Pentagon Papers

by Neil Sheehan

  Even in these early years of American involvement, the Governments of South Vietnam were perceived as mere instruments of larger American objectives. It was Gen. J. Lawton Collins, acting as President Eisenhower’s personal representative in Indochina, who first proposed the ouster of Ngo Dinh Diem. The Vietnamese leader was saved at the time by agents of the Central Intelligence Agency, but several of those agents were still available to help arrange a coup against Mr. Diem eight years later.

  Even in those early years, the Pentagon papers show, Washington’s public optimism about the prospects for anti-Communists in Vietnam masked a private pessimism.

  And even then the North Vietnamese Communists were being held responsible for the direction of the insurgency in the South, even though it was not for lack of trying that the Americans in the South failed to cause equal difficulty in the North.

  In hindsight, with the benefit of the Pentagon papers, it is plain that the Kennedy years brought more, much more of the same.

  The “domino theory” was now expanded to embrace concern about the fate of Indonesia, loosely regarded as also in Southeast Asia. The fiasco in Cuba and tension over Berlin made it seem even more imperative to take a stand somewhere, if only for demonstration purposes.

  Despite the Eisenhower warnings, Laos was deemed to be a poor place to make a stand. So it was partitioned among three rival factions, with the North Vietnamese gaining a convenient corridor for systematic infiltration into South Vietnam.

  The deal had the effect of making the defense of South Vietnam vastly more difficult at the very moment when the American commitment to its defense was taking deeper root. The same paradoxical effect was achieved many times during the years of American involvement in Indochina.

  The character of that involvement, it is now clear, also underwent a portentous though subtle change during the Kennedy years: American military and political activities came to be valued less for their intrinsic benefits than for the general encouragement they might give to the struggling South Vietnamese. They also came to be valued less for the damage they might inflict on the North Vietnamese than for the fear of still greater American involvement they were supposed to arouse.

  Even though the Kennedy Administration knew the sad facts of instability, corruption and tyranny in South Vietnam, it consistently gave priority to military measures that would express its activism and bespeak its determination. Its vain but constant hope was that morale would improve in Saigon and that the threat of massive American intervention would somehow persuade Hanoi to relent.

  So for practical as well as domestic political reasons, private realism yielded even further to public expressions of optimism and confidence. Three weeks after the Bay of Pigs in April, 1961, Mr. Kennedy felt it necessary to order the start of new covert operations against the territory of North Vietnam and Communist regions in Laos.

  Later in 1961, he heard so much debate about the growing need for American ground troops in Vietnam that the decisions to send several thousand military “advisers” seemed a relatively modest and cautious move.

  But the pressure built for a more direct American management of the entire war, an impulse that found its ultimate expression in Washington’s complicity in the overthrow of President Diem. Once again, more than the President realized and perhaps more than he wanted, the obligation of the United States had been simultaneously deepened and made more difficult to redeem.

  Along with the Kennedy term and the Kennedy men, President Johnson thus inherited a broad Kennedy commitment to South Vietnam. And twice in Mr. Johnson’s first four months in office, Secretary McNamara returned from Saigon with the news that things were going from bad to miserable. Stable government now seemed impossible to achieve and the countryside was fast falling into Vietcong control.

  Mr. McNamara and many other officials began to press for action, including new covert attacks against North Vietnam and at least urgent planning for open bombing and border patrols. They acknowledged privately that the real problems were in the South, but they could not yet conceive of any effective form of intervention.

  So they built on the old formula of the Kennedy years—action for action’s sake, not because it would achieve anything tangible but because it might help morale in Saigon and cause Hanoi to recognize that it could never “win” the war without confronting American power.

  As the Pentagon papers show, these “scenarios” for threat and escalation were written in the glib, cold but confident spirit of efficiency experts—the same experts whose careful plotting of moves and countermoves against the Soviet Union in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis had so gloriously vindicated the new political science of gamesmanship and probability theory.

  Assistant Secretary of Defense John T. McNaughton, who eventually turned against the war with a pathetic confession of ignorance of the Vietnamese people, best typified this style of thought and planning at the upper levels of government.

  In his memorandums, choices of more or less war were reduced to “options”: “B-fast full squeeze. Present policies plus a systematic program of military pressures against the North . . .”; “C-progressive squeeze-and-talk. Present policies plus an orchestration of communications with Hanoi and a crescendo of additional military moves . . .”

  Countries and peoples became “audiences”: “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) . . . 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—signalling to the DRV that initiatives are being taken, to the GVN 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.”

  Many of these memorandums were only “contingency plans” that contemplated what else the United States might do in one or another eventuality. But there was nothing contingent in their definition of American purposes and objectives, in their analyses—in the crucial years of 1964-65—of the rapidly deteriorating situation in South Vietnam and in their revelation of the state of mind of the dozen or so top officials whose persistent clamor for action could be delayed but never ultimately denied by a President who shared their purpose.

  And there was nothing “contingent” about the direct orders of the National Security Council and the Presidential messages that have turned up with the Pentagon papers. The lines of reasoning and decision from the action papers to the contingency papers are direct and unmistakable.

  The Pentagon papers and The Times’s reports on them confirm the judgment of contemporary observers that President Johnson was reluctant and hesitant to take the final decision at every fateful turn of his plunge into large-scale war.

  Mr. Johnson and other officials were often evasive or coy with the press by creating the impression that plans for bombing were only “recommendations” without “decision” or that “requests” for more troops from the field were not “on my desk at this moment” because they lay formally elsewhere.

  But these are not the most important deceptions revealed in the Pentagon papers.

  There is, above all, much evidence that the four Administrations that progressively deepened the American involvement in the war felt a private commitment to resist Communist advance, and then a private readiness to wage war against North Vietnam and finally a private sense of frustration with the entire effort much sooner and to a much greater extent than they ever acknowledged to the Congress and the nation.

  There is evidence in the papers that the Congress was rushed into passing a resolution to sanction the use of force in Vietnam in 1964, ostensibly to justify retaliation for an “unprovoked” attack on American vessels, even though the Administration really intended to use the resolution as the equivalen
t of a declaration of war and withheld information that would have shown the North Vietnamese to have had ample reason for “retaliating” against the United States.

  There is evidence that all the elaborately staged offers of negotiation and compromise with the Communist adversary were privately acknowledged in the Administration as demands for his virtual “surrender.”

  And there is evidence, scattered over the years, that the oft-proclaimed goal of achieving “self-determination” for the South Vietnamese was in fact acceptable to the United States only as long as no South Vietnamese leader chose neutralism or any other form of nonalignment. As President Johnson put it in a cablegram to his ambassador in early 1964, “Your mission is precisely for the purpose of knocking down the idea of neutralization wherever it rears its ugly head.”

  The evidence for two very specific charges of deception that have been leveled against President Johnson since publication of the Pentagon papers is much less clear.

  The Pentagon study itself did not make any charges, and neither did The Times in its reports on the findings of the study. But many readers concluded that Mr. Johnson had lied to the country in 1964, when he denounced his Republican opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater, for advocating full-scale air attacks against North Vietnam, and again in April, 1965, when he secretly authorized the use of American troops in an offensive combat role.

  The Pentagon study describes a “general consensus” among the President’s advisers, two months before the 1964 election, that air attacks against North Vietnam would probably have to be launched. It reports an expectation among them that these would begin early in the new year. As The Times report added, the papers also showed the President “moving and being moved toward war, but reluctant and hesitant to act until the end.”

  Mr. Johnson and those who defend his public statements at the time are undoubtedly right in their contention that the President made no formal decision to authorize more bombing until there were additional attacks on American bases in February, 1965.

  But the President also knew that most of his major advisers regarded such a decision as “inevitable”—because they thought South Vietnam to be in danger of imminent collapse, because the forces to conduct more air attacks were in place, because the target lists had long ago been prepared and because even sustained bombing was destined to be merely a stopgap measure until more troops could be rushed to South Vietnam.

  In a search through his own dispatches from Washington at the time, this reporter has come upon three interesting accounts that help to explain the confusion but tend to support the much more thoroughly researched judgment of the Pentagon papers.

  On Oct. 9, 1964, The Times reported on a news conference question to Secretary Rusk about reports “here and in Saigon that the Administration was considering a ‘major turn’ in policy but deferring a decision until after Election Day, Nov. 3.” Mr. Rusk refused to predict “future events” but said that domestic politics had no bearing on any such decisions.

  On Feb. 13, 1965, after a new “retaliatory” raid on North Vietnam but before the start of sustained bombing, this reporter quoted two unidentified high officials as follows:

  “There is no doubt that the President remains skeptical about a deeper involvement in Asia, but he is getting some very belligerent advice from very intimate quarters.”

  “History may determine that it was already too late, that the die is cast, but I am sure that the Government’s strategy is not yet determined.”

  In other words, even high officials sensed that their President was still reserving final judgment and “decision,” but they did not really know how much real choice remained.

  Even after the decision had been made, however, there was no simple way to get a straight answer from the Johnson Administration in those days, as is evident in the opening lines of a dispatch on March 2, 1965:

  “The Administration described today’s air strikes against North Vietnam as part of a ‘continuing’ effort to resist aggression and made no effort, as in the past, to relate them to particular provocation. . . . The White House said only that there had been no change in policy. The State Department said nothing. . . .”

  Some officials at the time, and Mr. Johnson on at least one occasion since then, suggested that such coyness after decision had been deemed necessary to avoid provoking intervention in the war by Soviet or Chinese Communist forces. They never explained, however, why either nation would make such a grave decision on the basis of announcements in Washington rather than on the facts of the bombing, which were well known to them.

  A far more plausible explanation, one that sounds strange in matters of such weight but rings true to those who could observe Lyndon Johnson closely and sympathetically in those days, has been offered by Stewart Alsop in Newsweek: “President Johnson was trying to fool not the people but himself—and temporarily succeeding.”

  What really emerges from the Pentagon papers, Mr. Alsop wrote approvingly, “is a picture of a desperately troubled man resisting the awful pressures to plunge deeper into the Vietnam quagmire—resisting them as instinctively as an old horse resists being led to the knackers. The President bucks, whinnies and shies away, but always in the end the reins tighten—the pressures are too much for him.”

  And, he adds: “A precisely similar sequence of events—mounting pressure from his advisers, instinctive resistance by the President, final agonized agreement—preceded the President’s decision to commit additional troops and to give the marines an offensive role. When he made these decisions, the President did not realize—because he did not want to realize—that he had crossed his Rubicon. He still hoped and prayed that a bit more air power, a few more troops on the ground, would bring the Communists to the conference table in a mood to ‘reason together.’ Hence there really had been, in his own mind, nothing ‘very dramatic’ about his decisions, no ‘far-reaching strategy.’”

  As the Pentagon papers further show, Mr. Johnson was to make two or three other big decisions about troop commitments and carve them up into smaller, more digestible numbers, as if this could hide the magnitude of the American involvement. He knew that he was not winning the war and he knew that he was playing only for some unforeseeable stroke of good fortune, and it may be that his sense of statesmanship led him to conclude that the nation would be preserved longer if he minimized the task.

  Whatever the motives, the methods for handling the awkwardness of Vietnam had then become almost traditional. But it was Mr. Johnson’s misfortune to be President, as Mr. Gelb, the coordinator of the study has written, when the “minimum necessary became the functional equivalent of gradual escalation” and the “minimal necessity became the maximum” that international and domestic constraints would allow.

  The overriding evidence in the Pentagon papers, quite apart from the timing of decisions or the candor with which they were disclosed, is that the United States Government involved itself deeply and consciously in a war that its leaders felt they probably could not win but that they also felt they could not afford to lose.

  Gradually, some of the leading advocates of the war lost their enthusiasm for it, but even in disillusionment they felt a higher duty of loyalty to the President and his policy than to the public that had become deeply divided and tormented by the war.

  As early as 1966, Mr. McNaughton perceived an “enormous miscalculation” and an “escalating military stalemate.” By 1967, Mr. McNamara and probably others were recommending a reduction of objectives and perhaps a face-saving exit through the formation of a coalition government in Saigon.

  But Mr. Johnson thought more unhappy Americans were hawks than doves and he was also forced, amid fears of noisy resignations, to negotiate with his military leaders, who were demanding more, rather than less, commitment.

  Not until the shock of the enemy’s Tet offensive in 1968, and the need to mobilize reserves if he was to meet the military’s request for 206,000 additional men for the combat zone, did Mr. Johnson set a fin
al limit on the American commitment, cut back the bombing of North Vietnam and announce his plan to retire without seeking a second term.

  No one knows to this day whether by these moves the President intended to hurry out of the war in some face-saving manner or merely to buy still more time from the American voters for a final effort at vindication.

  As the Pentagon papers disclose, his Administration did not expect much from the bombing limitation or the new offer to negotiate with Hanoi.

  “We are not giving up anything really serious in this time frame” of four weeks, the State Department informed its embassies, noting that poor weather would have curtailed the raids for that period in any case. It said that some of the air power would be switched to targets in Laos and South Vietnam and that in any case Hanoi was expected to reject the bid for talks and this would “free our hand after a short period.”

  Hanoi accepted the bid for talks, but has offered very little so far that interests Washington. Neither on the way in nor on the way out, it is now clear, was the American hand in Vietnam ever “free.”

  –July 6, 1971

  EDITORIALS FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

  The Vietnam Documents

  In an unprecedented example of censorship, the Attorney General of the United States has temporarily succeeded in preventing The New York Times from continuing to publish documentary and other material taken from a secret Pentagon study of the decisions affecting American participation in the Vietnam War.

  Through a temporary restraining order issued by a Federal District judge yesterday, we are prevented from publishing, at least through the end of the week, any new chapters in this massive documentary history of American involvement in the war. But The Times will continue to fight to the fullest possible extent of the law what we believe to be an unconstitutional prior restraint imposed by the Attorney General.