The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  Kennedy had of course in the last couple of months privately expressed a nagging doubt: Could it be done? Was it worth doing? He had always feared the combat-troop idea; the French, he said repeatedly, had not been able to deal with the Vietnamese with 300,000 men, how could we? This was a political war; one could not produce military answers. He was increasingly dubious about the whole thing, about just how effective any Western presence which required force could be in Asia. It seemed to do more harm than good in order to survive. Just before he died he took Michael Forrestal aside and told him that he wanted Forrestal to make a special trip to Cambodia to see Prince Sihanouk. Forrestal’s specific mission would be to convey Kennedy’s personal and political warmth, Kennedy’s belief in the kind of neutralism Sihanouk followed, that we felt we understood him better now, and that we wished him great success. That in itself marked a change from the more hostile attitude of the past, when Washington had been forced to accept the essentially anti-Cambodian anti-Sihanouk attitude of South Vietnam. In the last few weeks of his life he had talked with some aides, such as Kenny O’Donnell, about trying to paper it over through 1964, keeping the commitment away from Goldwater as a target, and then trying to negotiate his way out. He had spoken similar words to Mike Mansfield, though omitting the reference to the 1964 election, simply talking about de-escalating, letting out his misgivings about our involvement. The men who were close to him in the White House felt that these doubts were growing all the time. And certainly he had been burned in the past. He knew the limits of force, and he knew the limits of what the generals recommended, and the limits of institutional wisdom. What was it he had said to Harriman at the time of Laos: It’s political, if they don’t want me to go to war in Cuba ninety miles from home, how can I go to war 12,000 miles away? And yet, and yet . . . More skeptical, more subtle than his public pronouncements, he had nonetheless failed to deal with Vietnam as a political problem. His response, if not combat troops, had been highly operational and functional and programmatic. He had worked to conceal the truth about Vietnam from the public and had markedly increased the American commitment, and he had severely limited the hand of a fresh, unsure successor. And he had passed on to that successor the brilliant, activist can-do Kennedy team, a team somewhat tempered in the past by Kennedy’s own skepticism, but which now found itself harnessed to the classic can-do President. He had deepened the commitment there, and he had, in a way, always known better. He had preached, both in his book and in his speeches, about the importance of political courage, but his Administration had been reasonably free from acts of courage, such as turning around the irrationality of the China policy. In this most crucial area the record was largely one of timidity.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Lyndon Johnson seemed in those first few months to be always in motion, running, doing, persuading; if later much of the nation, bitter over its seemingly unscheduled and unchartered journey into Southeast Asia, turned on him and remembered his years with distaste, it was grateful for him then, and with good reason. His mandate seemed to be to hold the country together, to continue to exhort from those around him their best, to heal wounds and divisions. Kennedy had been the man who experimented, who ventured into new areas, civil rights, and in so doing caused division and pain. He had jarred our nerves in taking us places we had not intended to go; now Johnson would heal not just the pain caused by the assassination but the tensions caused in the venturesome days of some of the Kennedy policies. The healer. If later one of the Johnson qualities which caused doubts among the nation’s critics was his force, the very abundance of it—the great capacity to plead, to bully, to beg, to implore, the capacity to manipulate them to what he considered his interest and the nation’s interest—in those early days he was much hailed for it. He was not berated for being a manipulator then, that term would come later. His ability to drive men to a program and policy beyond what they themselves considered wise was considered a national asset, since the men he was manipulating were largely old tired conservative Southern congressmen who headed committees and thus blocked progress. A powerful Presidency was still considered very desirable in those days; the problem was seen as too much power in the Congress and too little in the executive branch, which was exactly the way that man of the Congress recently transferred to the executive office, Lyndon B. Johnson, felt.

  The decision in those early months was to hold the line on Vietnam, to hold it down and delay decisions. Too many other things took primacy over it; since Vietnam had always, as far as American policy there was concerned, reflected American developments rather than Vietnamese events (the Buddhist crisis was one of the rare occasions which were primarily Vietnamese and contrary to what the Americans wanted), it was, despite the collapse of successive governments, imperative to keep Vietnam quiet. Though the men around Johnson were crisis-mentality men, men who delighted in the great international crisis because it centered the action right there in the White House—the meetings, the decisions, the tensions, the power, they were movers and activists, and this was what they had come to Washington for, to meet these challenges and handle them—in 1964 they deliberately avoided a sense of crisis on Vietnam, with the exception of the Tonkin Gulf incident, which became an incident in large part because they needed a congressional resolution. Thus events which might have been played up were played down. Provocations by the other side, the very same kind of alleged provocations which in 1965, when we were ready and geared up (that is, the presidential race run, the President elected, the inaugural given) would stir us to action, retaliation, escalation, first of words and then deeds, these acts were disregarded in 1964.

  In Saigon there were attempts to stop the coups, to stop these malignant acts which kept getting in the American newspapers and which made it harder and harder to convince the American public that the struggle there was necessary. So 1964 became a year when Vietnam could no longer be kept on the back burner; events there would thrust the country, the frailty of it all, in front of the American people, but it was a year in which the highest level of American policy makers refused to accept the necessity for making important decisions, tried to delay them, to buy the President a little more time. Besides, Lyndon Johnson liked choices and options. So it was a lost year; opportunities were lost for possible political negotiation, of re-evaluation of American attitudes, of perhaps convincing the American public that it wasn’t worth it, that the Vietnamese themselves did not care that much about the war. Instead of that, they held the line. They did not think time was working against them and decided not to deal with Vietnam in 1964, but to keep their options open. They would not be entrapped, they would make their decisions carefully and in their own time (they were above all functional, operational, tactical men, not really intellectuals, and tactical men think in terms of options, while intellectuals less so; intellectuals might think in terms of the sweep of history and might believe that twelve months would make little difference in Vietnam, that if the sweep of history was bad in 1964, it would probably, if anything, be a good deal worse in 1965). They could, they thought, control events, but it was all an illusion. Time had been closing off options relentlessly since 1945 and 1946, when it would have been easy to have a political settlement, a favorable one, with the United States dealing from strength, but ever since those days, the possibility had steadily diminished as the other side, the Vietnamese Communist forces, had become progressively stronger and the United States had become increasingly committed to the idea (then hardly part of its global outlook) that Vietnam was vital.

  Thus past years had shown that time diminished options, and this would be true in 1964 as well. A year later the Communists would be that much stronger, the government in Saigon that much weaker, and the United States, having used force in Tonkin, that much more committed. Events, George Ball would write in 1965, a year later, in beginning his final and most important paper in trying to keep us out, and drawing on a quote from Emerson, are in the saddle and tend to ride mankind. When they came t
o make the final fateful decisions, there would be options, but the real ones would be long since lost; the options they would deal with in 1965 were artificial ones. Given their outlook and their conception of the country and of their own political futures, they would be driven to certain inevitable, highly predictable decisions, but they still had the illusion that they could control events. They were rational men, that above all; they were not ideologues. Ideologues are predictable and they were not, so the idea that those intelligent, rational, cultured, civilized men had been caught in a terrible trap by early 1964 and that they spent an entire year letting the trap grow tighter was unacceptable; they would have been the first to deny it. If someone in those days had called them aside and suggested that they, all good rational men, were tied to a policy of deep irrationality, layer and layer of clear rationality based upon several great false assumptions and buttressed by a deeply dishonest reporting system which created a totally false data bank, they would have lashed out sharply that they did indeed know where they were going.

  Yet the old dilemma of Indochina was now finally coming to its illogical conclusions. Being good and decent men, they could not use nuclear weapons, not on first strike at least, perhaps in retaliation, though. They were the policy makers of the greatest nuclear power in the world, except that they could not use those weapons—indeed, their private defense policies were based on the unwillingness to use nuclear weapons—particularly against a small nation in a guerrilla war. Yet because of the Cold War legacy, the loss of China, they could not lose more territory (contested territory; uncontested territory was another thing) to the Communists. And yet we could not fight a long limited war. Korea had been deeply unpopular, and now finally the illusion of a viable South Vietnamese government able and anxious to fight for its own sovereignty was dying. We could not let go, and yet we did not want to get in.

  The leadership of course was very good. The loss of Kennedy was mourned, and yet Johnson, this new President . . . he was a powerhouse, a mover. He went after the same programs that Kennedy had wanted, but with more force. McGeorge Bundy, sensing grave doubts about Johnson in his White House shop, where the relationship to Kennedy had been so personal, where the men had been something of a reflection both of Kennedy and Bundy, lectured some of them, telling them not to be such Eastern snobs about Johnson, to cast that arrogance aside. Perhaps he did not have the elegance of his predecessor, but he got things done, and perhaps, being somewhat weak in foreign affairs, he would need them more; there would perhaps be a greater role to play. So it would, some thought, be an Olympian union, the Kennedy staff and style in foreign affairs, and the Johnsonian force in domestic events. And if they were impressed by Johnson, not just the force, but the fact that there was, for all the braggadocio, far more subtlety to the man than anyone had realized, as if some of the roughness of style and of language was a deliberate attempt to hide his sensitivity—he was impressed by them. He had never had men like these working for him. McNamara, the head of Ford Motor Company. “The ablest man I’ve ever met,” he called him. Bundy, flashingly brilliant, the dean of Harvard College, working for this old boy from San Marcos State Teachers College. He did not really like Bundy, sensing at times a patronizing attitude, though occasionally so delighting in him, in Mac’s style—Mac briefing, tidying up a complicated question, so professional, so clean—that a small amused smile would come to his face, like a hitting coach watching a fine hitter or a connoisseur watching a great ballet dancer. Mac was dancing, and dancing for him. It was an art form. And Rusk . . . Rusk had been the head of the Rockefeller Foundation, a Rhodes scholar, and Rusk was intelligent and cautious, a wise person.

  He was in awe of men like these and he judged them by their labels. Other men who had worked for him were just as able, but he knew them all, knew their faults and their weaknesses, and he had put his stamp on them. But these men were different. They were not Johnson men, he had not put his stamp on them, finally broken them, made them his, seen that they too, like everyone else, had their faults. That would be later, and only Rusk would be spared; McNamara would be someone who had “headed Ford for only one week.” Bundy was “just a smart kid. Period.” But now this remarkable team that Jack Kennedy had assembled was working for him, Lyndon Johnson, whom in the old days they would never have even voted for, let alone worked for. Lyndon Johnson, who knew all the faults of some of the great men on the Hill, was markedly uncritical, and accepted judgments from them which he might have questioned from his own men. Years later George Ball, who, having fought with Johnson on the war and lost, retained a considerable affection for him, would say of that period and Johnson’s relationship with the Kennedy luminaries that Johnson did not suffer from a poor education, he suffered from a belief that he had had a poor education.

  In 1964 the leadership, confident of itself and its professionalism, held back on making decisions on Vietnam and allowed the bureaucracy to plan for war. There were signs of this in early 1964; indeed, if you put the signs together in retrospect, they were largely negative. However, that all seemed more obvious later; they were well concealed at the time. At the time, the political men around the President were busy planning for his election campaign, and for the Great Society to come, and they were sure that Vietnam was somehow a stumbling block over which they would not stumble, that Johnson, in the words of the speeches being written, wanted no wider war, that he would, as he himself thought, reason with the other side. Yet gradually, even in early 1964, the play was being held closer and closer, and there were fewer and fewer players and decision makers; others, doubters, were slowly being cut out of the play. Those who were running it were running it on a straight nuts-and-bolts basis, and the various forecasts of the intelligence agencies were being brushed aside. These estimates were still very dark, but the attitudes were still very programmatic.

  McNamara was learning the hard way about Vietnam; when he went there in December 1963 he had begun to know what to look for in the field. He still did not know how truly resilient the other side was or how weak the fabric of the South was (in discovering that the other side was stronger, he did not realize that the balance was virtually irreversible; he believed that more effort, the right programs, more matériel might turn the tide). He had also learned how to penetrate Harkins’ briefings and he had become angry over what Harkins had told him in the past, and it showed this time. There was one session when he was questioning a junior officer and he sensed that the junior officer was about to be candid, except that Harkins and General Stilwell kept interrupting, trying to intercede and stop the young officer from answering. Suddenly McNamara turned to them, the anger open and visible, his face red—“I asked that Major the question and I want an answer.” It was a very tense and bitter scene. On his return to Washington he got together with McCone, who was also bothered by the reporting from Saigon, feeling that too much had been filtered out in the previous years, and they decided to do a joint CIA-Defense intelligence survey of the situation, which they felt was very bad; at least they ought to serve the President with as honest an evaluation as possible. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff blocked it, they wanted to control their flow of information; reporting and re-evaluation of reporting was a very sensitive subject. The proposed survey might reflect unfavorably on some very important generals, and it might, by its forecasts for the future, take some of the play away from the military (instead of just reporting how bad the situation was, it might predict the likelihood of the other side to reinforce). And it might—which it did—give a far more pessimistic appraisal of the status of the war than MACV was providing.

  So the JCS held off, but the CIA decided to go ahead with the study anyway, and sent a team of about twelve men, all experts, all with about five years’ experience in the country. They were billed officially as “joint team,” though the JCS sent back channel messages to MACV saying not to believe it. Once again the military was able to hold on to its version of reality, this time against the best efforts of the Secretary of
Defense; the report of the special team was very pessimistic, but it had no effect on the overall evaluation.

  Above all, there was no real investigation of what kind of a deal might be worked out with Hanoi and the Vietcong, what neutralization might mean. So a year for political exploration was lost, and the reason for this was to be found in the character and outlook of the Secretary of State of the United States, a man who believed in force, who believed in the commitment, who believed that the proper role for the State Department would come after the military had turned the war around and State was charged with negotiating a sound peace, and who believed that the Secretary should defer to the President, should not be a strong figure in his own right. Where a Harriman or a Ball might have seized the initiative, might have begun his own explorations for peace, might have decided that politically Vietnam was hopeless, and therefore militarily as well, Rusk was content to wait, to let events come to him. He was convinced that the military estimates were accurate, that the generals could achieve what they said they could. He was a forceful, determined, hard-working, intelligent man who was in charge of the political aspects of American policy, and he would have made a very great Secretary of Defense, it was his natural constituency. He did not push negotiations in that period because he did not believe in them, and he feared that the very idea of negotiations would make the weak fabric of Saigon even weaker.