The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  When Eisenhower was running for President in 1952, he had moved first to consolidate his position within his newly adopted political party and establish rapport with the more conservative Republicans headed by Taft. Taft was embittered by the Korean War, not because he thought it was the wrong war, but because he felt that Truman had usurped the powers of the Congress. During the 1952 campaign Eisenhower had again and again pledged that he would consult with the legislative branch, that he would return the Congress to its proper place in decision making. In addition, he had been extremely critical of the war itself. “If there must be war,” he said during the campaign, “let it be Asians against Asians with our support on the side of freedom.” So Eisenhower was committed to genuine consultations and he was also against land wars in Asia. At the same time, he belonged to a party which had come to power exploiting the issue of anti-Communism and the failure to hold the line against the Communists, particularly in Asia. Now, with pressure mounting for intervention in Vietnam, he was caught in something of a dilemma. The party lines were already being drawn; perhaps Red-baiting would be a two-way street. (Thruston Morton, then an Assistant Secretary of State for Congressional Relations, would recall coming out of a House session at the time and overhearing Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., say to James Richards, “The damn Republicans blamed us for losing China and now we can blame them for losing Southeast Asia.”)

  If early in 1954 Eisenhower had any doubts about the attitude of the Congress toward American intervention, they disappeared in February 1954 when the Department of Defense announced that forty B-26 fighter-bombers and two hundred American technicians were being sent to Indochina. This was the first American aid in personnel, and if it was a trial balloon, it worked handily; the Congressional reaction was swift and ferocious. The Administration, somewhat surprised by the vehemence of the response, immediately announced that the technicians would be withdrawn by June 12. But even this was considered too late. Mike Mansfield rose in the Senate to ask whether it was true, as rumored, that the United States planned to send two combat divisions to Indochina. He was assured by Majority Leader William Knowland, speaking for the Administration, that it had no such intention. And Senator Richard Russell warned that this was a mistake which could bring us piecemeal into the war. The Administration quickly backed down, and in backing down, it showed that it realized just how war-weary the country was.

  Nevertheless, the pressure from the French continued to build. With the garrison at Dienbienphu obviously trapped, there was an emotional quality to the crisis, a desire to save the boys. Admiral Radford was sympathetic. Dulles seemed sympathetic. Vice-President Nixon was said to favor intervention. Eisenhower was reported to be ambivalent, not revealing his own feelings. On April 3, 1954, at Eisenhower’s suggestion, Dulles met with the Congressional leadership, a group which included Minority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson and the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, Richard Russell. Significantly, though the idea for the meeting was Eisenhower’s, he was not present; he did not put his own feelings and prestige on the line that day. Rather he let his Secretary of State make the case, even though Dulles had far less influence with the Democrats because of partisan statements in the past.

  As it turned out, though, Dulles was in effect putting his office on the line; he himself did not make the case. It was Admiral Radford who carried the ball, a man who neither represented a national American position, nor for that matter even an Administration position, nor necessarily the position of the American military. The purpose of the meeting soon became clear: the Administration wanted a congressional resolution to permit the President to use naval and air power in Indochina, particularly a massive air strike to save the garrison at Dienbienphu. Radford made a strong and forceful presentation: the situation was perilous. If Indochina went, then Southeast Asia would go. We would be moved back to Hawaii. The Navy, he assured the senators, was ready to go, two hundred planes were on the carriers Essex and Boxer.

  The senators began to question Radford. Would this be an act of war? Yes, we would be in the war. What would happen if the first air strike did not succeed in relieving the garrison? We would follow it up. What about ground forces? Radford gave an ambivalent answer.

  Senator Knowland told his colleagues that he was on board, which was not surprising, since he was a certified hawk, a member of the China Lobby, fond of ending meetings by giving the Nationalist toast, “Back to the mainland.” Not everyone else was so euphoric or enthusiastic. Senator Earle Clements of Kentucky asked Radford if all the other Chiefs were on board. Radford said they were not.

  “How many of them agree with you?” Radford was asked.

  “None,” he answered.

  “How do you account for that?”

  “I have spent more time in the Far East than any of them and I understand the situation better.” (Which was not true; all the other Chiefs had spent comparable time in Asia.)

  At this point Johnson took over. He had talked with Russell earlier—at this stage of his career he was still quite dependent on Russell for private leadership and advice—and had found that Russell was appalled by the whole thing. Russell had in fact been wary of the gradual expansion of the American empire since World War II. He did not think our power was limitless, and he was worried that our designs would take us beyond our reach, that we would enter places where we were not wanted. Indochina, he thought, was the symbol of it all and might turn into an enormous trap. Now Johnson was disturbed by the implications of the Radford appeal for a variety of reasons. He doubted that the necessary resources existed in a war-weary country which had just come out of Korea, and he did not want the blame for refusing to go to war placed on him and the Democratic leadership in Congress. If Eisenhower went for a congressional resolution, then Johnson would be right smack on the spot, which was exactly where he did not want to be—he was always uneasy about being out front. He certainly did not want the Democrats to be blamed for losing Indochina.

  The Democrats, he told Dulles, had been blamed for the Korean War and for having gone in virtually alone without significant allies. Knowland himself, Johnson pointed out, had criticized the Democrats for supplying 90 percent of the men and money in Korea. The patriotism of Democratic officials had been questioned. He was touched now to be considered so worthy and so good a patriot as to be requested to get on board. But first he had some questions, because he did not want to relive the unhappy recent past. What allies did they have who would put up sizable amounts of men for Indochina? Had Dulles consulted with any allies? No, said the Secretary, he had not.

  By the time the two-hour meeting was over, Johnson had exposed the frailty of the Administration’s position. (This may have been exactly what Eisenhower wanted, to expose his case and have the Congress itself pick apart the weaknesses. Eisenhower was a subtle man, and no fool, though in pursuit of his objectives he did not like to be thought of as brilliant; people of brilliance, he thought, were distrusted. It was not by chance that he had not been present; let Dulles make the case.) The military were far from unanimous about whether to undertake the air strike. In addition, the United States might have to go it alone if it entered a ground war. Dulles was told to sign up allies, though it was known that Anthony Eden was dubious. Thus the burden, which the Administration had ever so gently been trying to shift to the Congress, had now been ever so gently shifted back, if not to the Administration, at least to the British, who were known to be unenthusiastic.

  No one, it seemed, was eager to take real responsibility. The President had again used the Congress as a sounding board and had quickly sensed deep reservations. But as Dienbienphu still held, the pressure did not go away.

  Again, however, a key individual would help prevent the United States from stumbling into this war which no one wanted, but which the rhetoric seemed to necessitate. This time it was the Army Chief of Staff, General Matthew B. Ridgway. He was an imposing figure, Big Matt Ridgway, hard and flinty. Organizer of the first American airborne di
vision, the 82nd, he led the first American airborne into Sicily, and then jumped again in Normandy, and was the first commander of the 8th Airborne Corps in 1945. When the end of the war was near, he had been chosen to lead all airborne troops in the scheduled invasion of Japan. He had thus ended the war as a general with an enormous reputation, yet his career still very much in bloom, the top commander of elite units. He had been brought to the Pentagon right before the Korean War and was considered a possible Chief of Staff, and when the Korean War broke out, he had been told to keep an eye on General Walton Walker’s Eighth Army and be ready to go if anything happened to Walker. When Walker was killed in an accident, he took over the Eighth Army. He made a point of being a dramatic figure, aware that the men were always watching. Even as commander of the Eighth Army in Korea, he wore his paratrooper’s jump harness, a reminder to a trooper that he had been airborne, and on that harness his ever-present two grenades. Almost the first thing he did when he took over the Korean command was symbolic: he stopped all troops from riding in closed jeeps because he felt it gave them a false sense of warmth and security and thus made them more vulnerable to the enemy and the cold. When Truman finally fired MacArthur, Ridgway replaced him, and had systematically pulled the U.S. forces back together, and made his reputation even more enviable, both to soldier and civilian. He was by 1954 the most prestigious American still in uniform, an old-fashioned, hard-nosed general of great simplicity and directness.

  When Ridgway left for Korea in December 1950, he had been Deputy Chief of Staff for over a year. During that period the State Department had on several occasions asked for increased military aid for the French, and each time Ridgway had bitterly opposed it. To him, it was like throwing money down a rathole, and a bad rathole at that. He did not have much sympathy for the French cause; after all, they had never sent their own draftees to Indochina—just mercenaries, as he called them. Part of his reasoning was very old-fashioned: he thought we were supposed to be an anticolonial power and this was a colonial war, absolutely contrary to the traditions we said we espoused. If Radford believed that politically we had to stop Red China from sweeping over the entire peninsula, then Ridgway was a man of different political convictions; he thought the region was important but not vital, and he believed in diversity; he did not think that the Communists could long hold control over such diverse peoples. They might try, he thought, but it would not work well. It could not be done. He was, in effect, a military extension of Kennan.

  Now, in April 1954, with the pressure mounting, and knowing that bombing would lead to ground troops, Ridgway was very uneasy. He knew Radford wanted in, and he suspected Dulles wanted to test the New Look. Ridgway had always thought the New Look both foolish and dangerous. Wars were settled on the ground, and on the ground the losses were always borne by his people, U.S. Army foot soldiers and Marines. It was his job to protect his own men. So he sent an Army survey team to Indochina to determine the requirements for fighting a ground war there. What he wanted was the basic needs and logistics of it. He sent signalmen, medical men, engineers, logistics experts. What were the port facilities, the rail facilities, the road facilities? What was the climate like, which were the endemic diseases? How many men were needed?

  The answers were chilling: minimal, five divisions and up to ten divisions if we wanted to clear out the enemy (as opposed to six divisions in Korea), plus fifty-five engineering battalions, between 500,000 and 1,000,000 men, plus enormous construction costs. The country had nothing in the way of port facilities, railroads and highways, telephone lines. We would have to start virtually from scratch, at a tremendous cost. The United States would have to demand greater mobilization than in Korea, draft calls of 100,000 a month. Nor would the war be as easy as Korea, where the South Koreans had been an asset to the troops in the rear guard. It was more than likely that in this political war the population would help the Vietminh (Ridgway was thus willing to make this crucial distinction that everyone glossed over in 1965). Instead of being like the Korean War it would really be more like a larger and more costly version of the Philippine insurrection, a prolonged guerrilla war, native against Caucasian, which lasted from 1899 to 1913 and which had been politically very messy. Nor did the Army permit the White House the luxury of thinking that we could get by only with air power. Radford’s plans for an air strike were contingent on seizure of China’s Hainan Island, which seemed to guard the Tonkin Gulf, because the Navy did not want to enter the gulf with its carriers and then have Chinese airbases right behind them. But if we captured Hainan, the Chinese would come across with everything they had; then it was not likely to remain a small war very long.

  Thus the Ridgway report, which no one had ordered the Chief of Staff to initiate, but Ridgway felt he owed it both to the men he commanded and to the country he served. His conclusion was not that the United States should not intervene, but he outlined very specifically the heavy price required. On April 26 the Geneva Conference opened. On May 7 Dienbienphu fell. On May 11 Ridgway briefed the Secretary of the Army and the Secretary of Defense on his survey team’s report. Shortly afterward he briefed the President. Eisenhower did not say much at the time, Ridgway recalled, just listened and asked a few questions. But the impact was formidable. Eisenhower was a professional soldier and an expert in logistics; the implications were obvious. “The idea of intervening,” Ridgway would write, “was abandoned.” Later Eisenhower himself wrote of his doubts of a Radford air strike; it would be an act of war which might easily fail and then leave the United States in a position of having intervened and failed.

  Even after Dienbienphu fell there would be other efforts by Dulles to arrange for American intervention. But the high point of it had passed, the emotional pitch had been reached when there were white men trapped in that garrison, about to be overrun by yellow men. The pressure thereafter would be more abstract. Dulles still talked of going in, and there were even letters from Eisenhower to the British suggesting that common cause be made. The British, more realistic about their resources, wanted no part of it. These subsequent attempts to go in were sincere, and to what degree they represented an attempt to share responsibility for not going is difficult to determine. But Eisenhower was in no mood for unilateral action, and in 1954 his manner of decision making contrasted sharply with that of Lyndon Johnson some eleven years later. Whereas Eisenhower genuinely consulted the Congress, Johnson paid lip service to real consultation and manipulated the Congress. Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff had made a tough-minded, detailed estimate of what the cost of the war would be; eleven years later an all-out effort was made by almost everyone concerned to avoid determining and forecasting what the reality of intervention meant. In 1954 the advice of allies was genuinely sought; in 1965 the United States felt itself so powerful that it did not need allies, except as a means of showing more flags and gaining moral legitimacy for the U.S. cause. Eisenhower took the projected costs of a land war to his budget people with startling results; Johnson and McNamara would carefully shield accurate troop projections not only from the press and the Congress but from their own budgetary experts. The illusion of air-power advocates and their political allies that bombing could be separated from combat troops, which was allowed to exist in 1965, was demolished in 1954 by both Ridgway and Eisenhower.

  Thanks to Eisenhower and Ridgway, a war that no one wanted was allowed to slip by; responsibility was very pleasantly divided among the Administration, the military, the Congress and the allies. Eisenhower himself deserved the credit, but Ridgway made it easier by giving the President a base of expertise and old-fashioned integrity, a general less than eager for a bad war. Later Ridgway would write that of all the things he had done in his career—the battles fought, units commanded, medals won, honors accorded—there was nothing he was prouder of than helping to keep us from intervening in Indochina. The country was very lucky in having him there; it would not always be so lucky. Eleven years later he watched with mounting horror how we were doing all the things he
had managed to prevent. In 1965 he would serve as a source for doubters like columnist Walter Lippmann and Senator Fulbright, but repeated efforts to make him go public with his reservations failed. He did not feel he could go against the men like Westmoreland he had once led.

  If Ridgway was not consulted by President Johnson in 1965, perhaps it was because his views were already known. But in February 1968, when the great controversy raged over whether to limit intervention, he was called in by the President to discuss the war. And there was one moment which reflected the simplicity and toughness of mind which he and others had exhibited in 1954, and the fuzziness of the 1965 decision making. Ridgway was sitting talking with Johnson and Vice-President Humphrey when the phone rang. When Johnson picked it up, Ridgway turned to Humphrey and said there was one thing about the war which puzzled him.

  “What’s that?” Humphrey asked.

  “I have never known what the mission for General Westmoreland was,” Ridgway said.

  “That’s a good question,” said Humphrey. “Ask the President.”

  But when Johnson returned, he immediately got into one of his long monologues about his problems, pressures from every side, and the question was never asked.

  But not going into French Indochina in 1954 was not the same thing as getting out. We decided that we would stay and supplant the French after the Geneva Agreements had been signed in July, calling for a division of the country. Ho Chi Minh established himself in the North, so Dulles decided that the rest of the country, below the 17th parallel, would be a Western bastion against the Communists—exactly, we thought, what the South Vietnamese would want: our protection, our freedoms. There was arrogance, idealism and naÏveté to it. We assumed that as Western Europe had welcomed our presence there, the South Vietnamese would want us in their country, despite the fact that we had been on the wrong side of a long and bitter colonial war. We had assumed that we could sit on the sidelines without helping the nationalists in their fight for freedom; we could help the colonial power and somehow not pay a heavy price. Yet this illusion existed; we were different, we were not a colonial power. Dienbienphu, Dulles said at the time, “is a blessing in disguise. Now we enter Vietnam without the taint of colonialism.”