McNamara also turned his attention to the New Look reserve structure and did not like what he found. In June 1961 Kennedy met Khrushchev in Vienna for a heated debate on world politics, and the president returned dismayed that he had impressed the Soviets as a weak leader. Khrushchev strengthened this fear in August when he erected a wall to stop refugees from reaching West Berlin and then threatened Allied control of their part of the city. McNamara called 148,000 reservists to active duty, partly to improve readiness, in part as a diplomatic signal. The results were mixed. Air Force (Guard and Reserve) and Navy air and surface units showed reasonable readiness, but Army Reserve and National Guard units showed a shocking lack of training, manpower, equipment, and enthusiasm. After demobilization the following year, McNamara proposed to merge the Army and Air Force Guard and Reserve, which set off a storm in Congress. The secretary settled for a less dramatic approach by giving the Air and Army Guard the principal responsibility for providing combat units and assigning Air Force and Army Reserve units supporting missions. He also provided additional training funds for “selected” units and supported internal reforms that reduced drill-pay reservists from 937,000 to 871,000 but improved unit readiness.
The major test of flexible response came from Cuba, where Castro threatened American domination of the Caribbean basin. The Castro threat, which made Cuba a bastion for exporting revolution, agitated the administration. It also tied Communist subversion into part of a global pattern. In January 1961 Khrushchev stressed in a major speech that the Soviet Union would support “wars of national liberation” and protect the Third World bastions of socialism that such wars produced. Similar sermons from Castro, Che Guevara, and Chinese Defense Minister Lin Biao convinced Kennedy that the United States did not have an adequate capacity to stop Communist subversion. As he told his closest advisers, the United States would have to become more proficient at counterinsurgency. In April 1961 he demonstrated his own and the nation’s ineptness in covert operations by making the decisions that botched the Cuban exile invasion at the Bay of Pigs. Neither a true covert operation nor a conventional invasion, Operation ZAPATA depended on a revolt that never occurred, air cover that proved inadequate, and interagency coordination that failed. After a series of postmortems, the most important directed by JFK’s personal military adviser, Maxwell D. Taylor, the administration spurred the CIA, the Agency for International Development, the U.S. Information Agency, and the armed forces to give counterinsurgency the highest priority. Kennedy gave the CI crusade his personal touch by forming the Special Group/Counterinsurgency, dominated by his brother Robert, Taylor, and McGeorge Bundy.
Demonstrating the old proverb that Irishmen always get even, Kennedy approved joint maneuvers in 1962 that tested the contingency plan for an invasion of Cuba. After a purge of the CIA’s operations directorate, he unleashed Operation MONGOOSE, a series of schemes to bring Castro down through Cuban exile—CIA collaboration. He also gave his personal attention to the growth and reorientation of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, an elite and neglected force of 2,000 that was supposed to organize sabotage teams in Asia and Eastern Europe in the case of general war. McNamara organized his own OSD task force and linked it with a similar group created in the JCS. Giving the Army the lead in developing CI forces and doctrine, Kennedy and McNamara expanded the Army’s military assistance and civil affairs schools and held CI seminars for high-ranking civilian officials and military officers. Special Forces, however, held center stage—green berets and all—for the president ordered it to assist native villagers, rural militias, and foreign ranger forces to combat Communist guerrillas. In November 1961 the first Special Forces teams reached the embattled central highlands of South Vietnam, but the geographic orientation of the government’s CI effort remained Latin America.
For both the United States and the Soviet Union, Castro’s survival had passed the unconventional stage, for the Russians had started to provide the Cubans with a flood of advisers, ground weapons, aircraft, and air-defense missiles. In the summer of 1962 intelligence reports from Cuba mentioned new missiles, but closer investigation suggested that the installations were for air defense.
In September, however, air reconnaissance officers remained concerned about a pattern of construction that they had identified from limited flights, but not until early October did they receive permission to collect definitive photographs using an advanced model of the U-2, controlled by the CIA. The U-2 flight, conducted October 14, produced convincing evidence that the Russians were building sites for two types of offensive missiles, the medium-range (1,000 miles) SS-4 and the intermediate range (2,200 miles) SS-5. Further analysis suggested that the total missile force might number as many as eighty missiles of both types. At the time the U.S.S.R. had only about thirty ICBMs capable of reaching the United States; eighty MRBNs (the SS-4s) and IRBMs (the SS-5s) did not reverse the strategic advantage of the United States, but they might have dangerous implications for the nation’s alliance system if the Russians went unchallenged. Kennedy’s political career was no less at stake. The crisis also heartened those politicians and generals who longed to overthrow Castro and give the Russians a bloody nose, even if only symbolically. When presented with the photographic evidence collected and analyzed by the experts of the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), the administration decided to respond. After weighing the implications of an air strike on the missile complexes, Kennedy decided to force the Russians to withdraw the missiles if he could, but to prepare for a conventional invasion of Cuba and a nuclear war with the Soviet Union if his crisis diplomacy failed. As one participant recalled, “the smell of burning hung in the air.”
For one week (October 21–28, 1962), the United States and the Soviet Union flirted with nuclear war, and then they both blinked, to the vast benefit of both nations. After about a week of intensive debate within his administration, President Kennedy accepted an option fashioned largely by his brother and Robert McNamara: a selective naval blockade of Cuba that would prevent further military assistance to the Russian and Cuban armed forces on the island. The president threatened further action if Khrushchev did not bring the missiles home, a point he made in a dramatic national radio and television address on October 22. Although he could not be sure that the Russians had nuclear warheads in Cuba, Kennedy had to proceed as if they did. It was well that he did so, for NPIC found a warhead storage site after the crisis abated, and the Russians later admitted that they had had around twenty warheads in Cuba. The crisis peaked on October 27, the day the SS-4 sites became operational. Early in the day an Air Force U-2, flown by Major Rudolph Anderson, plunged to the earth, hit by a Russian air-defense missile. Without direct authorization, the commander of SAC, General Thomas S. Power, put his force in Defense Condition (DEFCON) 2, a posture that placed his bombers and missiles in the last stages of prewar readiness; Power had the orders transmitted in the clear for the edification of the Russians. Khrushchev also may have had second thoughts about his ability to control his commander in Cuba, General Issa Pliyev, who had shot down the U-2 without prior approval. Although control procedures for handling the missiles and nuclear warheads were more restrictive, General Pliyev may have had some latitude in launching missiles (including nuclear) at an American invasion fleet, already under way for Havana. Khrushchev could not stop an uncompromising message already sent to Washington, but he could send another personal plea, which he did. On October 28 he agreed to withdraw the missiles if the United States would not invade Cuba. Kennedy promptly accepted the offer.
The peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 appeared to prove the wisdom of flexible response and its accompanying readiness programs. Alerted strategic forces, especially SAC’s bombers, posed such a threat to the Soviet Union that a nuclear exchange appeared unlikely. NATO’s conventional forces (and its tactical nuclear weapons) seemed to ensure no Soviet response in central Europe. The Navy’s carrier battle-groups and antisubmarine task forces held the balance
at sea. As Kennedy and Khrushchev exchanged messages that combined threats and concessions, McNamara assembled an invasion force in the Caribbean and at southern ports that rivaled the task forces organized during World War II. In assessing the success of its crisis diplomacy, the Kennedy administration concluded that the combination of political will, strategic nuclear superiority, and conventional military readiness had given Khrushchev no rational alternative but retreat. Flexible response, applied with cautious threats of escalation, had restored America’s initiative in the Cold War. This conclusion was further reinforced in April 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson deployed a brigade of Marines and part of the 82d Airborne Division to halt a civil war in the Dominican Republic. Thus far the simultaneous test of flexible response in Southeast Asia had not yet brought any major reassessment of American defense policy.
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SEVENTEEN
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In Dubious Battle: Vietnam, 1961–1967
On his last day in office, January 19, 1961, when President Eisenhower briefed his successor on affairs in Southeast Asia, the departing president emphasized the situation in Laos and the grave possibility of U.S. intervention there. Not once did Eisenhower mention Vietnam. Yet Vietnam, not Laos, engulfed the presidencies of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon. No dramatic event—no musket volleys on Lexington Green, no artillery rounds battering Fort Sumter, no Japanese Zeros shattering a quiet Sunday morning in Hawaii, no Soviet tanks rumbling across the 38th Parallel—announced to the American people that they were at war. Instead the conflict approached stealthily, yet steadily, like a guerrilla setting up an ambush. Suddenly (or so it seemed), a dozen years after the Korean War ended, the U.S. was again engaged in a war on the Asian mainland.
Riddled with ambiguities, uncertainties, and paradoxes, the Vietnam War defied easy generalizations. Pitting North Vietnam and a very substantial number of South Vietnamese against other Southerners, it was both a civil war and an international conflict involving the U.S., China, and the Soviet Union. Moreover, the international situation changed dramatically between 1964 and 1972, as the Chinese-Soviet estrangement became increasingly obvious and U.S. policy moved toward détente with both Communist superpowers. For the Vietnamese the war was unlimited, but for the major powers it remained limited: a situation fraught with intra-allied tensions. Foreign intervention both lengthened the war and increased its ferocity.
The fighting contained conventional and unconventional elements simultaneously, not just in different regions but sometimes in the same province. What was true in one place was often irrelevant in another because the conflict varied depending on where soldiers were stationed, when they served, and the nature of their assignments. Combat action in only ten of South Vietnam’s forty-four provinces accounted for half of all American combat deaths, and each of the five northernmost provinces was in that top ten. On the other hand, few Americans died in the Mekong Delta. Combat intensity varied from one year to the next, with 1968 being the most fierce. In round numbers, 15,000 American were killed in action (KIA) from 1964 to 1967, another 15,000 in 1968, and then 15,000 more during the rest of the war. Death fell most heavily on men assigned to maneuver battalions (meaning infantry and light mechanized units), who averaged about fifteen times the KIA rate of all other forces. But at the war’s height during 1968–1969, 88 percent of all servicemen were in non-combat occupational specialties.
Vietnam was always about more than the fate of that Southeast Asian country. Three presidents based their decisions as much on domestic political considerations as they did on the war’s exigencies. Democrats were especially unwilling to risk being perceived as “soft” on Communism by “losing” more territory and thereby igniting a new McCarthyism. “God Almighty,” said Johnson as he contemplated what would happen if Southeast Asia became Communist-dominated, “what they said about us leaving China would just be warming up, compared to what they’d say now.” Policymakers also worried about international “credibility.” NSC-68 asserted that Communists were “seeking to demonstrate to the free world that force and the will to use it are on the side of the Kremlin, that those who lack it are decadent and doomed.” Proving that the U.S. was neither decadent nor doomed required that presidents be tough, that they not back down from a fight. Successive presidents understood the link between “manly” behavior and political legitimacy. The Kennedy administration went out of its way to project a cult of toughness, and Johnson feared that if the Communists overran South Vietnam, political opponents would claim he “was a coward. An unmanly man. A man without a spine.” Nixon often insisted that neither he nor his nation would be defeated and humiliated and thus devalue his image of manly courage.
The containment policy, reinforced by a questionable “Munich analogy” and an unproven “domino theory,” impelled and then sustained the intervention. One of World War II’s foremost “lessons” was that democratic nations must never appease aggressors, as the British supposedly did at Munich; preventing a third world war seemed to require free nations to repel aggression anywhere it reared its ugly head. The domino theory postulated that if the Communists knocked over one nation, then its neighbors would automatically topple into the Communist camp. Containment and its corollaries caused policymakers to ignore the Communist world’s diversity. Policymakers also did not understand that anticolonial movements would have roiled Asia even if Communism never existed, and they ignored poignant warnings against involvement in Southeast Asia. For example, in 1949 the JCS asserted that the “widening political consciousness and the rise of militant nationalism among the subject people cannot be reversed.” Any effort to do so would be “an anti-historical act likely in the long run to create more problems than it solves and cause more damage than benefit.”
Finally, as always, soldiers waged two wars, one against the enemy and the other against the environment. Vietnam had varied terrain and ever-changing (though almost always miserable) weather. In the south the densely populated Mekong Delta was flat and watery, laced with swampy jungles and the Mekong River’s tributaries. Near Saigon and stretching northward for fifty miles were rolling hills covered with intermixed jungles and savannah-like grasses. Then came the southern terminus of the Truong Son Mountains, a region called the Central Highlands, a rugged 20,000 square mile plateau covered with tropical forests, bamboo, and elephant grass (which had such razor-sharp edges that soldiers believed anyone who walked through it qualified for a Purple Heart). Semi-nomadic, burn-and-plant ethnic groups called Montagnards inhabited the Highlands. Finally, South Vietnam’s northernmost end featured the Truong Son Mountains, a feral region of rain forests, jagged peaks, and surging rivers. From south to north these regions corresponded to what Americans would label IV Corps Tactical Zone (IV CTZ), III CTZ, II CTZ, and I (pronounced “eye”) CTZ. South Vietnam had dry and rainy seasons depending on the southwest and northeast monsoons. The best campaigning weather prevailed during the dry season from February through May; major enemy offensives in 1968, 1972, and 1975 all occurred during this window. The dry season was also a boon for the Americans, since it allowed for more air strikes, greater helicopter mobility, and more reliable movement on the roads.
The United States and Revolution in Southeast Asia
President Truman’s decision in mid-1950 to intervene in Southeast Asia came against a seemingly perilous backdrop. Mao Zedong’s victory in the Chinese civil war appeared to tilt the world balance of power in the Communists’ favor, and fears of a Soviet threat to Western Europe fostered an almost desperate need for France to participate in NATO. But events limited France’s ability to devote resources to European defense. France had ruled Vietnam, as well as Laos and Cambodia, from the midnineteenth century until the Japanese replaced them as imperial overlords during World War II. Led by Ho Chi Minh, Vietnamese nationalists (called the Viet Minh) fought against the Japanese and proclaimed an independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) on the day Japan surrendered. But the Vietnamese d
esire for independence collided with France’s effort to reestablish its colonial empire after World War II, resulting in the First Indochinese War, which began in 1946. Although Ho was prominent in founding the French Communist Party and the Indochinese Communist Party, he was above all else a nationalist who sought a unified, independent Vietnam. Only after democratic nations such as France and the U.S. refused to support the DRV’s bid for independence did Ho turn to China and the Soviet Union for support; both extended diplomatic recognition in January 1950.
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