by Neil Sheehan
“It is important to differentiate the consensus of the principals at this September meeting,” the study says, “from the views which they had urged on the President in the preceding spring. In the spring the use of force had been clearly contingent on a major reversal—principally in Laos—and had been advanced with the apparent assumption that military actions hopefully would not be required. Now, however, their views were advanced with a sense that such actions were inevitable.”
The administration consensus on bombing came at the height of the Presidential election contest between President Johnson and Senator Barry Goldwater, whose advocacy of full-scale air attacks on North Vietnam had become a major issue. That such a consensus had been reached as early as September is a major disclosure of the Pentagon study.
The consensus was reflected, the analysis says, in the final paragraph of a formal national security action memorandum issued by the President three days later, on Sept. 10. This paragraph spoke of “larger decisions” that might be “required at any time.”
The last round of detailed planning of various political and military strategies for a bombing campaign began “in earnest,” the study says, on Nov. 3, 1964, the day that Mr. Johnson was elected President in his own right.
Less than 100 days later, on Feb. 8, 1965, he ordered new reprisal strikes against the North. Then, on Feb. 13, the President gave the order for the sustained bombing of North Vietnam, code-named Rolling Thunder.
This period of evolving decision to attack North Vietnam, openly and directly, is shown in the Pentagon papers to be the second major phase of President Johnson’s defense of South Vietnam. The same period forms the second phase of the presentation of those papers by The New York Times.
In its glimpses into Lyndon B. Johnson’s personal thoughts and motivations between the fateful September meeting and his decision to embark on an air war, the Pentagon study shows a President moving and being moved toward war, but reluctant and hesitant to act until the end.
But, the analyst explains, “from the September meeting forward, there was little basic disagreement among the principals [the term the study uses for the senior policy makers] on the need for military operations against the North. What prevented action for the time being was a set of tactical considerations.”
The first tactical consideration, the analyst says, was that “the President was in the midst of an election campaign in which he was presenting himself as the candidate of reason and restraint as opposed to the quixotic Barry Goldwater,” who was publicly advocating full-scale bombing of North Vietnam. The historian also mentions other “temporary reasons of tactics”:
• The “shakiness” of the Saigon Government.
• A wish to hold the line militarily and diplomatically in Laos.
• The “need to design whatever actions were taken so as to achieve maximum public and Congressional support . . .”
• The “implicit belief that overt actions at this time might bring pressure for premature negotiations—that is negotiations before the D.R.V. [Democratic Republic of (North) Vietnam] was hurting.”
Assistant Secretary of Defense John T. McNaughton, the head of the Pentagon’s Office of International Security Affairs, summed up these tactical considerations in the final paragraph of a Sept. 3 memorandum to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, in preparation for the crucial White House strategy session four days later:
“Special considerations during the next two months. The relevant audiences of U.S. actions are the Communists (who must feel strong pressures), the South Vietnamese (whose morale must be buoyed), our allies (who must trust us as ‘underwriters’), and the U.S. public (which must support our risk-taking with U.S. lives and prestige). During the next two months, because of the lack of ‘rebuttal time’ before election to justify particular actions which may be distorted to the U.S. public, we must act with special care—signaling to the D.R.V. that initiatives are being taken, to the G.V.N. [Government of (South) Vietnam] that we are behaving energetically despite the restraints of our political season, and to the U.S. public that we are behaving with good purpose and restraint.” The words in parentheses are Mr. McNaughton’s.
“Not to Enlarge the War”
The President was already communicating this sense of restraint to the voters. On the night of Aug. 29, in an address to a crowd at an outdoor barbecue a few miles from his ranch in Texas, when two tons of beef were served in a belated celebration of his 56th birthday, he made a statement that he was to repeat in numerous election speeches.
“I have had advice to load our planes with bombs,” the President said, “and to drop them on certain areas that I think would enlarge the war and escalate the war, and result in our committing a good many American boys to fighting a war that I think ought to be fought by the boys of Asia to help protect their own land.”
The policy of the United States toward Vietnam, the President explained later in his speech, was “to furnish advice, give counsel, express good judgment, give them trained counselors, and help them with equipment to help themselves.”
“We are doing that,” he said. “We have lost less than 200 men in the last several years, but to each one of those 200 men—and we lost about that many in Texas on accidents on the Fourth of July—to each of those 200 men who have given their life to preserve freedom, it is a war and a big war and we recognize it.
“But we think it is better to lose 200 than to lose 200,000. For that reason we have tried very carefully to restrain ourselves and not to enlarge the war.”
Eleven days earlier, on Aug. 18, Ambassador Maxwell D. Taylor had cabled from Saigon that he agreed with an “assumption” now held in the Administration in Washington that the Vietcong guerrillas—the VC, as they were usually termed—could not be defeated and the Saigon Government preserved by a counterguerrilla war confined to South Vietnam itself.
“Something must be added in the coming months,” the Ambassador said in his message. What General Taylor proposed to add was “a carefully orchestrated bombing attack on NVN [North Vietnam], directed primarily at infiltration and other military targets” with “Jan. 1, 1965, as a target D-Day.”
The bombing should be undertaken under either of two courses of action, the Ambassador said. The first course would entail using the promise of the air attacks as an inducement to persuade the regime of Gen. Nguyen Khanh to achieve some political stability and get on seriously with the pacification program. Under the second course, the United States would bomb the North, regardless of whatever progress General Khanh made, to prevent “a collapse of national morale” in Saigon.
For the Ambassador cautioned that “it is far from clear at the present moment that the Khanh Government can last until Jan. 1, 1965.” The Ambassador said that before bombing the North the United States would also have to send Army Hawk antiaircraft missile units to the Saigon and Danang areas to protect the airfields there against retaliatory Communist air attacks—assumed possible from China or North Vietnam—and to land a force of American Marines at Danang to protect the air base there against possible ground assaults.
His cable was designated a joint United States mission message, meaning that Deputy Ambassador U. Alexis Johnson and Gen. William C. Westmoreland, chief of the United States Military Assistance Command, had concurred with the Ambassador’s views.
On Aug. 26, three days before the President’s speech at the barbecue in Stonewall, Tex., the Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted a memorandum to Secretary McNamara agreeing with Ambassador Taylor. They said that bombing under his second criterion, to stave off a breakdown in Saigon, was “more in accord with the current situation” in their view and added that an air war against the North was now “essential to prevent a complete collapse of the U.S. position in Southeast Asia.”
The Joint Chiefs’ memorandum was the first appearance, the account says, of a “provocation strategy” that was to be discussed at the Sept. 7 White House session—in the words of the narrative, “deliberate
attempts to provoke the D.R.V. into taking actions which could then be answered by a systematic U.S. air campaign.”
The memorandum itself is not this explicit, although it does seem to suggest attempting to repeat the Tonkin Gulf clashes as a pretext for escalation.
In a Sept. 3 memorandum to Secretary McNamara, however, Mr. McNaughton was specific. He outlined several means of provocation that could culminate in a sustained air war. In the meantime, they could be employed to conduct reprisal air strikes that would help hold the situation in South Vietnam together and, the analyst notes, permit postponing “probably until November or December any decision as to serious escalation.”
This serious escalation Mr. McNaughton defined as “a crescendo of GVN-U.S. military actions against the D.R.V.,” such as mining harbors and gradually escalating air raids.
He described his provocation program to Mr. McNamara as “an orchestration of three classes of actions, all designed to meet these five desiderata—(1) From the U.S., GVN and hopefully allied points of view they should be legitimate things to do under the circumstances, (2) they should cause apprehension, ideally increasing apprehension, in the D.R.V., (3) they should be likely at some point to provoke a military D.R.V. response, (4) the provoked response should be likely to provide good grounds for us to escalate if we wished, and (5) the timing and crescendo should be under our control, with the scenario capable of being turned off at any time.” [See Document #79.]
The classes of actions were:
• South Vietnamese air strikes at enemy infiltration routes through southeastern Laos that would “begin in Laos near the South Vietnamese border and slowly ‘march’ up the trails and eventually across the North Vietnamese border.”
• A resumption of the covert coastal raids on North Vietnam under Operation Plan 34A, which President Johnson had temporarily suspended since the Tonkin Gulf incident. The South Vietnamese Government would announce them publicly, declaring them “fully justified as necessary to assist in interdiction of infiltration by sea.”
• A resumption of patrols in the Gulf of Tonkin by United States destroyers, code-named De Soto patrols, although these would still be physically “disassociated” from the 34A attacks. Mr. McNaughton noted that “the U.S. public is sympathetic to reasonable insistence on the right of the U.S. Navy to ply international waters.”
But a majority of the officials at the Sept. 7 White House strategy meeting disagreed. They decided for the present against adopting a provocation strategy for reprisal air attacks, precisely because the Khanh regime was so weak and vulnerable and the morale-lifting benefits of such strikes might be offset by possible Communist retaliation, the analyst says. The meeting was attended by the President; Secretary of State Dean Rusk; Secretary McNamara; Gen. Earle G. Wheeler, the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs; Ambassador Taylor, who had flown in from Saigon, and John A. McCone, the Director of Central Intelligence.
“We believe such deliberately provocative elements should not be added in the immediate future while the GVN is still struggling to its feet,” Assistant Secretary of State William P. Bundy wrote in a memorandum recording the consensus recommendations formally made to the President after the meeting.
“By early October, however, we may recommend such actions depending on GVN progress and Communist reaction in the meantime, especially to U.S. naval patrols.” A resumption of the destroyer patrols was one outcome of the Sept. 7 meeting.
The analyst says that a similar reason was given for the decision against beginning a sustained bombing campaign against the North, with or without a provocation strategy, in the near future. “The GVN over the next 2-3 months will be too weak for us to take any major deliberate risks of escalation that would involve a major role for, or threat to, South Vietnam,” the Bundy memorandum states.
Ambasador Taylor had acknowledged in his cable of Aug. 18 that bombing the North to prevent a collapse in the South if the Khanh regime continued to decline “increases the likelihood of U.S. involvement in ground action since Khanh will have almost no available ground forces which can be released from pacification employment to mobile resistance of D.R.V. attacks.”
The Pentagon account concludes from the Sept. 7 strategy discussions that by now the Saigon regime was being regarded less and less as a government capable of defeating the Vietcong insurgency than “in terms of its suitability as a base for wider action.”
Despite the pessimistic analyses of Ambassador Taylor and the Joint Chiefs for future escalation, some of those at the White House meeting hoped the Khanh regime could be somewhat stabilized. Citing handwritten notes of the meeting in the Pentagon files, the analyst quotes Mr. McNamara as saying that he understood “we are not acting more strongly because there is a clear hope of strengthening the GVN.”
“But he went on,” the account continues, “to urge that the way be kept open for stronger actions even if the GVN did not improve or in the event the war were widened by the Communists.”
The handwritten notes of the meeting quote the President as asking, “Can we really strengthen the GVN?”
And in his memorandum of the consensus, William Bundy wrote: “Khanh will probably stay in control and may make some headway in the next 2-3 months in strengthening the Government (GVN). The best we can expect is that he and the GVN will be able to maintain order, keep the pacification program ticking over (but not progressing markedly), and give the appearance of a valid government.”
On Sept. 10, therefore, the President ordered a number of interim measures in National Security Action Memorandum 314, issued over the signature of his special assistant, McGeorge Bundy. These were intended, in the words of William Bundy’s memorandum of consensus, “to assist morale in SVN and show the Communists we still mean business, while at the same time seeking to keep the risks low and under our control at each stage.”
The most important orders Mr. Johnson gave dealt wth covert measures. The final paragraph in the President’s memorandum also reflected the consensus, the analyst finds, of the Sept. 7 meeting and other strategy discussions of the time—“the extent to which the new year was anticipated as the occasion for beginning overt military operations against North Vietnam.”
This final paragraph read: “These decisions are governed by a prevailing judgment that the first order of business at present is to take actions which will help to strengthen the fabric of the Government of South Vietnam; to the extent that the situation permits, such action should precede larger decisions. If such larger decisions are required at any time by a change in the situation, they will be taken.” [See Document #81.]
The interim measures Mr. Johnson ordered included these:
• Resumption of the De Soto patrols by American destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf. They would “operate initially well beyond the 12-mile limit and be clearly disassociated from 34A maritime operations,” but the destroyers “would have air cover from carriers.”
• Reactivation of the 34A coastal raids, this time after completion of the first De Soto patrol. The directive added that “we should have the GVN ready to admit they are taking place and to justify and legitimize them on the basis of the facts of VC infiltration by sea.” The account explains, “It was believed that this step would be useful in establishing a climate of opinion more receptive to expanded (air) operations against North Vietnam when they became necessary.” The word in parentheses is the study’s.
• An arrangement with the Laotian Government of Premier Souvanna Phouma to permit “limited GVN air and ground operations into the corridor areas of [southeastern] Laos, together with Lao air strikes and possible use of U.S. armed aerial reconnaissance.” Armed aerial reconnaissance is a military operation in which the pilot has authority to attack un-programed targets, such as gun installations or trucks, at his own discretion.
• The United States “should be prepared” to launch “tit for tat” reprisal air strikes like those during the Tonkin Gulf incident “as appropriate against the D.R.V. in the ev
ent of any attack on U.S. units or any special D.R.V.-VC action against SVN.”
The President also ordered “economic and political actions” in South Vietnam, such as pay raises for Vietnamese civil servants out of American funds, to try to strengthen the Saigon regime.
The United States destroyers Morton and Edwards resumed the De Soto patrols in the Tonkin Gulf on Sept. 12, two days after Mr. Johnson’s directive. They were attacked in a third Tonkin incident on the night of Sept. 18, and the President glossed over it.
However, he went ahead with his decision to resume the 34A coastal raids, still covertly, the account says. The order to reactivate them was issued by Mr. Johnson on Oct. 4, with the specification that they were to be conducted under tightened American controls.
Each operation on the monthly schedules now had to be “approved in advance” by Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus R. Vance for Secretary McNamara, Llewellyn A. Thompson, acting Deputy Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, for Secretary Rusk, and McGeorge Bundy at the White House for the President.
During October, a subsequent report to William Bundy on covert activities said, the 34A coastal raids consisted of two shallow probes of North Vietnamese defenses, an attempt to capture a junk, and successfully shellings of the radar station at Vinhson and the observation post at Muidao.
Two of the sabotage teams that had previously been parachuted into the North also “carried out successful actions during October,” the report said. “One demolished a bridge, the other ambushed a North Vietnamese patrol. Both teams suffered casualties, the latter sufficient to cast doubt on the wisdom of the action.”
The U-2 spy plane flights over North Vietnam and the parachuting of supplies and reinforcements to sabotage and psychological warfare teams in the North continued throughout this period and had not been affected by the President’s suspension of the coastal raids after the original Tonkin Gulf incident.
