic problems.9 He resisted as long as he could, yet as he put it, he was forced to leave “the woman I really loved—the Great Society—in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world.”10
The president did, however, approve National Security Action Memorandum 288, authorizing preparations by the U.S. military “to be in a position on 72 hours’ notice to initiate … Retaliatory Actions against North Vietnam, and to be in a position on 30 days’ notice to initiate the program of ‘Graduated Overt Military Pressure’ against North Vietnam.”11 Johnson also approved, on McNamara’s recommendation, stepped-up covert operations under Operations Plan 34-A, including intelligence collection and graduated “destructive undertakings” against North Vietnam. The 34-A operations, conducted with increasing intensity during the spring and summer of 1964, included commando raids by mercenaries hired by the South Vietnamese to blow up rail and highway bridges and coastal installations north of the seventeenth parallel, raids by Laotian-marked T-28 fighter-bombers on North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao troop concentrations in Laos, and U.S. naval intelligence-gathering patrols off the coast of North Vietnam.12
The clash in the Gulf of Tonkin in the first week of August 1964, which resulted in the first overt U.S. military action in the Vietnam War and the famous Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that set the stage for the subsequent heavy U.S. intervention, was precipitated by the 34-A covert operations. At the time of a South Vietnamese amphibious commando raid against a group of coastal North Vietnam islands, the U.S. destroyer Maddox was in the area on an electronic intelligence-gathering mission, and the North Vietnamese evidently believed it to have been part of the coastal harassment operation. According to Pentagon testimony, on August 2 the Maddox was 23 miles from the coast and heading further into international waters, when three North Vietnamese torpedo boats began a run at her. The Maddox sunk one of the PT boats with a direct hit from its five-inch guns, and the other two were damaged by aircraft from the carrier Ticonderoga, cruising to the south of the encounter.
President Johnson ordered another destroyer, the C. Turner Joy, to accompany the Maddox back into the Gulf of Tonkin up to 11 nautical miles from the North Vietnamese coast and ordered a second aircraft carrier, the Constellation, to join the Ticonderoga to provide additional air cover. Plans were readied to bomb North Vietnam in the event of another attack on U.S. ships, and the administration dusted off a draft congressional resolution that it had prepared in May to gain legislative support for a commitment of U.S. armed forces to the Indochina conflict.
On August 4, North Vietnamese torpedo boats again made a run at the U.S. naval deployments. In response, in missions approved by the president, U.S. fighter-bombers from the Ticonderoga and Constellation struck four torpedo boat bases and an oil storage depot in North Vietnam. Johnson met with leaders of Congress to inform them of his decision to retaliate against North Vietnam for what he claimed was an unprovoked attack against U.S. ships and to enlist their support in passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.13
On August 7, by a vote of 88 to 2 in the Senate and 416 to 0 in the House, Congress resolved to “approve and support the determination of the President, as Commander in Chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression” and declared that “the United States is … prepared, as the President determines, to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom.”14
The ingredients were now in place for major, direct U.S. military intervention into the war in Southeast Asia. Detailed scenarios for systematic bombing of North Vietnam had been developed in the Pentagon. All that was needed was another attack on U.S. forces, either at sea or upon U.S. military bases in South Vietnam, or a formal request for military intervention from the government of South Vietnam, for the president to feel he was acting legitimately—with the advice and consent of the Congress—in making the United States an active fighting ally of South Vietnam.
Although many of Johnson’s political-military advisers were unhappy with the presidential restraint, he was not about to be stampeded into a war that now looked almost inevitable, until he had first validated his own mandate in the presidential elections of 1964—particularly as his election victory would be best assured by making his Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, appear to be the “warmonger.” It was the Republicans, he charged, who were “eager to enlarge the conflict.” “They call upon us to supply American boys to do the job that Asian boys should do.”15 As far as he was concerned, said the president,
I want to be very cautious and careful, and use it only as a last resort, when I start dropping bombs around that are likely to involve American boys in a war in Asia with 700,000,000 Chinese. So just for the moment I have not thought that we were ready for American boys to do the fighting for Asian boys.16
During the windup of the election campaign, he reiterated unequivocally, “We are not going to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”17
Even when the Vietcong, on November 1, 1964, in a surprise attack on the Bien Hao air base, killed five Americans, wounded seventy-six, and destroyed six B-57 bombers, Johnson continued to adhere to the escalation restraints, despite the view of principal administration foreign policy experts that the Bien Hao attack was at least as serious as the Gulf of Tonkin incident and therefore deserved a military reply. But Johnson’s overriding concern was to keep the Vietnam conflict from pushing him into taking any action that could complicate how people thought of him when they entered the voting booths.18
Only after the 1964 election did Johnson embrace the premise that the Vietnam conflict was the current flash point of the global conflict between the communist and noncommunist worlds—the major corollary being that as leader of the noncommunist side the United States had to assume full responsibility for ensuring the communists did not win. The American commitment, the price the nation would be willing to pay, was unqualified and open-ended. The implications began to be revealed in a series of events and decisions during the first half of 1965.
On February 7 U.S. fighter-bombers made a reprisal raid on North Vietnamese military barracks north of the seventeenth parallel in response to Vietcong mortar attacks on U.S. installations earlier in the day, including the Pleiku airstrip, where 7 Americans were killed, 109 wounded, and at least 20 aircraft were destroyed or damaged. The United States had every reason to believe, Secretary of Defense McNamara explained to reporters, “that the attack on Pleiku, Tuyhoa, and Nhatrang was ordered and directed and masterminded directly from Hanoi.” Under Secretary of State George Ball backed him up in the joint press conference on the day of the raids. There is no question, said the diplomat (reputed to be the leading administration “dove” on Vietnam), that “this was a deliberate, overt attempt by the regime in Hanoi to test the will of the South Vietnamese Government … and the Government of the United States.” This was a situation in which “we could not fail to respond without giving a misleading signal to the … regime in Hanoi” as to the strength of American purpose.19
The basis for the administration’s conviction that Hanoi was masterminding the campaign in the South was further elaborated on February 28, when the State Department issued its white paper entitled “Aggression form the North: The Record of North Vietnam’s Campaign to Conquer South Vietnam.”20 The sixty-four-page text, released to all news media, claimed to contain “massive evidence of North Vietnamese aggression.” It did document an increase, especially during 1964, of military aid from the North in the form of weapons and key advisory personnel; but it was certainly no more massive than the increase in U.S. “supporting assistance” to Saigon during the same period.
Hanoi used the increasing American involvement as its justification for increasing its infiltration into the South. And the U.S. government pointed to the evidence of this increasing infiltration as the reason for bringing coercive pressure upon Hanoi and dispatching more men and materials to South Vietnam to redress the deteriorating military balance.
At Kennedy’s death Johnson had inherited an American “advisory” force in Vietnam numbering somewhat short of 16,500. By August 1965, before the impact of the major increments ordered that year had been felt, there were already about 125,000 U.S. troops in the field. And decisions made in 1965 and 1966 meant that barring a political settlement the number of U.S. military personnel in South Vietnam could exceed half a million sometime in 1967.
The shift in the mission of these U.S. troops from “advisers” to the main offensive force also occurred between 1963 and 1966. U.S. advice to the South Vietnamese to make extensive use of helicopters for reconnaissance, troop support, and troop transport required, at the outset, training and maintenance bases staffed by Americans. But these bases also required protection (they were obvious targets for the Vietcong). When the South Vietnamese proved incapable of providing the kind of security needed, contingents of U.S. Marines were called in to help and eventually to take over the base security role. The United States became, willy-nilly, an active co-belligerent, albeit only in “defensive” situations. The next step, as communist military units and firepower increased, was to expand the perimeters of security of U.S. bases, and the operations this involved were the same as they would be in offensive combat missions. What was indistinguishable in operations easily became indistinguishable in purpose, as the United States drifted into full participation in “clear and hold” missions designed to reduce the proportion of South Vietnamese territory controlled by the Vietcong. Finally, as political instability in Saigon diverted the South Vietnamese military to political tasks, including the suppression of Buddhist civil disobedience, the United States found itself the dominant combat force in the Vietnam War.
When Johnson took the situation under intense scrutiny in late 1964, he found the commitments already entered into and the deployments already underway. To fail to approve the increased deployments then being asked for by the secretary of defense would be to fail to rectify the deteriorating military situation—it would mean accepting a humiliating military defeat. On the other hand, the increases in infiltration from North Vietnam, which paralleled the increased U.S. involvement during the previous year, gave little hope that the increases in American troops would accomplish anything more than drive the ground war to higher levels of intensity.
From what is known of Johnson-the-political-animal, it would be surprising to find that he would allow himself to be trapped into presiding over a slow war of human attrition on the Asian mainland and the long test of endurance it required. For one thing, the United States was likely to be hurt more than its adversaries, who (assuming China was drawn in) had a practically unlimited supply of expendable manpower. For another, the 1964 election results convinced Johnson that he embodied the great American consensus for getting on with the job of tending to the national welfare. The people were tired of the foreign entanglements the country had been sustaining since 1947, particularly those like Vietnam, where the connection with U.S. security was complicated and tenuous. Some means would have to be found for bringing a rapid conclusion to this war. Yet Johnson also sensed that the majority of voters were overwhelmingly against Goldwater because he embodied the pugnacious aspect of American nationalism that risked further expenditure of blood and treasure in “confrontations” with adversaries around the globe. Goldwaterism, as the election showed, was just not the dominant temper in 1964.
But here was LBJ, after having successfully made political capital out of Goldwater’s pugnacity, ordering the very escalation strategies that Goldwater had been advocating. The contradiction is at least partially resolved by attributing to Johnson-the-electioneer the very real belief that bombing North Vietnam would lead to the larger war (possibly through the entry of the Chinese) that he knew the American public did not want; whereas Johnson the commander in chief, looking in detail at the developing military situation in late 1964, saw that the United States was already heavily implicated in a rapidly expanding ground war that could easily lead to the intolerable and larger Asian land war. Marginal increments to U.S. forces in the South then being recommended by the military command in Saigon and endorsed by McNamara in Washington might not be sufficient to convince North Vietnam and China, and possibly even the Soviet Union, that an expansion of their commitments to Vietnam would involve them in a “deeply dangerous game.”
But the way the decision to bring the North under aerial attack was announced and implemented obscured the underlying rationale and possibly interfered with its utility as a signal to the communist powers. The bombing raid across the seventeenth parallel following the Vietcong attack on Pleiku—like the air strike in response to the Tonkin incident—was defined as a reprisal. The implication was: do not do what you just did or we will bomb again. But three days later, on February 10, the Vietcong again found their mark. This time a U.S. billet at Quinhon was blown up, killing twenty-three Americans. Now three times as many aircraft were used in retaliation, and the targets were further north, but still in the southern part of North Vietnam. It might appear as if the United States were trying to establish a let-the-punishment-fit-the-crime pattern, with the crime being attacks on American installations. However, the White House attempted to blur this impression in its communiqué of February 11, which cited, in addition to the Quinhon incident, Vietcong ambushes, raids, and assassinations against South Vietnamese personnel and installations as well as against Americans. These “continued acts of aggression by communist Vietcong under the direction and with the support of the Hanoi regime,” said the statements issued from Washington and Saigon, were the reason for the current air strike. This came a bit closer to displaying the central strategic rationale for commencing the bombing—namely, at least an “equalization” of the pain suffered by the North as compared to the suffering caused by their agents in the South, as a way of convincing Ho Chi Minh that if he continued the insurgency the price would henceforth be much higher than it had been. The selection of targets further north and the increase in intensity were also supposed to communicate that the first blows were only a harbinger of much more damaging blows to come. Yet the full explicit announcement of this rationale was evidently thought to sound too much like an “ultimatum,” with all the risks that would involve of provoking counterthreats, even by parties not yet involved. Consequently, in the coming months, as bombing of the North became a regular feature of the war, it was increasingly justified on the narrower grounds of its usefulness in “interdicting” the transport of men and material from the North to the South.
As the insurgency and terror in the South continued and the infiltration from the North increased, the administration was criticized heavily by domestic and foreign opponents of the bombing. The United States had expanded the war, putting pressure on the Soviet Union to aid Hanoi with at least air defense equipment, and incurring the risk of an even greater direct clash with the giant communist powers, and what did it have to show for it? An even higher level of warfare in the South. The argument that the United States had to bomb the North to buttress the shaky authority of each successive military junta in Saigon was even less convincing.
Meanwhile, with no discernible moves by the communists to scale down their insurgency, the frequency, scale, and type of target the United States was bringing under aerial bombardment were increasing. In this phase of the conflict the United States was also using up its fresh options and settling into a pattern of mutual injury at a higher level of destruction than that of a few weeks before. Hundreds of thousands of American boys were being sent overseas to fight Asian boys, the casualty lists were growing, the costs were in the billions, and still the end was no closer in sight.
Johnson’s instinct to break out of the pattern now resulted in a series of flamboyant peace moves. Up to the spring of 1965 it had been his stance (in reply to promptings from de Gaulle, the UN secretary general, Asian neutrals, and academic polemicists in this country) that there was nothing to negotiate except the cessation of the violent insurgency by the communists, and—in any case—negotiations would have to follow a bona fide cease-fire. In April 1965 the White House appeared to change its tune, or at least to be willing to play the counterpoint of negotiations and planning for peace against the continuing din of bombs and mortar and the calls from hawks to expand the list of targets to be hit in the North. Some pundits suspected this was another Johnsonian ploy of playing off the hawks against the doves to preserve his options for tactical maneuver in the long and messy conflict that now seemed to stretch endlessly ahead. But the ring of sincerity in his Johns Hopkins University address lends greater plausibility to the “breakout” hypothesis.
The case for “why we are there” was reiterated, with considerable eloquence, by the president at Johns Hopkins on April 7. There were references to the “deepening shadow of Communist China,” presumably the real stage manager of the insurgency in Vietnam. “It is a nation which is helping the forces of violence in almost every continent. The contest in Viet-Nam is part of a wider pattern of aggressive purposes.” He invoked the promises made by “every American President” since 1954 “to help South Viet-Nam defend its independence.” If the United States failed to honor these promises now, around the world, “from Berlin to Thailand,” the confidence of people “in the value of an American commitment and in the value of America’s word” would be shaken. “The result would be increased unrest and instability, and even wider war. … To withdraw from one battlefield means only to prepare for the next. We must stay in Southeast Asia—as we did in Europe—in the words of the Bible: ‘Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.’” And there was the posture of unflinching resolve: “We will not be defeated. We will not grow tired. We will not withdraw, either openly or under the cloak of meaningless agreement.”
But once this is clear, said the president, “it should also be clear that the only path for reasonable men is the path of peaceful settlement.” In a surprise formulation, he suggested an acceptable outcome and a range of flexibility in negotiating formats—both a thawing from what seemed to be his preexisting frigid stance. The “essentials of any final settlement,” he said, were “an independent South Viet-Nam—securely guaranteed and able to shape its own relationships to all others—free from outside interference—tied to no alliance—a military base for no other country.”
This was a considerable departure by the White House from its scornful response to de Gaulle’s suggestions for a “neutralization” solution. Moreover, “there may be many ways to this kind of peace: in discussion or negotiation with the governments concerned; in large groups or in small ones; in the reaffirmation of old agreements or their strengthening with new ones. And we remain ready with this purpose for unconditional negotiations.”
The peace he wanted, insisted the president, ought not to be incompatible with the desires of the North Vietnamese. “They want what their neighbors also desire … progress for their country, and an end to the bondage of material misery.” Their communist ideology and alignment with China were evidently not a bar to their peaceful association in regional economic development schemes: “We would hope that North Viet-Nam would take its place in the common effort just as soon as peaceful cooperation is possible.”
Meanwhile, work could begin on projects for regional economic development with those nations among whom peaceful cooperation was now possible. The president would ask Congress to contribute a billion-dollar investment to a program of Southeast Asian economic development to be organized initially by UN secretary general Thant. United States’ participation would be inaugurated by a team headed by Eugene Black. “And I would hope,” said Johnson, “that all other industrialized countries, including the Soviet Union, will join in this effort.”
These hopes for development and his dreams for an end to war, claimed the president, were deeply rooted in his childhood experiences. Rural electrification had brought cheer to the ordinary people along the Pedernales—was there any reason why it should not bring cheer to the sufferers along the Mekong? That vast river could provide food and water and electricity “on a scale to dwarf even our own TVA.”
We often say how impressive power is. But I do not find it impressive at all. The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure. They protect and cherish. But they are witness to human folly. …
Electrification of the countryside—yes, that … is impressive.
A rich harvest in a hungry land is impressive.
The sight of healthy children in a classroom is impressive.
These—not mighty arms—are the achievements which the American nation believes to be impressive. And if we are steadfast, the time may come when all other nations will find it so.21
Meanwhile, the arms, symbols of human failure and witnesses to human folly, had to be fully committed to “protect what we cherish.” During the month of April the pounding of the North intensified, with 1,500 air sorties against military targets recorded.22 And in the month following the peace overture at Johns Hopkins, 15,000 additional U.S. combat troops disembarked in South Vietnam, the largest increase yet for any month. The buildup was proceeding apace.
This was precisely the wrong way to get Hanoi to the negotiating table, charged critics at home and abroad. To bargain while under increasing bombardment would look like surrender. Lester Pearson of Canada, Senator Fulbright, and a number of newspaper editors argued for a bombing pause to convince the communists of America’s sincerity. The administration took counsel and decided to give this gambit a try.
From May 12 to May 18 the bombing raids ceased. Hanoi was informed in advance via diplomatic channels that the United States would be watching to see if there were “significant reductions” in actions by the communist military units in South Vietnam. The message suggested that such reciprocal action would allow the United States to halt its bombing and thus meet what was assumed to be the essential North Vietnamese precondition for beginning peace talks. When the air attacks on the North were resumed on May 18, the administration claimed disappointment that there had been no reaction from the other side.
But the critics were not silenced. Surely six days was not long enough to give Hanoi an opportunity to make a considered assessment of U.S. intentions and arrange for an appropriate response. In June, Secretary Rusk told the Foreign Service Institute that all that the U.S. government received from Hanoi and Peking were denunciations of the pause as a “wornout trick” and a “swindle.” Recent reports, he said, contained clear proof that “Hanoi is not even prepared for discussions unless it is accepted in advance that there will be a Communist-dominated government in Saigon.”23 Only in November did the State Department admit it had received a negotiating offer from Hanoi via the French government just a few hours after the six-day May pause ended. The French government is reported to have suggested that the bombings should cease again after the message had been received but apparently the U.S. government did not regard the response as a sufficiently serious negotiating offer. The administration was now subject to the charge of being deficient in its credibility.24
The failure of the North Vietnamese to give a satisfactory response to peace overtures in the spring of 1965 was stressed by the president in his July 28 “this is really war” speech, announcing an immediate 75 percent increase to U.S. fighting strength in Vietnam. Fifteen efforts with the help of forty nations, he said, had been made to attempt to get the “unconditional discussions” started. “But there has been no answer.” The United States would persist in its efforts to bring about negotiations, but meanwhile it would also persist on the battlefield, if need be, “until death and desolation have led to the same conference table where others could now join us at much smaller cost.”25
The president was speaking at a time of extremely low morale in Saigon. Another civilian government had fallen on June 11, and Air Vice Marshal Ky had assumed the reins of power in the face of increasing antigovernment and pro-neutralism agitation by the Buddhists. Support for neutralism, the new military junta announced, would be punishable by death. It was the beginning of a new time of political troubles in Saigon that would consume the energies of the South Vietnamese military while the United States began to assume the major combat functions. “We did not choose to be the guardians at the gate,” said the American president, “but there is no one else.”26
Thus, by the summer of 1965, the full character of the U.S. political-military involvement in Vietnam had matured, and its underlying assumptions were revealed.
1. Global balance of power considerations demanded that the United States do all that was required to prevent the communists from taking over South Vietnam. Failure to honor U.S. commitments to South Vietnam would weaken resistance to communist expansion all around the globe—a resistance critically dependent upon the belief by the noncommunist societies that the United States, when called upon, would help them to prevail in their anticommunist struggles.
2. If the communist insurgency in South Vietnam were not defeated now, the communist expansionary drive in the less developed countries would likely require a bigger war, possibly closer to America’s shores. Vietnam was a test case for the communist strategy of expanding through “wars of national liberation” in place of a strategy of direct military aggression. If this strategy of disguised aggression by paramilitary means were allowed to succeed, those within the communist camp who favored the coercive modes of expansion would be vindicated. If this “war of national liberation” were convincingly defeated, however, those within the communist world who believed in peaceful forms of competitive coexistence would be strengthened.
3. Those directing the insurgency in Vietnam could be induced to call it off only if they were convinced it would cost them too dearly to continue it and that even with the higher-cost efforts, they would not succeed. The U.S. strategy in Vietnam, therefore, despite its turns and twists, had an underlying consistent objective: to increase the enemy’s costs and diminish their prospects of success. Previous failures to adequately convince them (with only support for South Vietnam) that their costs would be excessive and their prospects of success very low led to the direct U.S. involvement, and this at increasingly higher levels of violence. The administration had no desire to have American soldiers again fight Asians or to widen the war to include the North, but as lower levels of conflict failed to convince the communists that the United States was determined to frustrate their designs, the administration was compelled to make its determination even clearer.
4. The strategy of steadily increasing the costs to its opponents carried with it the need to increase U.S. human and material costs; thus, American staying power demanded a national consensus without which the president could not get the congressional majorities needed to provision the war. Consequently, domestic dissent on the involvement in Vietnam became an ingredient in the test of strength and endurance with the enemy. Hanoi, it was feared, would exploit America’s desires to negotiate an end to the violence with a view toward maximizing dissent in the United States. And the Vietnamese communists would interpret such dissent as an indication that further persistence by them on the battlefield would soon bring about a condition in the United States wherein a majority could not be found to approve the continued high costs of the war.
THE EROSION OF DOMESTIC SUPPORT
As the buildup in Vietnam by the United States was met by increased Northern infiltration into the South, domestic criticism intensified. Students and professors held stop-the-war “teach-ins,” and artists, intellectuals, and religious leaders joined with standard peace groups in petitioning the government or marching on Washington to demonstrate against the bombing and for negotiations. Hanoi cooperated with hints through third parties that it might be willing to negotiate; these hints were picked up in the press, sometimes months after they had been made, and thrust at the administration as proof of official dishonesty in saying that it was constantly seeking to induce Hanoi to come to the conference table. American leaders were uninterested in negotiations, charged the critics.
The administration’s response to domestic criticism was at first testy and tight-lipped. But in the second half of 1965 the White House changed tactics and began to talk back to the critics, to take them seriously—some observers thought too seriously—and to send administration representatives to the teach-ins to present the administration’s case. The case included the major premises summarized above, including the one about the danger of too much dissent. This was a tactical blunder on the part of the administration, as it would be for any administration in the American democracy, particularly as the argument was only valid if all of the other premises were valid. And serious critics disputed them all.
The president’s worst fears of being driven to higher levels of warfare abroad without a sufficient consensus at home to support the greater resource drain seemed to be materializing. But at the end of 1965, he resorted again to a break out of the pattern move. This time it was a peace offensive the likes of which the diplomatic community had never seen. Prominent American officials made a whirlwind tour of world capitals while the military campaign was dramatically toned down.
Responding to a Vietcong initiative for a Christmas Eve cease-fire, the United States halted air action over North Vietnam simultaneously with the start of a twelve-hour truce on the ground. A similar “natural” truce would be coming up on the Buddhist Lunar New Year (Tet), January 20–24. The administration used the month-long interval of military de-escalation to press its diplomatic offensive, meanwhile not resuming the air attacks. This time the critics could not say the pause was too short for Hanoi to make serious contacts. Secretary Rusk publicly issued Washington’s fourteen points for negotiation in response to Hanoi’s four points, with the claim that the two positions were really not so far apart. Certainly there was reason for negotiation on the basis of both positions. But the administration’s credibility with its domestic critics, already seriously undermined by its past policy ambivalence and rhetorical excesses, was now injured even further by its frantic efforts, probably wholly sincere, to build international support for unconditional discussions between the belligerents. Doubts were raised as to the “unconditional” nature of the discussions as it became clear that the United States was quite sticky on the point of who was a legitimate spokesman for the other side. “If the Vietcong come to the conference table as full partners,” said Secretary Rusk, “they will … in a sense have been victorious in the very aims that South Vietnam and the United States are pledged to prevent.”27
Claiming again to have received no serious offer from Hanoi to negotiate, the administration resumed air attacks with even greater force at the end of January 1966. Domestic critics, if they were patriotic in motive, would have to finally realize there was no alternative but to rally behind their country’s military efforts. And certainly, if American boys had to be over there to hold the ground, who could criticize efforts to negate as much of the danger as possible by destroying enemy power while it was still on the trails in Laos, on the bridges above the seventeenth parallel, or in the storage depots near the factories?
But the new jingoism in the administration’s statements accompanying the resumption of bombing, particularly the implication that anything less than enthusiastic support was unpatriotic, provoked patriotic men in the president’s own party, like Senators Fulbright, Hartke, and Church, to an even greater attack on administration policies. Senator Fulbright’s Foreign Relations Committee became the staging ground for this new phase of the domestic debate.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings in February 1966 provided respectability for the serious criticisms—as distinguished from the emotional harangues of the so-called New Left. Convened for the purpose of requiring the administration to justify its requests for supplemental foreign assistance monies (needed to finance the military and economic assistance to Vietnam over and above the amounts previously authorized in the fiscal 1966 budget), these hearings exposed the nation and the world to the profound doubts about U.S. Vietnam policy held by some of the country’s most experienced former diplomats and military leaders and some of its most respected scholars.
General James Gavin testified before the Fulbright committee that he feared “the escalation in southeast Asia … [will] begin to hurt our world strategic position.” This might have “tremendous significance” in the long run, he said. “When we begin to turn our back on what we are doing in world affairs … to support a tactical confrontation that appears to be escalating at the will of an enemy we are in a very dangerous position in my opinion.”28
This policy, George Kennan told the committee (and the world; the hearings were broadcast live on television), “seems to me to represent a grievous misplacement of emphasis in our foreign policies as a whole.” Not only were great questions of world affairs not receiving the attention they deserved, said the author of the containment policy, but “assets we already enjoy and … possibilities we should be developing are being sacrificed to this unpromising involvement in a remote and secondary theatre.” Elaborating, Kennan claimed that
our relations with the Soviet Union have suffered grievously … at a time when far more important things were involved in those relations than what is ultimately involved in Vietnam. … And more unfortunate still, in my opinion, is the damage being done to the feelings entertained for us by the Japanese people. … As the only major industrial complex in the entire Far East, and the only place where the sinews of modern war can be produced on a formidable scale, Japan is of vital importance to us and indeed to the prospects generally of peace and stability in Asia. There is no success we could have in Vietnam that would warrant … the sacrifice by us of the confidence and good will of the Japanese people.
And challenging a central pillar of the administration’s case, Kennan contended that even a situation in which South Vietnam was controlled exclusively by the Vietcong, while regrettable, would not present dangers great enough to justify our direct military intervention, for given the Soviet-Chinese conflict, “there is every likelihood that a Communist regime would follow a fairly independent course.”
Conceding that “a precipitate and disorderly withdrawal” would be “a disservice to our own interests, and even to world peace,” Kennan nevertheless opined that “there is more respect to be won in the opinion of this world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant and unpromising objectives.”29
The president, anticipating what was in store in the February sessions of the Fulbright committee, felt it necessary to reassert once more his peace aims as well as his war aims for Vietnam. It was time to show that he meant business about the greater importance of agricultural productivity, rural electrification, and schools than strike aircraft, flamethrowers, and the tremendous military logistics networks.
The testimony before the Foreign Relations Committee of the administrator of the Agency for International Development, David Bell, was interrupted on February 4 for President Johnson’s announcement of his trip to Honolulu to meet with Prime Minister Ky and President Thieu of South Vietnam. To emphasize that the main purpose of the meeting was to explore plans for the peaceful reconstruction of Vietnam, the president announced he was taking along John Gardner, secretary of health, education and welfare, and Orville Freeman, secretary of agriculture. There would of course be strategy huddles with General William Westmoreland and the Vietnamese military, but the theme was to be socioeconomic development. And this was the emphasis in the Declaration of Honolulu issued by both governments from Hawaii on February 8. The government of South Vietnam pledged itself to “a true social revolution,” to policies designed to “achieve regular economic growth,” and to “build true democracy” through the formulation of a “democratic constitution” to be ratified by popular ballot. The United States pledged itself to full support of these aspirations. And to demonstrate their seriousness of purpose, President Johnson persuaded the Vietnamese leaders to extend an immediate invitation to Secretaries Gardner and Freeman to survey the social and economic situation and suggest practical courses of action. On the evening of February 8, the president announced that Vice President Hubert Humphrey was leaving immediately for Saigon to join the other cabinet members and to meet with South Vietnamese officials to discuss these matters. The White House would be represented directly by McGeorge Bundy and Averell Harriman, both of whom would be going along with the Vice President.30
The president did get the headlines and the television coverage with this swoop into Asia with Health, Agriculture, and the idealism of Humphrey. But the image came across somewhat differently from what he had hoped. The tone of the television commentators and journalists who covered the event suggested rather strongly that this was Johnson hucksterism more than substance. Juxtaposed against the good works backdrop was the indelible picture of LBJ embracing Prime Minister Ky as if he were a Democratic Party loyalist in the Texas statehouse. Ky, who had been installed recently by a military coup, was cracking down with authoritarian methods on the Buddhist agitators and had been making asides to the effect that any negotiations with the communists would be useless. Rather than Ky’s endorsement of the Great Society, Saigon-style, the picture that critics chose to display was that of Johnson’s committing himself to support Ky’s irresponsible brand of jet-set militarism.
Lyndon Johnson could legitimately claim that the resort to force to move men and nations was the exception, not the norm, of his foreign policies. His preferred mode of influence was that of the prophet Isaiah: “Come now and let us reason together.” It was reason, Johnson would insist, that brought about the resolution of the Panama Canal crisis of 1964–1965, and not simply the reason of the weak in accepting the dictates of the strong. The U.S. government under Johnson went further toward recognizing Panama’s sovereignty over the Canal Zone and in according Panamanians equitable treatment in U.S. zone installations than had any previous administration.
It was reason, the objective consideration of the advantages and disadvantages of alternative courses of action, that Johnson could claim to have brought to bear upon the Greeks and Turks to forestall their impending war over Cyprus, and upon the Indians and Pakistanis to persuade them to cease their war over Kashmir. The fact that the United States was in a position to affect the anticipations of advantage and disadvantage of the involved parties (the perquisites and protections of NATO membership to Greece and Turkey, the flow of military and economic assistance to the South Asian countries) was, of course, at the heart of the president’s appeals to substitute reason for passion.
Johnson had also shown an ability to practice restraint in situations of extreme local instability, such as in Indonesia, Rhodesia, and the Middle East, where it might have been tempting for a great power to intervene. Rather than attempting to play the world policeman, he prudently allowed events to take their course in response to lesser influences.
The U.S. support for the Alliance for Progress had been extended indefinitely. Constructive development schemes had been sponsored from the Amazon to the Mekong. The Peace Corps continued to receive the wholehearted support of the White House. A nonproliferation treaty and other arms control accords had been spurred by the personal solicitude of the president. New economic and cultural bridges were being built to Eastern Europe. West Germany had been encouraged to depart from its rigid legalisms vis-à-vis the East. And not a harsh word had been heard from the president against the Soviet regime, despite the many opportunities to retaliate for anti-U.S. diatribes from the Kremlin.
The arts of conciliation and compromise, in the Johnson administration’s self-image, were the facts of power now, more so than at any time since the start of the Cold War.
Yet an administration cannot escape the massive impressions created on domestic and foreign observers by its most dramatic actions. Regardless of intention, large doses of force in the international environment create a noise level that distorts the sound of other signals. And the effort to get conciliatory messages through the uproar of violence was virtually drowned out by a revival of the more histrionic aspects of postwar U.S. foreign policy—the resort to ideological hyperbole, to moralizing about the basis of U.S. overseas commitments, to lecturing neutrals about their vital interests, and to threats of more violence to come if the enemy persisted in its course.
SECRETARY MCNAMARA JUMPS OFF THE VIETNAM ESCALATOR
By the middle of 1966, the military strategy for getting North Vietnam to call off the war in the South seemed to be producing just the opposite results. The more U.S. forces were deployed into South Vietnam, the more units the North poured down the Ho Chi Minh trail and across the seventeenth parallel. Sustained bombing of the North only appeared to stiffen the will of Hanoi to persist. The studies Secretary of Defense McNamara called for deeply shocked him: although the bombing had destroyed major weapons storage sites, the flow of men and material into the South was undiminished. There was no feasible level of effort, concluded the studies, that would achieve the air war objectives. The only new proposal McNamara’s experts could come up with was to build an electronic barrier across Vietnam below the seventeenth parallel.
McNamara’s memoranda to the president began to reflect pessimism and the beginning of despair, especially in view of the continual requests from General William Westmoreland for reinforcements that were pushing the number of U.S. troops in South Vietnam up to the 500,000 mark.
The president in turn became more and more suspicious of McNamara. The parting of the ways came in the spring of 1967 and was reflected in the secretary of defense’s draft memorandum to the president of May 19 on the latest troop and air war requests from General Westmoreland. The substance of McNamara’s arguments played a pivotal role in crystallizing opposition to the war within the U.S. government. The next steps in the military escalation recommended by Westmoreland and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were likely to be “counterproductive.” McNamara advised:
Mining the harbors would … place Moscow in a particularly galling dilemma as to how to preserve the Soviet position and prestige. … Moscow in this case should be expected to send volunteers, including pilots, to North Vietnam; to provide some new and better weapons and equipment; to consider some action in Korea, Turkey, Iran, the Middle East or, most likely, Berlin, where the Soviets can control the degree of crisis better; and to show across-the-board hostility toward the U.S. (interrupting any on-going conversations on ABMs, non-proliferation, etc.). …
To U.S. ground actions in North Vietnam, we would expect China to respond by entering the war with both ground and air forces.
Instead, McNamara recommended that the president “limit force increases to no more than 30,000; avoid entering the ground conflict beyond the borders of South Vietnam; and concentrate the bombing on the infiltration routes south of 20°.”
With respect to one of the principal purposes of the bombing of North Vietnam—pressure on Hanoi to end the war—McNamara contended that
it is becoming apparent that Hanoi may have already “written off” all assets and lives that might be destroyed by U.S. military action short of occupation or annihilation. They can and will hold out at least so long as a prospect of winning the “war of attrition” in the South exists. And our best judgment is that a Hanoi prerequisite to negotiations is significant retrenchment (if not complete stoppage) of U.S. military actions against them.
And with respect to interdiction of men and matériel, it now appears that no combination of actions against the North short of destruction of the regime or occupation of North Vietnamese territory will physically reduce the flow of men and materiel below the relatively small amount needed by enemy forces to continue the war in the South. … Our efforts physically to cut the flow meaningfully by actions in North Vietnam therefore largely fail.
Moreover, McNamara argued, in words surely designed to compel a full reassessment of the purposes and means of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam,
The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 non-combatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one. It could conceivably produce a costly distortion in the American national consciousness and in the world image of the United States—especially if the damage to North Vietnam is complete enough to be ‘successful’. 31
The president and his national security adviser, Walt Rostow, henceforth categorized McNamara as a dove, which meant that he had to be effectively cut out of the most sensitive deliberations on the conduct of the war, since his rejection of the fundamental premises of the Vietnam strategy meant that he was no longer loyal to basic administration policy. In mid-October 1967, President Johnson informed McNamara that he was nominating him for the presidency of the World Bank, a post that had fallen vacant upon the retirement of the bank’s previous president, Eugene Black.
Despite his deep misgivings about the war, McNamara did not go public with them until almost 30 years after he had expressed his basic reservations to President Johnson personally and in his then top-secret memorandum. (That seminal memorandum was published in 1971—in the Pentagon Papers.) Finally, in his memoir, McNamara revealed to the world what he believed were the “major causes for our failure in Vietnam.” These included misjudging the intentions of the North Vietnamese, China, and the Soviet Union, and exaggerating the geopolitical dangers to the United States of their actions; attributing to the South Vietnamese a desire to fight for freedom and democracy; underestimating the power of nationalism to motivate the North Vietnamese and Vietcong to fight and die for their values; being profoundly ignorant of the history and culture of the people of Vietnam; overestimating the effectiveness of modern, high-technology military equipment in confronting an unconventional insurgency; underestimating the importance, yet difficulty, in winning the hearts and minds of the people; arrogantly assuming that we know what is in another people’s best interest and have the right to shape their nation in our own image; and failing to draw the Congress and the American people into a full and frank debate over the U.S. involvement.32
To succeed McNamara as secretary of defense, LBJ appointed his friend Clark Clifford, the distinguished Washington lawyer and adviser to presidents since Truman. Johnson was confident Clifford would work well with him, Rostow, and Secretary of State Rusk to reunify the administration (and hopefully also Congress) behind the Vietnam policy. But Clifford, to Johnson’s surprise and eventual despair, soon turned out to be an even more effective mobilizer of dissent within the policy establishment against continuing the escalation policy than McNamara.
1968: LBJ BESIEGED
Early in 1968 three developments converged and reinforced one another, culminating in Lyndon Johnson’s withdrawal from the presidential race simultaneous with a change in grand strategy for ending the war in Vietnam, and less visibly, in a willingness by some administration officials to challenge the heretofore sacrosanct premises about the U.S. world role. The first development was the upsurge of violence in the ghettos of America, stimulated by and in turn stimulating popular discontent because more resources were being devoted to the war in a small Asian country than to the war on poverty at home. The second development was the transference of student militancy from civil rights to the issues of the war and the draft and the ability of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy to convert student protest into the energizing force of a powerful anti-administration movement within the Democratic Party. The third development was the ability of Clark Clifford, succeeding McNamara as secretary of defense on March 1, 1968, to reach and move the president with evaluations of the military campaign in Vietnam that called into question critical assumptions under which the United States was fighting the war.
Clifford’s eyes were opened further during his first week on the job, as the president’s chairman of an interagency task force to evaluate the latest request from General William Westmoreland, American commander in South Vietnam, for 205,000 additional troops in the wake of the communist Tet offensive.33 Clifford was stunned by the magnitude of the request and accordingly decided to broaden the task force’s frame of reference to include the basic question of whether or not the United States was operating under a sensible strategic concept in Vietnam. Although the formal task force report to the president reaffirmed the existing policy, Clifford’s doubts had deepened during its deliberations, and in presenting the report to the president at the White House on March 4, he felt impelled to express his own newfound reservations. The latest troop request “brings the President to a watershed,” he ventured.
Do you continue down that same road of more troops, more guns, more planes, more ships? Do you go on killing more Viet Cong and more North Vietnamese? As we build up our forces, they build up theirs. The result is simply that we are fighting now at a higher level of intensity. … We are not sure that a conventional military victory, as commonly defined, can be achieved. … If we continue with our present policy of adding more troops and increasing our commitment, it may lead us into Laos and Cambodia. … We seem to have gotten caught in a sinkhole. We put in more and they match it. … I see more and more fighting with more and more casualties on the U.S. side, and no end in sight.34
Clifford recommended further study before implementing the task force recommendations. The president granted his new secretary of defense this delay; but as Townsend Hoopes, the under secretary of the Air Force, recalls, “the longstanding friendship between the two men grew suddenly formal and cool.”35
The president’s insecurities were increased by the results of the March 12, 1968, New Hampshire Democratic primary, which gave antiwar critic Senator Eugene McCarthy 42.2 percent of the vote, just a few percentage points behind Johnson’s 49.2. And when on March 16, Robert Kennedy announced that he too would seek the presidency, LBJ’s worst fantasies about the Kennedy clan’s desire to recapture the White House seemed to be materializing. Recalling these days for his biographer Doris Kearns, Johnson confessed that
I felt … that I was being chased on all sides by a giant stampede coming at me from all directions. On one side, the American people were stampeding me to do something about Vietnam. On another side, the inflationary economy was booming out of control. Up ahead were dozens of danger signs pointing to another summer of riots in the cities. I was being forced over the edge by rioting blacks, demonstrating students, marching welfare mothers, squawking professors, and hysterical reporters. And then the final straw. The thing I feared from the first day of my Presidency was actually coming true. Robert Kennedy had openly announced his intention to reclaim the throne in the memory of his brother. And the American people, swayed by the magic of the name, were dancing in the streets. The whole situation was unbearable for me. After thirty-seven years of public service, I deserved something more than being left alone in the middle of the plain, chased by stampedes on every side.36
It was not only dovish intellectuals and the people who had no knowledge of foreign affairs who were now challenging the wisdom of Johnson’s Vietnam policies. Even veteran cold warriors with impeccable loyalty were calling for a fundamental reassessment. Johnson was particularly shaken by former secretary of state Dean Acheson’s judgment, which he voiced to the president privately on March 15, that the administration was operating under the grossest of illusions about what was possible in Vietnam, that no one believed Johnson’s speeches any more, and that Johnson had lost touch with the country, which as a whole was no longer supporting the war.37
But the president only dug in his heels. On March 17, speaking to the National Farmers Union convention in Minneapolis, he said in a high pitch of emotion, “Your President has come to ask you people, and all the other people of this nation, to join us in a total national effort to win the war. … We will—make no mistake about it—win.” 38
The speech created an uproar, Clifford recalls. “My God, I thought, after only eighteen days in office, am I in such fundamental disagreement with the man who appointed me?” There was no avoiding the fact that he was now engaged in “a tense struggle for the soul and mind of Lyndon Johnson.”39
Clifford decided to reassemble Johnson’s senior advisory group on Vietnam to meet with the president on March 26. Present were Dean Acheson, George Ball, McGeorge Bundy, Douglas Dillon, Cyrus Vance, Arthur Dean, John J. McCloy, General Omar Bradley, General Matthew Ridgway, General Maxwell Taylor, Robert Murphy, Henry Cabot Lodge, Abe Fortas, and Arthur Goldberg. According to Townsend Hoopes’s account of this meeting, the president was “visibly shocked” and “stung” by the magnitude of the defection from the existing policy, and especially by the fact that sophisticated pragmatists like McGeorge Bundy and Cyrus Vance were now among those pressing for de-escalation, negotiations, and disengagement ahead of being able to ensure against a communist takeover in South Vietnam.40
It was at this crucial meeting that the president revealed to all of his key advisers the depth of his anguish at what a toll the war in Vietnam was taking on the nation—and him personally—saying, “I don’t give a damn about the election.” If prosecuting the war continued to take more and more resources away from what was needed domestically, “I will have overwhelming disapproval at the polls. I will go down the drain.” But he was going to do what was right, he insisted, even in an election year: more troops, more taxes, more cuts in the domestic budget. “And yet I cannot tell the people what they will get in Vietnam in return for these cuts.”41
The president was still operating under the assumption that the right thing to do was to give the military what they needed to continue the necessary fight in Vietnam.
Yet when Johnson went around the table at the March 26th meeting of what he liked to call the “Wise Men” to get each of their views, he appeared shocked at the responses he got from most of them. McGeorge Bundy summed up the emerging consensus: “Mr. President, there has been a very significant shift in most of our positions. … We can no longer do the job we set out to do … and we must begin to take steps to disengage.” Clifford, in retrospect, comments on the immense significance of what was happening: “The men who had helped lay down the basic line of resistance to the expansion of communism in the world, the statesmen of Berlin and Korea, had decided they had had enough in Vietnam. The price was not commensurate with the goal.”42
At Clifford’s urging, Johnson’s speechwriter Harry McPherson was able to persuade the now-demoralized LBJ to plan to announce in his forthcoming speech on Vietnam, scheduled for March 31, a unilateral de-escalation of the bombing and to imply there was more of the same to come if Hanoi would enter into serious negotiations. Clifford was gratified to see on his television screen the president finally coming around to the proposals he had been urging over the past weeks. What neither he nor the rest of the nation expected, however, was Johnson’s dramatic closing remarks on March 31 that in order to devote all his time and energies to the quest for peace, “I do not believe I should devote an hour or a day of my time to partisan causes. … Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”43
The president’s personal renunciation of further electioneering and of another term for himself evidently was interpreted in Hanoi as a more credible bid for peace than past efforts by the United States. Accepting the partial bombing halt as a basis for preliminary talks, the North Vietnamese also reciprocated with a temporary cessation of their shelling of cities in the South and a substantial reduction of large-unit operations in the demilitarized zone at the seventeenth parallel. Clifford and his associates felt vindicated in their belief that a U.S. posture looking very serious about de-escalating the conflict was better than muscle-flexing for getting Ho Chi Minh to the bargaining table.
Johnson remained skeptical, however, still wanting to believe that the real reason for Hanoi’s willingness to negotiate was that they had been hurt by the bombing more than they were willing to let on, and that a credible threat to resume full-scale bombing was therefore essential to induce them to accept an independent South Vietnam. Once again, in late October 1968, against his own instincts he ordered a total bombing halt, yielding to the insistences of Clifford and the two U.S. negotiators in the Paris talks with the North Vietnamese, Cyrus Vance and Averell Harriman. LBJ left office chafing at the bit and full of self-doubts about whether he had shown weakness or strength at the last.44
There still were numerous unreconstructed Vietnam interventionists in top policy-making posts in the fall of 1968, not the least of whom were Secretary of State Dean Rusk and the national security adviser Walt Rostow. The change—which Clark Clifford was instrumental in bringing about—was that it was now legitimate within the administration to debate the basic policy premises underlying the Vietnam involvement. And the now debatable premises, it would emerge, were part and parcel of the Weltanschauung of forward containment of communism that had dominated official Washington’s thinking since the late 1940s.
A fundamental tenet from Truman to Johnson was that the irreducible national interest (“securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity”) required that the communists not be allowed to extend their sphere of control. This policy was based on a set of interrelated assumptions that for the first time in nearly two decades were now up for serious reconsideration at the highest level of the government—namely:
• The Soviets and the Chinese communists were highly motivated to extend their rule to other areas.
• Soviet expansion alone, or the fruits of possible Chinese expansion if added to the Soviet sphere, could eventually give the communist nations a preponderance of power globally that would enable them to dictate the conditions under which the people of the United States should live.
• The establishment of additional communist regimes or the territorial expansion by communist countries other than Russia or China would add to the global power of the Soviets or the Chinese and their capacities for expansion.
• The Soviets and the Chinese communists would resort to military expansion if they were not checked by countervailing military power.
• Against a determined attack by either of the two communist giants, indigenous military power would be insufficient and U.S. military power would have to be brought in to redress the imbalance.
• A capability and the clearly communicated will to defend whatever area the communist powers might choose to attack, regardless of its intrinsic geopolitical weight in the overall balance, was necessary to prevent the communists from picking and choosing easy targets for blackmail and aggression. Moreover, America’s failure to defend one area would demoralize other such localities in their will to resist the communists. Even Western Europe and Japan, whose advanced industrialization made them critical weights in the global balance of power, would wonder under what circumstances the U.S. might consider them dispensable.
• Even if the Soviets and the Chinese communists were effectively deterred from direct military expansion, they would attempt to expand their spheres of control in underdeveloped areas through support of subversive movements, insurgencies, and “wars of national liberation.”
• Economic underdevelopment and the political disorder that comes from unsatisfied aspirations for betterment provide easy opportunities for communist takeover of subversive and insurrectionary movements; thus U.S. economic and political development programs, no less than counterinsurgency capabilities, must be prominent parts of the grand strategy of preventing adverse changes in the global balance of power. (An assumption prominent during the Kennedy-Johnson years).
Any questioning of the nature of U.S. security interests in Vietnam, or even questioning—as Clifford did—whether the protection of U.S. interests there was worth the high expenditures of human and material resources, would call into question the assumptions just enumerated.
The consensus underlying the constancy in foreign policy from Truman to Johnson appeared to be fatally weakened. Was there no basic foreign policy to be handed over intact on January 20, 1969, to the incoming Nixon administration?