The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  No wonder then that their relationship was so easy, and no wonder that of all the Kennedy people Rusk was the most at ease under Johnson. For Rusk believed in protecting the President from difficult decisions if he wanted to be protected, he believed in containment, he believed in our morality, as opposed to the immorality of the Communist world, and he believed in the use of the force, the primacy of the military, and deep down that the war was a crucial test in Vietnam, and that it was essentially a military problem. He believed, finally, that whatever doubts he had were secondary to what the President wanted to do (so that years later a man who was close to him would say that though Rusk’s instincts were divided, albeit probably more for the use of force than against, he could, had Johnson or Kennedy wanted to pull out, easily imagine Rusk having no problem at all assuming the role of main articulator of a policy of withdrawal, going before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, patiently withstanding the assaults of the Senate hawks).

  It was all these factors which allowed State to play such a dormant role in the year 1964, when the political situation in Vietnam continued to collapse and the strength of the Vietcong became ever more evident. When, under normal procedures, it should have been pushing harder than any other organ in the government to come up with political alternatives, when it should have been sending out warning signal after warning signal to the White House about the darkness immediately ahead in the tunnel, saying that the tunnel was getting longer and darker, State simply did not pose deep and probing questions. Instead it geared itself up on straight operational questions: how much fertilizer for this province, how much barbed wire for that. Nineteen sixty-four was a lost year, and much of the loss was attributable to the attitudes and disposition of Dean Rusk.

  Chapter Seventeen

  In the first couple of months the most forceful figure of the Johnson Administration on Vietnam was Robert McNamara, and it was he who set the tone. Rusk would develop a good relationship with Johnson and there was a natural affinity between the two men, but he did not start off as the strong man on Vietnam (later he would become a pillar of support for the policy as criticism mounted, but this was quite different from being an architect). In those days Rusk’s subordinates despaired of him, of his unwillingness to use his platform to play more of a role on Vietnam, his attitude that it was primarily a military problem. He hadn’t even visited the country, and there were those in State who thought he should.

  At this time Bundy did not have an easy relationship with the new President. Johnson had felt Bundy’s disdain in the past, had heard that Bundy mocked him around town, and there was almost an assumption on Johnson’s part that Bundy’s Eastern elegance and grace had somehow been aimed at Johnson. Bundy’s position would later improve, both because McNamara deliberately worked to sell Bundy to Johnson and also because Bundy took a vacation in the Caribbean, and when he did, the White House machinery seemed to fall apart. No one else knew how to push the buttons and move the papers the way Mac did, and Johnson operating without a Bundy found he needed one. However, the relationship was never an easy one, not then, not ever. But McNamara was another thing: from the start Johnson was in awe of him. McNamara, he told friends, was the ablest man he’d ever met in government, so bright, so forceful, so intelligent. He knew so much, and yet unlike intellectuals who knew things, which Johnson did not necessarily admire, McNamara was a doer, he moved things, he worked, a man after Johnson’s heart. He had made it by himself in the rough world of business, which impressed Johnson, and then he had given it up, all that money, millions of dollars, and all that stock, to serve the nation.

  But it was McNamara in those days who was strong and assertive; if Johnson was a new and untested President, McNamara was a sure and tested Defense Secretary, at the height of his reputation. Because Johnson depended on him, McNamara seemed to surge forward, to become even more assertive and aggressive. Some White House aides felt they could almost mark the change from January 1964 during the brief Panama crisis when there was some uncontrolled sniping and the question arose whether American forces should go into Panama after the snipers. Sitting in the White House with a small group, Johnson had begun a monologue on the sanctity of contracts, a discourse with a high degree of Teddy Roosevelt in it. What a terrible thing this was. By God, in Texas a contract was the most sacred thing there was. And then suddenly, without a word spoken, McNamara jumped up and went to the outer room and called the commander of the troops in the Canal Zone and told him to send them out to patrol in Panama. Some of the White House old-timers watched him uneasily; they thought it was not the way he would have behaved under Kennedy.

  If he abhorred a vacuum elsewhere in particular he disliked one on Vietnam, and to an extraordinary degree he took charge of Vietnam. He would complain privately, when political problems on Vietnam were brought to him by civilians, that why didn’t they ever go to Rusk with these things, but at the same time he managed to cut out more and more turf for himself. He had been visiting Vietnam often in the past, he had dealt with it, had virtually been the desk officer. He knew it, and knew the President, and he was determined to protect him on Vietnam. If there was to be criticism of the Administration in 1964, let it be of McNamara rather than his Chief. In very late 1963 and early 1964 he, more than any other governmental figure, set the tone and direction, representing Washington in Saigon, and Saigon in Washington, making himself the key figure, and thus ensuring, among other things, that the Administration’s attitudes on Vietnam would be primarily military, for McNamara, good civilized businessman and liberal, was nonetheless Secretary of Defense, the man of hardware, and he had to react to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and keep them in line. It was not just a matter of what he wanted, it was a matter of what he could negotiate between the Chiefs and the Administration. He had to come to terms with his constituency, so his attitudes, his love of statistics, his determination to quantify everything, his almost total absence of sense of nuance and feel, were also dominant. (In 1964 Desmond FitzGerald, the number-three man in the CIA, was briefing him every week on Vietnam, and FitzGerald, an old Asia hand, was made uneasy by McNamara’s insistence on quantifying everything, of seeing it in terms of statistics, infinite statistics. One day after McNamara had asked him at great length for more and more numbers, more information for the data bank, FitzGerald told him bluntly that he thought most of the statistics were meaningless, that it just didn’t smell right, that they were all in for a much more difficult time than they thought. McNamara just nodded curtly, and it was the last time he asked FitzGerald to brief him.)

  In December 1963 when McNamara had gone back to Vietnam, he had come away quite depressed. He had found out the degree to which the military had misled him in the past. In addition, the new government was not taking hold, the Vietcong still seemed to be growing in strength. Now he was really beginning to see how bleak the entire picture was. On this trip he had also spent a good deal of time checking the infiltration and discussing means of dealing with it. This would be important because as frustrations with the new government and the conduct of the war mounted, as the United States found itself face to face with failure in the South, it would concentrate more and more on areas that it felt could affect its power. The North. Hanoi. Thus increasing evidence of the failure of the antiguerrilla measures and techniques would push Washington to more and more emphasis on the role of Hanoi in the insurgency, the belief that if we could use our power against Hanoi, we could affect the origins. Thus in 1964, from frustration, Hanoi would grow as the villain; we would believe, first, that Hanoi was the source, and second, that we could, by threat of bombing, determine Hanoi’s willingness to underwrite the war. Both of these attitudes would continue to harden, and the players would come to accept them in 1964 in direct proportion to the failures in the South, despite the fact that the intelligence community was warning, first, that the problems were political and in the South, that even if you could shut the country off, the war would continue at virtually the same rate; and seco
nd, that there was considerable doubt about how much the threat of bombing would determine any actions of the North Vietnamese. But the thrust of the government was clear; if Saigon turned out to be incompetent, if all those plans and ideas and assistance failed in the South, then there had to be a new rationale. During his December 1963 trip, McNamara had talked at length with the military about covert operations against the North, going over the plans for them. In reporting to the President, he called the plans excellent and he had put General Krulak in charge of working out a program for Johnson on covert operations against the North. It would be known as 34A.

  At almost the same time, in January 1964, the Joint Chiefs of Staff moved to expand the war. In a memorandum for the President they decried the limits placed on them in the past (“The United States must be prepared to put aside many of the self-imposed restrictions which now limit our efforts, and to undertake bolder actions which may embody greater risks”). It was clearly the Chiefs’ testing of a new President to see how much pressure he could take and what results it would bring. In the past they had identified the source of opposition not so much at the normal center, the State Department, but at the White House; now they were experimenting to see whether with a new President and new failures of the old programs there might be more give, a relaxing of the restrictions; they were also doing what came natural to them, which was to ask for more force, to keep the ante above what the civilians wanted. They characterized the problem in the South not as a political problem, but one of being on the defensive:

  Currently we and the South Vietnamese are fighting the war on the enemy’s terms. He has determined the locale, the timing and the tactics of the battle while our actions are essentially reactive. One reason for this is the fact that we have obliged ourselves to labor under self-imposed restrictions with respect to impeding external aid to the Vietcong. These restrictions include keeping the war within the boundaries of South Vietnam, avoiding the direct use of U. S. combat forces, and limiting U. S. direction of the campaign to rendering advice to the Government of Vietnam. . . .

  The Chiefs recommended a wide range of escalatory measures, principally designed at widening the war, and striking at the North. Thus the scenario was being written in which Hanoi would become increasingly the villain, a villain who had been allowed too free a hand. Once the Chiefs took the position, then McNamara would have to turn to it—particularly if there were additional failures in the South, something which was inevitable—and if McNamara had to react to it, so would the rest of the Administration. If nothing was going to be decided in 1964, then the Chiefs were at least staking out their position (restlessness with the existing situation, which was defensive and wasteful). No comparable political positions were being staked out. The Navy and the Air Force were particularly enthusiastic on this theme; their role in the war had been much too small so far, and an expanded war, a war directed against the North, would allow them to use air power and, in the case of the Navy, carrier-based air power. If the Army had doubts about the efficacy of an expanded war, and it did wonder what air power could effectively do, it was also restless with the existing rules of the war; part of its own ideology was to forge ahead, not to permit sanctuaries, not to use less than maximum force. If an enemy was an enemy, then you lashed out at him. Aware of some of the dangers of an expanded war, and aware of the limits of air power on interdiction, the Army nevertheless was swept along. There would be, in an expanded war, enough room for everyone.

  In Washington the hope that the new government of General Minh, General Don and General Kim could be used to hold the line and begin to prosecute the war had soon vanished. There was little action and little intensification of the war, since these pleasant, emasculated men, having lived under both the French and the Diem governments for so long, made their own accommodations. They were charged with a desperate situation, and faced an enemy who was above all a revolutionary force; the last thing these men were was revolutionaries. They were nice upper-class men with no desire to repress the population, and no sense at all of the harsh demands on them. They could not cope. In addition, they had moved against Diem partly to head off pressure from younger officers who were themselves conspiring against Diem. Taking power had not necessarily removed that pressure and unified the society, but had, after all these years of harsh authoritarian rule, increased the desire for diversity in the South. The almost feudal factionalism of the South still remained a basic political problem among non-Communists, after the one factor which had briefly unified the society—the distaste and hatred for a sick regime—had disappeared. Even the military did not automatically rally around a military leadership, as the Americans learned; young officer was divided from old officer, northerner from southerner, air force from ground officer. In early 1964 there were rumblings of new coups, and of divisions. Nguyen Khanh, commander of the forces in the II Corps area in the Central Highlands, the last general to join the coup against Diem and a favorite of Americans, told his American advisers that he planned to pull a coup against the generals. The report was duly passed to MACV headquarters (and word of it unofficially went to the embassy, which took the position that it did not want to know anything). In February, Khanh deposed the generals, which pleased Harkins, who despised them and had always considered Khanh his special favorite of the Vietnamese officers (because, for one thing, Khanh spoke the best English and was considered the most pro-American).

  But the coup would accelerate rather than slow down the surface political instability of the country (the real political instability was basic to the country, old and dying institutions being supported by an outside power against newer, more modern internal drives), for the immediacy of the American acceptance of Khanh, plus the fact that in contrast to how difficult the coup against Diem had been, how easily Khanh pulled his, would underscore the frailty of political control in Saigon. It would encourage rather than discourage other plotters.

  Washington may not have realized how little all of this affected the average Vietnamese, but it wanted, above all, surface stability; it had never worried about subsurface instability because that was not visible to the American electorate. It could not, particularly in an American election year, sell the idea of aiding a beleaguered little ally if the ally was more beleaguered by his own officers and battalions than the enemy’s. So when Khanh pulled his coup Johnson was, if not angry, irritated and nervous; he was being assured that this was good, that the old generals were sloppy and pro-French while Khanh was our kind of officer, pro-American, he liked us, he would get with the program, that he was a doer, the kind of young nationalist we wanted to encourage and develop, young nationalist and pro-American. So Johnson had acquiesced, since there was nothing else to do—there was his ambassador in Saigon holding up the triumphant hand of Khanh like a winning boxer. But Johnson told his staff he wanted “no more of this coup shit.” If they had to plot, he said, let them plot against the Vietcong. It would, he said, kill him with the Congress and the newspapers. He couldn’t sell this war if they were going to play musical chairs. And he wanted this message brought to them: he wanted them to shape up and cool it. He chose his special messenger, the Secretary of Defense, who would also look over the situation, since the Chiefs were pushing for more force.

  McNamara arrived with presidential orders that there were to be no more coups, and the embassy was ordered to get McNamara and Khanh on the front pages everywhere, to make it clear that Khanh was our man. The order to get front-page exposure came through the USIA office, where Barry Zorthian, the officer in charge, decided to have McNamara and Khanh barnstorm together. McNamara would campaign, even babble a few slogans in Vietnamese, thus setting an example for Vietnamese politicians of how to reach out to their own people; when McNamara was gone, Khanh would continue to campaign, and win the people. Zorthian, the most subtle member of the embassy, a man whose own skepticism about the mission was considerable but who was brilliantly effective in quashing doubts in others, asked a staff member what McNama
ra might say which would be good in Vietnamese. So they went off together, McNamara and Khanh, the United States presence in Asia symbolized by the face of the Secretary of Defense, cameras clicking, McNamara saying, “Vietnam moun nam, Vietnam moun nam”—Vietnam a thousand years, Vietnam a thousand years. They made the news shows, the Huntley-Brinkley show. Poor stiff, graceless Robert McNamara, hardly gifted at public relations in his own country, looking particularly foolish as a campaigner (later when Johnson, still in love with McNamara, thought of him as a possible vice-presidential candidate, the ablest man he had ever met, one of the reasons the idea was blocked was memories of that pathetic little barnstorming trip in Saigon). It was an appalling trip, but it worked in that it got McNamara on the front pages, though of course it did not work in stopping coups; it showed the Vietnamese not that the Americans were committed to Khanh, but that the Americans would go with whoever held the reins; for if Khanh was the new American model Vietnamese as far as Washington was concerned, the Vietnamese read him more accurately: just another former French corporal playing the game of intrigue.