The Best and the Brightest (122 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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