The March of Folly (57 page)

While giving one signal to voters, Johnson had to give another of fiercer intent to Hanoi in the hope of holding back a challenge, at least until after the election. Naval units in the Gulf of Tonkin, including the destroyer
Maddox
, soon so notorious, went beyond intelligence gathering to “destructive” action against the coast, which was supposed to convey a message to Hanoi to “desist from aggressive policies.” The real message, which by now virtually everyone believed necessary, was to be American bombing.

Johnson, Rusk, McNamara and General Taylor flew to Honolulu in June for a meeting with Ambassador Lodge and CINCPAC to consider a program of American air action and the probable next
step of ground combat. The rationale for the bombing was two-thirds political: to bolster the sinking morale in South Vietnam, strongly urged by Lodge, and to break the will to fight of the North Vietnamese and cause them to cease supporting the Viet-Cong insurgency and ultimately to negotiate. The military aim was to stop infiltration and supply. Recommendations and caveats were tossed and turned and argued, for the planners were not eager for belligerency in a civil conflict in Asia, even while pretending it was “external aggression.” The underlying need, given the rapid failing of the South, was to redress the military balance so that the United States should not negotiate from weakness. Until that could be achieved, any move toward negotiations “would have been an admission that the game was up.”

As it was bound to, the uncomfortable question of nuclear weapons came up without arousing anyone’s advocacy. The only case in which their use was even theoretically contemplated was against the vast peril, as it was seen, of the Communist Chinese if they should be provoked into entering the war. Secretary Rusk, whose adrenaline always rose on that subject, believed that in view of China’s enormous population, “we could not allow ourselves to be bled white fighting them with conventional weapons.” This meant that if escalation brought about a major Chinese attack, “it would also involve use of nuclear arms.” He was nevertheless aware that Asian leaders opposed it, seeing in it an element of racial discrimination, “something we would do to Asians but not to Westerners.” Possible circumstances of tactical use were briefly discussed. General Earle Wheeler, new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was unenthusiastic; Secretary McNamara said he “could not imagine a case where they would be considered,” and the matter was dropped.

Operational plans for the bombing were drawn, but the order for action postponed, for while the election still lay ahead, Johnson’s peace image had to be protected. The graver question of ground combat was left in abeyance until a dependable government could be installed in the political shambles of Saigon. Further, as General Taylor pointed out, the American public would have to be educated to appreciate the United States interest in Southeast Asia. Secretary McNamara, with his usual precision, thought this “would require at least thirty days,” as if it were a matter of selling the public a new model automobile.

Johnson was intensely nervous about expanding American belligerency for fear of precipitating intervention by the Chinese. Nevertheless, if escalation was inevitable, he wanted a Congressional mandate. At Honolulu the text of a draft resolution was read and discussed, and on his return home the supreme manipulator prepared to obtain it.

The Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 7 August 1964 has been so exhaustively examined that it can afford to rest under more cursory treatment here. Its importance was that it gave the President the mandate he was seeking and left Congress suddenly staring helplessly and to some extent resentfully at its empty hands. Not a Fort Sumter or a Pearl Harbor, Tonkin Gulf was no less significant; in a cause of uncertain national interest, it was a blank check for Executive war.

The cause was the claim of the destroyer
Maddox
and other naval units that they had been fired upon at night by North Vietnamese torpedo patrol boats outside the three-mile limit recognized by the United States. Hanoi claimed sovereignty up to a twelve-mile limit. A second clash followed the next day under obscure conditions never fully clarified and subsequently, during re-investigation in 1967, thought to have been imagined or invented.

White House telecommunications to Saigon crackled with crisis. Johnson promptly asked for a Congressional Resolution authorizing “all necessary measures to repel armed attack,” and Senator J. William Fulbright, as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, undertook to guide it through the Senate. While aware that he was not altogether upholding the constitutional authority of Congress, Fulbright believed in Johnson’s earnest assurances of having no wish to widen the war and thought the Resolution would help the President withstand Goldwater’s calls for an air offensive and also help the Democratic Party by showing it to be tough against Communists.

The personal ambition that so often shapes statecraft has also been cited in the suggestion that Fulbright had hopes of replacing Rusk as Secretary of State after the election, which depended on retaining Johnson’s goodwill. Whether true or not, Fulbright was correct in supposing that one purpose of the Resolution was to win over the right by a show of force.

Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin tried to limit the Resolution by an amendment against “any extension of the present conflict,” but this was quashed by Fulbright, who said that since the President had no such intentions, the amendment was not needed. Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, working the famous eyebrows, hinted at the lurking uneasiness among some Senators about the whole involvement when he asked, “Is there any reasonable or honorable way we can extricate ourselves without losing our face and probably our pants?” The most outspoken opponent was, as always, Senator Wayne Morse, who denounced the Resolution as a “pre-dated declaration of war,” and, having been tipped off by a telephone call from a Pentagon officer, questioned
McNamara closely about suspicious naval actions in the Gulf. McNamara firmly denied any “connection with or knowledge of” any hostile actions. Morse was often right but fulminated so regularly against so many iniquities that he was discounted.

The Senate, a third of whom were also up for re-election, did not wish to embarrass the President two months before the national vote or show themselves any less protective of American lives. After a one-day hearing, the Resolution authorizing “all necessary measures” was adopted by the Foreign Relations Committee by a vote of 14 to 1 and subsequently approved by both Houses. It justified the grant of war powers on the rather spongy ground that the United States regards as “vital to its international interests and to world peace, the maintenance of international peace and security.” Neither the prose nor the sense carried much conviction. By its ready acquiescence, the Senate, once so jealous of its constitutional prerogative to declare war, had signed it over to the Executive. Meanwhile, with evidence accumulating of confusion by radar and sonar technicians in the second clash, Johnson said privately, “Well, those dumb stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.” So much for casus belli.

Alternatives for the United States were offered at this time by U Thant’s proposal to reconvene the Geneva Conference and by a second summons from de Gaulle for a negotiated peace. De Gaulle proposed settlement by a conference of the United States, France, Soviet Russia and China to be followed by evacuation of the entire Indochina peninsula by all foreign forces and by a big powers guarantee of the neutrality of Laos, Cambodia and the two Vietnams. It was a feasible—and probably at that time achievable—alternative, except that it would not have ensured a non-Communist South Vietnam, and for that reason it was ignored by the United States.

An American emissary, Under-Secretary of State George Ball, had been sent a few weeks previously to explain to de Gaulle that any talk of negotiations could demoralize the South in its current fragile condition, even lead to its collapse, and that the United States “did not believe in negotiating until our position on the battlefield was so strong that our adversaries might make the requisite concessions.” De Gaulle rejected this position outright. The same illusions, he told Ball, had drawn France into such trouble; Vietnam was a “hopeless place to fight”; a “rotten country,” where the United States could not win for all its great resources. Not force but negotiation was the only way.

Although he might have gloated to see the United States discomfited as France had been, de Gaulle let a larger consideration govern him.
The reason why he and other Europeans in many subsequent efforts tried so earnestly to disengage the United States from Vietnam was fear of American attention and resources being diverted from Europe to an Asian backwater.

U Thant had meanwhile ascertained through Russian channels that Hanoi was interested in talks with the Americans, and he so informed the United States Ambassador to the UN, Adlai Stevenson. U Thant proposed a cease-fire across both Vietnam and Laos and offered to let the United States write the terms as it saw fit and to announce them unchanged. On conveying this message, Stevenson met only stalling in Washington, and after the election a negative response on the ground that the United States had learned through other channels that Hanoi was not really interested. Further, Rusk said, the United States would not send a representative to Rangoon, where U Thant had arranged for the talks to take place, because any hint of such a move would cause panic in Saigon—or, what the United States really feared and did not say, renewed feelers toward neutralism.

Not concealing his displeasure at this rejection, U Thant pointedly told a press conference in February that further bloodshed in Southeast Asia was unnecessary and that only negotiation could “enable the United States to withdraw gracefully from that part of the world.” By that time the American bombing campaign called ROLLING THUNDER had begun and under the crashing and killing of American air raids the opportunity for graceful exit would never come again.

Johnson had already let pass a greater opportunity for disengagement—his own election. He defeated Goldwater by the largest popular majority in American history and gained unassailable majorities in Congress of 68–32 in the Senate and 294–130 in the House. The vote was largely owed to the split among Republicans between the Rockefeller moderates and the Goldwater extremists and to the widespread fear of Goldwater’s warlike intentions, and the result put Johnson in a position to do anything he wanted. His heart was in the welfare programs and civil rights legislation that were to create the Great Society, free of poverty and oppression. He wanted to go down in history as the great benefactor, greater than FDR, equal to Lincoln. Failure to seize his chance at this moment to extricate his Administration from an unpromising foreign entanglement was the irreparable folly, though not his alone. His chief advisers in government believed with him that they would take greater punishment from the right by withdrawing than
from the left by pursuing the fight. Confident in his own power, Johnson believed he could achieve both his aims, domestic and foreign, at once.

Reports from Saigon told of progressive crumbling, riots, corruption, anti-American sentiment, neutralist movement by the Buddhists. “I feel,” declared one American official in Saigon, “as though I were on the deck of the
Titanic.”
These signals did not suggest to Washington a useless effort and a time to cut losses, but rather a need for greater effort to redress the balance and gain the advantage. Officials, civilian and military, agreed on the necessity of intervention in the form of air war to convince the North to give up its attempted conquest. That the United States could accomplish its aim by superior might no one doubted.

Like Kennedy, Johnson believed that to lose South Vietnam would be to lose the White House. It would mean a destructive debate, he was later to say, that would “shatter my Presidency, kill my Administration, and damage our democracy.” The loss of China, which had led to the rise of Joe McCarthy, was “chickenshit compared with what might happen if we lost Vietnam.” Robert Kennedy would be out in front telling everyone that “I was a coward, an unmanly man, a man without a spine.” Worse, as soon as United States weakness was perceived by Moscow and Peking, they would move to “expand their control over the vacuum of power we would leave behind us … and so would begin World War III.” He was as sure of this “as nearly as anyone can be certain of anything.” No one is so sure of his premises as the man who knows too little.

A feasible alternative, on the strength of the electoral mandate, might have been to pursue U Thant’s overtures to Hanoi and even use his influence to install a government in Saigon (as Kennedy had suggested) that would invite the United States to depart, leaving Vietnam to work out its own settlement. Since this would inevitably lead to a Communist take-over, it was a course the United States refused to contemplate, although it would have cast off a devouring incubus.

A good look would have revealed that the raison d’être for American intervention had slipped considerably. When the CIA was asked by the President for its estimate of the crucial question whether, if Laos and South Vietnam fell to Communist control, all Southeast Asia would necessarily follow, the answer was in the negative; that except for Cambodia, “It is likely that no other nation in the area would quickly succumb to Communism as a result of the fall of Laos and Vietnam.” The spread of Communism in Southeast Asia “would not be inexorable”
and America’s island bases in the Pacific “would still enable us to employ enough military power in the area to deter Hanoi and Peking.” We would not, after all, have to pull back to San Francisco.

Another advice came from the inter-agency Working Group on Vietnam, composed of representatives from State, Defense, Joint Chiefs and CIA, who bravely undertook after the election in November to “consider realistically what our overall objectives and stakes are.” This unprecedented endeavor led the group, after long and careful review, to deliver a serious warning: that the United States could not guarantee a non-Communist South Vietnam “short of committing ourselves to whatever degree of military action would be required to defeat North Vietnam and possibly Communist China.” Such action could lead to a major conflict and “possibly even the use of nuclear weapons at some point.”