The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  Rusk was the least enthusiastic. In fact, one White House aide had first sensed that Rusk might be innately more conservative than the other Kennedy people, even before the inauguration, when Rusk had taken him aside and asked, “What’s all this talk about disarmament, they aren’t really serious about it, are they?” It was not so much that Rusk was against test-ban treaties as that he was a status quo man. The world was a static place, it changed very little, and then, very slowly. These differences, these divisions existed for very real and valid reasons and they would always exist and one did not push; pushing meant risks, on the Hill, with NATO allies, with the traditionalists in the foreign service; one moved slowly and was grateful for very small changes. Things like disarmament were for the Stevenson people and should be debated at the UN, and were for American domestic consideration by the liberals, but were not serious things (though later, when Johnson made it clear that he wanted a nonproliferation treaty, and when an issue like this was no longer groundbreaking, no one worked harder or more effectively for it than Rusk).

  So with these Administration differences, based upon institutional and personal viewpoints, the outlook on the test-ban treaty was surprisingly similar to attitudes on Vietnam, with the President particularly interested in securing a test-ban treaty, and with Harriman far ahead of Rusk in willingness to take what was deemed political risk in accomplishing it. Harriman had wrestled it out with the Russians; he, more than anyone else in the government, believed that the time was ripe and that it could be pulled off, although there were a few, like Wiesner, who felt that in the previous negotiations with the Russians a treaty had been possible, but the U.S. negotiators had been too conservative. This did not mean that the bureaucracy and the Hill were ready by a long shot for change on the arms race. The Hill seemed to be dubious, particularly the Armed Services Committee, and the bureaucracy itself was filled with potential opponents. In the spring of 1963, for example, when there was no real idea that a test-ban treaty was coming, the word slipped out that Senator John Stennis was going to hold hearings on the state of the nation’s preparedness. The preceding negotiations with the Russians had come surprisingly close to a treaty, and there was a feeling that things might be moving in that direction. But the threat of Stennis’ hearings was a serious one. In the hearings the conservatives would summon the generals, who always call for more preparedness and lament America’s present weakness, they create a more antagonistic climate, they worry the Senate and they worry the President; in all, they create a record which opponents of the treaty can work off. Some White House representatives went to see McNamara and warned him what was coming. McNamara was rather casual about it at first. He did not think that they were that close to a treaty. Anyway, if he made his case too soon, it would be easy for the opposition to counter it. Let Stennis have his hearings, he said, and we’ll wait. The White House people bowed to his superior judgment.

  A few weeks later they heard that John McCone had lent CIA specialists on nuclear weapons to Stennis, to help him make the case against the treaty—McCone had always opposed the treaty—and the White House people sensed that things might be more serious than they had imagined, and that this was in effect a confirmation that Stennis and McCone thought the treaty might be close. So Mac Bundy’s deputy, Carl Kaysen, got together with Abe Chayes, the State Department’s legal adviser, and with McNaughton, who was an expert on arms control, and decided that their instincts about being worried were good ones. They went back to McNamara and spelled out their doubts; he listened for a few moments and then said—I agree, you’re right and I was wrong; it is more serious, and you’re now the committee to oversee the executive branch’s argument. McNaughton is the chief, and you’re to put together our case, check out who the witnesses are, and balance the record.

  Thus were the Stennis hearings negated. As summer ended and it became a question of going before the Senate with the treaty, the Administration was far from confident about congressional support (later the 80­19 vote would imply that it had been a piece of cake all along; the truth was that the balance had seemed quite fragile at the start, and a vote near the two thirds needed for ratification was really no victory; it was almost an incitement to enemies as much as a change in the Cold War). With a Senate vote looming ahead, the Administration decided to test the waters in its own party. It sent an emissary to Dean Acheson to find out how Acheson felt on the treaty. It was a delicate mission, for Acheson, though a Democrat, was a good deal more hard-line than most of the young men running the government, and his opposition at this point might be critical, might just divide the Democrats in the Senate and encourage opposition to the treaty. They found, however, that Acheson was surprisingly sympathetic, but he did say there was something he objected to, and that was the way Averell Harriman was using the treaty negotiations to promote himself to Secretary of State. Couldn’t they do something about Averell, make him act his age? And so the message was brought back to the White House, and slowly they put together their forces on the Hill. It had not always been a sure thing, but the vote was very good, better than they expected, and the President was pleased. It was a highly personal victory; it had not been some force loose in the country which had pushed him forward, with the Administration harnessing it at the last minute (as civil rights would be), but rather something that his Administration had committed itself to and pushed through. He told friends that he had made the test ban the keystone of his foreign policy; if he lost in 1964 because of it he would be willing to pay that price.

  In the fall the President had been scheduled to go on a tour of Western states that Mike Mansfield had promoted, a conservation tour in essence, where he would praise wide open spaces and high mountains and clean rivers. It was not a subject which particularly interested him (conservation was not yet ecology), but Kennedy was glad to be leaving Washington. The trip did not start well. He made two poor appearances, and then in Billings, Montana, he was scheduled to give another boring speech, boring himself and his audience, and in the middle of it he mentioned the test-ban treaty, and as he did, the crowd responded with force and immediacy. It was a real rapport, not the carefully calculated applause lines which often mark a political speech, hackneyed calls to party or national fidelity written into a speech, the audience responding faithfully if listlessly on cue. Kennedy, who was above all a good politician, whose ear was fine and always tuned, and who sensed his audience well, adjusted immediately and continued on the peace theme, accelerating the tempo and the intensity, and the crowd responded. He talked of the nuclear confrontations of the last two years, first Berlin and then Cuba, and he said: “What we hope to do is lessen the chance of a military collision between these two great nuclear powers which together have the power to kill three hundred million people in the short space of a day. That is what we are seeking to avoid. That is why we support the test-ban treaty. Not because things are going to be easier in our lives, but because we have a chance to avoid being burned.”

  From then on through the Far West, the trip was the same; he strayed more and more from conservation and into the test-ban treaty, and everywhere the crowds were very good, and very responsive. The last night he went to Salt Lake City, where the crowds along the route were the best yet, and when he entered the Mormon Tabernacle, allegedly the enemy camp, he received a five-minute standing ovation as he walked in. Here again, in what was alleged to be Birch country, Goldwater territory, he challenged the theses of the far right and talked of the problems of living in a complicated world. He had long suspected that the right in America was overrated as a political force, that there was an element of blackmail to its power, and now he was convinced that the country was going past old and rigid fears of the Communists, that it was probably ahead of Washington in its comprehension of the world and its willingness to accept it (and if not ahead of Washington, at least far ahead of where Washington thought it was). He sensed that there was a deep longing for a sane peace and sane world. He knew that Goldwater would be his o
pponent in 1964 and now he felt that he could beat Goldwater badly and end some of the fears which had haunted American politics since the hardening of the Cold War. That and his own popularity, the fact that he was no longer considered too young. The 100,000 margin was a thing of the past.

  The following evening both Tom Wicker and Sander Vanocur, the New York Times and the NBC White House correspondents, respectively, sought out Press Secretary Pierre Salinger and suggested that the Western trip had uncovered a new and powerful issue. “Yes,” said Salinger, “you’re right. We’ve found that peace is an issue.” So it had come that in the last months of his life his Presidency had turned, and not by chance, it had coincided with the first major step away from the barren path of the Cold War. It was perhaps not surprising that the first step away from the glacial quality of the Cold War would take place with the Soviet Union on something like a test-ban treaty. It was an area of less political risk; there were checks, on-site inspections against violation, and these were part of the treaty. The burden of proof in a domestic political confrontation would be on the opposition to a treaty: Why do you oppose it, what proof have you against it? But on the question of whether or not a country would go Communist, the risk was higher, the burden of proof would be on the Administration rather than on the right-wing opposition. The question would be, Why did you lose that particular country? rather than, Was the loss of that country worth a nuclear confrontation? Was it worth a major American land war? So the first break had taken place here, and though it was historically a small break, it was a beginning, and it belonged to both Kennedy and Khrushchev. By that special irony the problems which had haunted him in his meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961 were past him now, he had come to terms with them, with his own sense of himself, with Khrushchev’s estimate of him, and above all, with his country’s estimate of him. But Vietnam, which he had conceived of as part of the price of making American power and determination credible to the Communists, was coming apart even as the U.S.-Soviet balance seemed to be stabilizing.

  For a brief moment after Diem’s death, Vietnamese officers were able to report honestly about what had happened in the war, what the situation was. The embassy was staggered under the impact of what was coming in from the field; the situation was far worse than it had expected, even in some of the more pessimistic quarters. There was, it turned out, no strategic hamlet program in the Delta to speak of; in many areas where the embassy had been reasonably confident, it turned out there had been few incidents precisely because the Vietcong totally controlled an area and did not need to launch any attacks. (As the reports came in, the Harkins-MACV line would immediately change to accept negative aspects of the reporting and claim that it had been going very well until the coup, but since then, the government had completely fallen apart and the war had started to go badly.) One brief example will suffice; about two weeks after the coup I went to the 7th Division area just below Saigon in the Mekong Delta; there a new general, Pham Van Dong, was conducting an operation. General Dong was talking about the misreporting and pointed to a district chief, said that the district chief had been an old aide of his and would tell the truth. “How many villages are there in your district?” the general asked him.

  “Twenty-four,” answered the official.

  “And how many do you control?” asked Dong.

  “Eight,” answered the official.

  “And how many,” said Dong with a grin, “did you tell Saigon you controlled?”

  “Twenty-four,” said the official, looking somewhat sheepish.

  On November 21 Henry Cabot Lodge flew to Honolulu on the first leg of a trip to Washington, where he planned to tell the President that the situation was much worse than they thought; even Lodge, who had been pushing the idea that the war was going badly, was shocked at just how discouraging it really was, and he planned to tell Kennedy that there was serious doubt as to whether any government could make it any more. He never delivered the report; in San Francisco he heard the news of the assassination in Dallas, and that Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Lodge asked the new President if he should simply return to Saigon; no, said Johnson, they ought to talk anyway. And so they met, and the message, that it was all bad in Vietnam, that hard decisions were ahead and not very far ahead, was delivered to a brand-new President, unsure of himself, unsure of the men around him, unsure of his relationship to the country, and the country’s acceptance of him. He was above all unsure of himself in foreign affairs, more suspicious of the world around him and of enemies than his predecessors. (A few weeks later a group of reporters gathered to have dinner with Johnson at the home of Phil Potter of the Baltimore Sun, an old Johnson friend. The reporters asked various questions. Russell Baker, one of them, asked what the first thing was that had gone through Johnson’s mind as the shots were fired and Rufus Youngblood threw himself on Johnson. “That the Communists had done it,” Johnson said, and Baker would remember being shocked by the reply, it had seemed so primitive.)

  If Vietnam was to be saved, Lodge said, it was Johnson who would have to make the tough decisions. “I am not going to lose Vietnam,” the new President answered. “I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.” Lodge then asked him what kind of political support he had. “I don’t think Congress wants us to let the Communists take over Vietnam,” Johnson answered. It was the first sign. There would not be many more for a while, but it was an instant response and an important one. But hard decisions on Vietnam were the last thing he wanted right away; he wanted first to help the nation (and himself) absorb the psychic shock it had just gone through (which he did by a whirlwind of activity), to establish as much continuity as possible, to hold on to the Kennedy men, not just the big Kennedy men at first, but all of them. (“I need you more than he did,” he would say, pressing them, pushing them, imploring them to stay. He invited the White House people, not just Bundy but many of them, to lunch, a friendly swim first, then everyone was marched over to the swimming pool, stripped down naked in a tiny dressing room, with the result that Robert Komer was so nervous that he dove in with his glasses on, and the rest of the swim was devoted to diving for Komer’s glasses.) He intended to secure the Kennedy legacy, prove his own worthiness to accept the torch by pushing the Kennedy legislation through Congress, then he would run for President against Goldwater in 1964, and finally, elected President in his own right, have a Johnsonian Presidency, a big one, an Administration all his own. All that would take time, and for a start he wanted to hold the world at bay; he did not need any additional and extraneous problems from the world, and particularly not from Vietnam.

  So the men around him set out almost immediately to hold the line, to protect the President, to delay decisions on Vietnam as long as possible, to keep it, if at all possible, off the front pages, to make as few decisions for as long as possible. Vietnam, however, was his, and a few days later he walked over to the State Department, assembled the gentlemen of that vast house of employment, and reminded them that he was the only President they had (just to make sure that they got the message, he had taken Speaker of the House John McCormack with him, that trembling, frail old man who was next in line in succession, a graphic illustration of the truth of Johnson’s words). He gave them a pep talk, emphasizing the importance of what they did, the difficulty under which they did it, the lack of recognition, saying he understood all this (which was not true. Of the many departments of the government, they constituted the one he was least sympathetic to; his view was not unlike that of Joe Kennedy. He believed them sissies, snobs, lightweights who sacrificed too little and thought themselves better than their country). He closed with one statement which sent cold chills into a few of the doubters who had been working on Vietnam under Harriman: “And before you go to bed at night I want you to do one thing for me: ask yourself this one question . . .” Pause. Then slowly, for emphasis, each word is a sentence: “What have I done for Vietnam today?” Then he left. Almost three years earlier, Douglas
MacArthur had told John Kennedy, in a discussion about the coming problems of Asia, that the chickens were coming home to roost for Kennedy. But instead they would come home for Lyndon Johnson.

  John Kennedy was dead. His legacy was a mixed one. He had come in at the latter part of the Cold War; at the beginning he had not challenged it, though he had, in the last part of his Administration, begun to temper it. On Vietnam his record was more than cloudy. More than any other member of his Administration, he knew the dangers of a deep U.S. involvement, the limits of what Caucasian troops could achieve on Vietnamese soil, and yet he had significantly deepened that involvement. He had escalated the number of Americans there to 16,900 at the time of his death, with more than 70 dead (each dead American became one more rationale for more dead Americans); more important, he had markedly escalated the rhetoric and the rationale for being there. Although he seriously questioned the wisdom of a combat commitment, and at the end had grave doubts about the viability of the counterinsurgency program, whether we should be there at all, he had never shown those doubts in public, from the rostrum of the bully pulpit. The only thing he had expressed doubts about was the Diem regime, that and little more. His successor had to deal not so much with Kennedy’s inner doubts so carefully and cautiously expressed, but with his public statements, all supportive of the importance and significance of Vietnam. In addition, his speeches and programs had raised the importance of Vietnam in American minds; his commitment had, by the publicity his Administration gave it, become that much more vital, and had led to that many more speeches, that many more newspaper stories, that many more television stories on the Huntley-Brinkley show.