Pentagon Papers

by Neil Sheehan

  Mr. Rostow’s memorandum, quoted at length in the Pentagon study, rejected proposals for mining North Vietnamese harbors and bombing port facilities lest these steps lead to a “radical increase in Hanoi’s dependence on Communist China” and increase United States tensions with the Soviet Union and China. [See Document #128.]

  He was considerably more positive than Mr. McNaughton on the results of the strategic bombing campaign, but urged that the bombing be concentrated on the supply routes in southern North Vietnam supplemented by “the most economical and careful attack on the Hanoi power station” and by “keeping open the . . . option” of bombing the Hanoi-Haiphong area in the future.

  A more equivocal position, the Pentagon study discloses, was taken by Assistant Secretary of State Bundy. His paper, completed on May 8, favored tactics that would “concentrate heavily on the supply routes” but would also “include a significant number of restrikes” north of the 20th Parallel. Without restrikes, he argued, “it would almost certainly be asked why we had ever hit the targets in the first place.” Moreover, it would keep Hanoi and Moscow “at least a little bit on edge.”

  But he was opposed to hitting such new and “sensitive targets” as the Hanoi power station, the Red River bridge at Hanoi and Phucyen airfield, 13 miles outside the city.

  The Pentagon study comments that “this significant convergence of opinion on bombing strategy in the next phase among key Presidential advisers could not have gone unnoticed in the May 8 meeting.” The account notes that a new effort began after the session to combine the various views in one paper largely drafted by Mr. McNaughton for Secretary McNamara and finally submitted to the President on May 19.

  Even before the White House meeting, Mr. McNaughton was uneasy about the over-all Pentagon position, especially the willingness to provide General Westmoreland with considerable reinforcements. The Pentagon study does not say who drafted the portions of the May 5 memorandum on the ground war or precisely what was proposed, although it reports that Secretary McNamara had been told that 66,000 more soldiers could be provided without calling up the reserves. Later the figure rose to 84,000.

  In a note to Secretary McNamara on May 6, Mr. McNaughton indicated that the May 5 memorandum proposed giving General Westmoreland 80,000 more men. Excerpts from that note vividly portray Mr. McNaughton’s unhappiness about this course of action:

  “I am afraid there is a fatal flaw in the strategy in the [May 5] draft. It is that the strategy falls into the trap that has ensnared us for the past three years. It actually gives the troops while only praying for their proper use and for constructive diplomatic action.” (The emphasis was Mr. McNaughton’s.)

  “Limiting the present decision to an 80,000 add-on,” he continued, “does the very important business of postponing the issue of a reserve call-up (and all of its horrible baggage), but postpone is all that it does—probably to a worse time, 1968. Providing the 80,000 troops is tantamount to acceding to the whole Westmoreland-Sharp request. This being the case, they will ‘accept’ the 80,000. But six months from now, in will come messages like the ‘470,000-570,000’ messages, saying that the requirement remains at 201,000 (or more). Since no pressure will have been put on anyone, the military war will have gone on as before and no diplomatic progress will have been made.

  “It follows that the ‘philosophy’ of the war should be fought out now so everyone will not be proceeding on their own major premises, and getting us in deeper and deeper; at the very least, the President should give General Westmoreland his limit (as President Truman did to General MacArthur). That is, if General Westmoreland is to get 550,000 men, he should be told, ‘That will be all, and we mean it.’” (The parentheses were Mr. McNaughton’s.)

  The note to Secretary McNamara, the study reveals, expressed uneasiness about the breadth and intensity of public unrest and dissatisfaction with the war. As a man whose 18-year-old son was about to enter college, the study notes, Mr. McNaughton was especially sensitive to the unpopularity of the war among the young.

  “A feeling is widely and strongly held that ‘the Establishment’ is out of its mind,” he wrote. “The feeling is that we are trying to impose some U.S. image on distant peoples we cannot understand (any more than we can the younger generation here at home), and we are carrying the thing to absurd lengths.

  “Related to this feeling is the increased polarization that is taking place in the United States with seeds of the worst split in our people in more than a century. . . .”

  A major assault on Administration policy drew near. In early May, the Pentagon study recounts, there were three C.I.A. intelligence papers “to reinforce the views” of civilian opponents of the bombing.

  One report concluded that 27 months of American bombing “have had remarkably little effect on Hanoi’s over-all strategy in prosecuting the war, on its confident view of long-term Communist prospects, and on its political tactics regarding negotiations.” A second, issued on May 12, characterized the mood in North Vietnam after prolonged bombing as one of “resolute stoicism with a considerable reservoir of endurance still untapped.”

  The third said that as of April, the American air campaign had “significantly eroded the capacities of North Vietnam’s industrial and military bases. These losses, however, have not meaningfully degraded North Vietnam’s material ability to continue the war in South Vietnam.”

  New Trend of Policy

  The climax for what the study calls the “disillusioned doves” came in Secretary McNamara’s May 19 memorandum to President Johnson, which marshaled the arguments against the strategy of widening the war and sharpened the case for curtailing the air war.

  What gave the May 19 “draft Presidential memorandum” a new and radical thrust, the analysts observe, were its political recommendations, reflecting Mr. McNaughton’s earlier point about the need to argue out “the philosophy of the war.”

  The May 19 paper not only recommended a cutback of the bombing to the 20th Parallel and only 30,000 more troops for General Westmoreland, but also advocated a considerably more limited over-all American objective in Vietnam that, in the words of the Pentagon study, “amounted to . . . a recommendation that we accept a compromise outcome.” [See Document #129.]

  As Mr. McNamara and Mr. McNaughton put it in the memorandum. “Our commitment is only to see that the people of South Vietnam are permitted to determine their own future. . . . This commitment ceases if the country ceases to help itself.”

  However much the United States might “strongly hope” for a non-Communist government that would remain separate from North Vietnam, they said, “our commitment is not” to guarantee and insist on those conditions.

  “Nor do we have an obligation to pour in effort out of proportion to the effort contributed by the people of South Vietnam or in the face of coups, corruption, apathy or other indications of Saigon’s failure to cooperate satisfactorily with us,” the writers declared.

  The United States was committed, they went on, “to stopping or offsetting the effect of North Vietnam’s application of force in the South, which denies the people of the South the ability to determine their own future.”

  The Pentagon study underscores the significance of Mr. McNamara’s break with policy. The paper, it says, “pointedly rejected the high blown formulations of U.S. objectives in NSAM 288 (‘an independent non-Communist South Vietnam,’ ‘defeat the Vietcong,’ etc.), and came forcefully to grips with the old dilemma of the U.S. involvement dating from the Kennedy era: only limited means to achieve excessive ends.”

  The reference was to National Security Action Memorandum 288, issued on March 17, 1964, which had since provided the basic doctrine for Johnson Administration policy.

  The emphasis in the “scaled-down” set of goals put forward by the McNamara-McNaughton memorandum, the analysts observed, was on South Vietnamese self-determination, which envisioned an eventual “full-spectrum government.”

  At several points the Pentagon study emphas
izes the sharp departure that this represented from established policy. “Let there be no mistake,” the study comments, “these were radical positions for a senior U.S. policy official within the Johnson Administration to take. They would bring the bitter condemnation of the [Joint] Chiefs and were scarcely designed to flatter the President on the success of his efforts to date.”

  In addition to advancing its own views, the McNamara-McNaughton paper developed the counterarguments against the military option of large reinforcements and a wider war, emphasizing the increasing popular discontent with the war among the American public.

  The memorandum acknowledged that a cutback on the bombing “will cause psychological problems” for allied officers and troops “who will not be able to understand why we should withhold punishment from the enemy.”

  However, the paper added: “We should not bomb for punitive reasons if it serves no other purpose. . . . It costs American lives; it creates a backfire of revulsion and opposition by killing civilians; it creates serious risks; it may harden the enemy.”

  The paper also pointed out that the bombing in the Hanoi and Haiphong regions took an extremely high toll in American pilots’ lives. On May 5, Mr. McNaughton commented that the loss rate over Hanoi-Haiphong was six times as great as over the rest of North Vietnam. Now, on May 19, the McNamara-McNaughton paper noted that the campaign against these heavily defended areas lost “one pilot in every 40 sorties.” It predicted that if the bombing was held below the 20th Parallel, these losses would be cut “by more than 50 per cent.”

  Their arguments against granting General Westmoreland the scale of reinforcements that he had requested were centered on what the Pentagon analysts refer to as the growing fear that such forces would engender “irresistible pressures” for carrying the battle beyond the borders of South Vietnam.

  The mobilization of reserves to provide the necessary manpower, according to the McNamara-McNaughton paper, would almost certainly stimulate a “bitter Congressional debate.”

  “Cries would go up—much louder than they have already—to ‘take the wraps off the men in the field,’” their memorandum asserted. It foresaw pressures not only for ground operations against Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam, but also, at some point, for proposals to use tactical nuclear arms and bacteriological and chemical weapons if the Chinese entered the war “or if U.S. losses were running high.”

  “Dilemma of President”

  Secretary McNamara showed his paper to President Johnson on May 19, the day it was completed, the study says. Although the analyst provides no documentary record of Mr. Johnson’s reaction, he comments that it was “not surprising” that the President “did not promptly endorse the McNamara recommendations as he had on occasions in the past.”

  “This time,” the study continues, “he faced a situation where the Chiefs were in ardent opposition to anything other than a significant escalation of the war wth a call-up of reserves. This put them in direct opposition to McNamara and his aides and created a genuine policy dilemma for the President.”

  In any event, the study says, Secretary McNamara quickly got the message intended by the President’s inaction. On May 20, Mr. McNamara—“perhaps reflecting a cool Presidential reaction,”—ordered a new study of bombing alternatives.

  The Joint Chiefs of Staff needed no spur. Within four days, they had submitted three memorandums, renewing earlier recommendations for more than 200,000 new troops and for air attacks to “shoulder out” foreign shipping from Haiphong and to mine the harbors and approaches, as well as raids on eight major airfields and on roads and railways leading to China. “It may ultimately become necessary,” they said, to send American troops into Cambodia and Laos and take “limited ground action in North Vietnam.”

  Their sharpest rebuttal to Mr. McNamara, however, came on May 31 in a paper contending that the “drastic changes” in American policy advocated by the Secretary “would undermine and no longer provide a complete rationale for our presence in South Vietnam or much of our efforts over the past two years.”

  Moreover, the parts of this paper quoted in the Pentagon narrative asserted that the McNamara-McNaughton memorandum “fails to appreciate the full implications for the free world of failure” in Vietnam.

  On the issue of public support for the war, the Joint Chiefs said they were “unable to find due cause for the degree of pessimism expressed” in the McNamara paper. They asserted their belief “that the American people, when well informed about the issues at stake, expect their Government to uphold its commitments.”

  Addressing the specific proposal for a bombing cutback, the Joint Chiefs were doubtful that such a step would induce Hanoi to move toward negotiations. They contended it would “most likely have the opposite effect” and “only result in the strengthening of the enemy’s resolve to continue the war.”

  In conclusion, the military leaders urged that the Mc-Namara proposals “not be forwarded to the President” because they represented such a divergence from past policy that they were not worthy of consideration. The Chiefs were unaware that Mr. Johnson had seen the paper 12 days before.

  In other agencies, the Pentagon study relates, official viewpoints fell between the two extremes and the debate floundered toward a compromise on the issues of tactics, without any shift in war aims.

  Under Secretary of State Katzenbach, for example, proposed on June 8, according to the study, that the United States add 30,000 ground troops “in small increments over the next 18 months” and “concentrate bombing on lines of communication throughout” North Vietnam but shifting away from strategic targets around Hanoi and Haiphong. The American political objective, he said, should be to leave behind a stable democratic government in Saigon by persuading Hanoi to end the war and by neutralizing the Vietcong threat internally.

  In the Pentagon, Mr. McNaughton found mixed views on the air war and summarized them for Mr. McNamara in another memorandum on June 12. The findings, cited in the study, were that Cyrus R. Vance, Deputy Secretary of Defense; Paul H. Nitze, Secretary of the Navy; and Mr. McNaughton favored the cutback in bombing; the Joint Chiefs renewed their case for escalation; and Secretary Brown of the Air Force recommended adding a few targets to the present list.

  The Pentagon study says it is unclear whether this paper was formally presented to President Johnson who, in any case, was preoccupied in June, 1967, with the six-day Arab-Israeli war and with preparations for his meeting with Premier Kosygin at Glassboro, N.J.

  Secretary McNamara’s primary attention remained on the unresolved troop issue. According to the Pentagon account, he went to Saigon from July 7 to July 12 under President Johnson’s instructions “to review the matter with General Westmoreland and reach an agreement on a figure well below the 200,000 [Westmoreland] had requested in March.”

  On Mr. McNamara’s final evening in Saigon, the Pentagon account says, the two men agreed on a 55,000-man increase, to a total of 525,000 troops. President Johnson approved the compromise, far closer to Mr. McNamara’s position than General Westmoreland’s, and announced it in a tax message on Aug. 4.

  But in a series of decisions on the air war during July and August, the President adopted a course that differed markedly from the strategy of de-escalation that Secretary McNamara had urged on him.

  His first decision, in mid-July, added only a few fixed targets, but in the next two months he approved all but about a dozen of the 57 targets the Chiefs of Staff wanted. On July 20, the Pentagon study reports, he added 16 targets, including a previously forbidden airfield, a rail yard, two bridges and 12 barracks and supply areas, all within the restricted circles around Hanoi and Haiphong.

  The day before the authorization of Rolling Thunder 57—each number signaling an extension of the air war—Secretary McNamara lost perhaps his closest adviser and staunchest ally. On July 19, Mr. McNaughton and his wife, Sarah, and their 11-year-old son Theodore were killed in a plane collision over North Carolina.

  By late July, the
study continues, the frustrations of the military commanders over the restraints imposed upon them had prompted the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee to schedule hearings on the conduct of the air war. Although conducted in secret, the hearings gave the public its first real knowledge of the policy division between Secretary McNamara and the Joint Chiefs over bombing.

  “The subcommittee unquestionably set out to defeat Mr. McNamara,” the analyst comments. “Its members, Senators Stennis, Symington, Jackson, Cannon, Byrd, Smith, Thurmond and Miller, were known for their hard-line views and military sympathies. . . . They viewed the restraints on bombing as irrational, the shackling of a major instrument which could help win victory.”

  Such powerful Congressonal backing for the air war, the study observes, “must have forced a recalculation on the President.”

  The study finds it “surely no coincidence” that on Aug. 9, the day the Stennis hearings opened, President Johnson authorized “an additional 16 fixed targets and an expansion of armed reconnaissance.”

  “Significantly,” the study continues, “six of the targets were within the sacred 10-mile Hanoi inner circle . . . . Nine targets were located in the northeast rail line in the China buffer zone [formerly a proscribed zone], the closest one eight miles from the border. . . . The tenth was a naval base, also within the China buffer zone.”

  The raids began promptly, the study recounts, and more targets were approved shortly afterward. The prohibited zone around Hanoi was restored from Aug. 24 to Sept. 4 to permit a follow-up to what the study calls “a particularly delicate set of contacts with North Vietnam.” The military sections of the Pentagon study give no details, but published reports have identified this as a secret effort to test Hanoi on what became known later as the San Antonio formula.