CHAPTER 24

“THE COUNTRYSIDE OF THE WORLD”

FOR MANY PEOPLE, LBJBRINGS TO MIND TWO HISTORI -cal phenomena: the Great Society and Vietnam. For almost everyone, Vietnam was the issue that brought him down and has forever tarnished his reputation—whether in liberal eyes, for escalating the war, or conservative ones, for badly mismanaging it. Yet both sides need to re-think his fundamental commitment to the war. It touched on his deepest beliefs and those of his fellow Americans.

Americans, Richard Hofstadter has written, are prone “to fits of crusading” and “do not abide very quietly the evils of life.” They are, Seymour Martin Lipset observed, “particularly inclined to support movements for the elimination of evil.”¹Religion was a most significant dimension of anticommunism during the cold war. Marxism-Leninism was repugnant in no small part because it was “godless.” Those in the 1950s, like Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had sought to create an anticommunist monolith to compete with the Sino-Soviet bloc had made the Judeo-Christian ethic its centerpiece. Christian realists like Reinhold Niebuhr and Lyndon Johnson saw racism, imperialism, and totalitarianism as threats not only to America’s strategic and economic well-being, but to its spiritual and moral integrity as well. Among the most passionate supporters of the war in Vietnam were American Catholics, who were well aware that the church constituted the backbone of resistance to the VC and NVA in South Vietnam even after the demise of Diem and Nhu.²LBJ both participated in these perceptions and inclinations and manipulated them to achieve his policy objectives. “From our Jewish and Christian heritage, we draw the image of the God of all mankind, who will judge his children not by their prayers and by their pretensions, but by their mercy to the poor and their understanding of the weak,” he proclaimed to the Society of Newspaper Editors. “I tremble for our people if at the time of our greatest prosperity we turn our back on the moral obligations of our deepest faith.”³Like freedom, democracy, and free enterprise, compassion was not divisible. “We made a basic national choice,” Johnson told a group of clergymen visiting the White House. “We chose compassion. We put our faith in man—in the dignity and decency of individual man.”⁴

 

BY THE MID-1960S, Khrushchev’s calls for wars of national liberation had sent shock waves through chanceries and foreign offices throughout the non-communist world. Then, in 1965, Lin Piao, Mao Zedong’s chief prophet, published a famous tract widely reproduced in the West. “On People’s War” proclaimed that China’s foreign policy was to encourage guerrilla wars in the “countryside of the world”—Asia, Africa, and Latin America—in order to encircle and destroy the imperialists in the “cities of the world,” North America and Western Europe. No less a publication thanThe Economist declared Lin’s article to be the beginning of the “Third World War” and insisted that Vietnam was the pass that must be held at all costs.⁵“It’s now hard to realize how overwhelmingly and universally it was accepted that there was a great Chinese-sponsored tidal wave moving down through Indochina, across Thailand, into Burma, and right up to India,” Harry McPherson noted some twenty years later. Two weeks before Johnson became president, theNew York Times ran a feature story warning of just such an eventuality.⁶Throughout Johnson’s presidency, public opinion polls would indicate support for a war to preserve a noncommunist entity in South Vietnam, if not for how that war was being conducted. Indeed, the citizens of the United States saw no moral alternative. At home, led by a southerner turned civil rights crusader, white middle-class Americans were undergoing a catharsis in which they were being forced to reconcile their Judeo-Christian principles with the evils of racial discrimination. Given the logic of the Second Reconstruction—that no believing person could deny equal opportunity and political freedom to another human being—how could the new America and its Texas prophet, trading in the angst of JFK, a fallen martyr, fail to come to the rescue of the nonwhite people of Vietnam in their struggle to resist communist totalitarianism?⁷

A majority of the American people did not want to repeat the Korean experience, did not want to get bogged down in a land war in Asia, and believed that Asians themselves ought to take primary responsibility for battling communism, but in the end they were not willing to stand idly by and see South Vietnam overrun by the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong, putative extensions of Maoist China.⁸Gallup polls taken in March 1965 indicated that 66 percent of those questioned believed that the United States should continue to do whatever was necessary to defend South Vietnam from the forces of international communism; 19 percent favored pulling out; and 15 percent offered no opinion. That consensus remained intact through the end of 1967.⁹

“The Countryside of the World”

THERE ARE THOSE WHO ARGUEthat shortly before his assassination, JFK had set in motion plans for an American withdrawal from Vietnam, thus making Johnson uniquely responsible for the war.¹⁰The best evidence for this is a meeting on October 2, 1963, when Kennedy gathered his top advisers to discuss Vietnam. After indicating that the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) could complete the military campaign by the end of 1965, McNamara said, “If it extends beyond that period, we believe we can train the Vietnamese to take over the essential functions and withdraw the bulk of our forces. We need a way to get out of Vietnam. This is a way of doing it.” General Maxwell Taylor, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, agreed and insisted that this would “reduce this insurgency to little more than sporadic itching” by 1965. If we fail to meet this date, McNamara noted, “we nonetheless can withdraw the bulk of our U.S. forces according to the schedule we’ve laid out, worked out, because we can train the Vietnamese to do the job.” Taylor interjected, “It ought to be very clear what we mean by victory is success. That doesn’t mean that every Viet Cong comes in with a white flag, but what we do [is] suppress this insurgency to the point that the national security forces of Vietnam can contain [it].” McGeorge Bundy asked for clarification: “That doesn’t quite mean that every American officer comes out of there, either.” Taylor: “No, no.” Bundy: “You’re really talking about two different things. What you’re saying is that the U.S. advice and stiffening function you may want to continue, but that the large use of US troops who can be replaced by properly trained Vietnamese can end.” President Kennedy specified that the policy statement should say, “While there may continue to be a requirement for special training forces, we believe that the major United States part of the task can be completed by the end of ’65.”¹¹But this was a plan for the Vietnamization of the war, not a scheme that would permit the fall of South Vietnam to the forces of communism, whether the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), the National Liberation Front (NLF), or a combination of the two.

Johnson’s decision to commit to Vietnam stemmed from his Christian idealism; the way he fought the war was a function of his strategic perceptions. Like his predecessor, LBJ was determined to do everything in his power to see that the war in Southeast Asia was fought and won by those with the most at stake; noncommunist Vietnamese. But in the end, he decided that holding the line at the seventeenth parallel was worth both American treasure and American blood. He understood the dangers of such a course, that America, with little imperial history, would have no patience for fighting a protracted war whose outcome would remain inconclusive, that any government waging such a war would be caught between nationalists who would want to wage war to the fullest extent of existing technology and neutralists who believed that communism was preferable to war, at least for a powerless, nonwhite people halfway round the world. But Johnson and his advisers believed that given the imperatives of the cold war, particularly the strength of anticommunism in the United States, the alternative to limited war in Southeast Asia might well be a nuclear holocaust in which much of the settled world would be destroyed.

During the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration, wrapped in the assumptions of the New Look, neglected conventional forces while threatening either overtly or covertly to use nuclear weapons in confrontations with Sino-Soviet power. The president and his advisers made it clear repeatedly that though they dreaded a nuclear exchange, they would not shy away from it if it meant preventing the Free World from being overrun by communism. When Kennedy and McNamara came to power they were appalled by the idea that policymakers would even consider limited nuclear war as an option. Once the first bomb exploded, there would be no limits. JFK and his advisers set about taking the nuclear option off the table, by simultaneously rejecting it rhetorically as a possible course of action, embarking on a nuclear arms buildup that would assure America’s enemies of total annihilation in case they were considering a first strike, and building up America’s conventional forces to fight limited wars.¹²

LBJ was fully in accord with this strategic vision. If there was going to be a war on his watch, it would be a limited war. LBJ’s old friend Bob Montgomery, the UT economist, recalled his saying that “if they [high-ranking military officers] were so hellbent on having a war he’d let them have the war, but they would have to fight it on the ground so they would know what war was. In other words, they couldn’t just fly over China and drop the bomb. Then of course, he was scared Russia would drop the bomb too.”¹³To put it simply, the only alternative, short of submission, to unlimited war was limited war. But the threat of nuclear confrontation lurked even in this option.

If, to preserve a noncommunist South Vietnam, the United States and its allies invaded the North, China would intervene just as it had done in Korea. In addition to maintaining heavy troop concentrations along their border with North Vietnam, China had 170,000 uniformed personnel in North Vietnam helping with the war effort; they and their reinforcements would surely overwhelm any American expeditionary force. In such a scenario, there would be calls from virtually all quarters in the United States except pacifists and the extreme political left for the use of tactical nuclear weapons.¹⁴China would respond, touching off a chain reaction in which the United States would bomb Chinese nuclear facilities, the Soviet Union would be drawn by treaty into the war, and a full nuclear exchange between it and the United States would ensue. “I think it is important to note,” Robert McNamara told congressional leaders in March 1965, “that Communist China signed the Sino-Soviet treaty in 1949, [by] the terms of which the Soviets agreed to come to the assistance of China in the event it was attacked. If we were to attack Communist China, the heartland itself, my personal view is that we can expect Soviet entry into the conflict.”¹⁵Recently declassified documents in the former Soviet Union reveal that Beijing eventually made such a scenario explicit. In the summer of 1965, Premier Zhou Enlai communicated directly with LBJ through several neutral intermediaries. His message was clear: China would not provoke a war with the United States, but it would honor its international commitments to North Vietnam. If America bombed China, China would fight back on the ground; bombing would mean war, and it would have no bounds.¹⁶

The specter of a nuclear chain reaction that could get out of hand hung over the Vietnam decision-making process throughout the 1960s. Compared to a nuclear Armageddon, the possibility of another protracted brushfire war paled. Given the procrustean bed upon which they were stretched, Lyndon Johnson and his advisers would seem to have had little choice but to fight a limited war in Southeast Asia. Why the administration could not or would not make this iron logic apparent to the American people is another issue. This was the scenario, then, that emerged from the contingency planning of 1964: help the ARVN defeat the Vietcong on the ground in the South and hammer the North into halting infiltration across the 17th parallel and aid to the NLF. As students of military history are well aware, contingency plans have a way of becoming reality.

 

ONNOVEMBER24, 1963, two days after the assassination, LBJ conferred with McNamara, Rusk, Ball, Bundy, McCone, and Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge on the crisis in Vietnam. Lodge, who had supported the coup earlier that year against Diem and Nhu, painted a rosy picture. Political repression was ending and the people were rallying to the new man, General Nguyen Khanh. He “left the President with the impression that we are on the road to victory,” minutes of the meeting recorded. McCone and the CIA disagreed, however, noting that far more of South Vietnam was under communist control than had previously been thought and that Khanh was totally unqualified to shape a political consensus out of the conflicted and conflicting parties that made up South Vietnamese society. There was no choice but to stay the course for the time being, McNamara observed. Johnson agreed.

LBJ was still angry over the decision to assassinate Diem. He placed much of the blame on Lodge, whom he regarded as a lazy, upper-class dilettente, whose paternalistic views had led the United States into the present state of affairs.¹⁷Nhu had been actively negotiating with the North Vietnamese, looking toward the creation of a unified Vietnam with Ho as president and Nhu as vice president, but he had been impossible to deal with. Diem had his faults, too, but at least he was not a military dictator and had a history as a noncommunist nationalist. Johnson understood that U.S. participation in the demise of both men had had the effect of deepening America’s commitment to the conflict. Both the public and the foreign policy establishment were bound to feel more responsible for what had happened and therefore what was happening in Vietnam. At the November 24 meeting, LBJ also told his advisers that he had long been dissatisfied with the way the Vietnam situation was being handled; he wanted no more divisions, no more bickering in either Saigon or Washington.¹⁸

Two days later, LBJ initialed a National Security Action Memorandum that declared it to be the “central object of the United States in South Vietnam to assist the people and Government of that country to win their contest against the externally directed and supported Communist conspiracy.” It promised to maintain programs of military and economic assistance at the level that had been obtained during Diem’s rule, but also called for planning for possible “increased activity.”¹⁹A month later, on New Year’s Eve, Johnson addressed a public letter to Khanh: “The New Year provides a fitting opportunity for me to pledge on behalf of the American Government and people a renewed partnership with your government and people in your brave struggle for freedom. The United States will continue to furnish you and your people with the fullest measure of support in this bitter fight. We shall maintain in VietNam American personnel and material as needed to assist you in achieving victory.”²⁰But how much aid, and what form should it take? When should aid be given, and what should the United States expect in return?

Over the next several months, Johnson was subjected to increasingly pessimistic reports on the situation in Vietnam, but could get no clear picture from his advisers as to what course to follow. Their lack of clarity was a product of their own indecision but also of domestic political considerations which, LBJ made clear, were of the utmost importance. The last week in December, McNamara returned from a fact-finding trip to Saigon. “The new government,” he reported, “is indecisive and drifting. The Country Team [U.S. civilian and military leadership] … lacks leadership, has been poorly informed, and is not working to a common plan … Viet Cong progress had been great during the period since the coup, with my best guess being that the situation has in fact been deteriorating in the countryside since July to a far greater extent than we realized.”²¹There were those outside the president’s immediate policymaking circle who took the position that the situation was so bad that the United States should accept neutralization even if this led eventually to the communization of the Indochinese peninsula.

Early in February 1964, French President Charles de Gaulle announced that France intended to extend formal diplomatic recognition to communist China; military confrontation and diplomatic isolation had failed. He privately advised the Johnson administration to work toward neutralist status for both North and South Vietnam. China and Vietnam, he pointed out, were age-old enemies, and as neutrals, North and South Vietnam were more likely to act as barriers to Chinese communist expansion than as handmaidens of that expansion.²²Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield agreed, warning LBJ in December and January of the “massive costs” of becoming bogged down in Vietnam. The strategic situation did not warrant it; there was no proof that the domino effect would apply. The United States and the Democratic party could not afford to fight and lose in Southeast Asia, he said. In his columns, Walter Lippmann took the position that Vietnam was simply not strategically important enough to warrant the kind of blood and treasure the United States had expended in Korea. In a conversation with LBJ and George Ball in May, he admitted that neutralization would in all probability be just a way station on the road to Chinese communist domination of all of Southeast Asia, but he argued that the United States could not stop this development under any circumstances. After a period, communist China would stabilize and mature like the Soviet Union; at that point, peaceful coexistence would be possible.²³

At the opposite extreme was a coalition composed of Republican leaders, certain members of the military, and General Khanh. On January 22, the Joint Chiefs sent McNamara a memorandum recommending that the Untied States put aside many of the “self-imposed restrictions” barring bolder action in Southeast Asia and take the fight to North Vietnam. The government of Vietnam (GVN) should be induced to turn over the actual tactical direction of the war to Military Assistance Command—Vietnam, which would, in turn, “arm, advise, and support” the GVN in a bombing campaign and in covert operations directed against the North. More important, the United States should “conduct aerial bombing of key North Vietnam targets” to discourage the communists from infiltrating men and equipment into the South, and it should “commit additional US forces, as necessary, in support of the combat action within South Vietnam.”²⁴As Maxwell Taylor, chair of the JCS and soon to become ambassador to Vietnam, later observed, “We should never have been fighting the war in the South; we should have been fighting it in the North to begin with.”²⁵Khanh, who was growing increasingly frustrated with the unsettled political situation in South Vietnam, agreed. He and the country, Khanh told Lodge, were not prepared to endure “the long agony” that Washington and Hanoi apparently had in mind for them.²⁶

Throughout the spring of 1964, as the presidential primaries unfolded, Republican leaders kept up a steady drumbeat of criticism for Johnson’s allegedly weak and indecisive policy in Southeast Asia. In North Carolina, Richard Nixon complained about LBJ’s lack of firmness in debunking de Gaulle’s neutralization proposal. On February 3, Barry Goldwater told a Minneapolis audience that LBJ and his advisers were “napping” while the war in Vietnam “is drifting toward disaster.”²⁷

Finally, there were the Kennedys. Johnson did not know in which direction RFK, Schlesinger, Sorenson, and O’Donnell would turn. Publicly, Bobby, like Jack, had taken a consistently hard line on Vietnam, citing the domino theory and the Munich analogy, insisting that if the United States did not live up to its “commitments” to South Vietnam, all of Southeast Asia would fall to the communists and America’s credibility as an ally would be destroyed. “We are going to win in Viet-Nam,” Bobby had said during a trip to Saigon in 1962. “We will remain here until we do win.”²⁸As John Roche, head of the Americans for Democratic Action and a hardcore cold warrior put it, “Bob Kennedy made me look like a pacifist on the subject of Vietnam as of … 1965 and 1964 and 1963.”²⁹If Johnson did not play his cards right, the Kennedys could lead a charge against him within the Democratic party for losing Indochina through inexperience and indecisiveness. Following a dinner with the Clark Cliffords and Joseph Alsops in June 1964, Alsop and LBJ withdrew for a private conversation. The columnist told Johnson that if he did not commit combat troops to Vietnam, he was going to preside over the first real defeat of the United States in history.³⁰

There was no support among LBJ’s advisers for de Gaulle’s neutralization scheme. They were all staunch anticommunists and believers in the domino theory.³¹There were, McNamara told Johnson, four alternatives open to the administration.

We can withdraw from South Vietnam. Without our support the government will be unable to counter the aid from the North for the Viet Cong. Vietnam will collapse, and the ripple effect will be felt throughout Southeast Asia, endangering the independent governments of Thailand and Malaysia, and extending as far as India on the west, Indonesia on the south, and the Philippines in the east … We can seek a formula that will “neutralize” South Vietnam. But any such formula will lead in the end to the same result as withdrawing support … We can send the Marines and other U.S. ground forces against the sources of the aggression. But if we do, our men may well be bogged down against numerically superior North Vietnamese and ChiCom [Chinese communist] forces … We can continue our present policy of providing training and logistical support for the South Vietnam forces. This policy has not failed. We propose to continue it.³²

Bill Moyers remembered a conversation he had with the president shortly after his initial meeting with Lodge, McNamara, and company on the crisis in Southeast Asia. Clearly, Vietnam was a test, LBJ said: “The Chinese. The fellas in the Kremlin. They’ll be taking the measure of us. They’ll be wondering just how far they can go … I’m going to give those fellas out there the money they want … I told them I’m not going to let Vietnam go the way of China. I told them to go back and tell those generals in Saigon that Lyndon Johnson intends to stand by our word, but by God, I want something for my money. I want ’em to get off their butts and get out in those jungles and whip hell out of some Communists. And then I want ’em to leave me alone, because I’ve got some bigger things to do right here at home.”³³The first week in February, he wrote Khanh, “I am glad to know that we see eye to eye on the necessity of stepping up the pace of military operations against the Viet Cong.”³⁴By late February LBJ seemed ready to move north. “Again re North Vietnam,” McCone recorded his saying in a meeting with his advisers, “he believed it essential to carry the fight to the enemy and that this be beyond pinpricking, as the criticism of our passive position in the face of the deterioration of the situation is growing and can lead to a defeatist approach.”³⁵

Yet, after a story by Chalmers Roberts appeared in theWashington Post to the effect that the administration was planning to attack North Vietnam, LBJ drew back. He feared that Goldwater, Nixon, and Dirksen were attempting to entice him to reveal his hand on Vietnam. If he was shown to be weak and vacillating, he would become an easy mark for the GOP; if he took the war to the North, he could be labeled a “warmonger,” as he put it, by liberals at home and abroad.³⁶“I’m confronted,” he told Richard Russell. “I don’t believe the American people ever want me to run [abandon Vietnam]. If I lose it, I think that they’ll say I’ve lost. I’ve pulled in. At the same time I don’t want to commit us to a war. And I’m in a hell of a shape.”³⁷He also came to accept the argument that to act against the North, even to encourage Khanh to do so, would at this point be strategically premature. Finally, he felt the foreign policy establishment was spinning out of control. It was obvious from the Roberts article and others that one or more hawks in the administration had been talking to the press, perhaps, LBJ thought, to add to their sense of self-importance, perhaps to force his hand. He traced one of the leaks to Walt Rostow, the hard-line former MIT professor working the Asian desk in the State Department. “If you want to plan a war,” Johnson told him, “you make it clear it’s your war you’re planning. And you go and fight it, because I don’t want to fight it for you.”³⁸

Instead of going north, the president ordered a new plan for Vietnamization. “I want you to dictate to me a memorandum—a couple of pages … so I can read it and study it and commit it to memory,” LBJ instructed McNamara on March 2. “We can say this is the Vietnamese’s war and they’ve got two hundred thousand men, they’re untrained, and we’ve got to bring their morale, and they have nothing really to fight for because of the type of government they’ve had. We can put in socially conscious people and try to get them to improve their own government … and we can train them how to fight … And that, after considering all of these, it seems that the latter [not withdrawing or escalating but continuing to do more of the same] offers the best alternative for America to follow. Now if the latter has failed, then, we have to make another decision. But at this point it has not failed.”³⁹The object of American policy henceforward, he remarked to a meeting of the National Security Council, was to achieve “a maximum effect with a minimum involvement.”⁴⁰

Critics of his dithering had a point: he was trying to have it both ways, at least until after the election. The maximum effect—minimum involvement plan contravened one of the fundamental tenets of warfare: never confront the enemy unless you are far superior in arms and men. To have maximum effect, there must be maximum effort. As Lincoln, Sherman, and North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap understood, victory required unlimited sacrifice of blood and treasure.

The situation in Vietnam continued to deteriorate throughout the late spring of 1964. Desertions from the ARVN outran enlistments. “The Government remains fragmented by dissension and distrust,” McNamara reported after another trip in May. Indeed, at the time, Khanh’s foreign minister was secretly telling the American Embassy that his chief had “possible Communist or neutralist connections.”⁴¹None of the major figures in the American mission seemed to be talking to each other. When he was in Saigon, McNamara asked the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, General Paul Harkins, “Paul, how long do you think it will take to wind up this war?” Harkins replied, “Oh, I think we can change the tide in about six months.”⁴²42 Yet, Lodge was reporting to the White House that “a massive Communist success is possible which could end the war as a Communist victory” if the United States were not to react promptly.⁴³Meanwhile, Khanh and the GVN initiated a public campaign in behalf of “marching North.” While on the campaign trail, Reserve Air Force General, U.S. Senator, and GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater suggested the use of “low yield atomic weapons” to defoliate South Vietnam’s borders and a U.S. conventional bombing campaign aginst the North.⁴⁴Hard-liners within the JCS, notably Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay and Marine Corps Commandant Wallace Greene, continued to insist that “operations in Vietnam should be extended and expanded immediately.”⁴⁵

By May LBJ was frustrated, conflicted, anguished. “Let’s get some more of something, my friend,” he told McNamara, “because I’m going to have a heart attack if you don’t get me something … Let’s get somebody that wants to do something besides drop a bomb, that can go in and go after these damn fellows and run them back where they belong.”⁴⁶Later, in conversation with Dick Russell, he said, again, “I don’t think the people of the country know much about Vietnam and I think they care a hell of a lot less.” But if he were to lose Vietnam to the communists, Johnson said, there was not a doubt in his mind that Congress would impeach him. The JCS wanted to show the enemy an iron fist: “They don’t believe that the Chinese Communists will come into this thing. But they don’t know and nobody can really be sure.”⁴⁷Later that same day, he vented to McGeorge Bundy: “I don’t think it’s worth fighting for and I don’t think that we can get out. It’s just the biggest damned mess that I ever saw … I was looking at this sergeant of mine [his valet] this morning. Got six little old kids over there and he’s getting out my things and bringing in my night reading … and I just thought about ordering his kids in there and what in the hell am I ordering him out there for? What the hell is Vietnam worth to me? What is Laos worth to me? What is it worth to this country? Of course, if you start running [from] the Communists, they may just chase you right into your own kitchen … But this is … a terrible thing that we’re getting ready to do … No, we’ve got a treaty but, hell, everybody else’s got a treaty out there and they’re not doing anything about it.”⁴⁸

The solution that Johnson and his advisers came up with, one they hoped would contain hard-liners at home, pacify Khanh and others who were becoming increasingly doubtful concerning America’s commitment to South Vietnam, and yet not enable liberals to label the president a warmonger, was to replace Lodge with a moderate military man and to authorize contingency planning for moves against the North, principally U.S. bombing of selected military and even industrial targets. Contingency planning did not constitute commitment, and yet if a crisis developed, as Lodge and Khanh were predicting, a mechanism would be in place for the United States to ride to the rescue.

In the late spring of 1964, to the great relief of the White House, Lodge announced that with the 1964 presidential campaign heating up, his party needed him and therefore he was resigning as ambassador to Vietnam and returning to the United States. Immediately, LBJ began casting around for a replacement. Both Rusk and McNamara volunteered, and Bobby Kennedy staged a minor campaign to be named to the position. LBJ decided that he needed all three in Washington for different reasons. Rusk and McNamara could be depended on to control State and Defense. As far as RFK was concerned, LBJ had no intention of sending his nemesis into harms’ way, perhaps to return in triumph—another Caesar—to lay claim to the throne.⁴⁹“I want him to stay right where he is,” he told Bundy. Besides, the attorney general carried too much baggage. “Bobby is a very, very controversial character in the country,” he confided. “I want this man to be above political matters of any kind and not to have been in any wars with Democrats or Republicans.”⁵⁰

Eventually, Johnson settled on Maxwell Taylor. His appointment had a number of advantages. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs was not of the Eisenhower, nuclear weapons persuasion. Indeed, he had resigned from the army in 1959 after making a public case for reemphasizing conventional warfare, especially counterinsurgency. After the Bay of Pigs, JFK called him back to service and jumped him over several senior officers to become chair. Taylor, multilingual, the author of several books, seemed the antithesis of single-minded war hawks like Curtis LeMay.⁵¹In many ways, Taylor was as hawkish as LeMay and Wallace Greene, commandant of the marine corps, but he was a gradualist. As could be expected from the author ofThe Uncertain Trumpet , Taylor was convinced that the United States and its allies could beat the communists at their own game in Vietnam.⁵²From Johnson’s perspective, Taylor was the perfect choice. He was a soldier and hence could “give us the cover we need with the country, with the Republicans and with the Congress,” he observed to McNamara. But he was also an intellectual and a friend of the Kennedys, which would placate Lippmann and the liberals. “The only man I know,” Johnson said, “who is not regarded as a war monger and who has a bunch of stars is Taylor.”⁵³

At the same time, Johnson named William Westmoreland to succeed Paul Harkins as commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam. Westmoreland seemed a military clone of Robert McNamara. A West Point graduate and veteran of both World War II and the Korean conflict, he was a thoroughly modern man, versed in systems analysis, a corporate executive in uniform who embraced his role as a team player. Westmoreland’s diaries and papers reveal an Eisenhower-Bradley type of soldier; competent, committed to (and understanding of) democracy, comfortable with civilian control of the military, and essentially colorblind. There was nothing of the megalomania of MacArthur or the unbridled militarism of LeMay in him. Apparently, the principle of civilian control of the military was very much on the president’s mind. “LBJ and I were both sharply conscious of the possibility of a parallel with MacArthur and Korea,” West-moreland recorded in his diary. “[Johnson] Made a blunt statement; have confidence you know what you are doing and hope to hell you don’t kick over the traces like MacArthur … I submitted my plan, but even with the rejection, I deemed we had enough force to win in time. I thought it important that the military display a posture and image recognizing the military’s subservience to civilian authority.”⁵⁴

Johnson believed that both Taylor and Westmoreland would have the patience and loyalty to do the job in Vietnam with the tools he chose to give them. “I will give you everything you want,” Johnson told Westmoreland when he first met him in Hawaii, “because you want what I want in Vietnam. But I may have to give it to you a little slower than you want.” The general replied, to LBJ’s delight, “Mr. President, I may not want it as fast as you think I will. We cannot bring it in faster than Vietnam can absorb it.”⁵⁵Like Taylor, Westmoreland was fully aware of the political situation in the United States and was willing to accommodate himself and his mission to it. “With a presidential election coming up,” the general noted, “LBJ did not want an image of being pushed around but he also wanted to appease the doves. Maxwell Taylor and Alexis Johnson [career diplomat who served as Taylor’s assistant] came over with a plan to pressure Hanoi by bombing, but we were consciously holding down on making waves until after the election on orders from Washington.”⁵⁶

 

IN THE MANEUVERINGSand discussions of spring and summer of 1964, and especially in the contingency planning that Washington had decided to employ to appease Goldwater, LeMay, and Khanh, three themes stand out: the concept of limited war, military action as a form of communication, and credibility as a justification for U.S. participation in the conflict in Souteast Asia. Robert McNamara, among others, readily embraced the concept of limited war. From the first, the goal of U.S. policy was not to defeat North Vietnam per se but to crush the Vietcong in the South and to persuade Ho and his colleagues in the Lao Dong, the Vietnamese Communist Party, to withdraw support from the insurgency.⁵⁷

Johnson, the ultimate persuader, did not believe that once committed in Vietnam, America could afford to fail. Credibility, the age-old notion that in international affairs, nations were only as good as their word, that if they reneged on an alliance, then in the future they would find it impossible to find new allies when danger threatened, carried a great deal of weight with LBJ, who remembered the great debate prior to American entry into World War II. If the peoples of the third world, particularly those in Asia who were contiguous to the communist superpowers, thought that Washington would abandon them at the drop of a hat, they were much more likely to make accommodations with Moscow and Beijing.

Following a conference of the East Asian chiefs of mission in the Philippines in 1967, the U.S. representative reported, “The Ambassadors were unanimous in the view that the determination which the U.S. has demonstrated in fulfilling its commitment to defend South Vietnam against aggression has had a major tonic effect on all the governments and people of the area. While all government leaders do not forthrightly speak out publicly to the degrees we wish, there is no free government in the East Asian area (except possibly Cambodia) which does not basically approve of what the U.S. is doing with respect to VietNam.”⁵⁸As the war dragged on, Japan, unarmed but a rising economic giant, continually expressed fear that the United States would lose its will and abandon Asia to the Chinese communists.⁵⁹

In mid-1964 Hanoi launched a program to convert the Ho Chi Minh trail, which ran southward from North Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia, entering South Vietnam at various points, from a network of jungle trails to a modern transportation system. This, coupled with the decision taken earlier in the year to introduce regular North Vietnamese Army (NVA) units into the South, meant that by summer’s end hundreds, soon to be thousands, of veteran North Vietnamese soldiers were taking up positions below the seventeenth parallel. The word “contingency” suddenly began to disappear from the memos of presidential advisers. Bundy urged Johnson to authorize the use of “selected and carefully graduated military force against North Vietnam … We should strike to hurt not to destroy and strike for the purpose of changing the North Vietnamese decision on intervention in the south.”⁶⁰Still Johnson refused. Then, at the Republican Convention in San Francisco in mid-July, a conservative insurgency swept Senator Barry Goldwater to the nomination. “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!” Goldwater told the enraptured delegates in his acceptance speech, adding for good measure, “Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” The Republican candidate had earlier urged that NATO commanders be given control of tactical nuclear weapons, and when asked about the situation in Southeast Asia had said, “I’d drop a low-yield atomic bomb on the Chinese supply lines in North Vietnam or maybe shell ’em with the Seventh Fleet.”⁶¹Determined to protect his right flank in the forthcoming battle with Goldwater and fearful that North Vietnam’s open commitment to the war in the South might lead to a collapse in the near future, LBJ decided to attack the North. But there would have to be a trigger.

As contingency planning for possible bombardment, blockade, or invasion of North Vietnam got under way in Washington, military intelligence began gathering information on a network of anti-aircraft missiles and radar stations installed by the Soviets on the bays and islands of the Tonkin Gulf. U-2 flights were able to photograph inland sites, but they were incapable of mapping the coastal installations. For this task, intelligence enlisted South Vietnamese commandos to harass the enemy radar transmitters, thereby activating them, so that American electronic intelligence vessels cruising in the Tonkin Gulf could chart their locations. In addition to these operations, codenamed DeSoto missions, a State Department—CIA task force under McGeorge Bundy was coordinating OPLAN-34, a top-secret program of infiltration and harassment of North Vietnam by South Vietnamese covert operatives. As 1964 progressed, then, North Vietnamese positions along the gulf coast were subjected to repeated attacks by the high-speed, heavily armed Norwegian speedboats used in the DeSoto program and to landings by OPLAN-34 operatives.

In July Admiral Ulysses Grant Sharp Jr., commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, ordered the aircraft carrierTiconderoga to the entrance to the Tonkin Gulf and instructed the destroyerMaddox to engage in DeSoto-type patrols off the North Vietnamese coast. On the night of July 30-31, South Vietnamese commandos in four patrol boats assaulted North Vietnamese positions on the islands of Hon Me and Hon Ngu, three and four miles, respectively, from the North Vietnamese mainland. Hon Ngu was only about three miles from Vinh, one of North Vietnam’s busiest ports. The crackle of North Vietnamese radar signals and radio traffic triggered by the attacks was monitored aboard theMaddox and transmitted to a special American intelligence center in the Philippines.

At eleven o’clock on the morning of August 2, theMaddox was situated some ten miles out to sea, adjacent to the Red River Delta, the northernmost point of its circuit. Suddenly, from behind the island of Hon Me, three North Vietnamese patrol boats attacked. As the trio fired their torpedoes, missing, theMaddox opened fire and signaled for air support from theTiconderoga. The skirmish, which lasted a bare twenty minutes, ended in a clearcut American victory. A single bullet struck theMaddox harmlessly, while U.S. fire sank one hostile craft and crippled the other two.⁶²

Reports of the incident reached Lyndon Johnson on the morning of the same day, Sunday, August 2. Because no American had been hurt, he told his staff, further action was unnecessary; he specifically rejected suggestions from the military for reprisals against North Vietnamese targets. The president instructed his spokesmen to play down the matter, and as a consequence, the initial Pentagon press release on the subject did not even identify the North Vietnamese as antagonists. At the same time, however, Johnson directed theMaddox and another destroyer, theC. Turner Joy , as well as protective aircraft, to return to the gulf. The commanders bore with them orders to “attack any force that attacks them.”⁶³The commander of theTiconderoga task force radioed Captain John J. Herrick of theMaddox that the North Vietnamese had “thrown down the gauntlet” and should be “treated as belligerents from first detection.”⁶⁴Finally, on the 3rd, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, and Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, briefed a combined meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees in executive session. They described the attack on theMaddox and the generally deteriorating situation in South Vietnam. In a conversation with Senator George Smathers of Florida, LBJ defended his decision not to retaliate: “You can’t give them orders to chase the hell out and destroy a boat that they don’t even know if they’ve seen.”⁶⁵

The night of August 3 was stormy and moonless. Around eight o’clock, intercepted radio messages seemed to indicate that communist patrol boats were bracing for an assault. Sonar began picking up bleeps on this night that one sailor later described as “darker than the hubs of hell.”⁶⁶An hour later the two destroyers started firing in all directions and taking evasive action to avoid North Vietnamese torpedoes. Their officers reported sinking two or perhaps three communist craft during the raid.

The battle report and traffic between theMaddox and Honolulu were monitored directly in the Situation Room in the basement of the White House. Duty officers summoned the president at once. McNamara asked permission to authorize the commanders of theMaddox andTurner Joy to “pursue any attacker and destroy the base of the attacker.” Johnson not only concurred, but observed that “we not only ought to shoot at them, but almost simultaneously pull one of these things that you’ve been doing [aiding South Vietnamese commandos in attacking targets in North Vietnam]—on one of their bridges or something.”⁶⁷During the NSC meeting that followed, Douglas Dillon, whom Johnson knew to be very close to Robert Kennedy, observed, “There is a limit on the number of times we can be attacked by the North Vietnamese without hitting their naval bases.” At 2:50, LBJ gave the order to retaliate.⁶⁸Meanwhile, however, he had instructed McNamara to obtain verification of the second North Vietnamese strike. Unfortunately, Captain Herrick had begun to have second thoughts about whether or not an actual attack had occured. On the afternoon of the 4th, he cabled CINCPAC, Sharp’s headquarters. The entire action had left many doubts, he reported, and he was conducting an immediate investigation. Several hours later, he cabled: “Review of action makes many reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear very doubtful … Freak weather effects and overeager sonarmen may have accounted for many reports. No actual sightings by Maddox. Suggest complete evaluation before any further action.”⁶⁹Late in the afternoon, McNamara sat down with the Joint Chiefs to evaluate the evidence to see if it could be safely concluded that a second attack had indeed occurred. The turning point was reached when he learned that someone in the administration had leaked to the press that a second attack had in fact taken place. There was no going back, then, he and Johnson concluded. If the administration were to take the position that evidence of the second attack was ambiguous, and not follow through with retaliation, it would open itself up to charges of deception and cowardice.

Though his information was still sketchy, Johnson called the congressional leadership, including Fulbright, to the White House on the evening of the 4th and announced that there had been a second, unprovoked, deliberate attack on theMaddox andTurner Joy. This time, he said, the United States had no choice but to retaliate, and he intended to ask for a resolution of support. After huddling briefly with Senators Fulbright, George Aiken, and Bourke Hickenlooper, Mansfield “read a paper expressing general opposition.” Richard Russell supported retaliation in principle but voiced concern about whether the United States had enough manpower and equipment in the area to do the job. Should the United States continue to allow the North Vietnamese “to murder us from bases of safety?” McNamara asked incredulously. “I think I know what the reaction would be if we tucked our tails.” At this point, Johnson chimed in: “Some of our boys are floating around in the water,” he said. The Republican leadership—Saltonstall, Halleck, and Dirksen—all expressed support and promised to vote for a congressional resolution. Fulbright came away from the meeting convinced that both attacks had occurred, that they were part of a communist test of American resolve, as Rusk put it, and that the assaults would continue unless the United States responded.⁷⁰

Johnson walked back to the Oval Office with Kenny O’Donnell. Speculating on the potential political effect of the crisis, they agreed that Johnson was “being tested” and would have to respond firmly to defend himself, not against the North Vietnamese but against Barry Goldwater and the Republican right wing. As O’Donnell later wrote, they felt that Johnson “must not allow them to accuse him of vacillating or being an indecisive leader.”⁷¹Bundy subsequently observed to LBJ that separating Eisenhower from Goldwater was “the real object” of the exercise.⁷²

Lyndon Johnson sensed that he was about to take a momentous step. Shortly before he was to go into another meeting of the NSC, South Carolina Senator Olin Johnston telephoned. “The newspapers called me today wanting to know if I was going to vote for you,” he said. “I said yes. I’m for keeping us out of war and I’m for voting for Lyndon Johnson.” “Well, I don’t know whether I can do that,” LBJ replied, clearly uneasy. “I’m going to do my best, Olin.” Johnston pressed: “You are going to find in my state and in the South these mothers and people are afraid of war.”⁷³During the American military buildup in Vietnam a year later, LBJ would tell Robert McNamara, “We know ourselves, in our own conscience, that when we asked for this resolution, we had no intention of committing this many ground troops.”⁷⁴As LBJ prepared to announce to the press that the United States was going to attack patrol boat bases in North Vietnam in retaliation for the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Lady Bird called. “I just wanted to see you, beloved, whenever you’re all alone, merely to tell you I loved you.”⁷⁵

Meanwhile, however, the White House believed that it had obtained independent verification that the second attack had occurred. Naval intelligence provided McNamara with a batch of intercepts of North Vietnamese radio flashes that seemed to be ordering their patrol boats into action. Although he was in Martha’s Vineyard at the time and was not summoned back to Washington until the afternoon of the 4th, Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy recalled that the intercepts—“get ready, go, we are attacking”—were compelling. “These intercepts were certainly taken by all concerned to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that there had been a second attack.”⁷⁶

As it turned out, evidence of the second attack was not even ambiguous; it was false. According to a recent article in theNew York Times , midlevel officials in the National Security Administration, responsible for monitoring communications between North Vietnamese shore bases and their vessels at sea, had made numerous egregious translation errors. They subsequently falsified their intelligence reports, the reports that McNamara and the chiefs were relying on, to make it appear that a second attack had occurred on the night of the 3rd when it had not.⁷⁷

As American jets lifted off theTiconderoga andConstellation , Lyndon Johnson appeared on television to report to the nation that an unprovoked attack had taken place against American vessels on the high seas and that he had ordered retaliation. “Repeated acts of violence against the armed forces of the United States must be met not only with alert defense, but with positive reply. That reply is being given as I speak to you tonight … Aggression by terror against the peaceful villagers of South Vietnam has now been joined by open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America.”⁷⁸The strikes destroyed or damaged twenty-five patrol boats and 90 percent of the oil storage facilities at Vinh.

On August 5, LBJ summoned Fulbright to the White House to ask him to manage the resolution that Johnson would submit to Congress that day seeking approval for retaliation that had already occurred and for future military action to protect South Vietnam and American personnel in the area if it should become necessary. The chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who viewed Barry Goldwater and the ultras as the greatest threat to the liberty and safety of the country since Joe McCarthy, readily agreed. On the morning of August 6, George Ball met in the majority leader’s offices with Mansfield, Fulbright, Russell, Saltonstall, and Aiken. There was no discussion of substance. “Our principal concern was one thing,” Ball later recalled, “that there would be a kind of orgasm of outrage in the congress and that some of the right-wing hawk Republicans might take such action that would be in effect a declaration of war or would put the administration in a position where we had to do things which we thought would be very unwise, that might involve bringing the Chinese in or offending somebody else.”⁷⁹It was decided that Fulbright would introduce the resolution as soon as possible, with Russell, Hickenlooper, and Saltonstall cosponsoring. The Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees would hold perfunctory hearings on the morning of the 7th; passage, they anticipated, would come easily that afternoon.

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, introduced by Fulbright, authorized the president to take “all necessary measures to repel any armed attacks against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.”⁸⁰On August 6, McNamara appeared before a joint session of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees to testify on the resolution. It was plain from the beginning that he would face little opposition. Opinion polls showed that 85 percent of the American people stood behind the administration; most newspaper editorials reflected this support. Nothing was said about the covert raids. Official reports indicated that theMaddox was engaged in routine patrols in international waters. The incidents were portrayed as “deliberate attacks” and “open aggression on the high seas.”⁸¹

Congress responded to the administration’s request with amazing alacrity. Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska attacked the resolution as “a predated declaration of war,” and Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin pointed out that the proposal amounted to a sweeping grant of authority to the executive. Wayne Morse demanded to know why American war vessels were menacing the coast of North Vietnam. George McGovern of South Dakota asked incredulously why a tiny nation like North Vietnam would want to provoke a war with the greatest superpower in the history of the world. One by one, Fulbright responded to the questions and criticisms. TheMaddox had been attacked without provocation, and the American reaction was entirely justified as an act of self-defense under Article 45 of the UN Charter. “It would be a great mistake,” he declared, “to allow our optimism about promising developments in our relations with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to lead us to any illusions about the aggressive designs of North Vietnam and its Chinese Communist sponsor.”⁸²The Senate debated the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution less than ten hours; for much of the time the chamber was less than one-third full. Fulbright carefully guided the resolution through, choking off debate and amendments. Only Morse and Gruening dissented; the final vote was eighty-eight to two.

For America, the war in Vietnam was about to begin in earnest.