Pentagon Papers

by Neil Sheehan

  Q. What is the likely N.V.A./VC [North Vietnamese Army/Vietcong] strategy over the next 10 months if U.S. forces are increased by 50,000, by 100,000 or by 200,000?

  A. We would expect the Communists to continue the war. They still have resources available in North Vietnam and within South Vietnam to increase their troop strength. . . . Over a 10-month period the Communists would probably be able to introduce sufficient new units into the South to offset the U.S. maneuver battalion increments of the various force levels given above.

  Q. What is the Communist attitude toward negotiations: in particular how would Hanoi deal with an unconditional cessation of U.S. bombing of NVN and what would be its terms for a settlement?

  A. The Communists probably still expect the war to end eventually in some form of negotiations . . . they are not likely to give any serious considerations to negotiations until this campaign has progressed far enough for its results to be fairly clear.

  If the United States ceased the bombing of North Vietnam in the near future, the C.I.A. believed, Hanoi would probably respond to an offer to negotiate, although the intelligence agency warned that the North Vietnamese would not modify their terms for a final settlement or stop fighting in the South.

  “In any talks, Communist terms would involve the establishment of a new ‘coalition’ government,” the C.I.A. said, “which would in fact, if not in appearance, be under the domination of the Communists. Secondly, they would insist on a guaranteed withdrawal of U.S. forces within some precisely defined period. . . .”

  General Taylor wrote a long memorandum that went not only to the Clifford Group but also directly to the White House. The general was opposed to any basic change in policy.

  “We should consider changing the objective which we have been pursuing consistently since 1954 only for the most cogent reasons,” he wrote. “There is clearly nothing to recommend trying to do more than we are now doing at such great cost. To undertake to do less is to accept needlessly a serious defeat for which we would pay dearly in terms of our worldwide position of leadership, of the political stability of Southeast Asia and of the credibility of our pledges to friends and allies.”

  General Taylor recommended against any initiative for negotiations that might involve a halt in bombing. To this end he proposed the withdrawal of the so-called San Antonio formula, enunciated by President Johnson the previous September, under which the United States would stop the bombing of North Vietnam if Hanoi promised “prompt and productive” talks and agreed to “not take advantage” of a bombing cessation in a military way. The general argued against “any thought of reducing the bombing.”

  Although he did not advocate any specific reinforcements for General Westmoreland, General Taylor recommended a build-up of the strategic reserve in the United States, thereby aligning himself with the Joint Chiefs.

  The Pentagon’s Office of Systems Analysis, headed by Dr. Alain C. Enthoven, said in a paper that “the offensive appears to have killed the [pacification] program once and for all.” In another paper, Assistant Secretary of Defense Enthoven painted what the study calls “a bleak picture of American failure in Vietnam.”

  “While we have raised the price to NVN of aggression and support of the VC,” the paper said, “it shows no lack of capability or will to match each new U.S. escalation. Our strategy of ‘attrition’ has not worked. Adding 206,000 more U.S. men to a force of 525,000, gaining only 27 additional maneuver battalions and 270 tactical fighters at an added cost to the U.S. of $10-billion per year raises the question of who is making it costly for whom. . . .

  “We know that despite a massive influx of 500,000 U.S. troops, 1.2 million tons of bombs a year, 400,000 attack sorties per year, 200,000 enemy K.I.A. [killed in action] in three years, 20,000 U.S. K.I.A., etc., our control of the countryside and the defense of the urban areas is now essentially at pre-August 1965 levels. We have achieved stalemate at a high commitment. A new strategy must be sought.”

  The paper concluded that a shift to a military strategy of having the United States forces protect population centers in South Vietnam, rather than ranging the countryside on search-and-destroy operations, would, if unchallenged by the enemy, stabilize American casualty rates.

  The Battle at Home

  By the end of the first meeting on Feb. 29, the Clifford Group had produced an initial draft memorandum for the President. It began with a pessimistic appraisal, expressing doubt that the South Vietnamese Army “as currently led, motivated and influenced at the top,” would buckle down to the job of pacifiying the countryside, or that the Saigon Government “will rise to the challenge” and “move toward a government of national union.”

  “Even with the 200,000 additional troops” requested by General Westmoreland, the draft memorandum said, “we will not be in a position to drive the enemy from SVN or to destroy his forces,” since Hanoi had always been able to maintain from its reserve a ratio of one combat battalion to 1.5 American combat battalions. A North Vietnamese combat battalion has some 300 men and an American combat battalion has about 700 men.

  If further escalation occurred, the draft went on, “it will be difficult to convince critics that we are not simply destroying South Vietnam in order to ‘save’ it and that we genuinely want peace talks.” It added: “This growing disaffection accompanied, as it certainly will be, by increased defiance of the draft and growing unrest in the cities because of the belief that we are neglecting domestic problems, runs great risks of provoking a domestic crisis of unprecedented proportions.”

  The memorandum concluded that the United States presence in South Vietnam should be used “to buy the time” during which the South Vietnamese Army and Government “can develop effective capability.” Therefore, the Clifford Group said, General Westmoreland should be told that his mission was to provide security to populated areas—along what the memorandum called “the demographic frontier.” He should also be told that he was not to wage a war of attrition against enemy forces or seek to drive them out of the country.

  This initial draft was discussed with military leaders in Mr. Clifford’s office on March 1. The meeting started an intense battle that went on for the next three weeks, the study says.

  “General Wheeler . . . was appalled at the apparent repudiations of American military policy in South Vietnam contained in the I.S.A. draft memorandum,” the analyst writes. “He detected two ‘fatal’ flaws in the population-security strategy” similar to the flaws found by the military in the defensive “enclave strategy” that some had advocated in 1966.

  The flaws, the Pentagon account says, were that “the proposed strategy would mean increased fighting in or close to the population centers and, hence, would result in increased civilian casualties,” and that “by adopting a posture of static defense, we would allow the enemy an increased capability of massing near population centers, especially north of Saigon.”

  At a formal meeting on March 3, Mr. Warnke read the initial draft of the memorandum to the entire Clifford Group. “The ensuing discussion,” the study says, “apparently produced a consensus that abandoning the initiative completely as the draft memo seemed to imply could leave allied forces and the South Vietnamese cities themselves more, not less, vulnerable.”

  There was also a sharp division on the bombing of North Vietnam. The initial draft recommended no bombing above present levels, and opposed proposals by the military to bomb closer to the centers of Hanoi and Haiphong as “likely to be unproductive or worse.”

  At the March 3 meeting, General Wheeler advocated an extension of the bombing again, rather than a cutback, while Mr. Warnke fought against expansion of the air war, the study asserts.

  Finally, Mr. Warnke and Phil G. Goulding, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, were directed to write a new draft that would deal only with the troop issue, recommending a modest increase; call for “a study” of new strategic guidance to General Westmoreland, advise against a new initiative on negotiations and acknowl
edge the split on the air war.

  The new paper, a draft Presidential memorandum intended for Mr. Johnson’s approval as doctrine, was completed the next day, March 4. “Gone was any discussion of grand strategy,” the study says. As it finally went to the White House, the memorandum made these recommendations:

  • Deployment of 22,000 more troops, of whom 60 per cent would be combat soldiers.

  • Reservation of a decision to deploy the remaining 185,000 men requested by General Westmoreland, contingent upon a week-by-week examination of the situation.

  • Approval of a reserve call-up of approximately 262,000 men, increased draft calls and extension of terms of service.

  • No new peace initiative.

  • A general decision on bombing policy, which the Clifford Group had not been able to reach. “Here,” the memorandum said, “your advisers are divided: a. General Wheeler and others would advocate a substantial extension of targets and authority in and near Hanoi and Haiphong, mining of Haiphong, and naval gunfire up to a Chinese buffer zone; b. Others would advocate a seasonal step-up through the spring, but without these added elements.”

  The analyst notes that both sides of the bombing argument in the memorandum were “devoted to various kinds of escalation.”

  “The proposal that was eventually to be adopted [by the President at the end of March], namely cutting back the bombing to the panhandle only, was not even mentioned, nor does it appear in any of the other drafts or papers related to the Clifford Group’s work,” the study notes. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Secretary Clifford, the account emphasizes, “differed only on the extent to which the bombing campaign against North Vietnam should be intensified.”

  The study speculates at this point on why a cutback in bombing to the 20th Parallel was not mentioned in any of these documents.

  The omission may be “misleading,” the narrative says, since the cutback “apparently was one of the principal ideas being discussed and considered in the forums at various levels.”

  “It is hard to second-guess the motivation of a Secretary of Defense,” the study continues, “but, since it is widely believed that Clifford personally advocated this idea to the President, he may well have decided that . . . to have raised the idea of constricting the bombing below the 19th or 20th Parallel in the memo to the President would have generalized the knowledge of such a suggestion and invited its sharp, full and formal criticism by the J.C.S. and other opponents of a bombing halt. Whatever Clifford’s reasons, the memo did not contain the proposal that was to be the main focus of the continuing debates in March and would eventually be endorsed by the President.”

  “Faced with a fork in the road of our Vietnam policy,” the study concludes, “the working group failed to seize the opportunity to change directions. Indeed, they seemed to recommend that we continue rather haltingly down the same road, meanwhile consulting the map more frequently and in greater detail to insure that we were still on the right road.”

  The President asked that the memorandum be sent to General Westmoreland for his views, since the recommendations, as the analyst says, “were a long way down the road in meeting [his] request.”

  In his reply on March 8 the general welcomed the additional 22,000 men proposed as a first increment, but told Mr. Johnson in a cablegram that he stuck by his request for the full 206,756-man reinforcement by the end of 1968.

  Mounting Pressure

  The documentary record for the final rounds of the internal policy debate now “becomes sparse,” the Pentagon study remarks, because the discussion was “carried forward on a personal basis by the officials involved, primarily, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State.”

  “The decision, however,” the account goes on, “had been placed squarely on the shoulders of the President. . . . The memorandum had recommended ‘a little bit more of the same’ to stabilize the military situation, plus a level of mobilization in order to be prepared to meet any further deterioration in the ground situation. . . .

  “But many political events in the first few weeks of March, 1968, gave strong indications that the country was becoming increasingly divided over and disenchanted with the current Vietnam strategy, and would no longer settle for ‘more of the same.’ ”

  The internal maneuvering revolved around the cutback in the bombing, first proposed, without result, by Secretary McNamara in October, 1966.

  “The first appearance of the idea in the documents in March,” the study says, came in a circuitous and seemingly casual way from Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who, as far as the record shows, had given no support to a cutback in bombing when it was proposed in 1967.

  But now in a note to General Wheeler on March 5, Secretary Clifford wrote that he was “transmitting for the latter’s exclusive ‘information’ a proposed ‘statement’ drafted by Secretary Rusk,” the study says.

  “The statement, which was given only the status of a ‘suggestion’ and therefore needed to be closely held,” the study continues, “announced the suspension of the bombing of North Vietnam except ‘in the area associated with the battle zone.’ It was presumably intended for Presidential delivery.

  “Attached to the draft statement, which shows Rusk himself as the draftee, was a list of explanatory reasons and conditions for its adoption. Rusk noted that bad weather in northern North Vietnam in the next few months would severely hamper operations around Hanoi and Haiphong in any event and the proposal did not, therefore, constitute a serious degradation of our military position. It was to be understood that in the event of any major enemy initiative in the South, either against Khesanh or the cities, the bombing would be resumed.

  “Further, Rusk did not want a major diplomatic effort mounted to start peace talks. He preferred to let the action speak for itself and await Hanoi’s reaction.

  “Finally, he noted that the area still open to bombing would include everything up to and including Vinh (just below 19 degrees) and there would be no limitations on attacks in that zone.”

  Mr. Rusk was thus suggesting the 19th Parallel as the cutoff point for bombing. Both the 19th and the 20th Parallels had figured in the discussions in 1967.

  “Clifford’s views of the proposal and its explanation do not appear in his note,” the study remarks. “It can be inferred, however, that he endorsed the idea. In any case, by the middle of March the question of a partial bombing halt became the dominant air-war alternative under consideration in meetings at State and Defense. It is possible that the President had already indicated to Clifford and Rusk enough approval of the idea to have focused the further deliberative efforts of his key advisers on it.”

  Aware that a Presidential decision was in the making, the advocates of all-out bombing pressed their views. On March 4, Dr. Harold Brown, the Secretary of the Air Force, sent to Deputy Secretary of Defense Nitze a memorandum setting forth three options for a step-up. The first was intensification of the bombing of “remaining important targets” in North Vietnam, and “neutralization of the port of Haiphong by bombing and mining.” The second was intensification of air raids in the “adjoining panhandle areas” of Laos and North Vietnam. The third involved increased air attacks in the South as a substitute for additional ground forces.

  Mr. Brown made plain his preference for the first option, which he said would “permit bombing of military targets without the present scrupulous concern for collateral civilian damage and casualties.” His objective was “to erode the will of the population by exposing a wider area of NVN to casualties and destruction.”

  In evaluating the effect of such a campaign, however, Mr. Brown “was forced to admit,” the study says, that it would not “be likely to reduce NVN capability in SVN substantially below the 1967 level,” and that North Vietnam would probably “be willing to undergo these hardships.”

  The study comments that Dr. Brown’s proposals, while indicating military thinking, “were never considered as major proposals within the inner circle of Presi
dential advisers.”

  Among other major advisers, the analyst reports, Under Secretary of State Katzenbach opposed a partial suspension of the bombing “because he felt that a bombing halt was a trump card that could be only used once and should not be wasted when the prospects for a positive North Vietnamese response on negotiations seemed so poor. He reportedly hoped to convince the President to call a complete halt to the air war later in the spring when prospects for peace looked better and when the threat to [the Marine outpost at] Khesanh had been eliminated.”

  Mr. Rostow, the analyst continues, apparently resisted all suggestions for a restriction of the bombing, preferring to keep the pressure on the North Vietnamese for a response to the San Antonio formula.”

  Public pressure now began to mount on the President as speculation grew that he was considering further escalation in Vietnam.

  On March 7, Senate debate on civil rights was interrupted as several prominent Senators demanded that Congress be consulted before any decision was made on troop increases.

  On March 10, The New York Times published the first report, from Washington, about General Westmoreland’s request for 206,000 troops. “The President was reportedly furious at this leak,” the Pentagon study says. The publication of the troop-request figure provided a “focus” for political debate and intensified the “sense of [public] dissatisfaction,” the study adds.

  The next day, Secretary Rusk appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations committee, ostensibly to testify on foreign aid. But the televised hearings turned into a two-day grilling of the Secretary on Vietnam policy. He confirmed that an “A to Z” policy review was being held, but refused to discuss possible troop increases. He said it would “not be right for me to speculate about numbers of possibilities while the President is consulting his advisers.”

  Not long after the conclusion of the second day’s hearings, the returns from the Democratic primary in New Hampshire began coming in. Senator Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota—the Pentagon historian terms him an “upstart challenger” for the Presidency—who had campaigned against President Johnson’s war policy and demanded a halt to the bombing, was only narrowly beaten by Mr. Johnson. In fact, when the write-in vote was finally tabulated, Mr. McCarthy had a slight plurality over the President.