by Pawel Motyl
This prompted President Lyndon Johnson, who had taken office after the assassination of President Kennedy, to deploy additional forces to South Vietnam to stabilize the situation. Command of these increased personnel was assumed by General William Westmoreland. Simultaneously, President Johnson authorized Operational Plan 34 Alpha, sending American destroyers to patrol the waters off the coast of Vietnam and carry out intensive surveillance operations to gather precious military intelligence.
The events that led directly to the decision to begin the US military operation in North Vietnam are a rather farcical series of mistakes and misunderstandings, though some claim it was a setup from the start. The prelude to the American attacks was an alleged August 4, 1964, Vietnamese attack on the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy while they were patrolling the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin. It’s important to note that this wasn’t the first attack—a couple of days earlier, the USS Maddox had come under machine gun fire. That attack, described in detail and reported back to Washington, didn’t provoke an immediate reaction, though many in the military pressured Johnson to respond with significant force. Among the politicians and generals unfavorably disposed toward Johnson, the oft-repeated opinion that Johnson was “too soft” and allowed the Vietnamese to get away with too much prevailed, thereby harming the United States’ image and threatening American interests. In such an atmosphere, it was impossible to ignore information about a torpedo attack on August 4, and so the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, who would become one of the central figures in the events to come, was duly informed.
McNamara lived an extremely interesting, and in the opinion of many, controversial life. Born in 1916 to a family of Irish immigrants, he was a graduate of Harvard Business School and later became its youngest-ever assistant professor at the time. In August 1940, he worked for Price Waterhouse. He spent World War II in the air force, and in 1946 went to the Ford Motor Corporation, where he helped to rebuild the company, which was suffering enormous losses at the time. In 1960, McNamara became the first president of the company to come from outside the Ford family. He didn’t manage to do too much in this role, though, as barely a year later, the president-elect, John F. Kennedy, offered him the position of Secretary of Defense. McNamara accepted, and he quickly became one of the most trusted and influential people in the Kennedy entourage—he actively participated in the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. He stayed in the post until 1968, making him the longest-serving Secretary of Defense in history at the time. After stepping down, he became President of the World Bank and occupied that post until his retirement in 1981.
On August 4, 1964, it was Robert McNamara who received the first report of the torpedo attack in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Secretary of Defense fully grasped the seriousness of the event and that in the coming hours he, the Chiefs of Staff, and the entire presidential administration would be required to prepare the essential information to enable Lyndon Johnson to make the correct decision to resolve the problem. It’s worth remembering that the president was in a difficult position: he had taken office as a result of the Kennedy assassination, and not by winning an election, which his opponents frequently, and more or less openly, reminded him of. At the same time, he was preparing to go head to head with an extremely tough rival—the prospective Republican candidate in the November 1964 presidential campaign, Barry Goldwater, a descendant of Polish immigrants who was a fervent anti-communist. In comparison to him, Johnson came across as calm, hesitant, and defensively-minded. The events of February 1964, when Fidel Castro cut off water supplies to the US base in Guantánamo and provoked no reaction from the president, were still fresh in Johnson’s mind. He knew that if he were to have any chance in the upcoming elections, he would have to change his image and convince Americans that he could also play hardball when necessary. He was convinced of this by a meeting with Kenneth O’Donnell, one of the White House secretaries and previously an advisor to Kennedy. O’Donnell himself later recalled that during the meeting, he and Johnson had agreed that “his leadership was being tested and that he must respond decisively.” 2 This opinion resonated with the words spoken earlier by Senator Richard Russell, Johnson’s friend and mentor, who noted after the Guantánamo episode that there was “a slowly increasing feeling in the country that we are not being as harsh and firm in our foreign relations as we should be.” 3 The Gulf of Tonkin incident thus gave Johnson an excellent opportunity to present a different face to the world.
McNamara, of course, knew about the president’s dilemma and directed a very clear question to Admiral Sharp: How long did he need to prepare air attacks on targets in North Vietnam? General David A. Burchinal was able to include the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga in the plans, so an attack could be launched by 6:00 am local time (6:00 pm in Washington). That gave Johnson a chance to make the relevant announcement to the media at 7:00 pm, right in time for the main evening news. McNamara and his advisors therefore rushed around and called a sitting of the National Security Council (NSC). The majority of the two-hour discussion, though, was focused not on an analysis of the military situation but of the political consequences of the decision to attack. Johnson was interested not only in the potential reaction of his rival Barry Goldwater, public opinion, and the media, but also the reactions of politicians from other countries. Ultimately, Johnson took the decision to attack, but in a more limited manner—he didn’t agree to the bombing of Hanoi or Haiphong; the only targets were to be Vietnamese patrol boats located in five ports, together with gas installations and storage in Vinh.
When McNamara met the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and passed on the president’s decision, work began on drawing up the attack orders. Meanwhile, though, something happened that McNamara hadn’t foreseen, and that brought the entire operation into question. Captain John Herrick, who was commanding the patrol on August 4, contacted the Pentagon to inform them that, following a subsequent assessment of the situation, he had doubts about the veracity of the attack. The report read as follows:
Review of action makes many recorded contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. Freak weather effects and overeager sonarmen may have accounted for many reports. No actual visual sightings by Maddox. Suggest complete evaluation before any further actions. 4
A startled McNamara sought confirmation of this report from Admiral Sharp, who admitted that he wasn’t 100 percent sure that the attack had actually taken place, although, in his initial report, which had started the whole thing, he had given very precise details about it, including the number of torpedoes used by the Vietnamese. Sharp requested more time to check the facts and recommended postponing the armed response until the matter was resolved. McNamara organized an urgent meeting of the Chiefs of Staff, during which he tried to establish whether or not the American destroyers had been attacked as reported. Under pressure from the Secretary of Defense, Admiral Sharp ultimately concluded that the attack had occurred—although he did so using words which were ambiguous to say the least. To McNamara’s final question about whether the attack had taken place or not, Sharp hesitated as he replied, “Oh, no doubt about that... I think.” 5
Meanwhile, President Johnson anxiously awaited confirmation of the order to attack, and regularly contacted McNamara, expressing his increasing impatience and placing him under ever-greater pressure. The hours passed. It was late in the evening, and he still couldn’t make his announcement on the situation in Vietnam and the US’s response. 6 Finally, shortly after 11:00 pm, McNamara confirmed the plans for the military operation; half an hour later, sitting in the Oval Office, the President announced that he had authorized “limited and fitting” retaliatory strikes on targets in North Vietnam. As a result of the subterfuge by McNamara and the other advisors, Congress unanimously voted for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave Johnson the power to increase the American presence in Vietnam. War had begun.
From the perspective of the decision-making process, a clear error is immediately
evident: operating in a totally new context, dealing with a country and a culture with which they had had little contact previously, responding to a startling and not entirely confirmed incident, the Americans adopted the advocacy approach, despite the evidence positively screaming out for a deeper analysis. They didn’t try to gain extra time; in fact, they did quite the reverse, setting a deadline by which time the decision had to be made (in time for Lyndon Johnson’s television appearance), thus placing everyone under extra pressure. An inquiry approach was immediately rejected as too time-consuming, and those trying to cast doubt on the official interpretation of events and wanting to thoroughly analyze the incident—Captain Herrick, for example—were pressured by those in authority to ease off. This trap was repeated on all levels: Captain Herrick was pressured by Admiral Sharp, who was being pressured by Robert McNamara, who in turn was being pressured by President Johnson. The combination of the time pressures and the authority trap meant that the decision was made on the basis of false indications—the documents released in 2005 confirmed that on August 4, 1964, no attack took place in the Gulf of Tonkin.
The former Secretary of Defense later featured as the main character in the 2003 documentary film The Fog of War, directed by Errol Morris. In it, an aging McNamara recalls the key events that led to the outbreak of the war in Vietnam and describes the role of the central figures involved. It’s telling that he admits at the end that the decision to attack was made based on false assumptions and was the result of a host of poor decisions made by President Johnson and his advisors. McNamara clearly stresses three issues. First, the root of the errors made on August 4, 1964, was, in his opinion, the pressure that led all those involved—both in the Gulf of Tonkin and in Washington—to “[see] what they wanted to see.” Second, in this instance, there was no equivalent of Tommy Thompson in the vicinity of the president, no reliable source of information about ambitions and motives in Hanoi. The effect, as McNamara says in the film, was that the Americans got things terribly wrong. Third, he points to the words used by President Johnson in one of his speeches:
If this little nation goes down the drain and can’t maintain her independence, ask yourselves, what is going to happen to all the other little nations? [... ] America wins the wars that she undertakes. Make no mistake about it. And we have declared war on ignorance and illiteracy, we have declared war on poverty, we have declared war on disease, and we have declared war on tyranny and aggression. We not only stand for these things but we are willing to stand up and die for these things. 7
In tribute to turkey syndrome, the assumption that this war would be won (just like the previous ones had been won) made it easy to ignore the potential threat from the Vietcong and take for granted that it would be a pretty simple conflict, with little required in the way of preparation. That attitude would come back to haunt the US.
The following years saw a massive escalation of military action. The United States didn’t stop at air attacks—in 1965, it sent in the army, whose numbers rose in a matter of months to 200,000. There was still a complete lack of an inquiry approach, and many army units had no idea at all about the kind of enemy they would be facing, or on what terrain and in what weather conditions they would be fighting. The conviction remained that this would be a potentially boring conflict, and one that should be relatively easy to win. There was no comprehension of what the war meant to the Vietnamese, for whom it was not a conflict between two opposing political blocs as part of the Cold War, but a struggle for independence and reunification of a country divided by the Geneva Agreement. In The Fog of War, McNamara recounts that precisely these words were used during a meeting in Hanoi in 1995 between him and Vo Nguyen Giap, Commander in Chief of the North Vietnamese forces during the 1960s. Vo Nguyen Giap bluntly told McNamara he was ignorant of Vietnam’s history and laughed at his assumption that North Vietnam had been part of an alliance with communist China and the USSR. And in fact, given the hundreds of years of conflict between the Vietnamese and the Chinese, such an assumption was, at the very least, dangerous, and it demonstrated that the Americans had not analyzed even fundamental questions about the region.
The effects of this were significantly more serious than the president’s circle could ever have imagined. In July 1965, President Lyndon Johnson uttered the following words, immortalized in Morris’s film, about the decision to send thousands more soldiers to North Vietnam: “Nobody believes that sending another fifty or hundred thousand will change anything. We’re doing a bad job. We’re losing... losing the terrain we’ve got.” 8 Despite this, military involvement increased in the following years, as the Americans’ situation grew more and more difficult. In other words, they also failed to take the correct, courageous decision to bring a rapid end to the action (seeing as they’d lost the war anyway) and minimize their losses. This is an early example of the sunk cost effect—it swayed Johnson and his successors, and none of them was prepared to make a Drucker-style right choice. In this light, some other words of McNamara, which I came across in his book about these events, offer an interesting commentary on the subject of leadership and taking strategic decisions:
Having reviewed the record in detail, and with the advantage of hindsight, I think it is highly probable that, had President Kennedy lived, he would have probably pulled us out of Vietnam [... ] I conclude that John Kennedy would have eventually gotten out of Vietnam rather than move more deeply in... 9
The leader’s error lay, in this case, in accepting a view that turned out to have no solid basis in fact (building a position in Southeast Asia through military force, assuming the USA was vastly superior in both a technological and a military sense), which led to the making of poor strategic decisions (attacking North Vietnam) as well as operational ones (e.g., increasing the involvement of land forces). Additionally, the attitudes of the key personnel, including President Johnson, made it impossible to begin an open discussion about the possible options and, as with the Bay of Pigs, only one scenario was taken into consideration.
Lyndon B. Johnson won the elections in November 1964, defeating Barry Goldwater by a landslide, and held office till January 1969. The war in Vietnam dragged on for nearly four more years, until it was ended by the signing of the Paris Peace Accords on January 27, 1973.
Mark Twain once said that good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions. The wisdom of life, therefore, should come from drawing conclusions from past mistakes—preferably ones made not by us but by others. I get the impression that among Lyndon Johnson’s advisors at the time there was no one who possessed such wisdom. No one looked at the historical context, which led to the acceptance of false assumptions, and no one looked at similar military failures—decision-making errors that had been behind the failure of the Nazi’s Operation Barbarossa of 1941, an event that fell well within the boundaries of living memory.
Although it might be controversial to say so, Adolf Hitler became an authentic leader during the 1930s, presenting a defeated Germany with a tempting vision of restoring the country’s power. The failed painter proposed an alluring image of a strong economy and of increasing Lebensraum, which later became the underlying motive for military action. Rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Hitler took up politics and joined the NSDAP (the Nazi party), eventually becoming its leader. As head of the NSDAP, in 1923, he led the Munich Putsch, which also became known as the Beer Hall Putsch due to the place where it was started (in the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall). This led to his being arrested and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. Hitler made best use of his time while incarcerated in Landsberg prison, writing the infamous Mein Kampf (“my struggle”), in which he outlined the ideological framework for the national-socialist movement. Meanwhile, his party grew stronger, and its radical messages became more and more popular toward the end of the 1920s, as the country struggled with economic crisis and poverty; the NSDAP entered the Reichstag, in time becoming the main political force in
the country. Adolf Hitler himself came to power in 1933, when he was chosen to be Chancellor of the Reich; one year later, he combined the roles of president and chancellor, declaring himself the Führer (leader).
The first actions that essentially started the war, though at the time they appeared relatively benign, were the remilitarization of the Rhineland (breaking the Locarno Treaties) and the annexing of Austria into Germany in 1938. Several months later, on the basis of the Munich Accord, and taking advantage of the political expediency of the UK and France, Hitler first annexed the Sudetenland and then partitioned Czechoslovakia, thus creating the Nazi-administered Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Encouraged by the passivity of the signatory countries of the Treaty of Versailles which had demilitarized Germany, Hitler escalated his territorial demands and, in 1939, set his sights on another neighbor: Poland. During a meeting with the Polish Foreign Minister, Józef Beck, Hitler demanded extraterritorial highways to the Free City of Danzig across what was referred to as the Polish Corridor to the Sea. Despite ongoing diplomatic discussions, the Third Reich drew up at the same time the Fall Weiss—the plan for an attack on Poland, which became further solidified by the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentropp Pact with the Soviet Union on August 23, 1939.
On September 1, 1939, the Wehrmacht invaded Polish territory and the Luftwaffe began airstrikes on Polish cities. Because of the overwhelming superiority of the German forces, the campaign ended within a month. The Third Reich then established a General Government on Polish land and turned its attention to the west. In 1940, Hitler decided to attack another neighbor—France, and included the Benelux countries in the assault, setting things in motion with the German army’s new doctrine of Blitzkrieg, or lightning war. The operation was launched on May 10, 1940, with a Luftwaffe strike on targets in Belgium and the Netherlands, followed by paratroop landings and land forces entering French territory. Although both sides were numerically similar (the Allies’ total armed forces in terms of men was even greater than that of the Germans), the battle was a short one, due to the highly effective operating method applied by the Nazis, together with its superb execution on the ground. The main Belgian fort, Eban Emael, was soon taken, a defeat that inflicted an enormous psychological impact—the Netherlands capitulated on May 14, and Belgium continued fighting for barely two weeks more, surrendering on May 28. Meanwhile, the French, supported by the British army, tried to put up resistance but were pushed further and further back by the Wehr-macht and decimated by precise bombing attacks. In addition, on May 24, the leader of the British Expeditionary Force took the decision to withdraw his troops, which outraged the French. Despite protests from Paris, in the following week, Operation Dynamo was put into action—over 330,000 British soldiers were evacuated from Dunkirk back to the UK. An isolated France could not defend itself any further and abandoned Paris, declaring it an open city on June 13. As a result, on the following day, Parisian streets and squares were swarming with German troops, while the French government evacuated to Bordeaux. Further decisive inroads made by Hitler’s armored formations led to the capitulation of France, announced on June 22, 1940. From the ruins of the country arose the puppet government of Vichy which, led by Marshal Philippe Pétain, supported the occupiers. In this way, in little more than a month, one of the largest European military and political powers fell, and the Germans reveled in their new approach to waging war, the Blitzkrieg.
