An American emissary, Under-Secretary of State George Ball, had been sent a few weeks previously to explain to de Gaulle that any talk of negotiations could demoralize the South in its current fragile condition, even lead to its collapse, and that the United States “did not believe in negotiating until our position on the battlefield was so strong that our adversaries might make the requisite concessions.” De Gaulle rejected this position outright. The same illusions, he told Ball, had drawn France into such trouble; Vietnam was a “hopeless place to fight”; a “rotten country,” where the United States could not win for all its great resources. Not force but negotiation was the only way.
Although he might have gloated to see the United States discomfited as France had been, de Gaulle let a larger consideration govern him. The reason why he and other Europeans in many subsequent efforts tried so earnestly to disengage the United States from Vietnam was fear of American attention and resources being diverted from Europe to an Asian backwater.
U Thant had meanwhile ascertained through Russian channels that Hanoi was interested in talks with the Americans, and he so informed the United States Ambassador to the UN, Adlai Stevenson. U Thant proposed a cease-fire across both Vietnam and Laos and offered to let the United States write the terms as it saw fit and to announce them unchanged. On conveying this message, Stevenson met only stalling in Washington, and after the election a negative response on the ground that the United States had learned through other channels that Hanoi was not really interested. Further, Rusk said, the United States would not send a representative to Rangoon, where U Thant had arranged for the talks to take place, because any hint of such a move would cause panic in Saigon—or, what the United States really feared and did not say, renewed feelers toward neutralism.
Not concealing his displeasure at this rejection, U Thant pointedly told a press conference in February that further bloodshed in Southeast Asia was unnecessary and that only negotiation could “enable the United States to withdraw gracefully from that part of the world.” By that time the American bombing campaign called ROLLING THUNDER had begun and under the crashing and killing of American air raids the opportunity for graceful exit would never come again.
Johnson had already let pass a greater opportunity for disengagement—his own election. He defeated Goldwater by the largest popular majority in American history and gained unassailable majorities in Congress of 68–32 in the Senate and 294–130 in the House. The vote was largely owed to the split among Republicans between the Rockefeller moderates and the Goldwater extremists and to the widespread fear of Goldwater’s warlike intentions, and the result put Johnson in a position to do anything he wanted. His heart was in the welfare programs and civil rights legislation that were to create the Great Society, free of poverty and oppression. He wanted to go down in history as the great benefactor, greater than FDR, equal to Lincoln. Failure to seize his chance at this moment to extricate his Administration from an unpromising foreign entanglement was the irreparable folly, though not his alone. His chief advisers in government believed with him that they would take greater punishment from the right by withdrawing than from the left by pursuing the fight. Confident in his own power, Johnson believed he could achieve both his aims, domestic and foreign, at once.
Reports from Saigon told of progressive crumbling, riots, corruption, anti-American sentiment, neutralist movement by the Buddhists. “I feel,” declared one American official in Saigon, “as though I were on the deck of the Titanic.” These signals did not suggest to Washington a useless effort and a time to cut losses, but rather a need for greater effort to redress the balance and gain the advantage. Officials, civilian and military, agreed on the necessity of intervention in the form of air war to convince the North to give up its attempted conquest. That the United States could accomplish its aim by superior might no one doubted.
Like Kennedy, Johnson believed that to lose South Vietnam would be to lose the White House. It would mean a destructive debate, he was later to say, that would “shatter my Presidency, kill my Administration, and damage our democracy.” The loss of China, which had led to the rise of Joe McCarthy, was “chickenshit compared with what might happen if we lost Vietnam.” Robert Kennedy would be out in front telling everyone that “I was a coward, an unmanly man, a man without a spine.” Worse, as soon as United States weakness was perceived by Moscow and Peking, they would move to “expand their control over the vacuum of power we would leave behind us … and so would begin World War III.” He was as sure of this “as nearly as anyone can be certain of anything.” No one is so sure of his premises as the man who knows too little.
A feasible alternative, on the strength of the electoral mandate, might have been to pursue U Thant’s overtures to Hanoi and even use his influence to install a government in Saigon (as Kennedy had suggested) that would invite the United States to depart, leaving Vietnam to work out its own settlement. Since this would inevitably lead to a Communist take-over, it was a course the United States refused to contemplate, although it would have cast off a devouring incubus.
A good look would have revealed that the raison d’être for American intervention had slipped considerably. When the CIA was asked by the President for its estimate of the crucial question whether, if Laos and South Vietnam fell to Communist control, all Southeast Asia would necessarily follow, the answer was in the negative; that except for Cambodia, “It is likely that no other nation in the area would quickly succumb to Communism as a result of the fall of Laos and Vietnam.” The spread of Communism in Southeast Asia “would not be inexorable” and America’s island bases in the Pacific “would still enable us to employ enough military power in the area to deter Hanoi and Peking.” We would not, after all, have to pull back to San Francisco.
Another advice came from the inter-agency Working Group on Vietnam, composed of representatives from State, Defense, Joint Chiefs and CIA, who bravely undertook after the election in November to “consider realistically what our overall objectives and stakes are.” This unprecedented endeavor led the group, after long and careful review, to deliver a serious warning: that the United States could not guarantee a non-Communist South Vietnam “short of committing ourselves to whatever degree of military action would be required to defeat North Vietnam and possibly Communist China.” Such action could lead to a major conflict and “possibly even the use of nuclear weapons at some point.”
At the same time, Under-Secretary of State George Ball, who as a believer in the primacy of Europe and a specialist in economic problems took a sour view of the whole Vietnam affair, exerted a major effort to deter the decision for combat. In a long memorandum he made the point that bombing, rather than persuading the North to abandon its aims, was likely to provoke Hanoi to send in more ground forces, its largest resource, which would in turn require larger United States forces to meet them. Already, Ball said, our allies believed the United States was “engaged in a fruitless struggle in Vietnam, and if expanded to a land war would divert America from concern with Europe. What we had most to fear was a general loss of confidence in American judgment.” His recommendation was to warn Saigon of possible disengagement on the basis of its failing war effort. This would probably precipitate a deal with the insurgents, which he privately thought was the best result attainable.
In discussion, Ball found the three chief officers of the Administration, McGeorge Bundy, McNamara and Rusk, “dead set” against his views and interested only in one problem: “how to escalate the war until the North Vietnamese were ready to quit.” When his memorandum was submitted to the President, the result was the same. Johnson looked it over, asked Ball to go through it with him point by point and handed it back without comment.
Why did these advisory voices of the CIA, the Working Group, the Under-Secretary of State, have so little impact? Advice on the basis of collected information was the business of the first two, of the Working Group specifically on Vietnam. If Johnson read its report—and one would like to think that
government agencies write reports for more than wallpaper—he refused the message. Ball could be tolerated as an “in-house devil’s advocate,” and was in fact useful in that role as showing the White House open to dissenters. But minds at the top were locked in the vise of 1954—that Ho was an agent of world Communism, that the lesson of appeasement precluded yielding at any point, that the United States’ undertaking to frustrate North Vietnam’s drive to control the country was right and must be carried out. How could it not succeed against what Johnson called “that raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country”? Despite the Working Group’s warning, the President, his Secretaries and the Joint Chiefs were sure that American power could force North Vietnam to quit while the United States carefully avoided a clash with China.
Hanoi too could be ill-advised. Two days before the American election, as if to provoke belligerency, the Viet-Cong took the first offensive action against a specifically American facility—a mortar attack on the Bien Hoa airfield. This was an American training base where a squadron of old B-57s had recently been moved in from the Philippines for training purposes, making it a tempting target. Six of the planes were demolished, five Americans killed, and 76 other casualties sustained. Certain that the attack was instigated by Hanoi, General Taylor, then Ambassador in Saigon, telephoned Washington for authority to take immediate reprisals. All chief advisers in the capital concurred. Waiting for the election, Johnson held back, and because of his nagging worries about China and despite reports of accelerating decay in Saigon, he was to hold back for three months more.
Cautious and hesitating, he sent McGeorge Bundy and McNamara’s Assistant Secretary, John McNaughton, to find out whether air war was really necessary to save the South. While they were in South Vietnam, the Viet-Cong made another attack, this time on American barracks at Pleiku, in which eight Americans were killed and 108 injured. Inspecting the shattered field, Bundy was said to have been outraged by the deliberate challenge and to have telephoned a highly charged demand for reprisals to the President. Whether he did or not, emotion was not the deciding factor. Bundy’s memorandum, drafted on his way home in company with Taylor and General William C. Westmoreland (the commander who had replaced Harkins), was cold and hard: without “new United States action, the defeat of South Vietnam appears inevitable.… The stakes in Vietnam are extremely high.… The international prestige of the United States is at risk.… There is no way of negotiating ourselves out of Vietnam which offers any serious promise at present.” Consequently, “The policy of graduated and continuing reprisal,” as planned, was the most promising course. Negotiations of any sort should not now be accepted except on the basis of an end to Viet-Cong violence.
Here were the essentials that were to hold United States policy in their grip: that the stakes were high, that protecting United States prestige from failure was primary, that graduated escalation of bombing was to be the strategy, that negotiations were not wanted until the scale of punishment softened the resolve of North Vietnam. Explaining gradualism, Maxwell Taylor wrote later, “We wanted Ho and his advisers to have time to meditate on the prospects of a demolished homeland.” A source of trouble was detected here by John McNaughton, a former professor of law given to hard analysis. With uncomfortable foresight, he included in a list of war aims “To emerge from crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used.”
In response to Pleiku, an immediate reprisal had been carried out within hours of the attack, with the Majority Leader and the Speaker of the House summoned to the White House to witness the decision. After three more weeks of anxious discussion, on 2 March, the program for a three-month bombing campaign called ROLLING THUNDER was begun.
Johnson’s anxiety lest the bombing overstep some unknown line of Russian or Chinese tolerance required ROLLING THUNDER to be supervised directly from the White House. Each week CINCPAC sent the program for the next seven days, with munitions dumps, warehouses, fuel depots, repair shops and other targets described and located and the number of sorties estimated, to the Joint Chiefs, who passed them to McNamara and he to the White House. Here they were carefully examined at the highest level of government by a group consisting initially of the President, the Secretaries of Defense and State and the chief of NSC, who assembled for the task at lunch every Tuesday. Their selections, made 9000 miles from the spot by men immersed in a hundred other problems, were conveyed back to the field by the same route. Afterward, the results of each sortie, reported by each pilot to his base commander, were collated and communicated back to Washington. McNamara was always the best informed because, it was said, in driving over from the Pentagon he had eight more minutes than the others to study his target list.
The presiding presence at the Tuesday lunches was the wallpaper of the second-floor dining room depicting scenes of Revolutionary triumphs at Saratoga and Yorktown. Ever hungering for history’s favor, Johnson invited a professor of history, Henry Graff of Columbia University, to attend several sessions of the Tuesday lunches and interview the members. The resulting account did not erect the monument he hoped for. In his own version, possibly embroidered for effect, the President lay awake at night worrying about the trigger that might activate “secret treaties” between North Vietnam and its allies, sometimes to the point of putting on his bathrobe at 3:00 a.m. and going down to the Situation Room, where air raid results were marked on a wall map.
A greater danger than China lay on the American home front. While national sentiment, insofar as it paid attention, on the whole supported the war, the bombing campaign brought explosions of dissent on the campuses. The first “teach-in” of faculty and students, at the University of Michigan in March, attracted an unexpected mass of 3000 participants and the example soon spread to universities on both coasts. A meeting held in Washington was connected to 122 campuses by telephone. The movement was less a sudden embrace of Asia than an extension of the civil rights struggle and the Free Speech and other student radical enthusiasms of the early sixties. The same groups now found a new cause and provided the organizing energy. At Berkeley 26 faculty members joined in a letter stating that “The United States government is committing a major crime in Vietnam” and expressing their shame and anger that “this blood bath is made in our name.” Though mauled by the feuds of rival factions, the protest movement lent a fierce energy, much of it mindless, to the opposition.
The need of a “convincing public information campaign” to accompany military action had been foreseen by the policy-makers, but its efforts accomplished little. Speaking teams of government officers sent to debate in the universities only supplied more occasions for protest and victims for the students to heckle. A White Paper entitled “Aggression from the North” issued by the State Department, designed to show the infiltration of men and arms by North Vietnam as “aggressive war,” was feeble. In all their public justifications, the President, the Secretary of State and other spokesmen harped on “aggression,” “militant aggression,” “armed aggression,” always in comparison with the failure to stop the aggressions that brought on World War II, always implying that Vietnam too was a case of foreign aggression. They made the point so insistently that they sometimes said it explicitly, as when McNamara in 1966 called it “the most flagrant case of outside aggression.” The ideological division in Vietnam may have been real and insuperable, just as was the division between South and North in the American Civil War, but it is not recorded in the American case that the North’s war against the South’s secession was considered “outside aggression.”
By April it was apparent that ROLLING THUNDER was having no visible effect on the enemy’s will to fight. Bombing of the supply trails in Laos had not prevented infiltration; Viet-Cong raids showed no signs of faltering. The decision to introduce American infantry seemed ineluctable and the Joint Chiefs so recommended. Fully recognized as portentous, the question was exhaustively discussed, with the confident assurances of some matched by the doubts and ambivalence of others, both military and civilian. The d
ecisions taken in April and May were piecemeal, based on a strategy of continued bombing supplemented by ground combat with the aim of breaking the will of the North and the Viet-Cong “by effectively denying them victory and bringing about negotiations through the enemy’s impotence.” This impotence it was thought possible to achieve by attrition, that is, by killing off the Viet-Cong rather than trying to defeat them. United States troops were to be raised initially to a combat strength of 82,000.
Wanting it both ways, battle axe and olive branch, Johnson delivered a major speech at Johns Hopkins University on 7 April offering prospects of vast rural rehabilitation and a flood control program for the Mekong Valley, supported by $1 billion of United States funds, in which North Vietnam, after accepting peace, would share. The United States would “never be second in the search … for a peaceful settlement,” Johnson declared, and was ready now for “unconditional discussions.” It sounded open and generous, but what “unconditional” meant in American thinking was negotiations when the North was sufficiently battered to be prepared to concede. Matched by an equal and opposite insistence on certain preconditions by the other side, these were the fixed premises that were to nullify all overtures for the next three years.
The billion-dollar carrot attracted no bites. Rejecting Johnson’s overture, Hanoi announced its four preconditions the next day: 1) withdrawal of United States military forces; 2) no foreign alliances or admission of foreign troops by either side; 3) adoption of the NLF (National Liberation Front or Viet-Cong) program by South Vietnam; 4) reunification of the country by the Vietnamese without outside interference. Since point 3 was exactly what the South and the United States were fighting against, it was the obvious nullifier. International interest in sealing off the conflict found itself blocked. A conference of seventeen non-aligned nations convened by Marshal Tito appealed for negotiations without effect; contacts with Hanoi pursued by J. Blair Seaborn, Canadian member of the International Control Commission, went unrequited; the prime ministers of four British Commonwealth countries on a mission to urge negotiation in the capitals of the parties to the struggle were refused admission by Moscow, Peking and Hanoi. An envoy of the United Kingdom on the same mission, admitted to Hanoi a few months later, found the response still negative.
The March of Folly Page 43
