The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  If there was one other thing that bothered Walt’s colleagues on the professional level, it was the firmness of his belief in his own ideas (at a given time), a lack of healthy skepticism about them, a lack of reflectiveness and open-mindedness. His great strength was also his great weakness: a capacity to see patterns where previously none existed, to pull together diverse ideas and acts into patterns and theories. It was this which made him intellectually interesting and challenging but which made him dangerous as well because, some felt, he did not know when he had gone too far, when to stop, when the pattern was flimsier than he thought. If some doubted his wisdom, few doubted his enthusiasm, the energy of both the mind and the body, that Walt really wanted to use his mind. During the early days of his tour as head of the Policy Planning Council at State he went off to Latin America for a brief trip. On his return he announced to the startled assemblage of the Council that he now knew how you get to understand Latin Americans: you begin by understanding that in the first place they are Asians. “Oh, for God’s sake, Walt,” someone in the room told him, “why are you talking about something you know nothing about?”

  But he was a man of ideas, determined that his ideas should live. All those years he was particularly committed to the idea that the United States with its technology and its ideals could play a dominant role in the underdeveloped world and in stopping Communist revolutions, could in fact sponsor our own peaceful revolutions on our own terms. The gap between the life styles of the poor and of the Americans did not faze him. History was on our side if we did it right. Modernization was the key. To him Ho and men like Che Guevara were evil, out to oppress rather than liberate, and his staff would never forget the meeting he called the day Che Guevara was killed. Like a bit of theater, Walt very dramatic: “Gentlemen.” Pause. “I have very important news.” Everyone leaning forward. “The Bolivians have executed Che.” Another pause to let the satisfaction sink in. “They finally got the SOB. The last of the romantic guerrillas.” Rostow was, the staff noticed, excited, almost grateful for the news. This proved it was all right, that history was going according to schedule, just as his own books had predicted. History was good.

  At the end of the presidential campaign Kennedy had promised Rostow the chairmanship of the State Department’s Policy Planning Council, a job which seemed ideal for him, a good place for an idea man and not too close to the center of the action. But Rusk put his foot down; since he had already accepted too many of Kennedy’s political people and he was bothered by Rostow, who seemed verbose and ideological, he drew the line. Meanwhile, Rostow was in Cambridge waiting for the phone call from Kennedy or Rusk, but that job offer never came. Instead, Rusk wanted George McGhee, his old friend and colleague during the Truman Administration, for the job, and Rostow could be his deputy. The prospect of being deputy did not intrigue Rostow, who called Kennedy; the President-elect said not to worry, something would be worked out. Then in December 1960, when Kennedy went to Harvard to meet with the Overseers, a symbolic and moving occasion in Cambridge, he summoned Rostow alone for breakfast, a momentous occasion which sent great waves surging across Cambridge, then attuned for all bits of Kennedy gossip, showing that Rostow must be an insider, after all. Kennedy was particularly good at using the peripheral benefits of his office and position to ease people’s hurt. At the meeting he promised Rostow a job as Bundy’s deputy, which delighted Rostow, and he immediately accepted.

  Since Rostow was known in Cambridge for his enthusiasm, particularly his enthusiasm for his own ideas, there were those in the Harvard-MIT complex who regarded his appointment as something of a mixed blessing. On the day of the announcement Lucian Pye, a professor of political science at MIT, walked into a seminar, shuffled papers for a minute, looked at his class and finally said, “You know, you don’t sleep quite so well any more when you know some of the people going to Washington.” If Rostow was not known for his modesty in the Cambridge world, he soon showed up in Washington true to form, grandly defining his job to a reporter in terms worthy of his stature (he had entitled his latest book The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, to which the British publisher would modestly add: “It provides the significant links between economic and noneconomic behavior which Karl Marx failed to discern”). Pointing to Suez on a map, Rostow noted that he and Mac had divided the world, Bundy getting everything west of Suez, and Rostow everything east of it. This seemed a fair split, Bundy being totally a man of the Atlantic, a serious theater for a serious man (Robert Komer, the most articulate White House spokesman for the dark of skin, would complain, only partly in jest, that the key to the world was to get Bundy to go from Gibraltar to Tangier, that would be a breakthrough), whereas Rostow was fascinated by the underdeveloped world. He felt that this was the main new arena of confrontation, and that Eisenhower had let it all slip away.

  Rostow had arrived with a definite and decided view on Vietnam, that the United States must move, that this was the right spot. In the early days he pushed very hard for action, sponsoring General Lansdale, asking for increased commitment of troops, for more covert operations, promoting the idea of the vice-presidential trip to Saigon. He also talked about bombing the North, hitting the supply routes, and though he was combative and aggressive about it, there were jokes among the insiders about Walt’s SEATO Plan Six, and later about Air Marshal Rostow. There was a certain touch of amusement about this, about Rostow being a little too zealous, perhaps a little too energetic, a little too anti-Communist; he seemed to mean what he said about the guerrillas and the Communists. Kennedy was amused by this, and by the fact that for all his enthusiastic anti-Communism, the right wing and the security people were always picking on Rostow, and there were constant problems of security clearances for him, a throwback to his leftist days. Kennedy would say, half in irritation, half in jest, “Why are they always picking on Walt as soft-headed? Hell, he’s the biggest Cold Warrior I’ve got.” In choosing Rostow for the fact-finding trip to Vietnam, Kennedy was picking the one member of the Administration genuinely enthusiastic about a guerrilla confrontation there.

  There was an additional reason why Rostow did not fear confrontation in Vietnam, and that was an almost mystic belief in air power. He was convinced, indeed he knew, that we had an unbeatable weapon, that we could always fall back, even if reluctantly, on our real might, which was the gleaming force and potential of the U.S. Air Force. Perhaps all men tend to be frozen in certain attitudes which have been shaped by important experiences in their formative years; for young Rostow, one of the crucial experiences had been picking bombing targets in Europe. It had been a stirring time, a time when he was of great service to his country. He had believed in strategic bombing, in the vital, all-important role it played in bringing victory during World War II, that it had broken the back of the German war machine. His enthusiasm for bombing and for his own role had allowed him to withstand all the subsequent intelligence of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (not by chance were two of that survey’s chief members, John Kenneth Galbraith and George Ball, among the leading doves on Vietnam), which proved conclusively that the strategic bombing had not worked; on the contrary, it had intensified the will of the German population to resist (as it would in North Vietnam, binding the population to the Hanoi regime).

  Rostow remained uniquely oblivious to counterarguments about bombing; if anything, he believed that we had not used enough of it against the German oil depots and electric grid, and he would later seek to remedy that omission in Vietnam. Only the Air Force itself was more fervent than Rostow in the belief that in this weapon we had a panacea for military problems. Where others might have been hesitant about a real confrontation with Hanoi, Rostow had fewer fears and more confidence; the idea of being able to use bombing as a fall-back weapon was particularly comforting. His faith in bombing persisted through 1967, despite the mounting evidence against its effectiveness. In fact, after one confrontation with Undersecretary of State Nicholas deB. Katzenbach in 1967 over the failu
re of bombing, Katzenbach walked out shaking his head. He turned to a friend and said, “I finally understand the difference between Walt and me. I was the navigator who was shot down and spent two years in a German prison camp, and Walt was the guy picking my targets.” But all this came later, even the failure. It was his confidence about bombing and its magic that gave him a special fervor; almost alone among the Kennedy people, he was a believer.

  The other member was Maxwell Taylor, the Kennedy-type general. He was articulate, he was presentable. (You would, said one member of the Administration years later, be impressed with Max even if he were in civies.) Between 1955 and 1959 he had struggled with the Eisenhower Administration as Chief of Staff of the United States Army, during the years when the doctrine was massive retaliation, a doctrine which severely reduced the size and role of the U.S. Army (the Kennedy people, who were always sloppy in their homework, all thought he had resigned in protest. Quite the opposite was true; though he had presented radically different strategies, he had walked the narrow path, thus managing to coexist for four years; then he retired. After his tour was up, he wrote his dissenting book, which was so critical of the Republicans that it left the impression that Taylor had, in fact, resigned).

  He was a man of considerable stature, the linear descendant of the greatest American general of that era, Matt Ridgway; he was a man with a good combat record who was a hero to civilians and soldiers alike, and people seemed to think of him as the next Ridgway. In 1960 Taylor left his job as president of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York, a position which had added to his laurels—the cultured war hero. He was also more than a little vain, not just about his hearing, which was bad, and for which he did not want a hearing aid, but about his title as well. At the beginning of the Administration there had been some trouble over it: should it be The Military Representative of the President, a title which he wanted, or Kennedy’s choice, Special Military Representative? Kennedy, being President, won.

  The general seemed almost invented for the Kennedy years; he was cool, correct, handsome and athletic. As an airborne general, he was more modern in outlook than other generals; he spoke several languages and had written a book. And he was imposing, always in control. Once, while he was Superintendent of West Point, he had attended an assembly of college presidents at which he spoke forcefully and eloquently, all without a note. Afterward another educator congratulated him on such a good impromptu speech. “I never do anything impromptu,” he answered. Most important of all, his strategic views coincided exactly with Kennedy’s. He thought nuclear weapons an unthinkable instrument of American policy, and he did not think a U.S. President would initiate a nuclear war. Classic conventional war seemed increasingly outmoded; thus he had written that the next generation of wars would be brush-fire wars which the United States, as keeper of world stability and honor, must extinguish. He seemed to be talking about guerrilla wars, though it would turn out that he was the most conventional of men in terms of the new kind of warfare; what he was really talking about was apparently limited use of highly mobile conventional forces in very limited wars. This was, of course, a fine point which might develop later but which was not discernible in the early days of the Administration, a time when there was more excitement about guerrilla warfare and small wars than there was knowledge about them.

  To the Kennedy people, then, he was a good general, different from the Eisenhower generals, who were simply typical of the military establishment. (Kennedy also assumed that all good generals liked one another, and thus that General James Gavin, similarly a good general, a romantic, Airborne figure who had written books and also shortened a brilliant career in protest over Ike’s policies, and who had also supported Kennedy against Nixon—a prime test for a good general—must be a friend of Taylor’s. “Jim, Jim,” Kennedy had once yelled to a departing Gavin in the White House, “Max is here! Max is here!,” imagining that the two were close friends, but drawing from Gavin the coldest look imaginable. The truth was that the two disliked each other, had long been rivals, had even skirmished over which airborne division would lead the post­World War II parade through Manhattan, and would end up bitterly divided on the Vietnam war.) In addition, the new Administration people believed that Taylor could and would be a Kennedy general, at least as loyal to them as to his uniform and institution—a very real splitting of loyalties, as it would turn out. He had served Kennedy well during the Bay of Pigs, though his reports had been curiously technical in nature and not very astute politically. But Kennedy was inclined to think of Taylor as being dispassionate and rational, indeed more like himself than anyone else in the new Administration, with the possible exception of Bundy. As if that were not enough, Robert Kennedy was enamored of him and constantly promoted him.

  So now here was Taylor, chosen for this mission, not necessarily a man of the JCS, but in the Kennedy eyes more independent than that, more modern, less bureaucratic; he was, above all, a man who had been warning for nearly a decade that the great military problem in the world was not nuclear war, but brush-fire wars, and now he was going to a country which contained, if nothing else, the world’s most intense brush-fire war.

  So they went, Rostow and Taylor; they got on well together. They were both activists, and those who wondered whether America had been taken over by soft, weak men would be reassured by the many photographs sent back from Saigon showing Taylor and Rostow playing vigorous tennis with various Vietnamese. Kennedy had also asked Lansdale to make a special trip to Vietnam, and he had accepted, learning only later that he would be a part of the Taylor mission. Before they left, Taylor had asked each member of the group to make a list of what he would like to look into once they arrived in Vietnam. Lansdale, who was the most professional member of the group, made a fairly long list of things: he wanted to find out more about the relationship of the government to the people, he wanted to know if the government was reaching the people, what the feeling was of people getting drafted, who could become an officer in the South Vietnamese army (ARVN) and who could not, what the local feeling was toward tax officials, how valid the case of the Vietcong was in rural areas. Lansdale was not a particular admirer of Taylor’s in the first place; in the 1955­56 period, when Taylor was the Chief of Staff, Lansdale had wanted more emphasis on the development of Special Forces and irregular-warfare units, and had found Taylor unreceptive to the idea, ready, if anything, to cut back the number of men on irregular duty. Now he again found Taylor unreceptive to his list, which was accepted without comment. The two men never discussed it on the trip, and Taylor never asked Lansdale why he wanted to look into these matters.

  Thus it came as no surprise to Lansdale that when the protocol list for official functions for the trip was drawn, Taylor drew the cutoff line immediately above Lansdale’s name, Lansdale, of course, being well known and popular in Vietnam. What came as a greater surprise was Taylor’s view of what this war was all about. He assigned Lansdale the task of looking into the possibility and cost of erecting a huge fence which would run the length of the country and stop infiltration. For years, Lansdale, along with other knowledgeable Americans in Vietnam, had mocked the French Expeditionary Forces for their preoccupation with static outposts, what the Americans considered a Maginot Line mentality; now as he took the assignment from Taylor he thought to himself, Here we are, trying to create our own Maginot Line. It was, he thought as the mission progressed, all like that, trying to refit conventional ideas for an unconventional war. What it would amount to, he thought, was taking an army that was dubious in battle and making it more mobile, avoiding the real social and political causes for its military failures. But he was below the cutoff line in more than protocol, and his feelings would not be reflected in the mission’s findings.

  They were not alone in making the trip to Vietnam. Also going was one of Washington’s most influential columnists (then he was still influential; the war would severely damage his credibility and systematically lessen his influence), a man wit
h an enormous vested interest in Asian anti-Communism, Joseph Alsop. He had never quite forgiven the State Department for allowing the United States to stand idly by while China went Communist. China had fallen despite his warnings, but he was still a forceful advocate of the domino theory, a man skilled in the ways of Washington, well connected politically and socially, and while he would not stoop to the kind of tactics which had marked McCarthyism, he nevertheless could make the case for holding the line in a way which implied that manhood was at stake; this he now did, and what he wrote from Honolulu on October 18 was symbolic of the kind of writing and pressure a President faced in those days:

  Is there any real foundation for all the talk about the Kennedy administration “lack of firmness”? The talk disturbs the President so much that he came to within an ace of making his recent North Carolina speech a major answer to his critics. But is there anything to it but political hot air? On the way to troubled South Vietnam where the administration’s firmness is once again being tested, the foregoing question looms very large indeed. This reporter’s “yes, but” answer begins oddly enough with a typical specimen of modern American academic politics. . . .