Pentagon Papers

by Neil Sheehan

  “16. (D-Day) Call for conference on Vietnam (and go to U.N.). State the limited objective: Not to overthrow the North Vietnam regime nor to destroy the country, but to stop D.R.V.-directed efforts in the South. Essential that it be made clear that attacks on the North will continue (i.e., no ceasefire) until (a) terrorism, armed attacks, and armed resistance to pacification efforts in the South stop, and (b) communications on the networks out of the North are conducted entirely in uncoded form.”

  The last paragraph was to provide a capsule definition of what the Administration meant when it later spoke publicly about “negotiations,” a definition the analyst describes as “tantamount to unconditional surrender” for the other side.

  The covering memorandum on the scenario pointed out that military action would not begin until after “favorable action” on the joint Congressional resolution. William Bundy drafted the resolution on May 25.

  Attached to the scenario were assessments of possible Soviet, Chinese and North Vietnamese reactions. These included a provision for reinforcing the South Vietnamese Army “by U.S. ground forces prepositioned in South Vietnam or on board ship nearby” if Hanoi reacted by intensifying Vietcong activity in the South.

  After meetings on May 24 and 25, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council—including Secretaries Rusk and McNamara, John A. McCone, Director of Central Intelligence, and McGeorge Bundy, Presidential assistant for national security—decided to recommend to the President only piecemeal elements of the scenario. Among these were the sending of the Canadian emissary to Hanoi and the move for a joint Congressional resolution.

  The documents do not provide a clear explanation for their decision, the analyst says, although an important factor seems to have been concern that “our limited objectives might have been obscured” if the Administration had begun a chain of actions to step up the war at this point.

  Whether political considerations in an election year also prompted the President to limit the proposed escalation is a question that is not addressed by the study here. The narrative does attribute such motives to Mr. Johnson’s similar hesitation to take major overt actions in the following month, June.

  In any case, the account explains, the urgency was taken out of the Laos crisis by a Polish diplomatic initiative on May 27 for a new Laos conference that would not include discussions of Vietnam, a major fear of the Administration. The President instructed his senior advisers to convene another strategy conference in Honolulu at the beginning of June “to review for . . . final approval a series of plans for effective action.”

  On his way to the conference, after attending the funeral of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in New Delhi, Secretary Rusk stopped off in Saigon for conversations with General Khanh and Ambassador Lodge.

  The Ambassador and Gen. William C. Westmoreland, who was replacing General Harkins as chief of the Military Assistance Command in Saigon, flew to Honolulu with Secretary Rusk for the strategy session at Admiral Felt’s headquarters there on June 1 and 2, 1964. They were joined by William Bundy, Mr. McNamara, General Taylor, Mr. McCone and Mr. Sullivan.

  While he had previously counseled patience, Mr. Lodge’s chief recommendation at Honolulu reflected his growing nervousness over the shakiness of the Saigon regime. He argued for bombing the North soon.

  The analyst writes: “In answer to Secretary Rusk’s query about South Vietnamese popular attitudes, which supported Hanoi’s revolutionary aims, the Ambassador stated his conviction that most support for the VC would fade as soon as some ‘counterterrorism measures’ were begun against the D.R.V.”—the Democratic Republic of (North) Vietnam.

  Admiral Felt’s record of the first day’s session quotes Mr. Lodge as predicting that “a selective bombing campaign against military targets in the North” would “bolster morale and give the population in the South a feeling of unity.”

  The Honolulu discussions concentrated on an air war, ranging over its entire implications, down to such details as the kind of antiaircraft guns North Vietnam had and how difficult these defenses might make attacks on particular targets. By now the Joint Chiefs had improved on Admiral Felt’s Operation Plan 37-64 to the point of producing the first version of a comprehensive list of 94 targets, from bridges to industries, that Mr. McNamara and President Johnson would use to select the actual sites to be struck when sustained air raids began in the coming year.

  Obtaining a Congressional resolution “prior to wider U.S. action in Southeast Asia” was a major topic. The analyst paraphrases and quotes from William Bundy’s memorandum of record on the second day’s talks to summarize the discussion concerning the resolution:

  “Ambassador Lodge questioned the need for it if we were to confine our actions to ‘tit-for-tat’ air attacks against North Vietnam. However, Secretaries McNamara and Rusk and C.I.A. Director McCone all argued in favor of the resolution. In support, McNamara pointed to the need to guarantee South Vietnam’s defense against retaliatory air attacks and against more drastic reactions by North Vietnam and Communist China. He added that it might be necessary, as the action unfolded . . . to deploy as many as seven divisions. Rusk noted that some of the military requirements might involve the calling up of reserves, always a touchy Congressional issue. He also stated that public opinion on our Southeast Asia policy was badly divided in the United States at the moment and that, therefore, the President needed an affirmation of support.

  “General Taylor noted that there was a danger of reasoning ourselves into inaction,” the memorandum goes on. “From a military point of view, he said the U.S. could function in Southeast Asia about as well as anywhere in the world except Cuba.”

  The upshot of the conference, however, was that major actions “should be delayed for some time yet,” the historian says. A separate briefing paper that William Bundy prepared for Secretary Rusk to use in communicating the conference’s findings to the President at a White House meeting late on the afternoon of June 3 counseled more time “to refine our plans and estimates.” Mr. Bundy emphasized the need for an “urgent” public relations campaign at home to “get at the basic doubts of the value of Southeast Asia and the importance of our stake there.”

  Secretary McNamara, General Taylor and Mr. McCone joined Secretary Rusk in making the June 3 report to the President on the Honolulu conference. A documentary record of this White House meeting is not available, but the study deduces the President’s reaction and decisions from the subsequent actions taken by his senior advisers.

  Where decisive military actions were concerned, “the President apparently recognized the need for more and better information, but did not convey a sense of urgency regarding its acquisition,” the analyst says. He notes that on the same day as the White House meeting, “possibly just following,” Secretary McNamara told the Joint Chiefs that he wanted to meet with them on June 8, five days later, “to discuss North Vietnamese targets and troop movement capabilities.”

  But one element of the May 23 scenario, the positioning of forces for later action, began to fall into place right after the White House meeting. The Pentagon study says that “noncommitting military actions . . . were given immediate approval.”

  On June 4 Mr. McNamara directed the Army to take “immediate action . . . to improve the effectiveness and readiness status of its matériel prestocked for possible use in Southeast Asia.”

  The Secretary’s directive specifically ordered the Army to augment stocks previously placed with Thailand’s agreement at Korat, a town south of the Laotian border, to support potential combat operations by a United States Army infantry brigade and to give “first priority at the Okinawa Army Forward Depot to stocking non-air-transportable equipment” that would be required by another Army infantry brigade flown to the island staging base on sudden notice.

  The President also “apparently encouraged” the intensified public-relations campaign recommended by William Bundy and the other Honolulu conference participants, the study asserts.

&nbs
p; “In June, State and Defense Department sources made repeated leaks to the press affirming U.S. intentions to support its allies and uphold its treaty commitments in Southeast Asia,” the analyst explains, citing several articles that month in The New York Times. The Administration also focused publicity through June and into July on its military pre-positioning moves. The augmentation of the Army war stocks at Korat in Thailand was given “extensive press coverage,” the account says, citing a dispatch in The Times on June 21, 1964.

  And what the analyst calls “the broad purpose” of these positioning moves—to serve as steps in the operation plans—was not explained to the public.

  The Administration did openly step up its air operations in Laos in mid-June, after the enemy provided it with a rationale of self-defense. On June 6 and 7 two Navy jets on low-altitude target reconnaissance flights were shot down by enemy ground fire. Washington immediately added armed escort jets to the reconnaissance flights and on June 9 the escort jets struck Pathet Lao gun positions and attacked a Pathet Lao headquarters.

  A similar escalation of the T-28 operations and the involvement of Thai pilots was unofficially acknowledged in Washington, although the responsibility for these operations was laid to the Laotian Government. And subsequent strikes by the American escort jets against enemy positions were not made public.

  At the end of June the Royal Laotian Air Force was secretly strengthened with more T-28’s, and American planes began conducting troop transport operations and night reconnaissance flights for a successful counteroffensive by the Laotian Army to protect the key position of Muong Soui.

  Firmness, but Restraint

  President Johnson was projecting an image of firmness but moderation, the study notes. In early June, he first requested and then rejected a draft from Mr. Rostow for a major policy speech on Southeast Asia that took an “aggressive approach,” and instead relied “on news conferences and speeches by other officials to state the official view,” the account continues. “In contrast to the Rostow approach, [the President’s] news conference on 23 June and Secretary Rusk’s speech at Williams College, 14 June, emphasized the U.S. determination to support its Southeast Asian allies, but avoided any direct challenge to Hanoi and Peking or any hint of intent to increase our military commitment.”

  A formal question the President submitted to the C.I.A. in June also indicated what was on his mind. “Would the rest of Southeast Asia necessarily fall if Laos and South Vietnam came under North Vietnamese control?” he asked. The agency’s reply on June 9 challenged the domino theory, widely believed in one form or another within the Administration.

  “With the possible exception of Cambodia,” the C.I.A. memorandum said, “it is likely that no nation in the area would quickly succumb to Communism as a result of the fall of Laos and South Vietnam. Furthermore, a continuation of the spread of Communism in the area would not be inexorable, and any spread which did occur would take time—time in which the total situation might change in any number of ways unfavorable to the Communist cause.”

  The C.I.A. analysis conceded that the loss of South Vietnam and Laos “would be profoundly damaging to the U.S. position in the Far East” and would raise the prestige of China “as a leader of world Communism” at the expense of a more moderate Soviet Union. But the analysis argued that so long as the United States could retain its island bases, such as those on Okinawa, Guam, the Philippines and Japan, it could wield enough military power in Asia to deter China and North Vietnam from overt military aggression against Southeast Asia in general.

  Even in the “worst case,” if South Vietnam and Laos were to fall through “a clear-cut Communist victory,” the United States would still retain some leverage to affect the final outcome in Southeast Asia, according to the analysis.

  It said that “the extent to which individual countries would move away from the U.S. towards the Communists would be significantly affected by the substance and manner of U.S. policy in the period following the loss of Laos and South Vietnam.”

  As in the case of the earlier C.I.A. analysis stating that the real roots of Vietcong strength lay in South Vietnam, the study shows that the President and his senior officials were not inclined to adjust policy along the lines of this analysis challenging the domino theory.

  Only the Joint Chiefs, Mr. Rostow and General Taylor appear to have accepted the domino theory in its literal sense—that all of the countries of Southeast Asia, from Cambodia to Malaysia, would tumble automatically into the Communist camp if the linchpin, South Vietnam, were knocked out, and that the United States position in the rest of the Far East, from Indonesia through the Philippines to Japan and Korea, would also be irrevocably harmed.

  Yet the President and most of his closest civilian advisers—Mr. Rusk, Mr. McNamara and McGeorge Bundy—seem to have regarded the struggle over South Vietnam in more or less these terms. [See Document #63.]

  In 1964, the Administration also feared an outbreak of other “wars of national liberation” in the Asian, African and Latin American countries, and, Mr. McNamara wrote in his March 16 memorandum to the President, “the South Vietnam conflict is regarded as a test case.”

  The struggle in South Vietnam was likewise bound up with the idea of “containing China,” whose potential shadow over Southeast Asia was viewed as a palpable threat by Mr. Rusk because of his World War II experience in Asia and the victory of Mao Tse-tung’s revolution in China.

  But behind these foreign-policy axioms about domino effects, wars of liberation and the containment of China, the study reveals a deeper perception among the President and his aides that the United States was now the most powerful nation in the world and that the outcome in South Vietnam would demonstrate the will and the ability of the United States to have its way in world affairs.

  The study conveys an impression that the war was thus considered less important for what it meant to the South Vietnamese people than for what it meant to the position of the United States in the world.

  Mr. McNaughton would later capsulize this perception in a memorandum to Mr. McNamara seeking to apportion American aims in South Vietnam:

  “70 pct.—To avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor).

  “20 pct.—To keep SVN (and then adjacent) territory from Chinese hands.

  “10 pct.—To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life.

  “Also—To emerge from crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used.

  “NOT—To ‘help a friend,’ although it would be hard to stay in if asked out.”

  The words in parentheses are Mr. McNaughton’s.

  Thus, he had reasoned in another memorandum, even if bombing North Vietnam did not force Hanoi to call off the Vietcong, “it would demonstrate that U.S. was a ‘good doctor’ willing to keep promises, be tough, take risks, get bloodied and hurt the enemy badly.”

  And while the study shows doubt and worry in the Administration, it also reveals an underlying confidence among the decision makers at the top, whose attitude would count, that if this mightiest nation resolved to use its vast power, the other side would buckle.

  Mr. Rostow would articulate this confidence in a memorandum to Secretary Rusk that fall: “I know well the anxieties and complications on our side of the line. But there may be a tendency to underestimate both the anxieties and complications on the other side and also to underestimate that limited but real margin of influence on the outcome that flows from the simple fact that we are the greatest power in the world—if we behave like it.”

  Accordingly, in mid-June, the Administration carried out another element of the May 23 scenario, the element that had first been formulated by Ambassador Lodge as his “carrot and stick.” On June 18, at the Administration’s request, Mr. Seaborn, the new Canadian representative on the International Control Commission, paid the first of his two secret calls on Premier Dong in Hanoi.

  Washington sought to convey to North Vietnam through Mr. Seaborn the more
precise and threatening meaning of the preparatory military deployments to Southeast Asia that it was publicizing on a vaguer level in public. Back in May, Mr. Lodge had urged an unacknowledged air strike on some target in the North “as a prelude to his [Mr. Seaborn’s] arrival” if the Vietcong had recently committed some terrorist act “of the proper magnitude” in the South, but the President apparently did not see fit to act on the suggestion by June.

  The analyst says Mr. Seaborn stressed to Premier Dong that while the United States’ ambition in Southeast Asia was limited and its intentions “essentially peaceful,” its patience was not limitless. The United States was fully aware of the degree to which Hanoi controlled the Vietcong, Mr. Seaborn said, and “in the event of escalation the greatest devastation would of course result for the D.R.V. itself.”

  The North Vietnamese Premier, the study relates, “fully understood the seriousness and import of the warning conveyed by Seaborn.” Whether Mr. Seaborn also proffered the “carrot” of food and other economic aid is not reported.

  At the June 3 meeting at the White House, the President had also apparently approved continued work for the Congressional resolution, the historian says, because planning for it continued apace. “Its intended purpose,” the historian comments, “was to dramatize and make clear to other nations the firm resolve of the United States Government in an election year to support the President in taking whatever action was necessary to resist Communist aggression in Southeast Asia.”

  By June 10, there was “firm support” from most of the foreign-policy-making machinery of the Government for obtaining the resolution, although the account notes that at an interagency meeting that day “five basic ‘disagreeable questions’ were identified for which the Administration would have to provide convincing answers to assure public support.