The Best and the Brightest (72 page)

While McNamara was in Vietnam, the State Department had been preparing a major study on the bombing at the Policy Planning Council under Robert Johnson. The study had been ordered at the beginning of the year but little had been done about it then; suddenly McNamara went to Vietnam and the timetable was speeded up, the answers were to coincide with his return. There was enormous pressure for an answer to the question: Would the bombing work? Perhaps there was going to be a decision to bomb, after all.

Robert Johnson himself had not been eager to take on the job of preparing the study. As Rostow’s deputy, he knew how strongly his boss felt on the subject of bombing, that it was above all
the
answer, the vital card, and though he liked Rostow personally, he disagreed strongly. His own impression was that Vietnam was coming apart and would continue to do so, and he thought it would be difficult to do an honest paper with Rostow in charge. Nonetheless, he finally accepted the job. He put together a staff of about six people, all intergovernmental men, all pure intelligence people. The study dealt solely with the bombing and they had to identify the main questions. First: Would it work? Would Hanoi drop its support of the Vietcong if we pressured by bombing? Then: What were the upper levels of the U.S. commitment? What would bombing do in the way of bringing about meaningful negotiation? What would be the problems of exiting, in case of failure? What would be the problems of justifying the U.S. action in legal and moral terms? What was the problem of defining American objectives and Communist possible reactions? And finally: What would the effects be on the Sino-Soviet split?

It was, in the classic sense, a pure study. It reflected the genuine expertise of the government from deep within its bowels, not its operational functions, not its ambitions, not its success drives. None of the staffers represented vested interests, and none really saw his future being affected by either a positive or negative study. They considered all kinds of bombing, quick tit-for-tat retaliations and massive, prolonged saturation bombing. They worked under intense pressure for about two weeks, eight hours a day, six days a week. When they finished they had a stack of papers about a foot high and the essential answer, which was no, bombing the North would not work.

Basically the study showed that the bombing would fail because the North was motivated by factors which were not affected by physical change and physical damage. The North Vietnamese were not hooked on the idea of economic growth determination (which was one of the great hang-ups of Rostow), but were determined to extend their regime’s control to the entire country rather than maintain their industrialization. That was what motivated them, and that was what they considered their unfinished business. They had invested a great deal in it and they would continue to invest in it; no North Vietnamese government could afford to do less. Hanoi, the study said, enjoyed the nationalist component of unity and the Communist component of control, which made for an organized, unified modern state. Given their standard of living, their determination, bombing would not affect them, other than produce a tendency perhaps to strengthen the regime’s control. There was also a consensus on one key point: if you threatened the North with escalation you would soon know whether or not it would work because they would have to respond before you started (that is, they would never fold their hand under duress and go to the bargaining table, because once there, all the United States would have to do was threaten once more to start bombing and they would have to concede more).

Nor was anyone particularly optimistic the bombing would improve South Vietnamese morale. The study implied that escalation would not bring negotiation, that it would place at least as much pressure on the United States as on Hanoi, and that the subsequent problems of deescalation would be even more difficult to deal with. Bombing would have raised the stakes, South Vietnam would have become much more important as an issue, a South Vietnamese regime would have become even more dependent upon the United States (which had just bombed the North, partly to improve Southern morale). So the position, in terms of extrication, would be even more complicated.

In addition, the study showed that there would be a considerable international outcry if the United States bombed the North, that this would seem a disproportionate response to what the North was doing in the South (which reflected a feeling that few Americans had, about how repugnant bombing was to the rest of the world, since much of it had been bombed, while America had done some of the bombing but had never been bombed itself), and that while this would not pose a serious problem if quick success was achieved, it would become sticky if the war became drawn out, as it was likely to be.

It was an important study because it not only predicted that the bombing would not work, and predicted Hanoi’s reaction to the pressure, which was to apply counterpressure, but it forecast that the bombing would affect (and imprison) the American government. That was particularly prophetic because America did eventually bomb with a view to bringing the North to the conference table. It would find that it was, instead of changing the North, sticking itself to a tar baby, and that nothing could take place in the way of talks or negotiations, no word of peace exchanged as long as the bombing continued, thus forcing an American President to change and undo his own fragile political balance and give up hopes of a second term in order to get back a card for the purposes of negotiation, a card which had been played in the first place to bring negotiations.

The Johnson study had very little impact, for a variety of reasons. The first was that Policy Planning is not an operative area, it is not a place for doers, and over a prolonged period of time in the State Department its influence had steadily decreased. As the Cold War had advanced and hardened, there was less and less need for it; what the United States wanted to do, the internal and domestic implications of a policy, became more important. So Policy Planning was off the beaten path. Rostow, the current head of it, had been sent there by Kennedy in a moment of Kennedy’s disenchantment. For all its talented people, it did not enter into policy making, it was not a serious place. The elephant was great and powerful and preferred being blind. That was one problem. The second problem was timing; though the study had been rushed through with the idea of coinciding with the McNamara report on bombing, the President had let McNamara know that he did not want to make any major decisions for the present, and so the bombing was put on hold, and the decision delayed. Similarly, the massive and significant study was pushed aside because it had come out at the wrong time. A study has to be published at the right moment, when people are debating an issue and about to make a decision; then and only then will they read a major paper, otherwise they are too pressed for time. Therefore, when the long-delayed decisions on the bombing were made a year later, the principals did not go back to the old Bob Johnson paper, because new things had happened, one did not go back to an old paper.

Finally and perhaps most important, there was no one to fight for it, to force it into the play, to make the other principals come to terms with it. Rostow himself could not have disagreed more with the paper; it challenged every one of his main theses, his almost singular and simplistic belief in bombing and what it would accomplish. He did not censor the study, but he worked to suppress it and as a result its distribution was quite limited; neither Rusk nor Bill Bundy was enthused by it (in other days Harriman might have forced it upon everyone), and it was very closely held. Later in the year, however, parts of the report were bootlegged through the government, and one part of it played a major role in confirming the doubts of George Ball and provided much of the raw material for his dissenting papers. So the government was able to weed out its own caution, and keep it out of the mainstream; if it is kept out of the mainstream, it does not exist. And so it did not exist.

Even so, the slate had to be wiped clean. Not only was there a need to negate and remove the Policy Planning study, but there was a need to have a piece of paper which would be intellectually reassuring. In April a special intelligence study was ordered, which meant that though many of the same experts would participate, the results would be radically different, because the military intelligence people were brought in. A Special Intelligence Estimate is a very formal procedure, with very definite patterns. CIA, for instance, chairs it, which means that the Agency’s role shifts dramatically. Instead of giving pure intelligence, the Agency people become bureaucratic. They are told to come up with a piece of paper and they want to provide that piece of paper; thus they seek a consensus. In addition, they are working against a deadline, which means the softening of their own estimates in order to get the military to come along. Thus the State Department experts, the Intelligence and Research people, lose an ally (CIA), which has become bureaucratic, and gain an enemy, the military.

And the military, in a case like this, can be very tricky in its intelligence estimates; it is the job of the military intelligence people to get along with their superiors. Rusk and Bill Bundy, for example, did not directly try to influence their own intelligence people (they often ignored them, but they did not meddle with them; rather the real problem in 1964 for the INR people was trying to get the attention of their superiors, trying to get someone to fight for them). But the JCS and their intelligence people are quite different; the light colonels and bird colonels, bright men on their way up, are soldiers; they are in uniform, they know what the JCS wants, they are servants, and they have bright careers ahead. An Air Force intelligence officer will not, for instance, say that the bombing will not work. So in an intelligence estimate like this, the INR experts are not going against comparable intelligence officers; instead, they are going against wholly committed men (very intelligent men, and men whose private estimates may be quite close to what the INR people are saying).

State would see grays, the military blacks and whites; State would see doubts, the military certitudes. And State would always end up being conciliatory; its terms were not as firm and hard and sure as the military’s. INR could never be sure of what it was saying, and somehow the military always seemed sure; they had facts and they had military expertise. If State tried to challenge them, it was blocked off. State could not make judgments on military possibilities, things which involved military expertise. Yet at the same time the military were constantly poaching on State’s territory (“We will bomb X and Y, and you can’t tell us that they won’t feel it, that they won’t quit then”). There was, for example, a major argument over whether or not explosives could close the Mu Ghia Pass. The State people argued that rather than closing it, explosives would widen it (which is exactly what happened). The military were sure explosives could close it. They were experts on explosives, this was their trade, so how could State know—what did State know about bombing?

To a degree, the Army was sympathetic to what the INR people were saying. The Army people had always had their doubts about the effect of interdiction by air, but the services would bind together under the gentlemen’s agreements which protect their autonomy and mythology (the Army did not challenge the Air Force on its capacity to bomb, and the Air Force, though reflecting considerable doubts, did not challenge the Army on its capacity to fight a politically oriented land war in Asia, though later each branch’s intelligence estimates of the other’s failings were quite accurate; the Army was good on the failures of the bombing, the Air Force was good on the limits of the land war). But in the overall intelligence estimate, the arrival of the military shifted the weight of the study. CIA was neutral and compromised in order to have a finished piece of paper and the political people were brought down to a minority viewpoint, largely footnoting their dissent. The crucial factor was that the President would ask, What is the vote? and the vote would be yes, the bombing would do it. Thus did the government protect its capacity to go against its own wisdom and expertise.

Chapter Eighteen

Very subtly in the late winter and into the early spring of 1964 a change began to take place within the government and the bureaucracy. It was something which was not announced, but Vietnam gradually became a more sensitive, more delicate, and more dangerous subject. As such it became something spoken about less and less, the decisions became more and more closely held, and the principals became even more guarded with whom they spoke on the subject. They did not want to be seen with known, identified doves; they did not want to be considered soft. If they had to meet with, say, a reporter known as a dove, they would let friends know that it had to happen, as Bill Bundy did, but with an inflection in his voice of what-else-can-I-do, and a pleasure in telling aides that he was keeping the dove journalist waiting, which was what a dove deserved. Or at the White House, where the subject became more and more sensitive, Chester Cooper, a former CIA analyst who was extremely knowledgeable about Indochina, found that it was more and more difficult to reach McGeorge Bundy on the subject as the questions became graver and the failures more apparent. Cooper began to write memos to his boss expressing his grave doubts about the situation in Vietnam, but he soon found that the subject was so delicate that it was better to write them by hand so that Bundy, reading them, would know that not even a secretary had seen these words and these thoughts; such doubts did not exist except in the most private sense between two men.