The Generals

by Thomas E. Ricks

  Once obfuscation became accepted as the approach, it was hard to drop it. When Sen. Wayne Morse of Oregon asked Taylor skeptical questions about the Gulf of Tonkin incident of August 1964, “Taylor gave misleading answers,” McMaster noted.

  Later in 1964, the Chiefs again made a run at expressing dissent. Taylor had been sent to Vietnam as U.S. ambassador and had suggested that Earle Wheeler succeed him as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Wheeler, growing frustrated in the post, eventually told McNamara that the Chiefs were prepared to state to the president that unless the war was taken vigorously to North Vietnam, they wanted to withdraw American forces from South Vietnam. McNamara met with the Chiefs and kept them from bolting by promising that he was willing to entertain the possibility of a series of major escalatory actions, from heavily bombing the North to confronting China in a land war—none of which he really wanted to take. When the Chiefs submitted a memo to the president stating their views, McNamara omitted a key phrase from it. The result of such evasion, concluded McMaster, was that “the assumptions that underlay the president’s policy went unchallenged by the one formal body charged by law and tradition with advising the president of the United States about strategy and warfare.”

  Johnson was certainly a poor wartime commander in chief, but he remained a canny manipulator of men. In mid-1965, he cajoled the Joint Chiefs, “You’re my team; you’re all Johnson men.” At this point, duty should have overcome courtesy and impelled the Chiefs to correct their president, as Marshall almost certainly would have: They were not his men, they should have said—they were the nation’s men. Yet the president had measured them well, for, in fact, they would behave as his minions when they met with members of Congress and failed in their duty to be truthful.

  Finally, in November 1965, Wheeler and the other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff got up the nerve to go to the White House and present President Johnson with a united front. They called for an end to his policy of gradual escalation and lobbied to replace it with a major military offensive against North Vietnam. They wanted to pound North Vietnam hard from the air, with both Air Force and Navy jets, and also to mine and blockade its harbors. Furthermore, they wanted this application of “overwhelming naval and air power” to be done quickly. Johnson made it clear that this was not a welcome meeting. He did not offer them seats, though he listened attentively as they stood in a semicircle to present their recommendations.

  When the Chiefs finished, the president turned his back on them for about a minute, leaving them standing while seeming to weigh their counsel. Then he whirled on them in a fury. “He screamed obscenities, he cursed them personally, he ridiculed them,” recalled Charles Cooper, then a Marine major, who had been brought to the meeting to hold maps. Among the names the president spewed, recalled Cooper, who later rose to the rank of lieutenant general, were “shitheads, dumbshits, pompous assholes.” After the Army chief of staff and the Marine commandant confirmed their support for a sharp, swift escalation of the war, Johnson again yelled at them. “You goddam fucking assholes. You’re trying to get me to start World War III with your idiotic bullshit—your ‘military wisdom.’” Then he ordered them to “get the hell out of here right now.”

  In his car afterward, Adm. David McDonald, the chief of naval operations, said, “Never in my life did I ever expect to be put through something as horrible as you just watched from the president of the United States to his five senior military advisers.” Johnson had counterattacked powerfully. Henry Kissinger, meeting Gen. Wheeler three years later, saw him as a beaten dog, resembling “a wary beagle, his soft dark eyes watchful for the origin of the next blow.” Gen. Harold K. Johnson, the Army chief of staff, told students at the Army War College years later that at one point he had decided to resign as chief of staff of the Army. “And then on the way to the White House, I thought better of it and thought I could do more working within the system than I could by getting out,” he recalled. “And now I will go to my death with that lapse in moral courage.” He also seemed to retreat in place emotionally and professionally. “I acquired the feeling, the sense, that I was an observer, I was not a participant—particularly in my role as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

  Johnson’s tantrum was a modern low point in discourse between generals and presidents. Among other things, President Johnson’s explosion recalls George Marshall’s wisdom in trying to maintain a social and emotional distance from the president. Had FDR spoken to him in the degrading fashion Johnson spoke to the Joint Chiefs, Marshall almost certainly would have replied that he clearly had lost the confidence of the commander in chief and so was obliged to submit his resignation as chief of the Army. It was a sign of the decline in the quality of the nation’s military leadership that none of those present in that November 1965 meeting did so. As Gen. McMaster put it in Dereliction of Duty, his scholarly study of the professional and moral failures of the Joint Chiefs in dealing with the war, that lapse invited tolerance of greater sins. “The president was lying, and he expected the Chiefs to lie as well or, at least, to withhold the whole truth. Although the president should not have placed the Chiefs in that position, the flag officers should not have tolerated it when he had.” It was equally a sign of how Lyndon Johnson had failed to live up to the example of Franklin Roosevelt, whom Goodwin called “his patron, exemplar, and finally the yardstick by which he would measure his achievement.” Unlike FDR, Johnson never really explained his war to the nation. “At no time that I was aware,” wrote Joseph Alsop, who became almost the last “hawk” among prominent journalists, “did President Johnson or his advisers seek to prepare the American people for the grim consequences of a protracted military battle, nor did they adequately explain to the public the reasons for the fight.” Neither the president nor the Joint Chiefs of Staff did their duty during the Vietnam War.

  b. In the field

  Here is the history of the American involvement in combat in Vietnam in a nutshell: In 1964, the situation in Vietnam was eroding quickly. Then came 1965, the year of emergency, when the South Vietnamese government looked as if it might collapse if not reinforced by American forces. In 1966, the Army and the Marines fought to establish themselves and secure bases in Vietnam. In 1967, the Americans began to take the fight to the enemy, going after his bases and lines of communication. They were surprisingly successful in doing so. In Chau Thanh, just south of the Plain of Reeds, senior Communist cadres criticized local fighters for retreating. The fighters protested, “We met with very strong enemy units that were ten times stronger than we. Therefore, we dared not resist their operations. If we stood against them, we would have been completely eliminated. The enemy . . . has mechanized equipment and modern weapons.” Military setbacks carried political consequences for the Viet Cong, or National Liberation Front, explained a village secretary from an area just to the northwest: “The Tam Hiep villagers’ confidence has been shaken, and they want to cut all ties with the Front. Most of them still pay taxes, but it is simply to have the Front leave them alone.”

  The two sides were heading toward a major clash that would come early in 1968 and prove to be the determinative campaign of the war. Until then, it was possible for both sides to develop a genuine sense of progress—a situation surprisingly common in war. If the Americans were pushing back the Viet Cong and their Northern backers in 1967, the Communists could conclude at the same time that they had met the world’s most powerful military on the battlefield and, despite lacking its tanks, bombers, and helicopters, had survived and even learned something about how to handle the newcomers. Vo Nguyen Giap, the North Vietnamese defense minister, would write in September of that year that “the situation has never been as favorable as it is now. The armed forces and the people have stood up to fight the enemy.” By then the Communists were planning the major offensive they would launch five months later.

  In fact, by late 1967, there were signs that the Vietnam War was beginning to sour for the U.S.
Army. It was an unwanted war for which the Army had not prepared. “The officer corps of the 1960s was trained to fight Russians,” Charles Krohn, an Army intelligence officer in Vietnam in 1967–68, wrote decades later. “They envisioned massive tank and mechanized infantry battles. Force versus force. In Vietnam every American officer dreamed of the day when the little beggars would come out and fight, but they never did”—at least not during his time there. As it fought in Vietnam, the Army was not much interested in the theories or tasks of counterinsurgency that lay outside “its standard operational repertoire,” Army analyst Andrew Krepinevich noted. This included tactics such as “long-term patrolling of a small area, the pervasive use of night operations, [and] emphasis on intelligence pertaining to the insurgent’s infrastructure rather than his guerrilla forces.”

  The U.S. Army in Vietnam displayed a willful ignorance. It did not see a need to send senior officers to the British Jungle Warfare School, in Malaysia. Nor did it choose to study the French experience in Vietnam a decade earlier, even though the French arguably had fought harder, with higher casualty rates. Pentagon analyst Thomas Thayer recalled being told by the French defense attaché in Saigon—a veteran of fighting in Vietnam who was chosen for the diplomatic post because of his excellent English—that during the first eighteen months of his assignment, only one American had visited him to inquire about the lessons the French might have to share. Even more strikingly, when Army Special Forces troops under a CIA program began training villagers to defend themselves, the program worked, with armed locals posting “a record of almost unbroken success” against the Viet Cong. Areas around villages in the training program recorded a noticeable improvement in their security. Maxwell Taylor, by then the American ambassador, directed the CIA to turn the program over to the U.S. military, resulting in a major drop in the effectiveness of the mission. “Our direction was you organized these villages for their own defense, and that expanding defense then excludes the enemy,” remembered William Colby, who was the CIA station chief in Saigon from 1959 to 1962 and then chief of the agency’s Far East Division until 1968. “When the military took over, it was ‘You take these forces and use them on offensive missions.’ They sent them up on the Cambodian border and they chased around in the woods and it never had a damn thing to do with the overall strategy.” In other words, they were misused just as Weyand’s 25th Infantry Division had been misused, with the same poor result. Under military control, over the following year the village defense program collapsed.

  Nor did Army leaders pay much attention to the fact that during the early part of the war, the Viet Cong’s primary form of support was local: It drew almost all of its recruits from the surrounding population and its weaponry from government forces, through either capture or purchase. For example, Truong Nhu Tang, then a Viet Cong official, recalled that his subordinates had been able to buy cigarettes and radios—and even weapons such as hand grenades and antipersonnel mines—from South Vietnamese officers. “The rationale that ceaseless U.S. operations in the hills could keep the enemy from the people was an operational denial of the fact that in large measure the war was a revolution which started in the hamlets and that therefore the Viet Cong were already among the people when we went to the hills,” Francis “Bing” West wrote in a 1969 study. Nor, he noted, were local South Vietnamese particularly worried by large Viet Cong units, because they knew the Americans could and would track and confront those units. Rather, West wrote, what concerned those officials far more was “the local VC forces with their cunning, their killing of selected targets, and their dedicated commitment.”

  The Army’s leaders in Vietnam chose to ignore even the knowledge of its own best-informed members: When advisers in the field, close to the action, disputed the optimistic reports coming out of the American military headquarters in Saigon, their views were generally ignored. Early in his tenure as commander in Vietnam, Westmoreland ordered the advisers to put aside their frustrations and to “accentuate the positive” in their reports. One of the most outspoken advisers, Lt. Col. John Paul Vann, effectively demanded a hearing, traveling to Washington and using Army connections to line up an opportunity to brief the Joint Chiefs of Staff on his notably pessimistic views. Taylor, then still the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, learned about the planned briefing a few hours before it was to begin and, in collaboration with his protégé Gen. Earle Wheeler, the Army chief of staff, canceled it at the last minute. A similarly skeptical State Department report titled “Statistics on the War Effort in South Vietnam Show Unfavorable Trends” was swatted aside with a note from Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to Secretary of State Rusk: “Dean: If you promise me that the Department of State will not issue any more military appraisals without getting the approval of the Joint Chiefs, we will let this matter die. Bob.”

  The Army in Vietnam even managed to disregard formal internal reports that “noted the absence of an overall counterinsurgency plan and the excessive use of firepower, particularly in pacification operations,” wrote Krepinevich. In March 1966, a lengthy report commissioned by Gen. Johnson concluded that “the war has to be won from the ground up.” The Army chief of staff went on to make a series of somewhat muddled recommendations on how to bring about that reorientation. On the one hand, the report, which reflected the views of young officers who had served as advisers in Vietnam, stated that the American approach to the war had been “inappropriate” and “marginally effective.” The report found that “present U.S. military actions are inconsistent with that fundamental of counterinsurgency doctrine which establishes winning popular allegiance as the ultimate goal. While conceptually recognizing the total problem in our literature, Americans appear to draw back from its complexity in practice and gravitate toward a faulty premise for its resolution—military destruction of the VC.” It also stated that the Viet Cong were “relatively self-sustaining,” winning support locally. Yet it denounced the enclave approach with which the Marines had been experimenting in coastal population centers, seeing it as too static and passive. Rather, it said, the “bulk” of American forces should continue to be used to confront “main force” Communist units and attack their lines of supply. But after making that case, it continued on into a massive contradiction: “At no time should U.S. . . . combat operations shift the American focus of support from the true point of decision in Vietnam—the villages.” In other words, the central task of the war, the decisive fight, somehow was not a mission for the Americans—it was someone else’s job. If that were the case, the center of gravity of the American effort should have been supporting South Vietnamese forces. But it did not do so. Instead, as Vietnam veteran and historian James Willbanks observed, “the South Vietnamese were virtually shunted aside and relegated to a supporting role.”

  Westmoreland loathed the PROVN report, as it was known in the Army. Gen. Davidson, his intelligence officer, while sympathetic to Westmoreland, faulted his handling of the report:

  The study deserved more mature consideration. Its executioner was General Westmoreland, and while he does not even mention PROVN in his memoirs or in his Official Report on the War, his reasons for throttling it are obvious. PROVN forthrightly attacked his search and destroy concept, which, correctly or incorrectly, Westmoreland sincerely held to be the right strategy. . . . He could not embrace the study’s concept (that search and destroy operations were unproductive) without admitting that he and his strategy were wrong.

  So rather than shift to what it needed to do, the Army would continue doing what it knew how to do, which is how bureaucracies act when they lack strong leadership. “We went and fought the Vietnam War as if we were fighting the Russians in the plains of central Europe for a very simple and straightforward reason—that was what we were trained, equipped, and configured to do,” said Komer, who revitalized the pacification effort in Vietnam in 1967. “We over-funded and over-invested in a military war we couldn’t win the way we fought it, and we really didn’t do enough for
what was, even from the outset, proving to be at least a limited success, and that was the pacification effort.” The Army believed, institutionally, that winning wars meant killing enemy soldiers and disrupting enemy operations by cutting supply routes, and that was what it intended to do, even if it meant fighting a grinding war of attrition that was perhaps irrelevant. In the Army view, Krepinevich wrote, “all that was needed was efficient application of firepower.” Indeed, when Westmoreland was asked at a press conference about the best way to respond to an insurgency, he replied with one word: “Firepower.” In light of all this, it can be argued that the United States really never launched a genuine counterinsurgency campaign in Vietnam. In fact, by one measure, financial expenditures, the war was foremost an air effort (with $9.3 billion spent in fiscal year 1969) and secondarily an attritional ground campaign (with spending of $4.6 billion in the same period). The total tonnage dropped by American aircraft during the war averages out to seventy tons of bombs for every square mile of Vietnam, noted the Pentagon’s Thayer. “Pacification was a very poor third,” he concluded.