5    A Hundred Circling Camps (1965–1967)

Lyndon Johnson no doubt considered his troop decision both urgent and necessary. South Vietnam sagged under the assaults of the National Liberation Front and North Vietnamese. Nguyen Cao Ky recalled, “Things were going poorly, especially in the Central Highlands . . . In past years the monsoon season, which begins in autumn, had signaled the start of a new communist offensive. It was still months before the monsoons, however, and the number and intensity of . . . incidents had increased dramatically . . . In short the enemy was on the verge of cutting South Vietnam into two parts.”¹ According to one account, the ARVN high command thought of relocating its headquarters from the capital to the peninsular port of Vung Tau, well suited for close-in defense, and Prime Minister Ky considered abandoning the old imperial capital of Hue, pulling out of the northernmost provinces. General Westmoreland noted, “The enemy was destroying battalions faster than they could be reconstituted and faster than we had planned to organize them under the ARVN’s crash build-up program.”² Without American troops, Westmoreland foresaw quick defeat. He made no claims for victory, but the alternative was disaster.

LBJ made his choice. At Army posts throughout the United States, keen excitement ensued as troop units got orders to prepare for deployment and others were culled for specialists to fill out the ranks of those headed for Vietnam. For the professional military this was the moment, and Vietnam the place, for careers to be made and laurels won. Supremely confident of its capabilities, the military fielded its First Team. The Americans were determined to win.

Well might Saigon leaders fear for the Central Highlands. South Vietnamese colonel Nguyen Van Hieu, chief of staff of II Corps, recorded that peasants living in upland strategic hamlets (now called “new life hamlets”) and resettlement centers flooded district towns in the foothills. At corps headquarters in Pleiku, food prices rose steeply, doubling in less than six months. The NLF had cut every road connecting the highlands to the rest of Vietnam. Only airplanes linked Pleiku to the outside. Morale plummeted. Hieu looked around him and saw downcast faces. In June Le Thanh village was overrun. On July 7 the North Vietnamese captured the district town of Dak To, north of Kontum and a key ARVN position. The Vietnam People’s Army could not hold the town, but its exploit pointed up the danger. The next day Colonel Hieu and his boss, General Vinh Loc, began a major road-clearing operation. Saigon reinforced II Corps with half a dozen elite battalions, including a Marine group and the Second Airborne Task Force.

The South Vietnamese accounted their operation a success. It featured the first use of B-52 bombers in the highlands and a carefully orchestrated movement of supply convoys that improved Pleiku’s situation. But the People’s Army struck back, besieging the Special Forces camp at Duc Co. Isolated even after the ARVN’s road clearing, Duc Co hovered at the edge of extinction. General Loc defended it because the camp blocked the easiest route to Pleiku from the VPA base camps across the Cambodian border. To scout the area, the Americans lent him Special Forces Detachment B-57, Major Charles Beckwith’s Project Delta. Duc Co became its second major operation. Early in August the North Vietnamese closed in and fully invested the camp. Now II Corps committed its two-battalion Airborne Task Force to strengthen Duc Co. Norman Schwarzkopf, the American commander in the Persian Gulf war of 1990–1991, had his first claim to fame as senior adviser to these ARVN paratroops.

General Westmoreland also sent one of the two battalions of his 173rd Airborne Brigade, which freed up enough ARVN troops for II Corps to send a relief column. The Vietnamese Marines, backed by armor and Rangers, made the attempt. They ran into a large-scale ambush carried out by the VPA 32nd Regiment. After a three-day battle the force finally made it to Duc Co, and the ARVN spent the better part of a week sweeping the zone around the camp.

This action served as prelude for what happened upon the arrival of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), known as “The Cav.” Cued by the fighting, General Westmoreland rejected other plans for these troops and sent them straight to the highlands. The Americans already in place secured An Khe in the foothills, which became The Cav’s initial base. Hanoi, aiming to study U.S. tactics and methods, chose a head-on battle at another Special Forces camp called Plei Me. “The Front Command launched the Plei Me Campaign,” the VPA history notes, “carrying out a plan to besiege a position and annihilate the relief force. Our objective was to deal a painful blow to the puppet army in order to lure the American troops in so that we could kill them.”³ (In the People’s Army system, a “front” represented a major regional command, equivalent to an ARVN corps, a U.S. “field force,” or the “Marine amphibious force.”) Hanoi’s Highlands Front, known as the B-3 Front, came under the orders of Chu Huy Man, the DRV’s own montagnard. Man had been a prisoner at Kontum during French colonial times. For the Vietminh he had led a division recruited from the mountains along the Chinese border, playing a key role at Dien Bien Phu. Later he held posts dealing with upland minorities and most recently had been in Laos in charge of Hanoi’s mission to assist the Pathet Lao. Man came down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in 1964 as chief of the Vietnam Worker’s Party General Political Department, responsible for montagnard affairs. Now he was back in the saddle as a combat commander.

General Man put his 33rd Regiment, just arrived from The Trail, into the Plei Me attack. The ambush force would be the 32nd, veterans of Le Thanh and Duc Co. With Pleiku weakened by dispatch of ARVN’s relief column, the fresh VPA 66th Regiment would attack General Loc’s headquarters. Later, other VPA units would join in to capture Pleiku as a whole. Vietnamese accounts published during the war claimed great success in preserving the operation’s secrecy, and postwar histories do not dispute them.

The initial assault captured one of two outposts protecting Plei Me and annihilated a patrol in a satellite position. The Americans applied airpower. Only a sapper attack (a VPA-style commando raid) took place against the camp itself. Vinh Loc sent II Corps reinforcements, a relief force of 1,200 troops with tanks, armored cars, and personnel carriers, plus a couple of guns. The expedition virtually replayed the Duc Co operation. The U.S. command canceled a stand-down for Major Beckwith’s Project Delta and got him to Plei Me by October 22, reinforced by two ARVN Airborne Ranger companies. Beckwith took command. The next day and night brought the ambush battle. The lead element of Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Truong Luat’s relief column held off a VPA battalion, but his following force, with the guns and most of his infantry, sustained heavy losses.

Chu Huy Man’s calculations went wrong, however. The Cav was now arriving, and the division’s 3rd Brigade immediately went into Pleiku. This enabled the ARVN to send its last troops to help Colonel Luat, finally breaking through to Plei Me on October 25. Charlie Beckwith considered himself lucky to get out without a scratch. In pursuit of the People’s Army troops fading into the jungle, The Cav’s 2nd Battalion, 8th Cavalry airlifted into a landing zone near Plei Me the next day. This began an extensive campaign fought to hunt down Chu Huy Man’s men before they could escape. It became known as the Ia Drang (Ia is the word for “river” in the local language). Spurred by Westmoreland and Major General Stanley R. Larsen, leader of I Field Force (then called Task Force Alpha), the command corresponding to Loc’s, the 1st Cavalry Division conducted a monthlong operation.

This battle of the Ia Drang valley (actually just a small segment of it) is what most Americans think of when they recall U.S. troops entering South Vietnam. It was popularized by the book and movie We Were Soldiers Once . . . And Young, which focuses on a single engagement of the campaign, the heroic stand of Colonel Harold Moore’s 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry at a site called Landing Zone (LZ) X-Ray. The collective memory is dominated by the image of soldiers alighting from helicopters, marching into the nearby jungle, and encountering hordes of charging North Vietnamese. But an examination of veterans’ stories, military records, official and popular accounts, and a rich memoir literature conveys a different impression. Moments of sheer terror punctuated an anxious daily existence in which the potential for ambush—and the fear of encountering booby traps—alternated with the frustration of navigating the jungle and savannah. Encounters with the enemy brought firefights that were basically delaying actions pending the arrival of reinforcements, aerial support, artillery fire, or all three. For the special operations forces and other combat units sent into remote sectors of “Indian Country,” the land inhabited solely by Vietnamese adversaries, help came largely by air and involved complications arising from rules of engagement, location of the action, and availability of forward air control.

Life in the field varied a great deal, depending on where soldiers were operating and at what stage of the war. This is a reason why the second question a Vietnam veteran asks another is usually “When and where were you?” (the first is “What unit?”). Patrols close to bases might actually be accompanied by Vietnamese vendors hawking soda, cigarettes, and candy. Troops on roads enjoyed vehicle transport. But the daily task of clearing roads was some of the most hazardous duty. French soldiers in the previous war had dreaded this necessity, and Americans would too. Serving in the lowlands meant water and mud in the rice paddies. There too, enemy tunnel networks were encountered most often, and tunnel warfare was terrifying.

A large majority of the 2.5 million Americans who served in Vietnam were stationed in the coastal plains and the Mekong delta. Vietnamese were most numerous in the lowlands, so that brought frequent contact with villagers and the kinds of interactions that could evoke the “Ugly American.” GIs who dehumanized the Vietnamese as “gooks” or “slopes”—and there were many—impeded counterinsurgency, which aimed at gaining the confidence of Vietnamese. Such pejoratives were often applied to ARVN allies as well. Oddly, this attitude often did not extend to the adversary. Denigrated as Vietcong by the Saigon government, Liberation Front soldiers were generally respected by the Americans, who called them “Victor Charlie,” “Mr. Charles,” or simply VC. The North Vietnamese were typically the NVA, for North Vietnamese Army, regarded as some of the best light infantry in the world.

In the savannah and highlands, elephant grass sometimes taller than a man could slow progress to a crawl. Ranging the Central Highlands or the uplands of the Annamite mountains below the Demilitarized Zone meant cutting through elephant grass and scaling heavily forested slopes. Triple-layer jungle was the worst, found in the uplands and out toward the border. Heat was pervasive, but in the uplands there could be cold. Combat rations were dreaded, although larger operations featured field kitchens with hot food. During later stages of the war, operations were restricted to areas close to U.S. bases, and the troops were finally confined to the bases themselves in a bid to limit casualties.

Between operations the troops settled into base camps—large posts that might house a brigade or a division—or firebases—smaller installations that controlled the surrounding terrain to support troops on a mission. The Special Forces camps, with their indigenous troops, were another beast. Patrols radiated from these moderately well-defended bases into the hinterland, hoping to dominate the countryside but often settling for scouting out the enemy.

Troops in camp were safer than those outside, but except in the largest, rearmost bases, they were never truly safe, for the NLF and VPA carried out a program of harassment that included mortar and rocket attacks, sapper raids, ground probes, and occasional full-scale assaults. Vietnamese civilians performed a welter of tasks on base, from doing the laundry to carpentry, and there was always the fear that the locals were enemy agents. Air bases and Special Forces camps were especially popular targets for the adversary, offering the possibility of shutting allied eyes in Indian Country. Since most of the “forward operating bases” that served as launch points for special operations into Indian Country were also located at the camps, the enemy’s taking them out or isolating them could impede key U.S.–South Vietnamese offensive efforts, the only type of attack, besides bombing, that reached the NLF and VPA in their own base areas.

The strength of the National Liberation Front and its insurgency, particularly once reinforced by the Vietnam People’s Army, made it impossible for Washington and Saigon to attain the 10–1 or higher preponderance considered necessary for success in counterinsurgency, even with the addition of Johnson’s “Many Flags” third-country troops. Nor could the forces take over Indian Country or permanently occupy the adversary’s base areas. Westmoreland, his ARVN colleagues, and other commanders compensated with firepower and tactics. One was to employ so-called harassment and interdiction (H&I) fire—blind bombardment in the hope of inflicting losses or at least preventing movement. The places targeted became known as “free fire zones.” Both artillery and aircraft contributed to H&I fire, which soon accounted for much of the artillery ammunition and aerial ordnance expended by U.S. forces.

The primary ground tactic for excursions in Indian Country became the “search and destroy” mission, in which troops entered enemy territory and laid waste to anything deemed valuable. They would also attempt to force a battle, holding the enemy in place while commanders marshaled the capabilities to annihilate them. Closer to allied bases, where pacification and counterinsurgency were critical goals, “clear and hold” tactics were useful. All these tactics were critically affected by the shortage of troops, a problem accentuated by the wide variety of support forces backing U.S. combat troops; as a result, only one rifleman took the field for every seven or eight soldiers in the overall U.S. force.

Getting soldiers to the point of contact was where the helicopter came in. Other methods took more time, giving the enemy an opportunity to evade. The helicopter could quickly insert troops by “air assault” anywhere a suitable landing zone could be found. Of course, the NLF and VPA became adept at reading helicopter movements. Based on knowledge of where combat was in progress, combined with intercepted radio traffic (especially where communications security was sloppy), the adversary had a fair chance of divining the targets of air assaults. The Liberation Front and People’s Army also developed their own tactics to counter air assault, designating small units as rear guards to engage the allies, making an LZ a “hot” one, to hold off the attackers long enough for their comrades to escape. Booby traps and other passive defenses could slow down GIs to the same purpose. The VPA became adept at fire tactics that drove the helicopters to higher altitudes (or to very low ones), making an assault more time-consuming (and providing more advance warning) or making the choppers’ navigation more difficult.

For both sides these tactics evolved by trial and error, and the Ia Drang campaign began that process. North Vietnamese sources indicate that General Chu Huy Man’s command deliberately changed its strategy so as to draw the 1st Cavalry Division into the Ia Drang valley. Most American observers view Ia Drang as a pursuit battle against the People’s Army. Major General Douglas Kinnard of The Cav used several novel techniques. For instance, members of the 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry—who called themselves the “Headhunters”—acted as a sort of aerial scout and strike force, with ground troops for probes once suspicious targets had been identified and gunship helicopters for “aerial artillery.” After putting in a brigade to secure Pleiku, Kinnard leapfrogged his Headhunters through it and into Duc Co; from there they ranged over the area and out to the Cambodian border. On November 1 the Headhunters caught up with a VPA battalion licking its wounds at a camp near the mountain massif known as the Chu Pong. Scout troops landed to engage the North Vietnamese. The Cav did what it did so well: used more choppers to pile on troops until the enemy broke. Two days later the Headhunters and some montagnard strikers set overnight ambushes around a new LZ called Mary, catching the VPA and triggering fresh combat. This became the first battle for General Man’s 66th Regiment, which had been sent toward the Chu Pong to cache its heavy weapons so the men could march faster. Another action followed on November 6. The Cav then executed another novel procedure made possible by its generous allotment of helicopters: exchanging the entire engaged brigade for a fresh one up from An Khe. This force contained Colonel Moore’s 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, which in the U.S. Army could trace its lineage to the men who had fought the Sioux under George Armstrong Custer.

Moore’s soldiers choppered into Plei Me, known to pilots as the “Tea Plantation,” and probed an area at the foot of the Chu Pong. Other units scouted adjacent sectors. The VPA struck back with a sapper raid that apparently went unnoticed by chroniclers of the Ia Drang campaign. In any case, on November 14 the 7th Cavalry air-assaulted into LZ X-Ray, an action critically hampered because The Cav’s intense pace left only sixteen choppers for Moore, and the tight jungle around X-Ray permitted simultaneous landing of just eight craft. Waves of helicopters were necessary for the initial lift because of the tight LZ. Robert Mason was a pilot in the second wave, and before they could ground, the LZ was already “hot.” Some ships had to abort. More flights were necessary to insert the full battalion, but fighting began before the lift was complete. Three VPA battalions sat on a ridge overlooking the LZ. Moore’s troops chased enemy patrols into the jungle, and then the VPA attacked, leaving one portion of grunts separated from the rest, all of them isolated, and some of his men still in the air. The Americans withstood the North Vietnamese assaults and spent an uneasy night. The next morning the enemy struck again. Only after beating off the attack and getting help from another battalion that marched in overland could Moore free his trapped platoon.

Hal Moore’s GIs were finally able to fly out on November 17. Given the paucity of choppers, reinforcements from two other Cav battalions had to trek in. They headed for an LZ named Albany, but as they neared it the GIs encountered a tremendous ambush and then a People’s Army attack on the new LZ. In some ways the crisis at Albany proved worse than at X-Ray. An hour passed before planes arrived to batter the enemy. Many of the Americans had no idea where they were or where other U.S. forces were. Troops at LZ Albany had to regroup into a final defensive perimeter. By the end of the day they had sustained 40 percent losses.

After the firefight at Albany The Cav switched out its brigades again, moving the unblooded 2nd Brigade into the highlands. At MACV General Westmoreland and his aides gushed about the success, claiming more than 1,500 VPA soldiers dead by body count and the loss of another 2,000-plus estimated. Helicopter pilot Mason recalled that Ia Drang was one of the few early Cav battles where he saw enemy dead lying in the open. General Kinnard also considered Ia Drang a success, validating the air assault tactics that now became a mainstay. But The Cav suffered 305 killed and 524 wounded—the equivalent of a full battalion, 10 percent of its combat strength. Many officers, Hal Moore among them, had little confidence in the “body count” claims. For its part, Hanoi also counted Ia Drang a success, for it suggested the People’s Army could stand against the best the Americans could throw at it.

With its mobility, The Cav was in great demand. MACV soon pulled the division out of the highlands and committed it to battle in the central coastal provinces. The ARVN was left to mop up, using its Airborne Task Force, in an operation that caught many VPA soldiers up against the Chu Pong. Colonel Ngo Quang Truong, commanding the ARVN paratroops, showed his military dexterity in this action. Although the ARVN soldiers did well, many Americans found them uninspiring. Before The Cav left, Robert Mason’s helicopter unit got the job of moving some ARVN soldiers. Their assignment officer told the pilots to make sure the door gunners kept their weapons trained on the South Vietnamese as they alighted from the choppers. “I was amazed,” Mason recalled. “In the months to come I would hear as much about being wary of the ARVNs as I did about the Cong. If neither was to be trusted, who were our allies?”⁴

The War and the World

America’s allies were the “Free World Forces” recruited so assiduously by President Johnson. Johnson had begun his “More Flags” program in April 1964, originally to show that many nations were willing to enlist in the Vietnam adventure. Nonmilitary assistance formed the bulk of aid then. But as Washington began pondering combat troops and sought numbers beyond what the United States could deploy, the focus shifted. That December LBJ widened the search for foreign soldiers. He made strenuous efforts in 1965. Westmoreland’s forty-four-battalion deployment program already included ten third-country maneuver battalions. This effort became the subject of bilateral diplomacy between Washington and other capitals. At the time, Johnson proved most successful with Australia and the Republic of Korea. A number of countries, including France, lent medical, agricultural, or economic aid. There were also Filipino medical and civic action teams; German, Italian, and Nationalist Chinese medical teams; a small Thai air force observer contingent; and the tiny British advisory mission led by Sir Robert Thompson.

Efforts to build the foreign involvement largely fell flat. With the British, for example, LBJ set security adviser McGeorge Bundy to work on his opposite number, British cabinet secretary Sir Burke Trend, in an attempt to convince London to send at least the Commonwealth infantry brigade it had in Malaysia. The British remained obdurate, even when the United States hinted that support for the British pound sterling, a currency threatened by foreign account deficits, might be contingent on British aid in Vietnam. With some logic but more calculation, London maintained that as a cochair (and presumably guarantor) of the Geneva conference, it could not be a belligerent. Great Britain maintained an embassy in Hanoi, and throughout the war its merchant vessels remained the leading noncommunist traders with North Vietnam.⁵

The other European powers were quite reluctant. Having been forced out of Indochina by the Americans, snubbed when de Gaulle suggested neutralization, and desirous of protecting friendly relations with the People’s Republic of China, France was not a candidate for intervention. It too maintained diplomatic ties with Hanoi. Italy saw its role less as participating in the war than as encouraging its settlement. Washington nudged Germany and Japan in the direction of involvement, but both countries, defeated powers in World War II, faced either political or legal obstacles to military involvement. Germany did no more than send medical teams.⁶

Japan’s first antiwar protests coincided with the U.S. reprisal bombings after Pleiku. It paid certain war reparations to South Vietnam and made some loans, in all about $56 million, in a program completed in 1965. Tokyo had a thriving foreign trade with the DRV, primarily for Hon Gay coal; however, it curbed those imports under LBJ’s pressure. With the Japanese Constitution containing a provision banning foreign military ventures, there could be no question of its contributing to the Free World Forces. Washington faced problems with Tokyo concerning Japanese sovereignty over islands and bases occupied since World War II, so under the circumstances, concerned itself primarily with securing Tokyo’s acquiescence in the use of Japanese bases to support its own Vietnam effort.⁷

Possibly Washington’s only ideological allies in the war were Australia and New Zealand. Both had similar perspectives on communism that were, on most points, close to that of the United States. A collective defense treaty called ANZUS, one with more teeth than SEATO, linked them to Washington. Australia believed in forward defense—combating the communists in Malaya and Southeast Asia was preferable to fighting them in Queensland. Since July 1962 Australia had had a strong military advisory group in Saigon under Brigadier General “Ted” Serong, numbering almost a hundred in late 1964, when Johnson asked Australia to triple it. Rather than dilute professional forces by drawing off specialists as advisers, Canberra preferred to send a combat unit and offered an infantry battalion, accepted by the Saigon government in April 1965. The 1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, arrived a month later to be posted near Vung Tau. New Zealand added an artillery battery that July. In 1966 the Australians upped their contingent to a full brigade, three battalions with supporting armor and artillery units.

As in the United States, Australia’s Vietnam war began in controversy and led to growing public outcry. People suspected political manipulation in the initial agreement to send combat forces. By the time of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, protest rallies had already begun, and telegrams of opposition were sent to President Johnson. A full-page antiwar advertisement first appeared in an Australian newspaper in mid-August 1964, run by the local section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Parliamentary debate and press reactions were divided but strong, and labor unions opposed the troop commitment, though mildly. A week before the Australian troops went to South Vietnam, a public vigil in opposition took place outside Parliament House in Canberra. The government of Sir Robert Menzies would be LBJ’s good ally, but at a growing political cost.⁸

By far the largest foreign contingent would be that of the Republic of Korea (ROK). Under LBJ’s original “More Flags,” the ROK sent a small group of man-to-man combat instructors. After the program’s expansion, bilateral talks between Washington and Seoul led to the dispatch of a major formation, a 2,000-man combat engineer unit—the so-called Dove unit—with infantry attached for security purposes. The Korean National Assembly agreed to this deployment on January 12, 1965. President Park Chung Hee, demonstrating his willingness to meet almost any level of commitment the United States suggested, later offered two full infantry divisions but attached stringent conditions involving U.S. aid to the ROK. This set the tone for the relationship.

American planners steadily expanded their expectations for Korean forces. With President Johnson sending U.S. troops to Vietnam for base defense, in April 1965 the plans called for three ROK battalions in a single regimental combat team. When Washington stepped up to the forty-four-battalion program, nine of ten third-country battalions—a full infantry division—were to be Korean (the last was Australian). LBJ agreed to Park’s conditions in May 1965 as details were worked out: the United States would increase economic aid to South Korea, finance the reequipment of ROK forces to replace the ones sent to Vietnam, continue military assistance at previous levels, modernize the full Korean military establishment, defray the pay of the ROK troops in Vietnam, and pay for their transportation costs.

Saigon formally requested ROK troops the same day Nguyen Cao Ky assumed the reins of power. By then, preparations to send the ROK Capital Division—in Vietnam, often called the “Tiger” Division—were well advanced. Its headquarters arrived at the end of September, and a 1st Infantry Regiment plus an ROK Marine brigade in mid-October. They went to Qui Nhon province on the coast below the Central Highlands, even as The Cav fought at Ia Drang. Before the last ROK troops had taken the field, talks were already under way for another division (the 9th), and most of it arrived in September 1966. The ROK forces in South Vietnam totaled about 21,000 at the end of 1965 and 45,000 a year later. They peaked at 50,000 at the end of 1968.

Most versatile of the Free World Forces were the Thais, although their participation began only later. During this early period the Kingdom of Thailand provided special forces to work with the CIA’s secret army in Laos, trained some ARVN soldiers in Thailand, and furnished a contingent of fewer than twenty pilots who flew C-47 aircraft for Saigon. Once Dean Rusk provided U.S. security guarantees in early 1963, the kingdom’s military rulers agreed to host a network of U.S. bases, constructed between 1964 and 1967. Thus, Thailand’s main importance early on was to U.S. air operations over North Vietnam and Laos. But the Thais sent an advisory mission to South Vietnam in 1966, followed the next year by an agreement on troops. A volunteer regiment, the “Queen’s Cobras,” arrived that September and fought for nearly a year northeast of Bien Hoa. About that time, President Johnson sent Clark Clifford and General Maxwell Taylor to encourage the troop-contributing countries to broaden their involvement, and Thailand agreed to send a full division. These troops, the “Black Panther” Division, began arriving in early 1969. The Thai contingent peaked in 1969–1970 at about 11,600 troops. By that time, Thai pilots were secretly flying combat missions over northern Laos, and Thai artillery—also secretly—supported the CIA in Laos. Infantry followed. By 1972 as many as 20,000 Thai troops were participating in the Laotian war, even as the last Thais left Vietnam. All this remained separate from the counterinsurgency war conducted simultaneously in northeastern Thailand.

Finally there were the Filipinos. The Philippines first became involved in the Vietnamese scene through Ed Lansdale, who had served there before going to South Vietnam. He arranged Filipino guards for Ngo Dinh Diem and later some trainers; he was also involved in Operation Brotherhood, essentially a foreign civic action and psychological warfare program. When the “More Flags” initiative began, the Philippines offered more. In late 1964 Washington and Manila began talks on Filipino combat engineer units. Politics delayed action until after the November 1965 election, which brought Ferdinand Marcos to power. Renegotiation slowed deployment of the Philippines Civic Action Group of three engineer battalions, which reached Vietnam in September 1966. The Filipino force of slightly over 2,000 served through 1968, when it was reduced to less than 1,600, and in 1969 to just a token force.

In sum, Lyndon Johnson worked hard to produce an international coalition but fell short of a true Free World Force. The weaknesses in America’s appeals for help trace directly to the shaky legal and moral justifications for war in Vietnam, much as would happen to George W. Bush and his “coalition of the willing” to invade Iraq. The rickety collection of allies Johnson mobilized amounted to a small number of countries, most of which were ready to use America’s desperation as a lever to extract U.S. dollars. In an odd way, the paucity of results from Johnson’s diplomacy to attract allies mirrored the failure of his efforts to negotiate an end to the war.

“We are ready now, as we have always been, to move from the battlefield to the conference table,” President Johnson told reporters at the White House on July 26, 1965. He went on: “I have stated publicly many times, again and again, America’s willingness to begin unconditional discussions with any government at any place at any time.” LBJ asserted that fifteen separate attempts had been made to open talks in concert with forty different nations.⁹ These declarations came simultaneously with LBJ’s decision to authorize the largest Vietnam escalation to date.

As with LBJ’s basic attitude toward the war, these words of peace can be seen in different ways. An unlikely image, especially for 1965, is that of Johnson as a seeker of peace. That picture does, however, fit the evidence that LBJ had doubts about a Vietnam commitment, so it bears mention. But the pattern of Johnson’s actions raises questions: the brief bombing pause to make Rolling Thunder seem justified; LBJ’s statement itself, in such close conjunction with his troop decision; the Johns Hopkins speech, with its admixture of talk rhetoric and fight imagery; even the president’s putting out a number on alleged peace feelers, much as he tried to put a count on America’s allies. And that is just the visible record. The actual, secret record of peace feelers adds to the pile of doubt.

First came Washington’s use of Canadian diplomat Blair J. Seaborn as emissary for messages to Hanoi in 1964–1965. Seaborn had worked with Henry Cabot Lodge when the latter represented the United States at the United Nations, and Lodge recommended him now. During Seaborn’s June 1964 visit to Hanoi, according to the diplomatic volumes of the Pentagon Papers, he warned Prime Minister Pham Van Dong that if the conflict should escalate, “the greatest devastation would of course result for the DRV itself.” Dong countered that North Vietnam would win such a contest. Seaborn passed further messages after Pleiku and at the time of Johnson’s May 1965 bombing pause. But there was no real negotiating position other than to offer talks and warn Hanoi of dire consequences. Washington’s intent was coercive.¹⁰

Seaborn’s final visit came shortly after Hanoi publicized its “Four Points” for an agreement, long the heart of its stance: (1) the United States must withdraw from Indochina, (2) the South Vietnamese people should determine their own affairs, (3) the status of South Vietnam would be characterized by “peace and neutrality,” and (4) Vietnam would be reunified. North Vietnamese diplomat Nguyen Duy Trinh told Seaborn that U.S. offers of unconditional negotiations were “deceitful,” in view of the American troops in the South and the bombing of the DRV. Seaborn concluded that Hanoi had little interest in talks. Historian George C. Herring observes, “The most important result of the Seaborn missions was probably to afford an additional reason, if one were needed, for subsequent American escalation.”¹¹

Then there were the peace efforts of UN Secretary-General U Thant. In February 1965 Thant told the U.S. ambassador he had been urging Hanoi to negotiate and that, according to the Soviets, the DRV would be willing to meet U.S. representatives in Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar). Thant offered as an alternative that the two Vietnams might sit down together. McGeorge Bundy advised Johnson against the idea. Its main result would be an irate phone call to Thant from Dean Rusk denouncing bilateral talks and demanding evidence of Hanoi’s sincerity. Thant went public in March, calling for a cease-fire and a multilateral conference, whereupon the United States insisted on positive moves by the DRV. Blair Seaborn’s boss, Canadian prime minister Lester Pearson, also gave a speech advocating talks; he suggested that a bombing “pause” might encourage such talks—the apparent stimulus for LBJ’s May bombing lull. But by then Thant was reduced to saying, “I strongly hope that there will be a follow-up on the stated willingness of the parties directly involved.”¹²

With President Johnson now considering troop deployment and the first U.S. battalions having already landed, public opinion remained divided. Opinion polls in March and early April showed that about a third of Americans favored talks. Negotiations were also a demand of and a rallying point for the SDS march on Washington. LBJ made points with his Johns Hopkins speech, but the teach-ins and combat action in Vietnam kept the issue on the front pages, and Johnson knew, as Americans did not, that escalation proposals were on his desk. More visibility for the diplomatic track seemed necessary to lay the groundwork for troops. LBJ approved the May bombing pause plus Project “Mayflower,” the next peace feeler, but certainly not at the instigation of his military or intelligence authorities, all of whom assessed the damage inflicted on the DRV as insufficient to drive Hanoi to the bargaining table. The evidence suggests that Johnson was not making an actual effort to jump-start talks.

Given the code name Mayflower on May 12, the feeler sought to use the Soviets to tell Hanoi that the U.S. bombing halt evidenced a desire for peace and to request a response. On the first day of the pause, Johnson made a speech where, without openly referring to the message, he asked Hanoi to consider a political solution. During Seaborn’s last Hanoi visit, the Czech ambassador took him aside to say that the DRV had never gotten Washington’s message—its man in Moscow had returned the cable to the Russians, ostensibly unopened.

The most concrete feeler of this period actually came to the United States from France. In May, Mai Van Bo, the DRV delegation chief in Paris, told the French that Hanoi’s Four Points could be considered subjects for negotiation rather than preconditions. The Quai d’Orsai passed this along speedily, but Washington did nothing. In mid-June Bo went back to the French foreign ministry to ask what had happened. The French could tell him nothing. Bo waited another month, then sent a similar message to Washington through a private citizen. Washington finally responded but kept the contact at a very low level by recruiting retired diplomat Edmund Gullion as its emissary. Gullion and Bo met and got as far as discussing the wording of a communiqué to announce reconvening the Geneva conference, but then Bo broke contact, telling Gullion the air attacks on North Vietnam had to stop for negotiations to begin. Washington, of course, had no intention of permitting another Geneva. Analysts reviewing this episode later for the administration concluded, “The U.S. was sending [Gullion] with the intention of seeking peace from a position of U.S. strength.” Gullion took his guidance seriously.¹³

Even the CIA would be drawn into alleged peace efforts in 1966 in a top-secret feeler christened “Elm Tree.” The adjective alleged is appropriate because some wanted to exploit it simply to induce defections of National Liberation Front adherents, and it would finally be subsumed in a Saigon government “reconciliation” program aimed at exactly that goal. Former strongman Nguyen Khanh played a key role in Elm Tree, approaching Americans to say he had opened channels to the NLF, whose leaders, like those of Saigon, were scions of elite Vietnamese families. When, after soundings by diplomat U. Alexis Johnson, the CIA took over the channel, it evaporated. Elm Tree led nowhere.

Several more feelers occurred between LBJ’s troop deployment and late 1966. There would also be another, more extensive U.S. bombing halt, thirty-seven days beginning at Christmas 1965. This represented a strategic choice, not just a publicity ploy. It is an important point because it sheds more light on Lyndon Johnson and has bearing on the charge that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were mere clerks, derelict in their duty. Starting in late October the Chiefs pushed for expanded bombing that would have pleased even Admiral U. S. G. Sharp (see later). Pundits nicknamed this the “sharp blow,” and it would have involved a series of strikes—Hanoi, Haiphong, airfields, surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites, roads, and railroads—in a period of just a few days, with at least some targets hit by B-52 bombers. This was the Christmas Bombing seven years before its time, not mere tactical advice. According to General Charles Cooper, then a Marine major and aide to the chief of naval operations, the Chiefs marched into the Oval Office, and LBJ lined them up near the windows. He knew what was up—memoranda on the JCS proposal had circulated, and McNamara had told him the Chiefs were hot under the collar. Johnson did not let them sit down.“We fully realize,” General Wheeler told the president, “that what we’re going to present today requires a very difficult decision on your part.” Johnson listened, then chewed them out royally. The president insulted each man individually, Cooper recalled, and “used the f-word more freely than a marine in boot camp.” Then Johnson came to his core concern: “I’ve got the weight of the Free World on my shoulders and you want me to start World War III.”¹⁴

Thus Johnson had been ready to fight to get his way, and he staged this encounter to back his military advisers down. With the pause he inaugurated a sort of peace offensive, weeks of frenetic activity in which U.S. diplomats went everywhere they could think of—from tiny African countries to the Holy See—trying to generate momentum, going through the Hungarians, Russians, Italians, the UN, and other European, African, and Asian countries, three dozen in all. A presidential letter went to every foreign delegation at the United Nations. All this actually led to one contact—“Pinta,” the Rangoon meeting with the North Vietnamese—but nothing came of it. Inspired, perhaps, Canadian leader Pearson used retired Canadian envoy Chester A. Ronning in another feeler in the spring of 1966. Ronning thought he had a breakthrough when Pham Van Dong hinted that if the United States stopped bombing, the DRV would negotiate. Washington took a dim view, however, fearing a halt would be seen as acceptance of Hanoi’s Four Points, instead demanding that U.S. de-escalation be reciprocated.

Through all this, it was not until January 1966 that the United States even had a bargaining position, and then it was crafted mostly for public consumption. There is a disconnect between the conditions posed and LBJ’s determination to present them. Secretary Rusk, emulating Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, unveiled 14 Points on Vietnam on January 3, 1966. Rusk may have thought his formula incorporated Hanoi’s Four Points, forming a basis for talks, but the U.S. formula indicated little flexibility and minimized the DRV position (its points “could be discussed along with other points that others might wish to propose”). The text explicitly stated, “We are not aware of any initiative which has been taken by Hanoi during the past five years to seek peace.” This language failed to acknowledge the Mai Van Bo feeler.¹⁵

One thing President Johnson did was appoint W. Averell Harriman his special representative for peace talks. This at least made someone responsible for the pathways that might lead to Hanoi. As factotum to backstop him, NSC staffer Chester L. Cooper, who had been ready to leave the White House, was induced to work for Harriman instead. Managing the peace offensive became Harriman’s first act, but much of it represented cosmetics. Along with the lack of a U.S. negotiating position, there was no plan for actually conducting talks.¹⁶ Hanoi viewed the bombing halt and peace offensive as a ploy. Its response came in a letter from Ho Chi Minh on January 24, 1966, demanding that the United States accept the DRV’s Four Points and unconditionally stop bombing to begin the peace process. Cooper’s evaluation of the diplomatic sally is significant: “Where finely tooled instruments were required, we used a sledgehammer. Where confidential and careful advance work was necessary, we proceeded with the subtlety of a Fourth of July parade.”¹⁷

The myriad details lie beyond the scope of this narrative. But note: Johnson concerned himself more with the appearance than the reality of starting talks. In addition, in keeping with an aggressive war strategy, the United States showed no interest in a solution not on its own terms. Most crucial, the key obstacles—the notions of preconditions and the bombing—were on the table at the very beginning of the ground war. And these obstacles were readily visible, known to LBJ and his colleagues. Bombing held particular importance with respect to negotiations. Critics of Johnson’s bombing policy treat it in isolation, as if this were a simple strategic bombing campaign. The reality is that bombing and diplomacy were intimately linked, as Rolling Thunder would demonstrate repeatedly. Meanwhile, the public impression remained that of diplomacy entailing much smoke but little fire. That seemed a thin reed, and LBJ’s foreign alliances a rickety structure, while the war heated up every day. American politics, already roiled by the bitter struggle over civil rights, sustained a renewed shock from land war in Asia. Social and political forces combined with open war to build steadily toward a climax.

A Gathering Storm

For some in a budding antiwar movement, the storm had already come. Washington increasingly became the focus for those concerned about Vietnam. That soured Lyndon Johnson considerably. The gloom contributed to Chet Cooper’s melancholy and his desire to leave the NSC staff. Cooper records, “the atmosphere within the White House was dark and forbidding.” He had to be careful about what he said, increasingly resorting to handwritten notes passed to Mac Bundy at meetings rather than considered opinions in papers or memos, which might fall into unfriendly hands.“In the spring of 1965,” he notes, “the White House felt like a besieged fortress. Pennsylvania Avenue was crowded and noisy with picketers day and night. Lafayette Park, across the avenue from the White House, had become a virtual campground for taunting protesters.” Luci Johnson, the president’s daughter, never forgot the “lullaby” that kept her awake night after night: “LBJ. LBJ, how many boys did you kill today?”¹⁸

Demonstrations outside the White House, the Pentagon, or the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York became legion in 1965. Consisting of a few, a dozen, or a hundred protesters, these small events were nickel-and-dime stuff, maybe even penny stuff to professional politicians, but they were the warp and woof of the Movement. The key would be presence, not mass, and it betokened a new style of “grassroots” politics the professionals disdained before they woke up to embrace it. Sponsors in these early days included the War Resisters League, SDS, Women Strike for Peace, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Committee for Nonviolent Action, Catholic Worker, and more. The SDS march on Washington became the first mass, multiorganization demonstration, and its unexpected draw hinted at the power of the grass roots. Further evidence was seen when 30,000 attended “Vietnam Day” at Berkeley in May and 18,000 turned up for a teach-in-cum-rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden a month later.

Another kind of protest, civil rights protest, also complicated presidential calculations. In August frustrated African Americans rioted in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, leading to a call-up of the National Guard. The Watts riots signaled that the social reform program called the “Great Society,” which competed with Vietnam for LBJ’s attention, had a long way to go.

For the time being, Johnson countered with his bridge to the American Friends of Vietnam; with his so-called truth squads, which mobilized to speak from every available podium; and with plain prevarication. Protesters’ arguments were considered a mere information problem, and White House officials tried to figure out how to cope. The president sent McGeorge Bundy, whom LBJ had forbidden to participate in the first teach-ins, out to battle Hans Morgenthau at a nationally televised teach-in that June. Unlike the earlier events, here Bundy controlled the format and exploited it to belittle the dissenters, quoting Morgenthau’s expressed fear in 1961 that communist domination of Laos was a virtual foregone conclusion.¹⁹ Dean Rusk charged antiwar thinkers with “gullibility” and “disregard of plain facts” in April, and in a May speech he supplied a slanted definition of “wars of national liberation”—calling them “any war which furthers the Communist world revolution.” In a July 11 interview with ABC Television reporters, the secretary of state asserted that there would be no sanctuary from U.S. attacks in North Vietnam or anywhere else. The CIA commissioned analyst George Carver to write a paper on the nature of the National Liberation Front, which the agency placed in the journal Foreign Affairs and then cited as the authoritative source on the subject. Robert McNamara, who met with five antiwar leaders on June 16, dismissed their objections with the comment, “We know things that you don’t.” He would later write that one cause of U.S. defeat was “profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area.”²⁰

Sensing that rhetoric would not suffice, President Johnson also feared charges from the Right, from conservatives and Goldwater Republicans determined to achieve victory. LBJ made his troop decision in the quietest way possible, announcing it in a late-night message to the nation and refusing to seek money from Congress, at least immediately. Early in August White House staffers held a strategy powwow to find ways to sell the war. Aide Douglass Cater advised the president to educate the people and air the issues driving him. Johnson rejected that advice too.²¹ The fracas that erupted weeks later over the Eisenhower letter no doubt reinforced LBJ’s sense that his course was correct. He must have thought the press already out to get him.

Instead of opening up, Johnson created an interagency committee to manage the flow of information to Americans. That fall the administration set up an active pro-war lobby. This entity, the Committee for an Effective and Durable Peace in Asia, announced on September 9, aimed to build support for LBJ’s policy. Its head was Arthur Dean, actually one of the “Wise Men” group of foreign policy advisers, who helped President Johnson when asked and who had recently been consulted on the troop decision. The White House’s purposeful action began the spiral of hostility that grew between America’s president and its people.

LBJ’s measures did not quell opposition to Vietnam. Various accounts of the antiwar movement detail how umbrella coalitions emerged during this period, the most important of them probably the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam and the Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade. In the streets, demonstrations continued, most nickel-and-dime protests, but quite a few larger ones too. The White House became a frequent target, as Chet Cooper’s recollections show. On August 8 and 9 more than 350 protesters were arrested outside the White House, charged with blocking access. Days afterward protesters tried to block troop trains en route to the Army port terminal in Oakland. In mid-October came the “First International Days of Protest,” a nationwide demonstration in which the largest manifestation of opposition would be the 25,000 people who marched in New York.

Then came November 2. Late that afternoon, in front of the Pentagon’s River Entrance and just a hundred yards from the windows of Robert McNamara’s office, a Baltimore Quaker named Norman R. Morrison doused himself with kerosene and lit a match, protesting the war in the style of the Buddhist monks in Saigon. Indeed, a monk had burned to death in Saigon just the day before. Morrison immolated himself, at the last moment tossing his fifteen-month-old child, Emily, to other protesters.

McNamara shuddered at this action, considering it a personal tragedy. He reacted to the horror “by bottling up my emotions and avoiding talking about them with anyone—even my family.”²² He would face opposition to LBJ’s Vietnam policy from his wife, Margery, and his children. The same was true for many others, from senior officials to junior military officers. Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, the CIA’s William Colby, and others shared McNamara’s problem, one replicated at family dinner tables throughout the country. The personal costs of LBJ’s course did not turn officials away from his policy—yet. This factor is muted in accounts of Vietnam, but its importance grew as the war remained intractable and opposition blossomed. Lyndon Johnson knew of these pressures, and about the grain-of-sand-in-the-seashell irritant of the protests. Although it still seemed minor, the Movement could routinely turn out 4,000 people to picket New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel when LBJ attended a dinner there in February 1966. The pot had begun to steam, though not yet to boil.

Washington’s war decisions were made in a fishbowl, under increasing scrutiny by a concerned public. That might not have been a problem if General Westmoreland’s strategy had offered a true path forward. Instead, almost as soon as MACV began deploying troops, the general’s staff realized the force was heavily weighted in favor of frontline “grunts,” as the GIs were called, lacking the support forces necessary to make them fully effective. Even worse, accelerating deployment revealed that South Vietnam lacked the ports, roads, and airfields necessary to operate the U.S. combat force. As Westmoreland later wrote, “even had South Vietnam been a modern, fully developed country with adequate logistical facilities readily adaptable to military use, troop build-up would have been slow.”²³ In fact, a brigade of the U.S. 25th Infantry Division would be airlifted directly to Pleiku to avoid squeezing it through the congested ports. Until the moment American troop strength peaked, several years later, tension between the level of forces and the network to sustain them remained a constant. Westy notes, “men locked in combat cannot long survive without adequate logistic support.”²⁴

Within weeks of the Ia Drang battles, MACV asked for another 100,000 troops. Forces that General Westmoreland had listed in cables as possible follow-ons were now pegged as necessary. More were requested to “fill out” those already approved. In September the MACV commander wanted twenty-eight fresh battalions; two months later he almost doubled the bid—to fifty-three battalions with commensurate expansion in Free World Forces and a total American deployment of 440,000 men by the end of 1966. Secretary McNamara endorsed the request, which became known as “Program 2.”

This would be President Johnson’s next significant Vietnam decision. Opposition among his advisers—except on one matter—was minor and involved those who wanted more of one thing or another. For example, General Maxwell Taylor and Air Force chief of staff General John McConnell wanted more bombing of North Vietnam before widening the troop commitment. Pacific theater commander Admiral U. S. G. Sharp wanted more reinforcements to Thailand in connection with the Vietnam buildup. No one suggested that Program 2 be canceled. At a summit meeting with South Vietnamese leaders at Honolulu in February 1966, the president approved the program.

The real problem was not deployment plans but U.S. military resources. Since the beginning of schemes for major combat, the generals had brought up the need to mobilize reserve and National Guard troops for units sent to Vietnam and to fill out the force structure. LBJ saw mobilization as a political problem. The choice begged the question of his legal authority in the absence of a declaration of war and also would have called into question why, if he were mobilizing, LBJ had not asked for greatly increased budgets. Johnson—and McNamara—resisted every proposal for reserve mobilization. That left just one potential solution, the draft.

American men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six (obligatory service did not apply to women in the 1960s) were subject to military service, familiarly called the “draft.” A wartime draft had been instituted during World War II, but none had ever existed in peacetime. That changed in March 1948, and the draft had been reauthorized several times since, requiring men to register for the draft and then be subject to call-up. Administered by the Selective Service System headed by General Louis Hershey, the mechanism worked at the behest of Pentagon planners, who calculated the number of draftees required to fill the ranks. Selective Service then assigned goals to local draft boards, which summoned the requisite number of individuals. The draft is discussed in more detail later, but the force that deployed to Vietnam in 1965 consisted primarily of longtime military professionals with a leavening of draftees. The buildup, combined with Johnson’s refusal to mobilize, transformed the U.S. force into one that was increasingly reliant on draftees or volunteers whose decisions to enlist had been driven—in 60 percent of cases, by Pentagon estimates—by the draft. Program 2 was the watershed. In 1966 draft calls jumped from 10,000 men a month to 30,000. Only 16 percent of American battle deaths in 1965 were draftees, but that proportion jumped to 21 percent in 1966 and swelled to more than 33 percent the next year.²⁵

In the absence of mobilization, Program 2 had to be stretched out. It took time to turn draftees into soldiers and especially to regroup new men with experienced soldiers in the units sent to Vietnam. In addition, the requirement for support units quickly enmeshed the U.S. Army and Marine Corps in a drive to create engineer, construction, logistics, transportation, helicopter, communications, graves registration, and other specialist formations of all kinds. Detachments pulled from active forces cobbled together provisional units that were rushed out to fill the gap until new ones could be formed. Some of Westmoreland’s Program 2 troops did not reach Vietnam until early 1967, and manpower at the end of 1966 would total 385,000. Still, the entire effort portended a steadily expanding war.

What Washington could do, Hanoi could do too. Maybe better. With the Vietnam People’s Army a less complex, less sophisticated machine, the DRV had fewer obstacles. Hanoi also had no illusion that it was fighting a limited war. It had made its decision to expand efforts—as well as improve the Ho Chi Minh Trail—a year sooner than LBJ, so by late 1965 the work had begun to bear fruit. Both the People’s Army and the People’s Liberation Armed Forces were upgraded and strengthened to the extent the Ia Drang battle, fierce as it was, represented just one of a series of simultaneous combats. There were other major assaults against the U.S. 1st Infantry Division north of Saigon and in Binh Dinh province on the coastal plain beneath the Central Highlands. Sustaining the field forces were the troops and supplies coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, plus a steady effort to land supplies by sea along the coast.

The People’s Army expansion would be impressive. At 195,000 men in early 1965, the VPA passed 350,000 that May and reached 400,000 before the end of the year. The army added a second tank regiment and doubled its artillery branch, equipping it with new 130mm guns and rocket launchers. Self-defense and coastal units formed throughout the DRV, with an increase of 600,000 soldiers through 1965 to reach 2 million. The VPA began recalling former enlisted personnel in 1964 and officers the following year.

Under the pressure of Rolling Thunder, and with the help of Soviet and Chinese aid, air defenses multiplied as well. Russian SA-2 SAMs were used to form the 236th Air Defense Missile Regiment in May 1965, with the 238th added a month later; SAM defense of the Hanoi area existed by the fall. Antiaircraft artillery almost tripled, from fourteen battalions to forty-one, with a dozen regiments and many independent units. The People’s Air Force formed three regiments of jet interceptors with Soviet-made MIG-17 and MIG-21 aircraft. Radar nets and aerial engagement management units expanded commensurately. This period also saw the introduction of Chinese troops into North Vietnam to assist in antiaircraft and coastal defense and help maintain and improve the DRV’s transportation network.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail benefited from systematic improvement efforts. By now it was no longer a collection of tracks and camps but one of roads and bases, called binh trams, that serviced passing units. Truck convoys replaced bicycles as the standard conveyances—by 1965 Group 559 operated six truck battalions, compared with just two of bicycles. The binh trams were being equipped with vehicle maintenance facilities, antiaircraft defenses, ground security elements, and many modern appurtenances. Separate antiaircraft units were placed at key points, such as the mountain passes where roads crossed from the DRV into the Laotian domain of The Trail. At Xuan Mai, near Hanoi, the People’s Army created a training center to prepare units and individuals for the trek. The appointment of Hanoi’s transportation minister as commander of Group 559, installed above the officer who had originally created The Trail, denoted the changes.

The regiments of VPA regulars The Cav had encountered at Ia Drang represented only the leading edge. During 1965 Hanoi sent seven full regiments and twenty battalions down The Trail, along with cadres, for a total of 50,000 men. By Vietnamese accounts, that represented an annual deployment of as many troops as had gone South before that time. The Twelfth Plenum of the Central Committee, meeting in Hanoi in late December, judged that despite the American buildup, there had been no net change in the balance of forces.

Hanoi strove to keep it that way. Regiment 18B crossed the DRV border to begin its march in February 1966, the first of fifteen regiments to make the trek that year. Even those 30,000 troops represented just half the total for 1966. That infiltration occurred despite U.S. efforts to stop it. American planes made 4,000 attack sorties (a sortie is a flight by one aircraft) against The Trail in the last quarter of 1965, 8,000 more in January 1966, and another 5,000 sorties in February. The scale of air effort was greater than Rolling Thunder itself during this time. Hanoi had clearly determined to match any escalation by Washington.

One reason the Ho Chi Minh Trail was bombed more heavily than the North would be that President Johnson decided to stop Rolling Thunder, a thirty-seven-day pause that became the longest of the war. Here LBJ responded to diverse stimuli. Johnson saw divergent trends in American opinion. On the one hand, a December 1965 poll showed that 65 percent of respondents supported holding the line, and another 28 percent favored carrying the war to North Vietnam even if it meant conflict with China—the conservative challenge. On the other hand, the antiwar movement continued to grow, punctuated by a Thanksgiving weekend march in Washington sponsored by SANE. Its leaders met with NSC staffer Chet Cooper and urged a halt of the bombing long enough to test negotiating possibilities. Since the protest leaders had already—at Cooper’s suggestion—actually sent peace appeals to Hanoi, he could hardly refuse to pass their views to the president.

There were other pressures on LBJ as well. Robert McNamara backed General Westmoreland’s Program 2 request, verified during his November 1965 visit to Saigon, but the secretary of defense coupled that with his own bid for a bombing halt. At State, Rusk and Ball agreed enthusiastically to the pause. At the NSC, Bundy tepidly backed it. In Congress, Mike Mansfield advocated a peace conference, to which a bombing halt could logically be coupled. Even the Soviets weighed in when their ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, told the White House that should there be a bombing pause, Moscow would do its best to obtain a favorable reaction from Hanoi. Opposition came from the Joint Chiefs, Ambassador Lodge, Admiral Sharp, General Westmoreland, and LBJ’s private advisers Clark Clifford and Abe Fortas. At a December 17 White House meeting, McNamara told the president that he could handle the Chiefs if LBJ made a firm decision.

Johnson felt buffeted. By his own account, LBJ reacted with deep skepticism when he first heard the halt proposal. He remembered the summertime pause as a failure and registered the complaints of opponents. At the LBJ Ranch on December 7, Johnson continued to express doubt, but Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy all reassured him. At the climactic meetings on December 17 and 18 LBJ finally agreed, despite Fortas and Clifford, whose “opinions carried weight with me.” But LBJ’s reluctance is evident in his comment that this amounted to another of “those 51–49 decisions that regularly reach the President’s desk and keep him awake late at night,” and in his insistence that no public announcement be made except of a brief Christmas truce, which the United States could then quietly extend.²⁶ Johnson’s reluctance is especially apparent from his incremental extensions: first the Christmas truce, then a longer pause, and finally, after a private meeting with McNamara in Texas, the halt, despite the fact that the full program had been laid down in extensive position papers over a period of weeks.²⁷

Washington combined its halt with the barren peace offensive already discussed. When CIA intelligence reports showed the North Vietnamese were taking advantage of the halt for troop and supply movements, Johnson ordered resumption of bombing. Rolling Thunder picked up, with 132 attack sorties flown against the DRV on January 31, 1966. Four days later Johnson decided on the Honolulu conference, where he made the final decision on Program 2 and met Saigon leaders Ky and Thieu. That meeting took place on February 6 at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. Aside from the frenetic activity necessary to take over two prime Hawaiian hotels (the second for guests and the press) at the height of the winter season on two days’ notice, the timing shows Johnson’s desire to signal U.S. determination.

So what had been LBJ’s original intent in halting the aerial assault? Several views can be noted. With the perspective of decades Chester Cooper wrote, “The resumption of bombing and the transparent public relations nature of the so-called search for peace during the halt were troubling.”²⁸ LBJ himself recalled that he had wanted “to explore every possible avenue of settlement before we took additional military measures.”²⁹ The Army’s official MACV historian observed, “Fully expecting the diplomatic effort to fail, the president intended the pause primarily to prepare American opinion for the larger war toward which his course was set.”³⁰ It is a reasonable conclusion that the diplomatic effort was the ploy and the deployment plan the president’s real business.

Of course, the Saigon leaders attending the instant summit were primarily concerned about the big war. Nguyen Van Thieu left no record. Nguyen Cao Ky recalled making a presentation in which he concentrated on four points he thought the Americans would appreciate: beating the Liberation Front, instituting social reform, building Saigon’s economy, and moving toward democracy. Ky’s presentation might have been too frank for the president’s taste. That night LBJ pulled Ky away from a reception to give him a private scolding. “Everything that we do in public,” Johnson told Ky, “whatever we say in public, is just for the public. Let me propose that from now on, every time we want to do something, or we have to discuss something between America and Vietnam, we’ll do it at the individual level. Just you and me. Together we’ll make the important decisions, things that we don’t want the public to know.”³¹

Later LBJ had another quiet session with Ky and Thieu together, commenting favorably on Ky’s ideas. From this time forward, Johnson became increasingly focused on what he termed Vietnam’s “other war,” the social and political competition between Saigon and the southern resistance that lay at the heart of what the counterinsurgency theorists called “pacification.” Nguyen Cao Ky thus played a role in the president’s conversion to a pacification devotee.

Be that as it may, Johnson ended by asking the Saigon leaders to speed up improvements in the South Vietnamese army, the ARVN, which Americans considered ineffective. That remained for the future, however. Almost immediately, Ky and Thieu faced a new political crisis, one that flowed from the alliance of a key ARVN commander with Buddhist factions worried that the Honolulu conference meant a new intensification of the war.

General Nguyen Chanh Thi, commander of the ARVN’s I Corps, a zone that included South Vietnam’s five northernmost provinces along with Da Nang, Hue, and the Demilitarized Zone, led some of the finest units in the ARVN. Next to Saigon itself, his sector seemed the most vital. General Thi also sat with Prime Minister Ky on the Military Revolutionary Council and was perhaps Ky’s most serious rival (other than Thieu, whom Ky then believed he had under control). Ky watched suspiciously as Thi consorted with the Buddhists, especially bonze Thich Tri Quang’s group, which advocated a middle way between Saigon’s anticommunist war and the NLF’s insurgency. Like many ARVN officers, who to one degree or another saw the political Buddhists as a front for communists, Ky held a jaundiced view. Officers on the I Corps staff quietly informed Ky of Thi’s Buddhist cavorting.

Early in March Ky decided to relieve Thi of command. That overestimate of his political power and miscalculation of religious feeling created a fresh political crisis. Within twenty-four hours the United Buddhists held protests in Hue and Da Nang, demanding that Ky and Thieu resign. The mayor of Da Nang found himself effectively superseded by a “Military-Civilian Struggle Committee.” A general strike paralyzed the city. Students joined the Buddhists in the streets, where roadblocks appeared, with altars and Buddha statues. Ky sent one general to take over, but he lasted just two days. Students seized the Hue radio station, beaming denunciations. This became the Buddhist “Struggle Movement.” Demonstrations spread to Qui Nhon, Dalat, Pleiku, Nha Trang, then Saigon itself. There ARVN paratroopers, of whom General Thi was one, even marched in his support. Ky was forced to return Thi to Da Nang to impose order, after which the general refused to resign. Early in April 3,000 men of the ARVN 1st Division, marching behind their military band, paraded in Thi’s honor. Ky promoted General Ton That Dinh to I Corps in April, but Dinh could not even assume the command.

Prime Minister Ky’s next move would be to replace Thi with General Huynh Van Cao. That proved to be a mistake. Cao, the same officer who had led the ARVN’s 1963 debacle at Ap Bac, could not bring himself to act against the Buddhists, whose protests grew. Nguyen Chanh Thi expected to ride the crest of the Buddhist wave. The Americans became heavily embroiled when Ky told MACV of his intention to send Vietnamese Marines to Da Nang to enforce Thi’s ouster. Westmoreland refused U.S. aircraft to move the troops, so Ky went through Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge to obtain this help.³² As Ky’s Marines arrived, artillerymen loyal to Thi trained their cannon on the airfield. Then Thi’s troops blocked the road between Da Nang and Hue. Tough ARVN airborne men led by Colonel Ngo Quang Truong cleared the way and surrounded two key Buddhist pagodas, offering amnesty to anyone who left. The Marines got through.

A psychological warfare team with Ky’s contingent set up a phony radio station purporting to speak for the Buddhists and made broadcasts designed to spread the idea that the Struggle Movement was a front for the communists. U.S. Marine commander Lieutenant General Lew Walt happened to agree with Ky’s phony broadcasts, so he did nothing to obstruct the ARVN psywarriors. Meanwhile, American Marines interposed themselves between the South Vietnamese, ingeniously blocking a bridge to prevent them clashing, and threatened the dissidents with U.S. planes and artillery. Walt ordered these measures, highly unusual among allies in war.

Now Ky sent Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan, a trusted operative, to Hue to deal with Huynh Van Cao. Loan had been Ky’s chief of staff in the air force, and in 1965 Ky made him National Police chief. That was shortly after Loan and a couple of others had rid the ARVN of Young Turk coup maker (and Hanoi secret agent) Colonel Pham Ngoc Thao, who died by strangulation in a Saigon hospital bed. Arriving in Hue, Loan went to see General Cao, demanding that he move against the Buddhists. Cao’s Catholic family lived in Hue, and he feared retribution if the government cracked down. Lew Walt’s deputy senior adviser to I Corps, Army colonel Arch Hamblen, was walking toward I Corps headquarters when he spied Cao through a window, listening to Loan while someone held a pistol near the general’s head. Hamblen hurried to rescue Cao, who first fled to Walt’s command post and then requested asylum at the U.S. consulate in Da Nang. A couple of days later General Cao Van Vien, chief of Saigon’s Joint General Staff, supervised Da Nang’s takeover by Vietnamese Marine battalions.

Nguyen Cao Ky finally bested Nguyen Chanh Thi with concessions. Ky promised the promulgation of a constitution and the creation of a national assembly. Though Ky watered this down to a constitutional convention and pushed national assembly elections back to 1967, this became the catalyst for such democracy as South Vietnam achieved. An election law advisory panel reported in June, about the time the Buddhist crisis subsided, on rules for the constituent group. Ky openly admits he tried to insert a wedge between Buddhist factions to weaken them. Nguyen Chanh Thi went into exile, much as had Nguyen Khanh, on a meaningless diplomatic mission. The general who replaced Thi, Hoang Xuan Lam, was a Buddhist acceptable to both the Struggle Movement and the military. Lam led I Corps for six years, with disastrous results. The circumstances of his appointment had much to do with his longevity in this post. Ngo Quang Truong, promoted brigadier, received command of the ARVN 1st Division.

Meanwhile, a couple of weeks after the Honolulu summit, LBJ saw Henry Graff, the Columbia University historian. They talked of the “other war” in Vietnam and the Christmas pause and supposed diplomacy but exchanged not a word on either the Program 2 buildup or the Buddhists.³³ LBJ saw the Struggle Movement as deadly serious. He agreed with Ky and noted in his memoirs, “I always believed that if Tri Quang and some of his principal followers were not actively pro-Communist, at least their movement had been deeply penetrated by Hanoi’s agents.”³⁴ Yet weeks of turmoil took their toll. By early April Johnson felt frustrated. According to aide Jack Valenti, at a Sunday edition of the Tuesday Lunch held April 2 in the Family Dining Room of the White House, the president told colleagues they should make every effort to keep Ky but “be ready to make terrible choices.” He wanted them to prepare a fallback position, talking to the Buddhists while disposing of Tri Quang: “if necessary, get out of I Corps area and even Vietnam.”³⁵ Johnson foresaw making a “stand” in Thailand. Valenti gave the president a paper that analyzed this and other possibilities. At a meeting that night, April 4, LBJ came back to the subject: the “time has come when the alternative is to get out—or do what we need to do to keep the government shored up.”³⁶ Over succeeding weeks, staff put a certain amount of work into the withdrawal option, openly championed only by George Ball, but advocates of force retained the upper hand.³⁷

Both the timing and the content of Johnson’s comments are significant. Nine months after his fateful decision to engage in the ground war, Lyndon Johnson had been forced to admit that the moment might have arrived when it had become necessary to withdraw. This was, in fact, one of the only times during his presidency that Johnson seriously entertained any thought of leaving Vietnam, and it was developments among South Vietnamese, not opposition in the United States, that brought him to that pass.

The Buddhist troubles not only shook the president; they startled the American people. In March when the crisis began, just under 60 percent supported the war, and a quarter opposed it. By May, when Ky’s soldiers occupied Da Nang, the balance had shifted—not decisively, but in an important way. Support for the war had shrunk to less than a majority (49 percent), while opposition had grown to more than a third (36 percent). That third became a core opposition. Antiwar sentiment never declined to much less than that, and in due course it grew. Johnson’s personal poll numbers also fell. The Buddhist crisis stripped away a slice of the Saigon government’s legitimacy in American eyes, with eventual but fateful consequences. This represented the product of LBJ’s staunch support for an ally that progressively seemed less worthy of it. George Bush’s backing for an Iraqi government that resisted political accommodation with its people played a similar role in the hardening of American opinion against the Iraq war.

Of course, Johnson did not withdraw from Vietnam. Instead, he did what he could to “nail the coonskin to the wall,” continuing the MACV reinforcement program and making new decisions on force. The most important concerned Rolling Thunder, the aerial assault on North Vietnam. It was about to attain new heights of ferocity.

At the moment of the Christmas halt, Robert McNamara had told Lyndon Johnson that he could handle the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Although direct evidence still lacks, it is highly probable that McNamara did this by promising the Chiefs that once the halt had run its course, he would back demands for widened bombing. This is in fact what happened. Beginning in late 1965 the JCS had proposed—along with Admiral Sharp at CINCPAC and General Westmoreland at MACV—attacks aimed at North Vietnam’s fuel storage and transport system—“petroleum, oil, and lubricants” (POL), in military parlance. Already by October only 10 of the 240 targets on the JCS list outside the Hanoi-Haiphong or border exclusion zones remained to be attacked, yet Rolling Thunder seemed to have achieved little. The air campaign had fallen into a rut. During 1965 North Vietnam had imported roughly 170,000 tons of petroleum products, and the Chiefs were anxious to strike that target. It became a new bombing panacea.

The question of POL attacks was partly subsumed in that of resumed bombing after the Christmas halt and partly folded into a larger strategic debate that dominated the first half of 1966. The Joint Chiefs certainly pushed hard. McNamara discussed POL targets in his advice on the resumption of Rolling Thunder, sent to Johnson in late January. That memo centered on countering infiltration, however, mainly by blocking routes that led to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, to which POL attacks could contribute. But the defense secretary also foresaw an effort so extensive—4,000 sorties per month—that even a proportion of sorties shifted from “armed reconnaissance” interdiction to POL strikes represented a substantial capability. McNamara asked the JCS to assess the feasibility of POL attacks in a specific study. By April, in conjunction with the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Chiefs had that study in hand.

In the meantime, there were changes at the White House. McGeorge Bundy departed, and Walt Rostow replaced him as national security adviser. Rostow had participated in strategic bombing against Germany in World War II and was a fan of POL. He proved a natural ally for the Chiefs in the POL debate, nudging LBJ as hard as the military and much more effectively, since he had daily access to Johnson. A CIA intelligence estimate in March strengthened the hand of POL advocates by concluding that bombing tactics so far had been flawed. McNamara and Rusk were more reluctant, fearing that effective POL attacks could draw China or the Soviet Union into the Vietnam war.

Admiral Sharp demanded that when bombing resumed, it destroy every significant target in the North, starting with POL. CINCPAC was convinced that Rolling Thunder, carried out that way, could win the war by the end of 1966 and would certainly do so before mid-1967. Sharp thought heavier bombing, not pauses, would produce negotiations. He was incensed at the slow approvals for expanding the air war. Much of his memoir is taken up with denunciations of LBJ and McNamara for holding back the aerial assault.³⁸

But Rolling Thunder actually moved ahead quite smartly. There were 4,484 attack sorties against the DRV in March and more than 5,000 in April, a new high. There would be 79,000 sorties in all of 1966, dropping no less than 136,000 tons of bombs—over twice the weight of munitions expended the first year. Moreover, the degree of Washington’s micromanagement—the main focus of Sharp’s complaints—was less than advertised. During the early months, Johnson had already given up approving individual missions, shifting successively to weekly and then biweekly “programs” governing hundreds, and eventually thousands, of sorties. In 1966 LBJ moved to monthly approvals. The focus of the POL debate would be the program for “Rolling Thunder 50,” an extensive menu of operations.

Originally, a selection of POL attacks was included in Rolling Thunder 50. But this bombing program landed on Johnson’s desk just as the Buddhist crisis heated up. With concern at the White House over whether the United States should withdraw, LBJ did not see this as the moment for an escalatory action such as moving against POL targets, many of which were located near Haiphong or Hanoi, in areas designated as exclusion zones. As an additional safety measure, LBJ increased the size of those zones considerably. POL slipped to Rolling Thunder 51.

Johnson’s critics on the air war tend to portray the president much like Adolf Hitler in World War II, pushing pins around on maps of the Russian front to signify orders to individual combat units. The reality was never like that. Rolling Thunder 51 involved 10,000 sorties; Rolling Thunder 52, 13,500. The programs identified long lists of targets and specified sorties to be aimed at each. At that level there was no question of micromanagement. Occasionally targets were taken off the list. Mostly what LBJ did was set parameters. He approved or denied types of weapons or tactics, such as armed reconnaissance versus targeted strikes, or large bombs versus smaller ones or cluster munitions. Johnson set geographic goals too, with many Rolling Thunder programs aimed at different regions of North Vietnam. Exclusion zones were a type of geographic limit. The whole POL debate shows LBJ setting bombing strategy by deciding on a concentration against a given target type. Cases in which specific strikes came to Johnson’s attention were primarily those involving previous targets within exclusion zones that were to be reattacked or were being rescheduled after cancellation due to weather or other considerations.

President Johnson’s system enabled him to weigh political and diplomatic considerations in a military program. The function of the target lists and exclusion zones related precisely to this. By declaring a halt (or not), expanding or contracting exclusion zones, or authorizing attacks within them, LBJ hoped to signal Hanoi. It could hardly be otherwise, because the goal of Rolling Thunder from the beginning had been to influence the DRV, not simply to hurt it. The damage inflicted, raising the cost of infiltration to North Vietnam, also had this political aim, with military impact an important but collateral consideration. Effectiveness contributed to Westmoreland’s attrition strategy, but the aim was never to bomb the DRV back to the Stone Age. Johnson could not hope to obtain a diplomatic effect except by varying the violence of Rolling Thunder in some fashion.

Arguments over bombing effectiveness are thus ultimately tangential. The attempt to pin the tail on Johnson also ignores the real flaws in the military’s own arrangements. Admiral Sharp at CINCPAC functioned more as bureaucratic manager than field commander, apportioning quotas for attack missions to the Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps air squadrons. Yes, Sharp fought Washington over rules of engagement, target systems, and aircraft usage (for example, commitment of B-52s to Rolling Thunder), but there is little evidence of CINCPAC developing a fresh strategy for the air campaign. Reliance on specified strikes plus armed reconnaissance continued throughout. Demands to hit Hanoi and Haiphong were about opening up JCS-listed targets, not new strategy. The most important innovations in the air campaign—seeding clouds to cause rain to flood Vietnamese rivers, the inception of an electronic battlefield to help interdict the Ho Chi Minh Trail—came from scientists, not CINCPAC. And in Washington, specifically at the White House, Rostow would be Sharp’s closest ally and advocate. The admiral’s wholesale condemnation is misplaced.³⁹

At the technical level, there were a host of initiatives and improvisations, but these should not be mistaken for strategy. They included the introduction of hot new planes, the adaptation of older ones for night work or electronic countermeasures, efforts to increase bomb loads, tactics that combined slow and fast aircraft, several types of gunships, airborne controllers to spot targets, airborne battle managers to direct large-scale operations, tightly coordinated search and rescue efforts, and more. There were also innovations specifically aimed at the ground war, most prominently the spraying of defoliant—the notorious Agent Orange—along roads and around bases, which began as early as 1962. Improvisations of ways to hit targets were especially prevalent for a time in 1966, when the United States ran short of a dozen kinds of munitions, particularly 500-pound bombs, the most commonly used type. Pilots were furious at being sent out with incomplete bomb loads or none at all. In fact, the Pentagon and CINCPAC, not Lyndon Johnson, set load limits to conserve ordnance. Veteran aircrews stationed at Da Nang at the time report their squadrons were practically ready to mutiny over the underarmed sorties. Other munitions, rockets, explosive shells, anything at all usable, were pressed into service to make up the difference. The United States actually paid West Germany a premium to buy back 500-pound bombs sold as surplus a few years earlier.⁴⁰ Sortie rates were finally reduced by the high command.

In any case, the air strategy issue for 1966 would be the POL strikes. Prodded by Rostow and Taylor (now LBJ’s personal adviser), and with the JCS and Sharp providing support, LBJ edged toward approval. Rostow actually argued that POL strikes would assist Johnson’s search for negotiations. The debate climaxed late in the spring. The president told the press on June 18, shortly after key deliberations, that heavier bombing was coming. On June 22 the Chiefs sent Admiral Sharp orders to begin POL attacks. The strikes started a week later and reached a high level with Rolling Thunder 51. Reconnaissance photos assessing the damage showed that the bombing was a great success. By late July, when Sharp completed a final strangulation plan, estimated capacities at many DRV oil storage facilities had already fallen by half. CINCPAC and Washington argued, however. U.S. bombing of a Soviet vessel in Haiphong and a pair of intrusions into Chinese airspace raised LBJ’s fear of the war spilling over. But in the end, the strikes or the lack of them made no difference. By August Hanoi had shifted its oil from large tank facilities to fifty-five-gallon drums dispersed along roads throughout the country. There was no way to eliminate them. POL bombing had had no discernible effect whatsoever. One more supposedly unbeatable card had fallen to a trump. Admirals and officials knew these secret, inner details. The public saw only broad outlines, like a shadow play, and mostly what the administration wanted it to see. But even the public learned enough for concern. Though the measures were backed by opinion polls, they energized dissenters.

Warplanes, Vietniks, and Grunts

In the era before electronic media, blogs, and the Internet, most Americans did not have access to major daily newspapers, while the television networks had yet to feature Vietnam as a daily story. Newsweeklies like Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report were their fare. These lacked depth, but they were what was available. A survey of this source clearly shows the media on board with the war. One big story came on January 7, 1966, when Time named William C. Westmoreland its “Man of the Year” and devoted a little more than six pages to the war. That was the moment of the Christmas halt and LBJ’s big peace offensive, which Time covered separately in an item it called “The Great Peace Teach-in.” Opposition to the Vietnam war would be notably underreported. Time’s take on the politics of the day was to write of “Vietniks and isolationists” in contrast to “the great majority of Americans who generally support [Johnson’s] Vietnam policy.” Even there, though, hints of unease appeared, with the journalists noting that support came “not in many cases without a certain apprehension.”⁴¹

Reporting the Honolulu conference that February, Time caught that the event had been scheduled hastily, but the degree of compression was such that the same story covered LBJ’s renewal of the bombing, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s reaction (the president “has unquestionably made the right decision”), the tail end of the peace offensive—“jawing” at the United Nations—and Vietnam hearings held by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.⁴² There was rather more excitement about action in Vietnam, where MACV threw the 1st Cavalry and the U.S. Marines into a double-pronged attack into the An Lao valley (operations “White Wing” and “Double Eagle”), described as the first division-size offensive of the war, as if Ia Drang had not happened.

Through 1966 the newsweeklies pictured the war as proceeding apace, with U.S. troop numbers constantly growing and progress being made everywhere. That did not match the inner knowledge of the generals or Johnson officials, who were also much more attuned to the growth of opposition to the war. In the spring of 1967 President Johnson summoned General Westmoreland home for consultations, in the course of which the general addressed a joint session of Congress in an attempt to build political support. Time called him “the paradigm of the military professional,” nodded with approval at Westy’s peroration that “we will prevail . . . over the Communist aggressor,” and found the war’s critics “less vociferous in recent months.”⁴³ At least by then the newsweeklies were reporting protests and made specific mention of Westmoreland’s repeated complaints that Hanoi hoped political opposition in the United States would take the wind out of Washington’s sails in Vietnam.

Typical stories of this period included one that Hanoi was escalating the war with new types of weapons, a passel of coverage of the Demilitarized Zone and the battle that took place around a strongpoint called Con Thien, the South Vietnamese elections, Moshe Dayan’s visit to South Vietnam (he believed that Hanoi could not continue much longer in a war against U.S. forces),⁴⁴ pacification, the air war, and, later in the year, the battles of Dak To and Loc Ninh. Political activity favorable to the Johnson administration often received more prominent treatment than did the opposition. For example, in May 1967 (when public opinion in favor of the war was actually falling), J. William Fulbright and fifteen other senators sent Hanoi “A Plea for Realism” and Time opined that “however unhappy or confused about the war, [Americans] agree in greater numbers than ever that it must continue to be fought.”⁴⁵ Six months later the same Luce publication reported the creation of the Citizens Committee for Peace with Freedom in Vietnam—a pro-war lobby directly orchestrated by the Johnson White House that consisted of a handful of establishment figures—as a grassroots nonpartisan group.

When Westmoreland came home in the spring of 1967, his real purpose pertained to LBJ’s deliberations on a new reinforcement program. The substance of that request is covered in the next chapter, but the press reported the story when the administration gave it out, not before. In June, about three months after the fact and with the president poised to announce his decision, U.S. News and World Report correctly noted the size of the MACV request at between 200,000 and 250,000 troops.⁴⁶ Good reporting could furnish a glimmer of another view, such as when Newsweek quoted a “McNamara associate” a couple of weeks later saying, “There is a serious question whether we need more troops in Vietnam, even though the military can always justify their requirements. We should be getting more effectiveness out of the South Vietnamese Army rather than deploying more of our own forces.”⁴⁷ The big national newspapers may have done better on the inner workings of power, but their editorial pages were supportive, and in the newsweeklies, the war was progressing faster and going better than in fact it was.

At the 1997 conference in Hanoi, North Vietnamese diplomats and officers were asked about the DRV’s intelligence on Washington decision making. They answered that they had had no agents beyond the Saigon government and had depended on subscriptions to Time and Newsweek and other publications. The North Vietnamese also obtained the New York Times through their embassy in Sweden and pouched the issues to Hanoi, a process that apparently took two weeks. Imagine that: Hanoi had been no better informed on Lyndon Johnson’s private thinking than were most people in small-town America! Meanwhile, in late 1967 North Vietnamese defense minister General Vo Nguyen Giap published a book on the future of the war called Big Victory, Great Task, which presented some figures on potential U.S. reinforcements to South Vietnam as part of its strategic analysis. Giap used the numbers 200,000 to 250,000. They could have come right out of U.S. News and World Report.

The broadest study of U.S. press coverage throughout the Vietnam war, a book by Clarence C. Wyatt, concludes that Washington got most of what it wanted from the press during this period through a policy of inundating journalists with a flood of facts—thus Saigon’s infamous “Five O’clock Follies” briefings—putting stories in whatever context the purveyors wanted. Reporters had tons of facts but no clarity. Deadline pressures in the field and some judicious leaning on editors at home did the rest. Most reporters were steeped in the same Cold War mythos as other Americans and willingly played the part of “paper soldiers” in support of the war effort.⁴⁸ The Army’s official history of its relations with the media reaches similar conclusions.⁴⁹ The discrepancies between what journalists were told and what they saw in the field emerged more slowly, and the calamities were yet to come.

Vietnam would be only a small part of Lyndon Johnson’s State of the Union message of January 12, 1966, but even so, the burden of the conflict was becoming visible. LBJ conceded that due to the war in Vietnam he could not do all he wanted in the War on Poverty. With General Westmoreland demanding troops, the administration out of cash to pay for the war without congressional appropriations, and the Christmas pause there for all to see, LBJ had to make a supplemental request for more than $12 billion. Not long afterward he put another $10 billion into the budget for the coming fiscal year, a deliberate underestimate that Johnson knew would force him into another supplemental request. At budget hearings McNamara had to admit that Saigon had less control of the villages than a year earlier, and the Air Force chief of staff would be obliged to say that the United States was not winning the war. To smooth the way past such discrepant information, Johnson invited senior congressional leaders to the White House for a stroking and grooming session. The president got more than he bargained for. His friend Richard Russell, aligned with those pushing for the POL strikes, had also concluded that carrying out both the war and LBJ’s Great Society programs had become impossible. He wanted a choice that Johnson resisted making. Senators Mansfield and Fulbright pressed LBJ not to resume the bombing. After the meeting, the two senators wrote him a letter, signed by more than a dozen colleagues, supporting that position. According to Minnesota’s Eugene McCarthy, almost one-third of the full Senate agreed.⁵⁰

Johnson went ahead with the bombing. Fulbright, whether incensed at the president or concerned at LBJ’s distancing himself from old congressional colleagues and worried about developments in Vietnam, used his Senate Foreign Relations Committee to hold televised hearings on the war beginning late in January and extending over six days. Here Fulbright made an open break with a president of his own political party and completed his move from conservative Democrat to dissenter. The administration resisted sending witnesses, but Fulbright was able to require Dean Rusk’s attendance, since a State Department budget request was before his committee. Rusk tried to invoke secrecy, insisting on executive session to discuss many questions, but Fulbright kept him on the record. Rusk portrayed Hanoi as an aggressor, rejecting contentions that Vietnam’s was a civil war, and he generally hewed to strident positions. Having been drawn into the fray, the administration now sent General Maxwell Taylor to do battle; he argued that the loss of South Vietnam would have “grave consequences,” setting in motion a “crumbling process . . . for the forces of freedom,” an evocation of the Domino Theory. Rusk repeated his performance during a final appearance on February 18, incidentally reiterating that the U.S. “commitment” to Vietnam had been made in 1954 or 1955 by Eisenhower, a veiled reference to the notorious Eisenhower letter, here again used as justification for war.

Another aspect of the Fulbright hearings is that they gave significant voice to opponents of engagement, including another noted general, James M. Gavin, who had once worked for Taylor. Also testifying in opposition was foreign policy guru and former diplomat George F. Kennan.⁵¹ These commentators publicly broke ranks with the uniformed services and foreign policy elite, destroying the pretension that professional opinion stood behind Vietnam strategy.

The most important aspect of the hearings is how they legitimized opposition and helped lay the foundation for dissenters to undermine the credibility of military intervention as foreign policy tool. Some quite substantial Americans, not merely “Vietniks,” opposed the war. Life magazine called the hearings a “Great Debate,” but they did not really rise to that level because the war was not really at stake—Fulbright lacked the power to actually reverse the U.S. course in Vietnam, no matter what happened at his hearings. Historians are divided on this episode. Antiwar movement expert Melvin Small finds,“It is difficult to evaluate the significance of the hearings”; historian Charles DeBenedetti argues,“They did open the ambiguities, contradictions, and uncertainties of administration policy to deliberative review”; and conservative observer Adam Garfinkle notes, “The hearings not only altered the image of opposition to the war, they also got the administration’s attention.”⁵²

Majority opinion still supported LBJ, including the conservatives who would have hit the president had he attempted disengagement. This included much of the press, like it or not. Typical was J. Russell Wiggins, editor (until 1968) of the Washington Post—sometimes held out as a bastion of antiwar sentiment—who wrote at the time of Pleiku that the incident (which he, among others, believed had been ordered by Hanoi) demonstrated “with dreadful clarity that South Vietnam is not an isolated battlefield but part of a long war in which the communist world seems determined to continue until every last vestige of Western power and influence has been driven from Asia.”⁵³

Lyndon Johnson was right to fear a right-wing revolt against withdrawal, but those who argue the antiwar movement prolonged the conflict misconstrue this. First, absent pressure from those denigrated as Vietniks, there would have been no political pressure to counteract escalation demands. The U.S. buildup proceeded about as quickly as it could have, so it is inaccurate to claim that intervention could have been more “decisive.”⁵⁴ Had LBJ been able to adopt some of the Right’s idealized solutions—such as massive bombing of Hanoi (as in the 1972 Christmas Bombing), at a time when North Vietnam had warm relations with both Moscow and Beijing—the result would have been the much wider war that Wiggins, for one, claimed to see and that Johnson dreaded. As described previously, the massive bombing option had already been explicitly posed, and LBJ had rejected it.

Second and equally important, Johnson may have feared the Right, but he tried to draw rightists in, to invoke their cooperation. Not so with the Left. As early as October 1965, when the International Days of Protest occurred, notes of George Ball’s telephone conversations reveal LBJ’s personal interest in stymieing opponents. He had State needle the Justice Department about applying the Logan Act—a 1799 law that forbids private Americans from conducting the nation’s foreign policy—against groups that encouraged foreigners to protest the war at U.S. embassies. Justice thought the idea far-fetched. Not long afterward LBJ told media figures of his concern that U.S. protests might be misinterpreted overseas. On October 26, 1965, within a week of that conversation, the CIA produced an intelligence report titled “Reactions Abroad to Vietnam Protest Demonstrations in the U.S.,” a coincidence that strongly suggests a response to a White House request. The CIA found that turnouts at foreign demonstrations had been light.⁵⁵

Early in 1966, as protesters planned a new “Vietnam Day,” Don Ropa of the NSC staff monitored it at the White House. Interestingly, like his predecessor Cooper, Ropa was on detail from the CIA. The White House also followed the organizational evolution of the Movement, including developments such as religious groups’ creation of the Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam (CALCAV). Avid eyes watched poll data. In March a Stanford poll of 1,474 respondents found 88 percent support for negotiations and 70 percent in favor of a UN cease-fire. Even among those ready to send as many as 500,000 troops to Vietnam there was 85 percent support for negotiations and 53 percent for free elections.

In May, as the counterculture magazine Ramparts prepared to publish revelatory stories on Vietnam, including an eye-opener on the work of Michigan State University advisers for Diem and as cover for CIA, Johnson political aide Douglass Cater looked into the magazine and reported to the president. Later the CIA, upon learning of further Ramparts stories directed at it, would take on the magazine in an attempt to defund or discredit it.

This became the very time when America’s internal security services, including local police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and even military intelligence, initiated efforts to subvert the peace movement in the guise of gathering information about it. Vietnam Day had been conceived by students at the University of California–Berkeley, the place where the free speech movement had begun. Secret FBI documents opened in 2002 after seventeen years of litigation reveal that the Bureau had kept a “security index” of persons at Berkeley since 1960. In January 1965 FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and CIA chief John McCone concerted a plan to leak derogatory material to conservative trustees on the University of California Board that might eliminate perceived liberals on the faculty and would, at a minimum, harass them. This scheme went so far as to tar university chancellor Clark Kerr as a “pro-communist.” The first large student protests at Berkeley happened that September. The following year, when Ronald Reagan ran for governor of California, FBI data were sent to him.⁵⁶ The emissary to Reagan would be Charles Brennan, FBI domestic intelligence chief.

The University of California–Irvine became another target. There the intruders were U.S. naval intelligence, and again the evidence emerged in declassified documents years later. Irvine became suspect after May 21, 1966, when the SDS chapter there held an antiwar protest outside El Toro, a nearby Marine air station. The Sixth Counterintelligence Team at El Toro filmed and photographed the protest, recorded license plate numbers, taped speeches (“it is very easy to be antagonistic toward people who disagree with you. Talk with them; try and reason things out”—that was subversive?), copied leaflets and handouts, and identified specific individuals, including protest organizer Patty Parmalee. Data on this protest appeared in Parmalee’s FBI file when she later got it declassified. FBI special agents appeared on the Irvine campus asking questions about Parmalee, for a more immediate chilling effect.⁵⁷

Investigations carried out by Congress in the 1970s established that the FBI had set up a formal project to counter antiwar radicals only in 1968, but in fact, Hoover had issued a directive in April 1965 ordering intensified coverage of the SDS and one in February 1966 to investigate any university activities linked to supposed “subversive” groups, starting with SDS. A couple of months later the Bureau circulated studies of college unrest in Detroit and Philadelphia, and in May 1966 Hoover directed his field offices to expand their coverage.

The Central Intelligence Agency was not far behind. Langley created Project “Resistance” to keep an eye on the antiwar movement. On March 15, 1966, it circulated a document from the Vietnam Day Committee that had foreseen massive bombing after the Christmas truce and appealed to peace groups everywhere to demand the Johnson administration demonstrate its sincerity with an indefinite cessation of bombing. That summer the CIA gave the White House advance warning of a demonstration there by the Washington Committee to End the War in Vietnam and a heads-up about a planned protest by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on the occasion of Luci Johnson’s wedding.

None of these were big protests. All were of the nickel-and-dime variety, with a couple of hundred demonstrators tops. The big actions of 1966 came that May in New York, when the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee brought together 20,000, and in August when thousands marched on the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The small demonstration outside the White House on the day Luci Johnson married Patrick J. Nugent amounted to a tiny fragment of the overall canvas, but one embarrassing to the president. One other small demonstration should be mentioned. In November when Secretary McNamara visited Harvard to give a speech, he was confronted by a small contingent of protesters organized by the SDS. In the wake of that experience, McNamara decided to order the review of U.S. involvement in Vietnam that became known as the Pentagon Papers.

No activity seemed too small to escape the attention of government agents. Merely reciting the size of the cache of declassified FBI documents on various groups and individuals (not necessarily the totality of holdings on these entities) gives an impression of the scope of surveillance. As of January 2004 the FBI had released 2,887 pages of documents on the SNCC, 282 on SNCC activist Stokely Carmichael, 11,674 on Malcolm X, 16,659 on Martin Luther King Jr., 967 on Roy Wilkins, 1,296 on Mario Savio of the free speech movement, 1,699 on the CALCAV, and 6,454 on the National Council of Churches. These were just a few of the relevant groups and people, many of them also participants in the civil rights movement—the FBI’s primary focus. This was the period of attempts to discredit Martin Luther King. Antiwar figures such as Abbie Hoffman had hardly come into focus, but the FBI would accumulate at least 13,262 pages of material on him too.

The Bureau’s tactics also deserve mention. Hoover’s monitoring was not limited to standard investigative methods—although the mere appearance of an FBI special agent asking questions about a person could strike fear into those people, their friends, associates, employers, and so on. The Bureau recruited informants inside organizations, running them in much the same fashion as the CIA controlled spies; it also wiretapped telephones, broke into homes and offices (the term of art being “surreptitious entry”; the slang, “black bag job”), and actively sowed dissension by fabricating letters or messages sent to targets or their associates aimed at discrediting them. Many of these methods were inappropriate, but the black bag jobs were outright illegal. Toward the end of 1966 Hoover prohibited them, but not before some 600 operations had been conducted, including 90 break-ins at offices of the Socialist Workers Party (the special agent in charge of the FBI’s New York office actually recommended commendations for half a dozen agents responsible for 15 of these burglaries during 1964–1965). Martin Luther King’s experience has been extensively recounted, but there was no fish too small to fry. It would have been one thing to employ these tactics against a declared enemy of the United States; it was another thing altogether to use them against Americans exercising constitutionally protected rights.

Despite the surveillance, President Johnson’s attempts to massage the American public, and his efforts to downplay the Vietnam conflict, LBJ’s poll numbers declined, with negative opinions of him reaching the mid-forties before the end of the year. As midterm elections neared, LBJ found Democratic Party candidates loath to appear with him. The party suffered losses. One of the few bright spots in the picture would be that Ramparts editor Robert Scheer was defeated in his run for the House of Representatives. The president did not know he had done well compared to where he would soon be.

As 1966 neared its end came an illustration of just how sensitive was the link between peace feelers and the Rolling Thunder air bombardment. A secret approach to Hanoi code-named “Marigold” had begun with contacts between Italian and Polish diplomats and the North Vietnamese; this led to a plan for a Johnson envoy to meet Hanoi representatives in Warsaw under the auspices of the Poles. Everything was in place in early December when U.S. bombers struck near the center of Hanoi. Johnson had approved the air strikes under the Rolling Thunder program, and they had been scheduled weeks earlier but canceled due to bad weather. Because CINCPAC could reschedule strikes without reference to Washington, Admiral Sharp put the mission back up. American warplanes attacked just as the diplomats were about to meet. Some crossed communications involving the Poles prevented salvaging this situation, and another Rolling Thunder restrike near Hanoi led the DRV to recall its envoy. Marigold illustrates exactly why LBJ needed to keep a close eye on the air campaign.⁵⁸

At the 1997 conference in Hanoi, the American delegation spoke to the diplomat who had actually been sent to Warsaw for Marigold. Nguyen Dinh Phuong revealed that he had actually gone bearing detailed instructions for initiating peace talks, including modalities and venues and a précis of a negotiating position. He had waited for several days after the initial missed meeting for the Poles to rearrange it, only to be recalled following the second U.S. bombing. This episode represented a true missed opportunity.

These months also saw the coalescence of another piece of the Vietnam problem—the draft and military resistance. As the armed forces sought to fill their ranks, the last quarter of 1965 brought the call-up of 170,000 Americans; another 180,000 young men, facing imminent induction, enlisted to ensure they could pick their assignments. In the spring of 1966 the Selective Service summoned 768,000 men for medical examinations prior to draft reclassification. Demands for manpower drove the Pentagon to relax standards. McNamara is still pilloried for his “Project 100,000,” an initiative that accepted recruits who had failed elementary achievement tests. Boxer Muhammad Ali is one example. In 1964 Ali had scored below the charts on the armed forces qualification tests administered as part of the draft physical and had been exempted. In 1966 he would be retested, score just as badly, but be ruled eligible. Ali claimed conscientious objector status as a Muslim cleric. His claim denied, Ali was prosecuted when he failed to report for duty. His case reached the Supreme Court, which ruled that the government had failed to take into account the depth of Ali’s religious beliefs.

Draft resistance began. Johnson had signed a bill in the summer of 1965 making the burning of one’s draft card a criminal offense. New Yorker David J. Miller promptly torched his in front of the Whitehall induction center in Lower Manhattan. Miller, a student at a Jesuit college, believed the war was wrong both morally and politically, that “it clearly couldn’t be right to defend the interests of imperialists within Indochina,” and he saw his action as symbolic free speech. The FBI arrested him days later. His case went to the Supreme Court too, which found against Miller in 1968. He served two years in prison.⁵⁹ By then there were lots of draft resisters, card burners, and court cases, and Selective Service had become a primal headache for both the White House and the Pentagon.

As the military filled with draftees, many very unhappy at where they were, others became scandalized at what they saw. Many of these men were from minorities and the lower classes because the system effectively selected out youths who had the resources or connections to secure deferments—one historian reframed Vietnam as the “working class war.”⁶⁰ Military morale began to slide. Suddenly the number of soldiers who went absent without leave (AWOL) or deserted shot up. In 1966 the overall AWOL figure rose to 57.2 per thousand servicemen, and desertions to 14.9 per thousand. The Marine Corps rate stood at 16.1 desertions per thousand. For the Army, the AWOL figure mushroomed to 78 per thousand in 1967; desertions were 21.4 per thousand in the Army and 26.8 in the Marines. Then AWOLs soared even higher in 1968. Drug use increased rapidly too. Military men were not happy, and like Americans at large, they confronted big questions about their attitudes on Vietnam. In a stunning development on June 3, 1966, in Texas, Privates James Johnson, Dennis Mora, and David Samas refused to deploy to Vietnam. They became known as the “Fort Hood Three.” Four months later at Fort Jackson, Army doctor Howard Levy stopped training Green Beret medical specialists, refusing to prepare them to perpetrate atrocities. “GI Resistance” to the Vietnam war was born.

The pace of both the war and the protests quickened in 1967. At the end of January 2,000 people demonstrated in the cold in front of the White House as CALCAV leaders met with staff to hand over a petition. General Westmoreland carried out a huge, corps-sized offensive north of Saigon. In February Women Strike for Peace mobilized 2,500 protesters who marched up to the Pentagon and pounded on its doors with their shoes. The University of Wisconsin became the locale for strong protests against Dow Chemical, manufacturer of napalm and defoliant chemicals used in the war. Some were arrested. The next day protesters surrounded the offices of the president of the university, trapping him inside.

White House operatives took a hand by engineering the formation of a pro-war advocacy group. In March a letter from a prominent Washington lobbyist to national security adviser Walt Rostow proposed this as part of a public relations strategy. Rostow took the idea to LBJ, who approved it on March 17.⁶¹ Subsequent correspondence shows that the lobbyist took soundings on such a committee at Rostow’s behest and came back for instructions based on a detailed concept of what such a group might look like, how it could be funded (start-up costs were estimated at $100,000 minimum, with more for newspaper ads, radio and television time, and so forth), and who might be approached to join it.⁶²

Rostow’s records show that he discussed the possibility with Nicholas deB. Katzenbach at the Justice Department and John T. McNaughton at the Pentagon and had further conversations with the lobbyist and other associates, including former CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt. On March 27 Rostow lunched with Katzenbach and McNaughton to go over specifics, and on the twenty-ninth he explicitly brought President Johnson into the project, saying, “we concluded that it might be helpful if a group of this kind could publicly throw its weight behind the key elements in your policy.” The covert nature of the undertaking Rostow also made explicit: “the enterprise should be organized at some distance from the Government.”⁶³ A similar idea came to LBJ through political aide Harry McPherson, who, like Rostow, told the president, “there should be no overt White House involvement in this.”⁶⁴ Aides McPherson and John P. Roche monitored this work. The group actually surfaced later that year, alleging that it represented mass opinion and that the antiwar movement was just an isolated fringe. Time magazine, at least, reported this as straight news.

Meanwhile, a pair of appearances by Martin Luther King Jr.—one in Beverly Hills, the other at Riverside Church in New York City—brought the civil rights leader out in foursquare opposition to the war. Rostow’s office worked hard the day after King’s April 4 Riverside Church speech to refute the reverend’s main points. By contrast, the Movement celebrated King’s adherence. Almost immediately he was made a cochairman of CALCAV. Then came April 15, when parallel marches took place in both San Francisco and New York, sponsored by the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. Huge crowds swarmed in both cities—between 100,000 and 400,000, by various estimates. King appeared again, as did many other civil rights figures and a bevy of antiwar leaders. But in New York’s Central Park, some of the most significant attendees were down in the crowd, not up on the speakers’ stand. About a dozen Vietnam veterans who had individually decided to come out against the war found one another, most of them under the banner of “Veterans for Peace.” A couple of months later they created a new organization and called it the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. It was past time to hear from real Vietnam veterans, for the war was headed to new peaks of ferocity.