The Generals

by Thomas E. Ricks

  Others sensed a larger and growing depersonalization in the Army. Capt. Roger Little lamented in 1955 that

  like the mass society in which we live, military units have become more like crowds than neighborhoods or regiments. Membership is constantly changing, with persons moving in and out, up and down, and to widely different stations. . . . They don’t really “know” one another. The regiments are like crowds, anonymous collections of people, constantly changing before their members develop common standards, and sharing few if any memories of the battle or the bivouac.

  By 1957 the Army was sufficiently concerned that it surveyed students at its Command and General Staff College, at Fort Leavenworth. A full 81 percent said they believed that commanders oversupervised junior officers. Among the causes they cited were an unrelenting demand for perfection, the use of excessively detailed orders, and overall lack of confidence in younger officers. Maj. Gen. Lionel McGarr, the commandant at Leavenworth, in a follow-up letter to the Army’s personnel chief, reported a consensus among students and faculty that the way the Army was managing its officers tended “to reward caution and conformity and to penalize progressive initiative.”

  The Army tried to address the problem but had little success. In September 1957, Army chief Taylor sent a letter to his senior generals expressing a concern about this tendency of junior officers to perceive that they were being micromanaged. The following year, the Army’s manual FM 22-100, on military leadership, warned, “Over-supervision stifles initiative and creates resentment.” Senior Army commanders also were sent a letter summarizing the issue. But not much was done besides this discussion. Most significantly, there was no indication that anyone saw the problem as a structural one arising from the way the Army managed and promoted its officers.

  One reason for inaction might have been that those who rose to the top in an era of micromanagement saw nothing worrisome about the close supervision of subordinates. It was, after all, what had helped them climb the ladder. “Why do so many generals pay so much attention to details?” wrote Maj. Gen. Aubrey Newman. “That they paid attention to important small matters is one reason they were made generals.” It was a maddening, but accurate, formulation: Micromanagement was becoming part of the Army’s culture—or, as George Fielding Eliot would have put it, its soul. As Gen. Newman’s comment indicates, general officers as a class were extremely resistant to outside criticism. After all, they could always say, they were the generation that had won World War II. After defeating the Nazis, everything else was deemed less of a challenge.

  By 1961, there was growing evidence that the Army was losing hold of the concept of command. Lt. Col. David Ramsey Jr. took to the pages of Military Review to argue that, despite what many of his comrades seemed to believe, “command and management are not the same thing.”

  From the outside, the Army looked terrific, in part because so much effort had been put into looking good. “It can be said without exaggeration that the Army . . . has never entered a war situation as well led as it is today,” Fortune magazine would report as the Vietnam War intensified. Part of its evidence was that “all but a fraction of the serving general officers and colonels have seen action or done staff duty in one or another of the great campaigns of World War II or Korea.” But there were signs of rot inside the service. Henry Gole, who had left the Army after the Korean War and returned in 1961, was shocked by the change he saw. “Officers were doing the tasks NCOs had done in 1953,” he recalled. “There was a lot of show . . . white rocks, short hair, shiny boots, the appearance of efficiency, over-centralization, fear of risk.”

  In the early 1960s, Peter Dawkins was a celebrity within the Army, a captain better known than most generals. As a youth he had overcome polio. At West Point he became the first person ever to be captain of the Corps of Cadets, student body president, in the top 5 percent academically, and captain of the football team. It was almost anticlimactic that he also won the Heisman Trophy in 1958, as the nation’s outstanding collegiate football player, and then became a Rhodes scholar. But by 1965 he had grown unimpressed with the Army’s sense of leadership. “The ideal almost seems to be the man who has done so little—who has exerted such a paltry amount of initiative and imagination—that he never has done anything wrong,” he charged in an article for Infantry magazine. “There was a time when an individual wasn’t considered a very attractive candidate for promotion unless he had one or two scars on his record. . . . If [a man] is to pursue a bold and vigorous path rather then one of conformity and acquiescence, he will sometimes err.”

  By this time, both elements of the Marshall system had begun to crumble: Generals were not selected for the qualities Marshall described, and were not relieved at the rate his model expected. Thus misapplied, the Marshall template of generalship tended to promote organization men who were far less inclined to judge the performance of their peers. They were acting less like stewards of their profession, answerable to the public, and more like keepers of a closed guild, answerable mainly to each other. Becoming a general was now akin to winning a tenured professorship, liable to be removed not for professional failure but only for embarrassing one’s institution with moral lapses.

  Without realizing it, by ceasing to police its own generals for competence, the Army had spurred the rise of a new practice: the relief of top generals by civilians, as occurred in Korea with MacArthur and would continue in Vietnam and subsequent wars. One of the few predictors of how well a war will go is the quality of discourse between civilian and military leaders. Unfortunately, in America’s next war, it was not the benign spirit of Marshall but the malign spirit of MacArthur that would hover over presidents’ discussions with their generals.

  This was the Army that would go into Vietnam—and that already was advising the Vietnamese military to take what now appears to have been entirely the wrong direction.

  PART III

  THE VIETNAM WAR

  For the Army, the 1950s had been a brush with institutional extinction, as many wondered aloud whether there would even be a role for ground forces in the new era of nuclear weapons. Gen. Maxwell Taylor, chief of staff of the Army from 1955 to 1959, would refer to the era as the Army’s “Babylonian captivity.” The Navy had been developing nuclear-powered submarines and nuclear-tipped missiles, while the Air Force, with its strategic bombers, became the star of the military establishment, for a spell enjoying a budget double the size of the Army’s. The Army rebounded somewhat under a new president, John Kennedy, who authorized an increase in its conventional forces from eleven to sixteen divisions and also encouraged the rapid growth of Special Forces. The Army eyed Indochina as the place to demonstrate its continuing relevance. But it also had to keep an eye on the Soviet Union and so was never permitted to deploy more than one-third of its soldiers to Vietnam.

  CHAPTER 15

  Maxwell Taylor

  Architect of defeat

  T he same men we have lionized as part of “the Greatest Generation” were the generals we have demonized, rightly, for their part in the Vietnam War. The generals of Vietnam, William DePuy once noted, were the frontline combat commanders of World War II. “All the way from Westmoreland down through the division commanders, most of us were battalion and regimental commanders in World War II,” he observed.

  These men were not just survivors; they were winners on a global scale. Born around the time of World War I, they had gone through the Depression as adolescents and had scrambled to get college educations. “We never had very much,” Gen. Walter “Dutch” Kerwin recalled decades later. “We never had radios and we never had a car. Along came the Depression and my father lost his job and, well, for about four years or so, we were in dire straits. So it was always impressed on me as a young kid that if I wanted to go anywhere I was going to have to fight for it.” During World War II, they not only survived but thrived. They rose quickly in rank as they took on and crushed the greatest external threat that e
ver faced the United States. These were men who in an Army of millions had been star performers. Kerwin, for example, as a major on the besieged beach in Anzio, Italy, in early 1944, effectively had been given the power of a general to sort out and make artillery fires effective against the German counterattackers. He was severely wounded in France later that year and, after recuperating for months, ended the war in Ridgway’s old post as the morning briefer to Gen. Marshall. Waiting his turn outside Marshall’s office, he would see “brigadier generals and major generals coming out of there with the shakes. He was very understanding, but a very disciplined man, and hard as nails.” In 1967, Kerwin would become Westmoreland’s chief of staff in Vietnam.

  It is difficult to put aside the miserable end of the Vietnam War and recall that, as the United States entered it, an overwhelming optimism pervaded the Army’s generals. Their outlook, verging on arrogance, was shared by their civilian overseers at the Pentagon and the White House. These men stood astride the world. Even now, it is startling to consider the awesome capacity of a nation that could simultaneously wage and lose a war on the far side of the planet, undergo a social revolution at home, and also launch a space program that placed human beings on the moon.

  But in a hot, wet, strategically insignificant corner of Southeast Asia, this world-beating generation of Army generals would become bogged down in frustration, so much so that the support of the American people, which they had learned to take as a matter of fact, began to erode. “It was the strangest thing that we have ever gotten mixed up with,” Gen. Bruce Palmer Jr., who at age thirty-one had been the chief of staff of the 6th Infantry Division in World War II, said not long after the end of the Vietnam War, in which he was a corps-level commander. “We didn’t understand the Vietnamese or the situation, or what kind of war it was. By the time we found out, it was too late.”

  This generation was led into Vietnam by Maxwell Taylor, who, slightly older, had commanded the 101st Airborne Division during World War II, though he missed its most celebrated engagement, at Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge. In 1960, a year after stepping down as Army chief of staff, he published a bitter critique of Eisenhower’s defense policies titled The Uncertain Trumpet. (The first draft of the book was written largely by Taylor’s staff aides, among them William DePuy and John Cushman, about whom more will be said later.) During the presidential campaign of 1960, Taylor and his book became favorites of the Democratic nominee, John F. Kennedy. “We had been affected tremendously by his book,” said the president’s brother and closest adviser, Robert Kennedy, who named a son after Taylor. Taylor’s book “may have influenced the United States involvement in Vietnam more than any other,” concluded Lt. Gen. Dave Richard Palmer.

  In the early 1960s, Taylor would become almost the opposite of George Marshall. Despite having worked for Marshall as a young officer in 1941–42, Taylor became a highly politicized officer who, rather than keep the White House at arm’s length, made his personal relationship with the president his base of power. Though out of uniform when John Kennedy became president, he would have more influence on the American entry into the Vietnam War than any general on active duty, playing Pangloss to Kennedy’s Candide.

  As Army chief, Taylor had felt unappreciated by President Eisenhower. But under Ike’s successor, the Army would reclaim the spotlight as Kennedy focused on the non-nuclear uses of the military. In 1961, even as Taylor’s misbegotten Pentomic concept was being hastily dropped by the Army, his influence was growing at the White House. Early in Kennedy’s term, in mid-April 1961, Taylor was given an opening by the Bay of Pigs debacle. The CIA-led attempt to send Cuban exiles into Cuba to depose Fidel Castro had caused the president to distrust the Joint Chiefs of Staff; he felt they had distanced themselves and failed to warn him of problems they foresaw. “Those sons of bitches with all the fruit salad just sat there nodding, saying it would work,” he reportedly complained.

  Taylor first came to the White House to lead an investigation into the Bay of Pigs fiasco for the president. He stayed on to become the president’s personal military adviser, a new position in which he effectively supplanted the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, enjoying far more access to the Oval Office than did anyone in the military. “I would often see him several times a day on many different subjects,” Taylor recalled of the president. He was seen not just as a general but as an important White House official with an open portfolio. “General Taylor had an influence with President Kennedy that extended far beyond military matters; rightly he regarded him as a man of broad knowledge, quick intelligence, and sound judgment,” said Gen. Earle “Bus” Wheeler, who became Army chief of staff in 1962. Wheeler recalled that the first issue Taylor took up, once he was officially a member of the White House staff, was what to do about Vietnam.

  In 1962, Kennedy made the de facto situation de jure by naming Taylor to succeed Lemnitzer as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, a position Taylor held until 1964. He was regarded warily by the other members of the Chiefs as the White House’s man, according to his not unsympathetic biographer, retired Army Brig. Gen. Douglas Kinnard. Discourse between the Chiefs and their commander in chief was strained under Kennedy, and would remain so under his successor. After two years as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Taylor again retired from the military, this time to become the American ambassador to South Vietnam, where he officially held the powers of a proconsul, overseeing both the civilian and military sides of the American effort. After leaving Vietnam, Taylor served as a consultant on the war to President Johnson for three years. He also was instrumental in putting in place two of the three top American commanders in the Vietnam War—first one of his former aides, Paul Harkins, and then another, William Westmoreland.

  American memory scapegoats William Westmoreland as the general who lost the Vietnam War, but Taylor should bear much of the blame for getting the country into it. As the strategic expert Bernard Brodie once put it, Taylor “bears as much responsibility as any other military man for the sad story of our commitment to Vietnam,” having been the man who peddled the idea of an intervention and who then shaped the American military’s approach to the conflict. Gen. Nathan Twining, a member of the Joint Chiefs for most of the 1950s, first as Air Force chief and then as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said in 1967:

  He is largely responsible for our position in Vietnam right now. He’s the one that wanted to do that, against all our advice. We argued this day after day, many times. . . . Taylor believed, at least he said so, that we could fight a war over there. Oh, we’ve argued this in the JCS time and again. He was the only advocate of it. All the Navy and the Marines and the rest of us were against it, but his statement was that we could fight a war over there by not shooting, not a shooting war, but have our forces there in not too big numbers, but we would supply the equipment, the training and all that for these people and let them do the fighting for us. . . . He was as much responsible for this as anybody.

  Twining here is overstating the extent and nature of JCS opposition to involvement in Vietnam during the 1950s—and especially misstating his own role—but the essence of his point is nonetheless correct: Taylor led the way.

  Taylor tugged the Joint Chiefs of Staff into supporting American involvement in a ground war in Vietnam. Before Taylor was involved, the Joint Chiefs had concluded that Vietnam was at the periphery of American interests. In the spring of 1954, Matthew Ridgway, who succeeded J. Lawton Collins as Army chief of staff, spearheaded a vigorous internal campaign to keep the American military out of a direct combat role in Indochina. Early in April 1954, Adm. Arthur Radford, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs, polled the Chiefs on whether they would support limited American military support for the beleaguered French forces at Dien Bien Phu. Radford was for it, and the representatives of the Navy and the Air Force were inclined to go along with him. “My answer is a qualified ‘yes,’” responded Twining, who thought “about three A-bombs” would take care
of the Indochina problem.

  If it came to a vote, it looked as though the Joint Chiefs would favor air strikes. Two American aircraft carriers, the Boxer and the Philippine Sea, steamed in the South China Sea with small nuclear bombs in their weapons lockers. But what Ridgway lacked in votes he made up for in energy. “My answer is an emphatic and immediate ‘NO,’” he wrote in his own memo. “Such use of United States armed forces . . . would constitute a dangerous strategic diversion of limited United States military capabilities, and would commit our armed forces in a non-decisive theatre to the attainment of non-decisive local objectives,” he told his fellow members of the Joint Chiefs on April 6, 1954. Nor, he stated in another document, would the use of atomic weapons reduce the number of ground forces required to fight in Vietnam, which he estimated would be seven to twelve divisions (that is, at least 300,000 men, including support troops), depending on whether the French withdrew and the Chinese intervened. Over Radford’s objections, the Army’s dissent was briefed to the president. Ridgway was joined in his objection by the commandant of the Marine Corps. He likely also gained strength from knowing that his commander in chief agreed with him. In 1951, not long before becoming president, Ike had written in his diary about Vietnam, “I’m convinced that no military victory is possible in that kind of theater.” In a 1954 meeting, according to Douglas MacArthur II, the State Department official who was a nephew of Gen. MacArthur, Eisenhower vowed, “As long as I’m president we will not go in with ground troops to Vietnam.” In a meeting with Radford and Taylor on the morning of May 24, 1956, Eisenhower expanded on that view, emphasizing that “we would not . . . deploy and tie down our forces around the Soviet periphery in small wars.” Finally, Ridgway had history on his side: Everyone involved knew that just four years earlier, MacArthur had assured President Truman that any Chinese intervention in Korea would be halted by air strikes, which, painfully, had proven not to be the case. Ultimately—at least as far as 1954 was concerned—the minority view of the chief of staff of the Army and the commandant of the Marine Corps prevailed: America would not go to war in support of the French.