The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (95 page)

In addition, the Kennedy administration had done something extremely dangerous when it increased the larger mission to Vietnam; it corrupted the truth to suit its political needs for short-term political profit—in effect buying time to get through to the 1964 election. Because in the process it planted the flag ever more deeply, it needed ever greater results, for appearances were everything, and it needed them faster. But those results were not forthcoming, because the policy never worked. Never. Therefore, to compensate for the failure to produce the desired results in the field, the Kennedy administration soon created something quite extraordinary—a giant lying machine, one based in Washington, with its major affiliate in Saigon, a machine that not only systematically rejected all pessimistic reports from the field, and punished those who tried to tell the truth, but created its own illusion of victories and successes, victories and successes that never existed. It was a great exercise in self-deception: what the great lying machine did in that period was delay the arrival of the truth in Washington by some three years, and of course it also began the process of diminishing the credibility of the government of the United States. What was lost in those three years was the ability to make wiser judgments about whether the commitment worked. In November 1963 John Kennedy was assassinated.

There would be no second term during which he could think about crossing the fail-safe point of sending combat troops. As his predecessors had left him with an immense burden in the existing policy on China, now he left his successor a policy that was an immense trap in Vietnam. Kennedy had always retained his mordant sense of humor. One day when he came out of an NSC meeting in which they had discussed some disastrous problem handed down to them by previous administrations, he said, “Oh well, think of what we’ll pass on to the poor fellow who comes after me.”

The poor fellow who followed, whom no one had ever thought of as a poor fellow, most especially those who had been run over by him in the past, or at the very least had their shoulders massaged and ended up voting on the side of an issue that they had not intended to vote on, was Lyndon Johnson, and the gift the Kennedy administration passed on was Vietnam, where by the fall of 1963 the Viet Cong had virtually won the war. The United States had spent three years making Vietnam seem more important in terms of geopolitics than the Washington authorities privately believed it was. By the time Johnson arrived, part of the rationale for the Americans doing what they were doing there was that they were already doing it, and not to continue to do it, in the cancerous way that these things feed on themselves, would weaken the United States elsewhere. Each cynical speech by some American official over the previous three years about how well the Americans were doing and how important Vietnam was became the rationale for the investment of more American bodies in a war that could not be won.

LYNDON JOHNSON WAS,
by contrast, a very different president from Kennedy, and whereas Kennedy had (privately) made distinctions between hard Communism in Europe and Communist-nationalism in the Third World, Johnson made few comparable distinctions in the Communist world, and he left less room for serious doubt among the men surrounding him. The rest of the world was for him a much more distant place than it had been to Kennedy. If Johnson came out of the 1964 election with a landslide, he intended to use his accumulated power as quickly as he could on domestic issues, not, as Kennedy would have, on foreign ones. Foreign policy had never interested him greatly unless it impinged directly on domestic policy. As Philip Geyelin, one of the best of the Washington foreign policy analysts, wrote prophetically in 1965, as he measured the approaching collision of Johnson and the world, “The point is that Lyndon Johnson never was really interested [in the world] except as a practical need to be arose.”

Lyndon Johnson knew nothing of the subtle strength of this small but fierce country, still fourth-rate to him, how it had managed to hold off mighty China in the past and defeat mighty France so recently. Yet in Vietnam history was fate. The men and women on the other side were the same people who had driven the French out, the heroes of the revolution, a revolution the United States chose not to see as a revolution; comparably, most of the top people in the South Vietnamese Army, fighting as it were on the pro-Western side, had also fought alongside the French during a revolutionary war. The other side’s leaders were skilled, brave, and had their form of political-military tactics, very similar to those of Mao and his compatriots, down pat. No one who had
fought them would ever underestimate either their ability or their patience—only powerful men in Washington who had no experience in this new kind of war would mock them for their lack of traditional battlefield organization. In the early war games that the top Americans had played back in Washington—a group on one side playing for Hanoi, their rivals playing for America, each making countermoves against the other—it always turned out that Hanoi had more options than the United States did, and could keep coming without paying an exorbitant price. In time they stopped playing the war games because they always ended so badly.

In 1964, as Johnson edged closer to the final decision on the war, there were three factors that tended to make him hawkish. The first was the nature of the man himself, his own image of himself, the need to stand tall, not to back off when he was challenged, and to personalize all confrontations and to see them as a test of manhood. Pierre Salinger’s job, Johnson told the principal Kennedy press officer when he first became president, was to sell Johnson as a big Texan who was both tall and tough in the saddle. Of a rebel leader in the Dominican Republic Johnson had told McGeorge Bundy, “Tell that son of a bitch that unlike the young man who came before me I am not afraid to use what’s on my hip.”

The second factor was an innate, almost unconscious American racism, the kind that had bedeviled so many officers in the field at the beginning of the Korean War, the notion that because Asians were smaller and from a lesser part of the world with lesser industrial and technological accomplishments, they were a lesser people and could not stand up to American technology and American troops. Certainly miscalculations of that kind had been costly in Korea, at the very beginning of the war, when everyone had underestimated the ability of the North Korean troops, and even more later on, when MacArthur had miscalculated what the Chinese would do and how well they would fight. Vietnam, when Johnson spoke about it at NSC meetings, was often “a raggedy ass little fourth rate country.” On occasion, like Ned Almond, he used the word “laundrymen” to describe the combatants.

Sometimes too, as he came close to the final decision on whether to send combat troops to Vietnam, Johnson’s racism showed in the way he spoke of the Vietnamese as being like Mexicans, the kind of lesser people you had to show some strength to before they got the message and gave you the respect you deserved. The Vietnamese, he would say, were not going to push Lyndon Johnson around, because he knew something about people like this, because back home he had dealt with people just like them, the Mexicans. Now, Mexicans were all right if you let them know who was boss, but “if you didn’t watch they’ll come right into your yard and take it over if you let them. And the next day they’ll be right there on your porch, barefoot and weighing one hundred
and thirty pounds, and they’ll take that too. But if you say to ’em right at the start, ‘Hold on, just wait a minute,’ they’ll know they’re dealing with someone who’ll stand up. And after that you can get along fine.”

And finally, and probably most important of all, there was the politics of it, because he was
always
a political man. That was what mattered most, and this time he got the politics wrong—he went to the politics of the past, not the future as it might have been if he had kept us out. Beneficiary of a landslide victory over a seemingly much harder line candidate, Barry Goldwater (in part because he had said he would not send American boys to do what Asian boys should do for themselves), Johnson misread the politics of his own victory. His sense of the war’s politics and the price of losing Saigon led him back to the fall of China and to the ferocious political forces that had been unleashed domestically. Johnson was immensely sensitive to those forces, because they had been unusually important in the two places he knew best: Washington, where he had seen senators who opposed Joe McCarthy destroyed, and Texas, where the local McCarthyism had been unusually virulent and very well financed by oil interests. It was in Texas, where, as Johnson made the mutation from liberal New Deal congressman to U.S. senator, he had gradually become politically closer and quite dependent upon some of the same powerful right-wing figures, the men of oil who had backed McCarthy.

China weighed heavily on him as he made his ultimate Vietnam decisions. He talked about it all the time. In private he would often go on about how China had destroyed the Democratic Party back in the early 1950s, and how the country might be engulfed in a resurgence of McCarthyism if Vietnam went under. Truman and Acheson had lost China, he would say, and it was like a mantra, and when they lost China they lost the Congress, because the Republicans in the Congress had finally found their issue. When he was alone in private moments with close friends and assistants like Bill Moyers and George Reedy, it would all pour out, his fear of losing what he prized most, the Great Society, which would be his signature accomplishment as president, losing it because he had been weak on Vietnam.

He had been there the last time it happened, he would say. Hell, he would add, Truman and Acheson had even been accused of appeasement, could you believe that? “You boys are young,” he told Moyers and some of the other young men, “and you don’t understand the connection of the Congress to Asia. They won’t give me the Great Society and Civil Rights if Ho is running through the streets of Saigon.” The Congress, he said, did not care about that kind of legislation. “They’ll push Vietnam up my ass all the time. Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam. Right up my ass.” He was, Moyers thought, far more than
Kennedy, caught in the recent past. He did not see the country as changing, especially as Kennedy had in the final few weeks of his life, which gave Kennedy a sense that peace might now be an issue. Oddly enough Johnson did not think the American people wanted the war, but he did not know how to get around the political system in Washington, which he thought did. He did not see the possibility that easing tensions in the Cold War at that moment might have new political benefits, or that the country might be changing, and a new generation, less a prisoner of the worst of the Cold War tensions, emerging.

What he did not see and could not see, in no small part because in the end there was a large part of him that was a bully, was that on the eve of battle with the forces of North Vietnam in 1965, America’s military and political strengths were on the surface, in some ways self-evidently awesome, while its weaknesses for a war like this were hidden away. Those weaknesses were basic; America’s inability to adjust to a distant war that was more political than military, its innate impatience, and the inability of its troops to become
Vietnamese
were far greater than any policy maker realized. Comparably the Vietnamese weaknesses were on the surface, and were self-evidently considerable—their lack of a great deal of modern military hardware—but their strengths were formidable, just beneath the surface. Those strengths were in their own way for this kind of war far greater than America’s, because in the end it was their country.

SERGEANT PAUL MCGEE
got out of the Army in June 1952, a little more than a year after he had held off the Chinese at McGee Hill on the south side of Chipyongni. McGee had wanted to stay in, because he liked the Army, and felt that he was a good and perhaps even a skillful soldier, but he was forced to take a hardship discharge to help out his family back in North Carolina. His father had started a small machine shop where he repaired parts for the machines used in the cotton mills, but then his father’s health had slipped badly, and Paul was needed at home. When he had fought in Korea he had never had any doubts that he was doing the right thing. He had volunteered for it, and even during the worst of the battle of Chipyongni he did not doubt the decisions that had brought him there. The ensuing half century did not change his mind. It had not been a popular war, he thought, and most of the country seemed to have forgotten about it long ago. But it mattered to him and some of his friends who had also fought there, and he thought that they had done the right thing, and it had been worth it for all the hardship and the loss of life. He thought the fact that the Communists had not tried anything like Korea again showed that America had been right in fighting there. He had missed being in the Army when he came back to Belmont, and on occasion in those years after Korea, the Army seemed to miss him; sometimes it sent recruiters down to see
how he was getting along, and to see if he had any second thoughts about coming back in. When they were trying to start the Special Forces at nearby Fort Bragg in the late 1950s, someone had looked at his records and decided he would make an ideal Green Beret, and they had put a good deal of pressure on him, but his family obligations outweighed his personal feelings that it was exactly the right kind of job for him. If he had gone back in he might have gotten a third war, he thought, the one in Vietnam, and he wondered if he would have made it back from Vietnam.

He did not know anyone who had gone to Korea who felt differently about that war. He was on occasion filled with sadness when he thought of the men he had known there who had not made it back. Sergeant Bill Kluttz, his buddy from that battle, had died recently, and they had stayed close to the end. McGee did not go to many of the veterans reunions anymore because the men were all getting older and fewer, and fewer of them were able to attend, and it made him sadder when he showed up and the ranks had thinned. He was still in touch with Cletis Inmon, who had been his runner up on McGee Hill, and they talked about once a month. They were able to communicate in those phone calls without actually saying things—he knew what Inmon was thinking when they were on the phone together, without many words passing between them—they had been there, had shared those dangers, and that set them apart from almost everyone else for the rest of their lives. They did not need words to bind them together; their deeds were the requisite bond. All in all, he thought, he was glad he had gone and fought there. It was a job to do, nothing more, nothing less, and when you thought about it, there had not been a lot of choice.