The March of Folly

by Barbara Tuchman

  When objective evidence disproves strongly held beliefs, what occurs, according to theorists of “cognitive dissonance,” is not rejection of the beliefs but rigidifying, accompanied by attempts to rationalize the disproof. The result is “cognitive rigidity”; in lay language, the knots of folly draw tighter. So it was with the bombing. The more punitive and closer it came to Hanoi, the more it foreclosed the Administration’s own desire to negotiate itself out of the war. At the end of 1967 the Defense Department was to announce that the total tonnage of bombs dropped on North and South together was over 1.5 million, surpassing by 75,000 tons the total dropped on Europe by the Army Air Force in World War II. Slightly more than half had been dropped on North Vietnam, surpassing the total dropped in the Pacific theater.

  One limit had been reached. In July, Johnson had placed a ceiling on the escalation of ground forces at 525,000, just over the figure General Leclerc, 21 years before, had declared would be required, “and even then it could not be done.” At the same time a new overture had been made by the United States with a slight relaxation of insistence on reciprocity. Two Frenchmen, Raymond Aubrac and Herbert Marcovich, the former a friend from old times of Ho Chi Minh and both eager to help end the war, had offered, through conversations with Henry Kissinger at a Pugwash conference, to act as envoys to Hanoi. After consultation with the State Department, they carried the message that the United States would stop the bombing if Hanoi gave assurance that this would lead to negotiations and on the “assumption” that the North would reciprocally reduce infiltration. The reply seemed to imply that talks might go forward on this basis, but further discussion was angrily cut off by Hanoi when Admiral Sharp launched a major bombing campaign to isolate Hanoi and Haiphong from each other and from their supply routes. The Tuesday lunch must have been napping over target selection on that day—unless the carelessness was deliberate.

  A month later, with the noise of dissent rising and evidence that a political challenge to Johnson within his party was in the making, the President made a major effort of his own. In a speech at San Antonio on 29 September he publicly repeated the formula of the Aubrac-Marcovich mission, saying that “We and our South Vietnamese allies are wholly prepared to negotiate tonight.… The United States is willing to stop all … bombardment of North Vietnam when this will lead promptly to productive discussions.” The United States would “of course assume” that while talks were in progress the North Vietnamese would not take advantage of the bombing halt. Hanoi flatly rejected the overture as a “faked peace” and “sheer deception.” As their channel, Wilfred Burchett, a pro-Communist Australian journalist in Hanoi, reported “deep skepticism” about public or private feelers from Washington. “I know of no leader who believes that President Johnson is sincere in stating that he really wants to end the war on terms that would leave the Vietnamese free to settle their own affairs.”

  The folly of missed opportunity was now Hanoi’s. By accepting Johnson’s public offer, the North Vietnamese could have held him to it and tested the results. If peace could have been plucked from the tangle, their country would have been spared much agony. But the bombing had made them paranoid, and having perceived a hint of give in their enemy’s position, they were determined to outlast him until they could negotiate from strength.

  Within days the event took place in the United States that turned the anti-war movement from dissent to political challenge. A presidential candidate came forward to oppose Johnson within his own party. Without a political challenge, anti-war organizers knew the movement could make little headway, and they had been active in the search. Robert Kennedy, though prodded by his circle, would not declare himself. On 7 October Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, in the long line of political independents bred in that region, filled the void with the announcement of his candidacy. Enthusiasm of the anti-war group enveloped him. Radicals, moderates, anyone regardless of politics who wanted to be rid of the war, rallied to him. Students poured from the colleges to work in his campaign. Until the first primary, Johnson and the old pros, with scorn for McCarthy’s followers as a bunch of amateurs, did not take the challenge seriously. In fact, it was the beginning of the end. One month later the Saturday Evening Post, organ of middle America, presented the sum of American intervention in a stark editorial that said, “The war in Vietnam is Johnson’s mistake, and through the power of his office he has made it a national mistake.”

  When the Tet offensive by the enemy exploded in Vietnam at the end of January 1968, the turn in American opinion against the war and against the President gathered force swiftly. Unlike the Viet-Cong’s previous war against the rural villages, this was a massive coordinated assault against more than 100 towns and cities of South Vietnam at once, where the insurgents had for the most part not been visible before. Now, in the ferocity of attack, which succeeded in penetrating the grounds of the American Embassy in Saigon, American television viewers saw fighting in the streets, gunfire and death in American precincts, and gained a fearful impression. Hue, the ancient capital, was held for several weeks by the Viet-Cong, with thousands of inhabitants massacred before it was relieved. The fighting lasted a month, with many towns dangerously besieged, and it seemed unclear which side the outcome favored. But that such offensive strength could be mobilized at all by a supposedly tottering enemy blasted all confident assessments, punctured Westmoreland’s credibility and stunned both the American public and the government.

  The intention of the offensive may have been to provoke an uprising or seize a major foothold or demonstrate an impressive degree of strength as a preliminary to negotiations. Although it failed to shatter the South, and cost the Viet-Cong and Northerners heavy casualties, estimated at 30,000 to 45,000, it succeeded in shock value. A sense of disaster pervaded the United States, sharpened by the most widely quoted remark of the war: “It becomes necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.” The American major meant that the town had to be razed in order to rout the Viet-Cong, but his phrase seemed to symbolize the use of American power—destroying the object of its protection in order to preserve it from Communism. As the fighting drew to a close, the sober voice of the Wall Street Journal declared, “We think the American people should be getting ready to accept, if they have not already, the prospect that the whole Vietnam effort may be doomed.”

  Westmoreland at once demanded an emergency airlift of 10,500 troops, and followed with a request, in which General Wheeler and the Joint Chiefs concurred, for additional forces numbering 206,000, well over the ceiling Johnson had set in July. Troop strength in Vietnam at this point was just under 500,000. An escalation of such magnitude, which was certain to raise a domestic outcry, faced the Executive with the moment when a choice had to be made between intensified combat and a non-military solution. With an election campaign about to begin, acceptance of Westmoreland’s request was daunting, yet mentally locked in the belief that superior force must prevail, Johnson was not ready to negotiate or disengage on any terms that could be construed as “losing.”

  He appointed a task force under Clark Clifford, the Secretary of Defense-designate, to examine the costs and effects of mobilizing another 200,000 men. When asked if their addition would make the difference between victory and stalemate, the Joint Chiefs could offer no assurance that it would. Although the task force endeavored to keep within their assignment, “fundamental questions” kept recurring: at home, call up of Reserves, extension of the draft, lengthened and perhaps repeated tours of duty, additional billions in cost, increased taxes, wage and price control; on the military front, the inescapable fact that 90,000 Northerners had infiltrated in 1967, that the current rate was three or four times that of the previous year, that the enemy could out-escalate us every time, that the bombing evidently could not stop them, that no level of attrition of their forces had proved “unacceptable.” In the fierce, in some places suicidal, assaults of the Tet offensive, the enemy had not hesitated to spend lives prodigally, in some cases at a 50 percent
casualty rate. What rate of attrition would they ever find “unacceptable”?

  Among the Joint Chiefs and the inner circle of the President’s advisers, of whom Rusk, Rostow, Generals Wheeler and Taylor were members of the task force, no inference seemed to be drawn from all this. They were frozen in the posture of the last three years, determined on pursuing combat and giving Westmoreland what he wanted. They were “like men in a dream,” in George Kennan’s words, incapable of “any realistic assessment of the effects of their own acts.” Clifford and others were doubtful, arguing for limiting the war effort while negotiating a settlement. Withdrawal was not an option, for after three years of devastating war and destruction, the revenge of the North was likely to be harsh and the United States could not now walk out and leave the people of South Vietnam to be slaughtered by their enemies. With something less than consensus, the task force recommended on 4 March an increment of 13,500 to meet immediate demands, while the rest of its report, according to a member, “was an effort to get the attention of the President—to get him to focus on the wider questions.”

  Clifford, chosen by Johnson to restore the support lost with McNamara, ironically absorbed McNamara’s disillusion as soon as he took his place. He had already been shaken the previous summer, when on a tour of the SEATO nations to urge a greater contribution of their forces, by the nonchalant attitude toward his mission. The allies, so called, who were the putative “dominoes,” were less than seriously engaged. Thailand, next door to the threat, had a contingent of 2500 in Vietnam out of its population of 30 million. Clifford had found esteem and encouragement for America’s effort but no disposition to enlarge forces and no serious concern. The view from within Southeast Asia of its own situation raised a serious question about what America was defending.

  On entering the Pentagon, Clifford found no plan for military victory but rather a series of limitations—no invasion of the North, no pursuit into Laos and Cambodia, no mining of Haiphong harbor—that precluded it. Among his civilian Assistant and Under-Secretaries, he found disenchantment, ranging from Townsend Hoopes’ memorandum on “Infeasibility of Military Victory” to Paul Nitze’s offer to resign rather than try to defend the Administration’s war policy to the Senate. He found a report by Systems Analysis stating that “despite a massive influx of 500,000 United States troops, 1.5 million tons of bombs a year, 400,000 attack sorties a year, 200,000 enemy KIA [killed in action] in three years, 20,000 United States KIA, etc., our control of the countryside and urban areas is now essentially at pre-August 1965 levels.”

  Further, Clifford found dire estimates of the effect on public opinion of each renewed escalation, and prognoses of budget increases of $2.5 billion in 1968 and $10 billion in 1969. He saw the national investment in Vietnam draining our disposable strength from Europe and the Middle East and the likelihood that the more we Americanized the war, the less South Vietnam would do for itself. He became convinced that the “military course we were pursuing was not only endless but hopeless.” The war had reached a dead end. Not a man to sink his high-powered talents and polished reputation in a failing cause, Clifford set himself to dislodge the President from his frozen stance. Against the “men in a dream” of the inner group, he was one against eight, but he had realities on his side.

  Political forces were aiding. Anti-war sentiment had mounted against the Democrats because they were Johnson’s party. The war had become such an albatross, Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland told Johnson’s speech writer, that “Any reasonably good Republican could clobber me if the election were held today.” Tydings’ advisers told him he could save himself only by attacking the President, and though he would not do that, he would have to “speak out against the war. It’s dragging the country down and the Democrats along with it.” He named several other Senators who reported the same situation in their states. It was confirmed by the California State Democratic Committee, which sent a telegram to the President signed by 300 members saying that in their judgment “The only action which can avert major Democratic party losses in this state in 1968 is an immediate all-out effort to secure a non-military settlement of the Vietnam war.” Polls at this time showed the incumbent President trailing any one of six potential Republican opponents in the coming election.

  An even stronger signal was Walter Cronkite’s broadcast of 27 February, upon his return from the “burned, blasted and weary land” still smoking from the Tet offensive. He described the new refugees, estimated at 470,000, living in “unbelievable squalor” in sheds and shanties and added to the 800,000 already officially listed as refugees. On the political front, he said, “Past performance gives no confidence that the Vietnamese government can cope with its problems.” He said the Tet offensive required the realization “that we should have had all along,” that negotiations had to be just that, “not the dictation of peace terms. For now it seems more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in stalemate.” The only “rational way out” was to negotiate our way out, but “not,” he warned again, “as victors.”

  The nation’s “uncle” had rendered judgment and “the shock waves,” said George Christian, the President’s press secretary, “rolled through the Government” up to the top. “If I’ve lost Walter,” the President commented, “I’ve lost middle America.”

  A week later Senator Fulbright announced that the Senate’s reinvestigation of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution had shown it to have been obtained by “misrepresentation,” and it was therefore “null and void.” News that the President was considering Westmoreland’s request for 200,000 men and had agreed with the Joint Chiefs on a call-up of 50,000 Reserves for strategic back-up leaked to the press, evoking the expected outcry. In dissatisfaction with the war, the public, if accurately reflected by press comment, was readier than the Administration to let go in Southeast Asia, and readier to acknowledge, according to Time, “that victory in Vietnam—or even a favorable settlement—may simply be beyond the grasp of the world’s greatest power.” That thought marked a rite of passage in the era of Vietnam.

  Emerging not too energetically from passivity, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee opened hearings at which Fulbright, in his opening speech, declared that the country was witnessing a “spiritual rebellion” among its youth against “what they regard as a betrayal of a traditional American value.” With the support of other Senators, Fulbright questioned the authority of the President to “expand the war without the consent of Congress.” Members of the Committee informed Clifford and General Wheeler privately that “We just couldn’t support a large increase in the number of troops in Vietnam—and if we wouldn’t support it, who would?” Called to testify at the hearings, Rusk maintained aims unchanged since Dulles, but admitted that the Administration was re-examining Vietnam policy “from A to Z” and considering alternatives.

  The next day, in the New Hampshire primary, Senator McCarthy won an astonishing 42 percent of the vote, and worse followed. Robert Kennedy, recognizing a good thing after someone else had tested the waters, declared himself a candidate. The fiend (in Johnson’s eyes) was in the ring and, given the aura of Kennedy popularity, was a more realistic political threat than Senator McCarthy. With both of them stumping the country as peace candidates, Johnson was now Goldwater, without his sharp convictions. He faced an electoral campaign which would tear apart the Democratic Party and in which he, the incumbent, would be permanently on the defensive, trying to justify a war policy that lacked any shine of success. Where nothing else—not JASON, not McNamara’s defection, not the non-results of attrition strategy, not Tet—had caused him to re-think, where everything only stiffened “cognitive rigidity,” the political prospect penetrated.

  It did not shake his resolve about the war, now too rigid to alter, but it raised the humiliating prospect of domestic defeat. At the same time that Kennedy announced, Dean Acheson, whom Johnson after Tet had asked privately for a review of the war effort, brought in his conclusion. After rejecting “canned b
riefings,” and consulting his own choices of sources at State, CIA and Joint Chiefs, he told Johnson that the military were going after an unachievable goal, that we could not win without an unlimited commitment of forces—just as the Working Group had said in 1964—that Johnson’s speeches were so out of touch with reality that he was no longer believed by the public and that the country no longer supported the war.

  This was the judgment of someone Johnson could neither bully nor ignore, whom indeed he respected; nevertheless, he was not ready to be told he was wrong. In the same week he delivered a bellicose speech to the National Farmers Union in which, pounding the lectern and jabbing his finger at the audience, he demanded a “total national effort” to win the war and the peace. He said he was not going to change his policy in Vietnam because of Communist military successes and denounced critics who would “tuck our tail and violate our commitments.” It was a last angry echo of the original vow not to be the first President to lose a war, and it was not admired. James Rowe, the President’s longtime friend and adviser, reported to him that calls came in after the speech from people “infuriated” by his impugning their patriotism and unmoved by his “win the war” oratory. “The fact is,” was Rowe’s hard summary, “hardly anyone today is interested in winning the war. Everyone wants to get out and the only question is how.” Three days later, Johnson suddenly announced the recall of Westmoreland and summoned the deputy commander, General Creighton Abrams, home for consultations with the Joint Chiefs. In the course of the consultations, the decision was taken against sending the additional 200,000 troops, but without any definitive change of policy. The Joint Chiefs’ price was Johnson’s agreement to call up 60,000 for strategic reserve.