The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  Kattenburg was quickly challenged by Max Taylor. What did Kattenburg mean by “forced out of Vietnam in six months”? He answered that in six months, as it became more and more obvious that the Western side was losing the war, more and more Vietnamese would go over to the Vietcong (by the rules of the game set by McNamara, he was not allowed to say what he really thought, which was that the war was probably lost already, that the military’s optimistic estimates were illusory, that it was far later than anyone thought; State could not challenge Defense estimates).

  Nolting took issue with Kattenburg. Although he allowed as how Kattenburg knew the cities, and yes, this political protest was taking place in the cities, and Diem was slipping in the cities among the intelligentsia, but out in the countryside, where the war was being fought, it had little effect, out there the people faced reality, and out there we were winning the war. At which point Rusk added that what Kattenburg had said was speculative, and anyway, one thing was clear, we would not leave Vietnam until the war was over and won, and the United States would not support a coup. To this McNamara agreed.

  It was again a key moment; here was Rusk, whose job essentially was to forecast political events and weigh political subtleties and political limits, saying that come hell or high water the job would be done, putting down his own subordinate (years later, after publication of the Pentagon Papers, he told interviewers that he had erred in underestimating the strength of the enemy). So there was in the meeting a sense of business as usual. The time for a coup had come and gone; the policy in the past had always been to stand in Washington and paper things over in Saigon, and that was the trend now. Whatever the problems, we could live with them, get on with it; the problem now, as they would soon learn, was that there was precious little left to paper over.

  Though Nolting had participated in the debate, he was almost finished as a player; he was no longer ambassador and he had little post-tour credibility as a witness. What credibility he did have was systematically destroyed by Harriman, who was brutally trying to remove the last remnants of Nolting’s legitimacy. When Nolting criticized Kattenburg, Harriman had moved in with a ferocity which startled the others in the room. “We do not,” he said angrily, unable to contain himself, “particularly value what you say since you were on vacation and unavailable for two months, and it is because of your reports, the weakness of them, that we have this very problem of information.” The attack was so fierce that Kennedy had to restrain Harriman, to make him stop, saying that he, the President of the United States, wanted Nolting to finish. But Nolting had left that meeting white-faced and shaken, and his last months in government were bitter ones. He was an outsider, using a small office at CIA, watching the policy disintegrate, finally leaving the government to become an international representative of the Morgan Bank (and to write various newspapers a commemorative letter on the annual occasion of Diem’s death, a date which in the country Nolting professed to love had become a national holiday). Yet if Nolting was finished as a player, there was still a great debate left on what to do, and that debate would focus on intelligence estimates, whether the war was being won or not.

  It was at this point in a bitterly divided bureaucracy that Maxwell Taylor was in the central position, and his behavior in the divisive months of the summer of 1963 would shed a good deal of light on how he would react in future struggles over Vietnam. As before, the pressures on him reflected two very powerful and conflicting loyalties, one to the President and one to his uniform. He was a divided man, and this would become more and more apparent as Vietnam continued to disintegrate. As the limited commitment he had helped author was becoming increasingly untenable, so was his own position.

  He had held strongly to certain basic military policies—based on the need to fight brush-fire wars—during the Eisenhower Administration, and he had been out of step with the Administration then. If he had not resigned, then he had at least resisted the temptation to sign on (succumbing, thought some friends, would have brought him the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs, but would have cost him dearly in terms of loyalty to the Army). So he had walked the tightrope, satisfying neither the Eisenhower Administration, which viewed him as being on the edge of disloyalty (unannounced dissent), nor satisfying the young colonels on his staff who wanted larger and more modern roles for the Army (they did not realize that Max Taylor did not like to fight when other people owned the battlefield). During his four years as Chief of Staff of the Army he had been undercutting as subtly as he could the Eisenhower policies of massive retaliation, with testimony on the Hill, with subtle leaks to the right journalists. Since he had always been against what he considered a futile policy, he had never become Chairman.

  It was with this image of being both a restrained and moderate general that he had arrived back in Washington, his book just published, The Uncertain Trumpet (“We have the ability to wage total war. We can trigger near total destruction. But can we defend Berlin—South Korea—Vietnam—Iran—Thailand—America?” said the dust jacket). He had been a convenient figure for Kennedy, as Kennedy was a convenient figure for him, each serving the other’s purpose. Kennedy, too, wanted to get away from the doctrine of massive retaliation. Kennedy wanted to rebuild the Joint Chiefs with younger men who were, if not directly loyal to him, at least cut more in his mold; Taylor was willing to do the same thing. (Taylor and McNamara were pushing for younger officers, switching the criterion for promotion, leaving busted careers in their wake. Men who one day had been too young for their next assignment would wake up and find themselves too old for it.) But now that he had made it back, Taylor faced the delicate job of balancing his loyalties to both the Administration and the uniform, a task for a man with a good political sense, which Taylor had. He was the kind of general that civilians liked, felt at ease with, felt they could trust. Civilians, looking at other generals, felt all they understood was their own problems; Taylor saw a wider periphery of interests, he understood what civilians wanted and why, and his career would be furthered by them. He was not blindly attached to his uniform; he was reasonable and above all civilized about things. Civilians, looking for allies, always liked him.

  Now he faced two interests which were by no means compatible: the Kennedy people, young, ambitious, aggressive, talked boldly about their anti-Communism. But that anti-Communism was not imbedded in them as a lifeblood, it was not their mission. They were willing to ride it out from time to time, but they were men essentially committed to a rational order. The military, in contrast, particularly the senior military, were very different. The Cold War was their mission, defense against the aggressor enemy; since they had to be prepared to die for their mission, they also had to believe in it. Since the Communists were the aggressor enemy, anti-Communism was the textbook of their life, and their political center was far to the right of the Kennedy political center. Success in the Kennedy Administration meant reading subtle changes in the world and the Administration’s reaction to them; bureaucratic success in the military meant getting along with your superiors and understanding their whims, and their whims were deep in the lifeblood of the Cold War. (Occasionally, however, a general like David Shoup would bemoan the extent to which anti-Communism had become part of American military doctrine—too much hating—and the attempt to create a countering ideology. Shoup did not like that, he did not believe in demonology. The job of the Marines, he said, was not to be anti-Communist, it was to wait until the President said “Saddle up and go,” and then to saddle up and go.) And then, of course, Taylor had to contend with an instinct (particularly among the Air Force and Navy people) to use force in any situation, and failing in the first dose of force, to use more force, then more force.

  At times these different pressures posed no problem. On the Bay of Pigs, Taylor had been a good critic of that particular disaster, and on the Kennedy attempts to limit nuclear testing and harness the arms race he was completely loyal to the Administration. He believed nuclear war was an irrational solution, and the soone
r the nuclear race was turned around the better. But that had always been the Army’s position. Now, with the problems of failure on Vietnam closing in, the urgency of what to do next, he would be in a different spot. Vietnam was a reflection of his military strategy (however incomplete) at this point; it was an experiment in a new kind of limited war. But if the Taylor-Rostow strategy failed, then what? Other generals would take over who were not so civilized, not so committed to the Administration, not so appalled by the specter of nuclear weapons. The Air Force, for instance, believed its weapons, its bombs, its nukes could do it all, and it was always ready to go. Thus the Air Force by itself, and with its friends on the Hill (since, of the three services, the Air Force required the most hardware, the biggest contracts, the closest links with industry, it had the most connections on the Hill), moved the center of the debate over a few notches to the right, which led generals like Taylor to believe that when they gave in a little on the use of force, the important thing was not so much that they were acquiescing, but that they were holding the line against something worse, protecting us from the Air Force with its nukes and missiles.

  So if Vietnam collapsed, it would pose this particular problem of what to do next. If limited force had failed, would there be more pressure for greater force? Taylor had been able to try out his own concept of the limited commitment to stop the brush-fire war by putting Paul Harkins there, not because Harkins was the ablest general around, but because, far more important, he was Taylor’s man and Taylor could control him. Now, in the middle of the crisis, with the State people despairing about Diem and about the conduct of the war, Taylor wanted to hold the line, to keep up the appearances, to keep from failing at what they were trying. As the struggle continued he kept Krulak in line, he kept Harkins in line, and he slowed McNamara’s own tendency to swing over.

  Taylor would in the ensuing weeks prove a formidable bureaucratic player, as some, like John Vann, had already learned. As the debate over information mounted he was determined to keep as much control as possible over military assessments. In September, with the bureaucracy as divided as ever, Kennedy decided to try and get information from both Lodge and Harkins on a long list of specific questions. The request was very much the President’s and he asked that Hilsman compose it. The cable itself reflected a vast amount of doubt about the progress of the war. Eventually the answers from both men came in: the Lodge report was thoroughly pessimistic, while the Harkins report was markedly upbeat, filled with assurance, but also bewildering because it seemed to be based on the debate in Washington rather than the situation in Saigon. In it, the puzzled White House aides found a reference by Harkins to an outgoing cable of Taylor’s. They checked out the number of the Taylor cable, but could find no record of it in the White House. Sensing that something was wrong, one of the White House aides called over to the Pentagon for a copy of the Taylor cable, giving the number, though being careful to call a low-ranking clerk, not someone in the Chairman’s office who might have understood the play. The young corporal was very co-operative and came up with the answer the aides wanted, a remarkably revealing cable from Taylor to Harkins explaining just how divided the bureaucracy was, what the struggle was about, saying that the Hilsman cable did not reflect what Kennedy wanted, that it was more Hilsmanish than Kennedyish, and then outlining which questions to answer and precisely how to answer them.

  The cable had been unearthed just before a key National Security Council meeting. The White House staff was very angry and felt that Taylor had been completely disloyal, although Kennedy himself was more fatalistic than upset, being perhaps more aware of the conflicting pulls on Taylor’s loyalty. At the end of the meeting, however, Kennedy asked Taylor to come in to a private office, like, thought some of the others, a little boy summoned to the principal’s office. (If Kennedy’s respect for Taylor slipped a little, it went up for Harriman, who, not knowing of the secret Taylor cable, had nonetheless not liked the Harkins response and had told Kennedy before the meeting that there was something funny about it, somebody was playing games on him. “Harriman really is a shrewd old SOB,” Kennedy said later.) In the intensity of the debate the incident quickly passed, although it did convince some of the White House staff members of what they had suspected all along, that Harkins’ response and attitudes were being almost completely controlled by Taylor, with Krulak acting as something of a messenger between them, and with McNamara’s own position thus limited by his necessity of going along with what were deemed to be military facts. Later the civilians asked to have a set of cable machines in the White House so this sort of thing could be monitored, and the military readily agreed. The next day some fourteen machines were moved into the White House basement, grinding out millions of routine words per day, and the civilians knew that they were beaten by the sheer volume, that it was impossible to monitor it all. They surrendered and the machines were moved out, almost as quickly as they had been moved in. As for Taylor, there were those in the White House who thought him disloyal to the President, though it was clear that he felt he was acting for the President’s own good, protecting Kennedy from himself and the people around him. He, Taylor, was civilized, there were far worse people waiting in the wings if it didn’t work out, and so all of this was being done for Kennedy’s own sake.

  Now suddenly, under crisis conditions, the Kennedy Administration was finding itself confronted with the questions it should have faced and resolved almost two years earlier, when it slipped into the larger commitment. The political problems of Vietnam now seemed very real because they had acquired greater American potential, and they did not go away. For the first time the State Department people were making something of a case for the basically political nature of the war. The things that so many, like Durbrow and Ken Young, had said in the past about the Nhus seemed only too true, and now in the glare of international publicity the Administration had to come up with answers. The Administration’s hopes that there might be an easy coup had dimmed. There was that old illusion, the separation of the Nhus from the government. On September 2 the President himself went on television with Walter Cronkite and tried to disassociate the United States from the harshness of the regime and talk about the limits of the American role in a guerilla war—it was, he said, “in the final analysis . . . their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it.” Then he talked about possible changes in policy and personnel which might help the war effort. In Saigon at the exact same time, Lodge was with Nhu, trying to get him out of the government, and perhaps out of the country. There seemed to be some progress—there would perhaps be an announcement saying that the progress against the Vietcong was so great that Nhu could now retire. However, four days later Nhu went into a tirade and said that he would not leave the country, though he might leave the government. Experienced Americans in Saigon and Washington realized that this too was a fraud, that there was no such thing as Nhu out of the government as long as he stayed in the country. With this in mind, the National Security Council met again on September 6, and heard the same two factions, ending in the same negated view of policy. The civilians said it was hopeless with Diem, and the military said that it was equally hopeless without him. McNamara, pressing the military side, said this was a good time for Lodge to start talking with Diem again and restore relations to normal. Sitting in on the meeting and listening to both sides cancel each other’s arguments was Robert Kennedy, and he asked the questions that should have been asked two years earlier.

  Perhaps no one person reflected the embryonic change in Administration and in American attitudes toward the Cold War as did Robert Kennedy, the change from tough and aggressive anti-Communism toward a more modest view of the American role, and a sense of the limits and dangers of American power. He was, in mid-1963, in the middle of his personal journey, his own attitudes very much in flux. He had entered the Administration as perhaps the most hard-line member of the entire inner group, and in fact, the job he had really wanted was not at Justice but at Defense, wher
e he wanted to be the number-two man, specifically in charge of ending what he and others in the Kennedy group believed was a missile gap. If he were at Defense, he told friends, he could serve as the ramrod, pushing through newer, tougher programs, and be a watchdog for his brother. At the same time he would be gaining valuable experience in foreign affairs, which he wanted, and similarly, escape going to Justice, where he feared his reputation as the cop of the family would become more permanent.