Pentagon Papers

by Neil Sheehan

  It is not clear from the documentary record whether President Johnson read this particular memorandum, but the Pentagon study says Mr. McCone expressed these same views in a personal memorandum to the President on April 28.

  In a separate intelligence estimate for the President on May 6, Vice Adm. William F. Raborn Jr., Mr. McCone’s successor, indicated agreement with Mr. McCone.

  Mr. Ball’s dissent came from the opposite side. He believed that neither bombing the North nor fighting the guerrillas in the South nor any combination of the two offered a solution and said so in a memorandum circulated on June 28, the study reports.

  “Convinced that the U.S. was pouring its resources down the drain in the wrong place,” the account goes on, Mr. Ball proposed that the United States “cut its losses” and withdraw from South Vietnam.

  “Ball was cold-blooded in his analysis,” the study continues, describing the memorandum. “He recognized that the U.S. would not be able to avoid losing face before its Asian allies if it staged some form of conference leading to withdrawal of U.S. forces. The losses would be of short-term duration, however, and the U.S. could emerge from this period of travail as a ‘wiser and more mature nation.’ ”

  On July 1, the analyst says, Mr. Ball reiterated his proposal for withdrawal in a memorandum to the President entitled “A Compromise Solution for South Vietnam.” [See Document #103.]

  But the President, the narrative continues, was now heeding the counsel of General Westmoreland to embark on a full-scale ground war. The study for this period concludes that Mr. Johnson and most of his Administration were in no mood for compromise on Vietnam.

  As an indication of the Administration’s mood during this period, the study cites “a marathon public-information campaign” conducted by Secretary of State Dean Rusk late in February and early in March as sustained bombing was getting under way.

  Mr. Rusk, the study says, sought “to signal a seemingly reasonable but in fact quite tough U.S. position on negotiations, demanding that Hanoi ‘stop doing what it is doing against its neighbors’ before any negotiations could prove fruitful.

  “Rusk’s disinterest in negotiations at this time was in concert with the view of virtually all of the President’s key advisers, that the path to peace was not then open,” the Pentagon account continues. “Hanoi held sway over more than half of South Vietnam and could see the Saigon government crumbling before her very eyes. The balance of power at this time simply did not furnish the U.S. with a basis for bargaining and Hanoi had no reason to accede to the hard terms that the U.S. had in mind. Until military pressures on North Vietnam could tilt the balance of forces the other way, talk of negotiation could be little more than a hollow exercise.”

  The study also says that two of the President’s major moves involving the bombing campaign in the spring of 1965 were designed, among other aims, to quiet critics and obtain public support for the air war by striking a position of compromise. But in fact, the account goes on, the moves masked publicly unstated conditions for peace that “were not ‘compromise’ terms, but more akin to a ‘cease and desist’ order that, from the D.R.V./VC point of view, was tantamount to a demand for their surrender.” “D.R.V.” denotes the Democratic Republic of Vietnam; “VC” the Vietcong.

  In Mr. Johnson’s first action, his speech at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore on April 7, he offered to negotiate “without posing any preconditions” and also held out what the study calls a “billion-dollar carrot” in the form of an economic-development program for the Mekong River Basin financed by the United States, in which North Vietnam might participate.

  The second action was the unannounced five-day pause in bombing in May, during which the President called upon Hanoi to accept a “political solution” in the South. This “seemed to be aimed more at clearing the decks for a subsequent intensified resumption than it was at evoking a reciprocal act of deescalation by Hanoi,” the study says. Admiral Raborn, in his May 6 memorandum, had suggested a pause for this purpose and as an opportunity for Hanoi “to make concessions with some grace.”

  The air attacks had begun Feb. 8 and Feb. 11 with reprisal raids, code-named Operations Flaming Dart I and II, announced as retaliation for Vietcong attacks on American installations at Pleiku and Quinhon.

  In public Administration statements on the air assaults, the study goes on, President Johnson broadened “the reprisal concept as gradually and imperceptibly as possible” into sustained air raids against the North, in the same fashion that the analyst describes him blurring the shift from defensive to offensive action on the ground during the spring and summer of 1965.

  The study declares that the two February strikes—unlike the Tonkin Gulf reprisals in August, 1964, which were tied directly to a North Vietnamese attack on American ships—were publicly associated with a “larger pattern of aggression” by North Vietnam. Flaming Dart II, for example, was characterized as “a generalized response to ‘continued acts of aggression,’” the account notes.

  “Although discussed publicly in very muted tones,” it goes on, “the second Flaming Dart operation constituted a sharp break with past U.S. policy and set the stage for the continuing bombing program that was now to be launched in earnest.”

  In another section of the study, a Pentagon analyst remarks that “the change in ground rules . . . posed serious public-information and stage-managing problems for the President.”

  It was on Feb. 13, two days after this second reprisal, that Mr. Johnson ordered Operation Rolling Thunder. An important influence on his unpublicized decision was a memorandum from his special assistant for national security affairs, McGeorge Bundy, who was heading a fact-finding mission in Vietnam when the Vietcong attack at Pleiku occurred on Feb. 7. With Mr. Bundy were Assistant Secretary of Defense John T. McNaughton and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Leonard Unger.

  “A policy of sustained reprisal against North Vietnam” was the strategy advocated by Mr. Bundy in his memorandum, drafted on the President’s personal Boeing 707, Air Force One, while returning from Saigon the same day. [See Document #92.]

  The memorandum explained that the justification for the air attacks against the North, and their intensity, would be keyed to the level of Vietcong activity in the South.

  “We are convinced that the political values of reprisal require a continuous operation,” Mr. Bundy wrote. “Episodic responses geared on a one-for-one basis to ‘spectacular’ outrages would lack the persuasive force of sustained pressure. More important still, they would leave it open to the Communists to avoid reprisals entirely by giving up only a small element of their own program. . . . It is the great merit of the proposed scheme that to stop it the Communists would have to stop enough of their activity in the South to permit the probable success of a determined pacification effort.”

  The analyst notes, however, that Mr. Bundy’s memorandum was a “unique articulation of a rationale for the Rolling Thunder policy” because Mr. Bundy held out as the immediate benefit an opportunity to rally the anti-Communist elements in the South and achieve some political stability and progress in pacification. “Once such a policy is put in force,” Mr. Bundy wrote, in summary conclusions to his memorandum, we shall be able to speak in Vietnam on many topics and in many ways, with growing force and effectiveness.”

  It was also plausible, he said, that bombing in the North, “even in a low key, would have a substantial depressing effect upon the morale of Vietcong cadres in South Vietnam.”

  Mr. Bundy, the study remarks, thus differed from most other proponents of bombing. These included Ambassador Maxwell D. Taylor, who despaired of improving the Saigon Government’s effectiveness and who wanted bombing primarily as a will-breaking device “to inflict such pain or threat of pain upon the D.R.V. that it would be compelled to order a stand-down of Vietcong violence,” in the study’s words.

  As several chapters of the Pentagon study show, a number of Administration strategists—particularly Walt W. Rostow, cha
irman of the State Department’s Policy Planning Council—had assumed for years that “calculated doses” of American air power would accomplish this end.

  Mr. Bundy, while not underrating the bombing’s “impact on Hanoi” and its use “as a means of affecting the will of Hanoi,” saw this as a “longer-range purpose.”

  The bombing might not work, Mr. Bundy acknowledged. “Yet measured against the costs of defeat in Vietnam,” he wrote, “this program seems cheap. And even if it fails to turn the tide—as it may—the value of the effort seems to us to exceed its cost.”

  President Johnson informed Ambassador Taylor of his Rolling Thunder decision in a cablegram drafted in the White House and transmitted to Saigon late in the afternoon of Sunday, Feb. 13.

  The cable told the Ambassador that “we will execute a program of measured and limited air action jointly with the GVN [the Government of Vietnam] against selected military targets in D.R.V., remaining south of the 19th Parallel until further notice.”

  “Our current expectation,” the message added, “is that these attacks might come about once or twice a week and involve two or three targets on each day of operation.” [See Document #93.]

  Mr. Johnson said he hoped “to have appropriate GVN concurrence by Monday if possible. . . .”

  The study recounts that “Ambassador Taylor received the news of the President’s new program with enthusiasm. In his response, however, he explained the difficulties he faced in obtaining authentic GVN concurrence ‘in the condition of virtual nongovernment’ which existed in Saigon at that moment.”

  Gen. Nguyen Khanh, the nominal commander of the South Vietnamese armed forces, had ousted the civilian cabinet of Premier Tran Van Huong on Jan. 27. Led by Air Vice Marshal, Nguyen Cao Ky, a group of young generals—the so-called Young Turks—were in turn intriguing against General Khanh.

  (A footnote in the account of the first reprisal strikes, on Feb. 8, says that Marshal Ky, who led the South Vietnamese planes participating in the raid, caused “consternation” among American target controllers by dropping his bombs on the wrong targets. “In a last minute switch,” the footnote says, Marshal Ky “dumped his flight’s bomb loads on an unassigned target in the Vinhlinh area, in order, as he later explained, to avoid colliding with U.S.A.F aircraft which, he claimed, were striking his originally assigned target when his flight arrived over the target area.” Adm. U. S. Grant Sharp, commander of United States forces in the Pacific, reported the incident to the Joint Chiefs.)

  Referring to the political situation in Saigon, the account says: “This Alice-in-Wonderland atmosphere notwithstanding, Taylor was undaunted.”

  “It will be interesting to observe the effect of our proposal on the internal political situation here,” the Ambassador cabled back to Mr. Johnson in Washington about the bombing. “I will use the occasion to emphasize that a dramatic change is occurring in U.S. policy, one highly favorable to GVN interests but demanding a parallel dramatic change of attitude on the part of the GVN. Now is the time to install the best possible Government as we are clearly approaching a climax in the next few months.”

  Ambassador Taylor apparently obtained what concurrence was possible and on Feb. 18 another cable went out from the State Department to London and eight United States Embassies in the Far East besides the one in Saigon. The message told the ambassadors of the forthcoming bombing campaign and instructed them to “inform head of government or State (as appropriate) of above in strictest confidence and report reactions.” [See Document #95.]

  Both McGeorge Bundy and Ambassador Taylor had recommended playing down publicity on the details of the raids. “Careful public statements of U.S.G. [United States Government], combined with fact of continuing air actions, are expected to make it clear that military action will continue while aggression continues,” the cable said. “But focus of public attention will be kept as far as possible on D.R.V. aggression; not on joint GVN/US military operations.

  The President had scheduled the first of the sustained raids, Rolling Thunder I, for Feb. 20. Five hours after the State Department transmitted that cable, a perennial Saigon plotter, Col. Pham Ngoc Thao, staged an unsuccessful “semi-coup” against General Khanh and “pandemonium reigned in Saigon,” the study recounts. “Ambassador Taylor promptly recommended cancellation of the Feb. 20 air strikes and his recommendation was equally promptly accepted” by Washington, the Pentagon study says.

  The State Department sent a cablegram to the various embassies rescinding the instructions to notify heads of government or state of the planned air war until further notice “in view of the disturbed situation in Saigon.”

  The situation there, the study says, remained “disturbed” for nearly a week while the Young Turks also sought to get rid of General Khanh.

  “The latter made frantic but unsuccessful efforts to rally his supporters,” the study says, and finally took off in his plane to avoid having to resign as commander in chief. “Literally running out of gas in Nhatrang shortly before dawn on Feb. 21, he submitted his resignation, claiming that a ‘foreign hand’ was behind the coup. No one, however, could be quite certain that Khanh might not ‘re-coup’ once again, unless he were physically removed from the scene.”

  This took three more days to accomplish, and on Feb. 25 General Khanh finally went into permanent exile as an ambassador at large, with Ambassador Taylor seeing him off at the airport, “glassily polite,” in the study’s words. “It was only then that Taylor was able to issue, and Washington could accept, clearance for the long-postponed and frequently rescheduled first Rolling Thunder strike.”

  Less than three weeks earlier, in his memorandum to the President predicting that “a policy of sustained reprisal” might bring a better government in Saigon, McGeorge Bundy had said he did not agree with Ambassador Taylor that General Khanh “must somehow be removed from the . . . scene.”

  “We see no one else in sight with anything like his ability to combine military authority with some sense of politics,” the account quotes Mr. Bundy as having written.

  In the meantime two more Rolling Thunder strikes—II and III—had also been scheduled and then cancelled because, the study says, the South Vietnamese Air Force was on “coup alert,” in Saigon.

  During part of this period, air strikes against North Vietnam were also inhibited by a diplomatic initiative from the Soviet Union and Britain. They moved to reactivate their co-chairmanship of the 1954 Geneva conference on Indochina to consider the current Vietnam crisis. Secretary Rusk cabled Ambassador Taylor that the diplomatic initiative would not affect Washington’s decision to begin the air war, merely its timing.

  According to the Pentagon study, the Administration regarded the possibility of reviving the Geneva conference of 1954, which had ended the French Indochina War, “not as a potential negotiating opportunity, but as a convenient vehicle for public expression of a tough U.S. position.”

  But, the account adds, this “diplomatic gambit” had “languished” by the time General Khanh left Saigon, and the day of his departure Mr. Johnson scheduled a strike, Rolling Thunder IV, for Feb. 26.

  The pilots had been standing by, for nearly a week, with the orders to execute a strike being canceled every 24 hours.

  But the order to begin the raid was again canceled, a last time, by monsoon weather for four more days.

  Rolling Thunder finally rolled on March 2, 1965, when F-100 Super Sabre and F-105 Thunderchief jets of the United States Air Force bombed an ammunition depot at Xombang while 19 propeller-driven A-1H fighter-bombers of South Vietnam struck the Quangkhe naval base.

  The various arguments in the Administration over how the raids ought to be conducted, which had developed during the planning stages, were now revived in sharper form by the opening blow in the actual air war.

  Secretary McNamara, whose attention to management of resources and cost-effectiveness is cited repeatedly by the study, was concerned about improving the military efficacy of the bombing even before t
he sustained air war got under way.

  He had received bomb damage assessments on the two reprisal strikes in February, reporting that of 491 buildings attacked, only 47 had been destroyed and 22 damaged. The information “caused McNamara to fire off a rather blunt memorandum” to Gen. Earle G. Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Feb. 17, the account says.

  “Although the four missions [flown during the two raids] left the operations at the targets relatively unimpaired, I am quite satisfied with the results,” Mr. McNamara began. “Our primary objective, of course, was to communicate our political resolve. This I believe we did. Future communications or resolve, however, will carry a hollow ring unless we accomplish more military damage than we have to date. . . . Surely we cannot continue for months accomplishing no more with 267 sorties than we did on these four missions.” A sortie is a flight by a single plane.

  General Wheeler replied that measures were being taken to heighten the destructiveness of the strikes and said that one way to accomplish this was to give the operational commander on the scene “adequate latitude” to attack the target as he saw fit, rather than seeking to control the details from Washington.

  One measure approved by the President on March 9 was the use of napalm in North Vietnam.

  And the day before, the day that 3,500 marines came ashore at Danang to protect the airfield there, Ambassador Taylor had already expressed, in two cables to Washington, what the historian describes as “sharp annoyance” with the “unnecessarily timid and ambivalent” way in which the air war was being conducted.

  No air strikes had been authorized by the President beyond the initial Rolling Thunder raids that began on March 2, and, according to the study, the Ambassador was irritated at “the long delays between strikes, the marginal weight of the attacks and the great ado about behind-the-scenes diplomatic feelers.”

  With the concurrence of General Westmoreland, Ambassador Taylor proposed “a more dynamic schedule of strikes, a several week program relentlessly marching north” beyond the 19th Parallel, which President Johnson had so far set as a limit, “to break the will of the D.R.V.”