The March of Folly (61 page)

As an alternative to bombing, JASON recommended construction of an “anti-infiltration” barrier across Vietnam and Laos for a distance of about 160 miles. Fully presented in the study with detailed technical plans, it was to consist of minefields, walls, ditches and strong points strung with electronic barbed wire and flanked by defoliated strips on either side, at an estimated cost of $800 million. Whether it might have worked cannot be known. Ridiculed by Air Force commanders at CINCPAC who could not allow an alternative to their function, it was never tried.

Like every other “dissonant” advice, JASON bumped against a stone wall. Strategy remained unchanged because the Air Force, in concern for its own future role, could not admit that air power could be ineffective. CINCPAC continued to raise the punitive level of the bombing on a basis of calculated pain according to a calculated “stress theory” of human behavior: Hanoi should respond to “stress” by ceasing the actions that produced it. “We anticipated that they would respond like reasonable people,” an official of the Defense Department said afterward. By the end of 1966 the bombs dropped reached an annual rate of 500,000 tons, higher than the rate used against Japan in World War II. Instead of rationally, Hanoi reacted humanly in anger and defiance, as the British had done under the German blitz, as no
doubt Americans would have done if bombed. Instead of bringing the enemy chastened to the negotiating table, the air offensive made them more adamant: they now insisted on cessation of bombing as a fixed precondition of negotiation.

Overtures continued through Chester Ronning of Canada and other intermediaries, because by now all parties would have welcomed an end to the war, each on its own terms, which remained irreconcilable. When Washington learned from visitors to Hanoi of finding readiness to talk if the bombing was stopped, the conclusion derived by the United States was that the bombing was hurting and should therefore be augmented to achieve the desired result. The result of course was a hardening of Hanoi’s intransigence.

JASON penetrated one significant spot in the stone wall. It confirmed doubts beginning to concern Secretary McNamara. His own Systems Analysis at the Department of Defense concluded that military benefits were not worth the economic cost. Though he gave no public indication, he seemed in private remarks to show a dawning recognition of futility. Believing, as he wrote to the President, that the prognosis for a “satisfactory solution” was not good, he declared in favor of the anti-infiltration barrier as a substitute for bombing and for further increase of ground forces. He failed to carry his point.

Elsewhere in government the sense of futility had spread, causing departures. Few resigned; most were eased out by skillful maneuvers of the President, who whatever his own misgivings did not welcome those of others, outspoken or even unspoken. Hilsman was eased out of the State Department in 1964, Forrestal from the White House staff in 1965, McGeorge Bundy from the NSC early in 1966, followed by the voluntary departures of George Ball and Bill Moyers in September and December 1966. Without exception, all went quietly, silent Laocoons who did not voice, much less shout, their warnings or disagreements at the time.

Silent departure of its members is an important property of government. To speak out even after leaving is to go into the wilderness; by exhibiting disloyalty to bar return within the circle. The same reasons account for reluctance to resign. The official can always convince himself that he can exercise more restraining influence inside, and he then remains acquiescent lest his connection with power be terminated. The effect of the American Presidency with its power of appointment in the Executive branch is overbearing. Advisers find it hard to say no to the President or to dispute policy because they know that their status, their invitation to the next White House meeting, depends on staying in line. If they are Cabinet officers, they have in the American
system no parliamentary seat to return to from which they may retain a voice in government.

Rusk remained the rock. If he had doubts, he was able as the classic civil servant to convince himself that American policy was right and to reiterate that regardless of all other considerations the original goal of preserving a non-Communist South Vietnam must be maintained. In tribute to his steadfastness, someone in his own department scrawled inside a telephone booth, “Dean Rusk is a recorded announcement.” Replacing Bundy, Walt Rostow, who had been predicting the imminent collapse of Viet-Cong insurgency since 1965, remained an enthusiast. At the top, Johnson was less so. Asked once how long the war might last, he answered, “Who knows how long, how much? The important thing is, are we right or wrong?” To pursue the killing and devastation of war with that question in doubt was unwise in relation to the public, to his own presidency and to history.

Through the draft, required by repeated escalations, the war was now affecting the general public directly. In mid-1966, the Pentagon announced that the troop level in Vietnam would reach 375,000 by the end of the year, with 50,000 more to follow in the next six months. By mid-1967, the level reached 463,000, with Westmoreland asking for 70,000 more for a total over 525,000 as a “minimum essential force” and Johnson announcing that the Commander’s needs and requests “will be supplied.” To the young answerable to the draft, this war made no appeal, especially not to those who saw it as mean and inglorious. Everyone who could took advantage of the draft extension allowed during the pursuit of higher education, while the less advantaged classes entered uniform. The inequitable draft, first sin of the Vietnam war on the home front, and intended to reduce cause for disaffection in the social sector, dug a cleavage in American society in addition to the cleavage in opinion.

Public protest meetings gathered members, campus demonstrations and anti-war marches swelled in stridency and violence, with waving of Hanoi’s flag and slogans shouted in favor of Ho Chi Minh. A huge rally clashed against soldiers in battle dress on the steps of the Pentagon with protesters arrested and women beaten. Because protest was associated in the public mind with drugs and long hair and the counterculture of the decade, it may have slowed rather than stimulated general dissent. By the public on the whole, anti-war demonstrations were seen, according to a poll, as “encouraging the Communists to fight all the harder.” Draft evasion and flag-burning outraged the patriots. Nevertheless, a sense of discomfort, animated by a perception of the war as
cruel and immoral, was spreading. Bombing of a small rural Asian country, Communist or not, could not be seen as imperative necessity. Eyewitness reports to the
New York Times
by Harrison Salisbury of hits on the civilian areas of Hanoi—first denied, then admitted by the Air Force—raised an uproar. Johnson’s rating in the polls for handling of the war slid over into the negative and would never again regain a majority of support. Accounts of prisoners casually tossed from helicopters and other incidents of callous brutality showed Americans that their country too could be guilty of atrocity. Opprobrium abroad, the mistrust of our closest allies, Britain, Canada and France, made themselves felt.

War is supposed to unite a people, but a war that excites disapproval, like that in the Philippines in 1900 or Britain’s Boer War, divides a country more deeply than its normal divisions. As the New Left and other radicals became more offensive and unkempt, they deepened the rift with the respectable middle class and excited the hatred and reciprocal violence of the unions and hard hats. How long could we stand the “spiritual confusion,” asked Reischauer in 1967 in a book called
Beyond Vietnam
. For some, perception of their country turned negative. The National Council of Churches claimed that America “was seen as a predominantly white nation using our overwhelming strength to kill more Asians.” Martin Luther King, Jr., said he could no longer reprove acts of violence by his own people without speaking out against “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.”

His was a terrible recognition. To see ourselves newly and suddenly as the “bad guys” in the world’s polarity and to know the agent was “my own government” was a development with serious consequences. Distrust for and even disgust with government were the most serious, beginning with alienation from the vote. “You voted in ’64 and got Johnson—why bother?” read a banner at an anti-war rally in New York. Vice-President Humphrey was unmercifully heckled at Stanford University. “The deterioration of every government,” Montesquieu wrote in the 18th century in his
Spirit of the Laws
, “begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.”

The Administration’s war reports eroded its credibility at home, for which much of the blame rested with the military. Indoctrinated in deception for purposes of misleading the enemy, the military misleads from habit. Each of the services and major commands manipulated the news in the interests of “national security,” or to make itself look good, or to win a round in the ongoing interservice contest, or to cover up mistakes or glamorize a commander. With an angry press
eager to expose, the public was not left in the usual ignorance of the often shabby deceptions lying beneath the hocus-pocus of communiqués.

Dissent spread to the establishment. Walter Lippmann spent an evening in 1966 persuading Katharine Graham, publisher of the
Washington Post
, hitherto firmly among the hawks, that “decent people could no longer support the war.” The alarming cost, reaching into the billions, mortgaging the future to deficit spending, causing inflation and unfavorable balance of payments, worried many in the business world. Some businessmen formed opposition groups, small in relation to the business community as a whole, but encouraged when the imposing figure of Marriner Eccles, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, spoke publicly for a group called Negotiation Now, organized by Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. An occasional ex-government voice broke silence. James Thomson, one of the internal dissenters who had left the Far East staff of the State Department in 1966, stated in a letter to the
New York Times
that there had always been “constructive alternatives” and, in an echo of Burke, that the United States as the greatest power on earth had “the power to lose face, the power to admit error, and the power to act with magnanimity.”

General Ridgway’s dislike of the war was well known. Reaching the independence of retirement, another of his stature, General David M. Shoup, recently retired Commandant of the Marine Corps and a hero of the Pacific war, joined him. The government’s contention that Vietnam was “vital” to United States interests was, he said, “poppycock”; the whole of Southeast Asia was not “worth a single American life.… Why can’t we let people actually determine their own lives?” Senator Robert Kennedy, the President’s nemesis, or so perceived, called for a halt to the bombing as futile and in another speech infuriating to the White House proposed that the NLF should have a voice in any negotiations. A milestone was passed when a single Senator, Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, joined the lonely pair of Morse and Gruening to vote against a new appropriation bill of $12 billion for the war. In the House, Representative George Brown of California offered a Resolution to be added to this bill stating that it be the “sense of the Congress” that none of the funds authorized should be used for “military operations in or over North Vietnam.” Though only a Resolution and not obligatory upon the Executive, it was nevertheless overwhelmingly defeated by 372 to 18.

Despite twenty years of pronouncements ever since Truman about the “vital” interest of Southeast Asia to the United States and the dire
necessity of stopping Communism, the purpose of the war to the general public remained unclear. In May 1967, when a Gallup poll asked respondents if they knew why the United States was fighting in Vietnam, 48 percent answered yes and 48 percent answered no. The absent Declaration of War might have made a difference.

The purpose of the war was not gain or national defense. It would have been a simpler matter had it been either, for it is easier to finish a war by conquest of territory or by destruction of the enemy’s forces and resources than it is to establish a principle by superior force and call it victory. America’s purpose was to demonstrate her intent and her capacity to stop Communism in a framework of preserving an artificially created, inadequately motivated and not very viable state. The nature of the society we were upholding was an inherent flaw in the case, and despite all the efforts at “nation-building,” it did not essentially change.

How then to terminate the squandering of American power in this unpromising, unprofitable, potentially dangerous conflict? Confident that North Vietnam must be hurting and could be brought to bend to the American purpose, the Administration attempted repeatedly in 1966–67 to bring Hanoi to the point of talks, always on American terms. The terms were a seemingly open-minded “unconditional,” ignoring the fact that Hanoi insisted on a condition: cessation of the bombing. United States overtures carried various pledges to end the bombing, to stop the increase of United States forces “as soon as possible and not later than six months” after North Vietnam pulled back its forces from the South and ceased the use of violence. All the offers depended on reciprocal reduction of combat by Hanoi. Hanoi offered no reciprocity unless the bombing stopped first.

Foreign powers added their efforts. Pope Paul appealed to both sides for an armistice leading to negotiations. U Thant, asked by Washington to exercise his good offices, urged the United States and both Vietnams to meet on British territory for negotiations. To all the overtures from whatever quarter, through public statements by Ho Chi Minh and other officials and interviews with visiting journalists, Hanoi reiterated its insistence as prerequisite to negotiation upon an “unconditional” end to the bombing, cessation of all other acts of war by the United States, withdrawal of United States forces and acceptance of the Four Points. While modification of the other conditions was made from time to time, the demand to cease bombing was basic and never varied.