The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  George Ball seemed an unlikely man to make a case for the doves and against the Establishment. He was first and foremost a Europeanist; perhaps more than any man in that government, even more than McGeorge Bundy, he was a man of Europe. His career had always been involved in Europe and in economic matters; he was an American disciple of Jean Monnet. He possessed a singular lack of concern, some of his colleagues in State thought in the early days of the Kennedy Administration, for the problems of Africans and Asians. Those in State who in 1961 and 1962 wanted to move American policy away from the old Europe-oriented colonial-power view of the underdeveloped world felt that Ball was the main antagonist in the Department, the man most likely, for instance, to take the French­Belgian­British­Union Minière view of sustaining the Katanga secession rather than the new-forces people’s view of ending it, thus gaining love and affection elsewhere on the African continent. It was one more irony of the war that George Ball would make his first national reputation—something he had always wanted and had been somewhat denied—as a man who had been prophetic on Asia, since he had been concerned about Vietnam in the first place because he feared (as did many Europeans) that it was going to divert America from its prime concern in the world, which was the European alliance.

  Ball was a more iconoclastic man than the Eastern group that Jack Kennedy had gathered around him; he was a Stevenson loyalist, a Democratic party worker, a good New Deal lawyer from Chicago who during the height of the McCarthy period was willing to represent Henry Wallace, a former Vice-President of the United States, when no one in Washington would. Ball had come to Washington with a cold and skeptical eye and a willingness to challenge assumptions. He did not, for instance, consider it a particularly bad thing for most of Africa to go Communist, thinking in fact that it might serve the Communists right to wrestle with the enormous problems of new countries; it might bog them down a little, and perhaps not win them many new friends. The exception, of course, would be an underdeveloped country particularly rich in minerals like the Congo, in which case the attitude of the European patron country might change (and as it changed, so would Ball’s). He had a certain unorthodox view of the world and a lack of preconception, except of course for an almost automatic instinct toward anything which promoted traditional European unity (he was the foremost advocate of the implausible MLF, a cartoonist’s delight and a politician’s nightmare). It was not easy to pin him down in the old split between the Acheson hard-liners and the Stevenson-Bowles faction in the Democratic party; there was a certain allegiance to Stevensonian liberalism, perhaps with a line a little harder and a little less idealistic in foreign policy. (“George,” noted a friend, “has a certain moral framework to his ideas, but he would be absolutely appalled if someone ever said that he did. George is very careful to camouflage his moral concerns—so he can be a better and more realistic player.”)

  Ball was a devotee of traditional nineteenth-century power politics; he felt that power is real, something that is almost tangible and has to be dealt with: thus, stay out of Vietnam; do not dissipate power in a situation where it is not applicable; nothing destroys power more than the misuse of it. He liked to look ahead and think of the United States in ten years: his dream was of an alliance of the great industrial powers of the world. There were only a few of them that were truly important, he felt, that had genuine power: a United Europe, one great power with primacy over Africa; the Soviet Union with primacy over Eastern Europe; Japan with primacy over Asia, including China; the United States with primacy over Latin America. If he was more hard-line than Stevenson and more power-oriented, he was less anti-Communist than Acheson, sensing that economic and industrial power rather than Communism and anti-Communism would divide the world. He was more like George Kennan than Acheson (though with his sense of Europe and his strong commitment to stronger links there, he was by 1963 the Acheson candidate for Secretary of State, Acheson being disenchanted with Rusk for not being stronger and more forceful, and sensing that Ball would be a driving force, seizing the initiative and pushing McNamara somewhat into the background).

  His pre-election relationship with Kennedy had been marginal, and he had not been in line for a particularly good job. Ball, himself uneasy about entering a somewhat anti-Stevenson Administration, never became a part of the inner Kennedy group; rather, he existed in something of a no man’s land for those first years. He was a man of immense pride, and he regarded much of the Kennedy style and dash with considerable skepticism; those snappy young men running around in the White House did not necessarily strike him as brilliant. He was a man of considerable zest, enthusiasm and egocentrism, and he did not defer to those around him in Washington. He was probably the most traveled man of that group in Washington, the best read, and certainly the most elegant in speech. He was also a good deal more worldly than the others. He wrote well and took a special pride in the language. Where others in high places were fascinated by having subordinates who were doers, activists, finely tuned young men, Ball was quite different. The young men he brought to him were decidedly intellectual; he judged them, it seemed, not so much on their ability to move paper and make phone calls, as on their wit and literary style. He was not in awe of McGeorge Bundy, thinking Bundy too much the pragmatist (Bundy in turn would call Ball “the theologian” because of too much belief, and occasionally irritated by Ball’s independence and individualism, once said to him, “The trouble with you, George, is that you always want to be the piano player”). Part of the tension between them, of course, was that each saw the other as a possible successor to Rusk. He was less than admiring of McNamara, sensing quite early the weaknesses in him, doubts which had been intensified by the Skybolt affair.

  A man of genuine intelligence and force, Ball rose at State on his ability, and because he was acceptable to all factions. Independence and ability, rather than being the good corporate man, he felt, should bring success in government, and besides, he simply was not constituted to be a good, obedient corporate figure. He got on particularly well with Rusk during the Kennedy years. The friendship survived remarkably well, despite the vast disagreements over Vietnam. (Years later, when Rusk’s reputation was at its lowest, a reporter, interviewing Ball about the war, would mention Rusk and would be stunned by Ball’s almost vehement answer, “I love Dean Rusk.”) Ball had a sense for Rusk as a human being that few others had in that era. Perhaps since both were outsiders in the Kennedy years, Rusk opened up more to Ball than to others. That, plus a certain gratitude to Rusk for permitting him as Undersecretary to dissent so strongly on Vietnam (“I cannot,” says one member of that Administration, “imagine McNamara letting Ball dissent like that. Nor, for that matter, can I imagine George letting Rusk dissent if Ball had been Secretary and Rusk Undersecretary”). The men could not have been more different. Rusk had a certain skillful knowledge about a vast number of problems, but was relatively thin and not too deep in any of them; Ball was interested in few things, but when he became involved in a subject—Vietnam, the Kennedy Round tariff negotiations, Cyprus—he would tear into it, break it down into component parts, master it, overwhelm it. Rusk served as Secretary of State with an overpowering sense of being a civil servant, a superclerk, an attitude which placed strong limits on his individual rights, whereas Ball, with a fierce sense of his own ability and prerogatives, felt that he was there to say what he believed. Rusk seemed ill at ease with power; Ball sought it avidly.

  He was a strong and forceful figure in all those years; in an Administration where too many of the figures were corporate men or gilded clerks, Ball was something surprisingly unique and old-fashioned, an independent man. He had enjoyed a good relationship with Jack Kennedy, and without demeaning himself at all, he enjoyed perhaps an even better one with Lyndon Johnson. He had come away impressed with the force and sense of vision of Johnson, the desire to commit human energy to human good, the almost naÏve belief in the powers of education. As Johnson slipped into his war Presidency, Ball was sometimes reminded of a stor
y about Woodrow Wilson arriving for his inaugural, getting off at Union Station on a rainy day, talking to a friend about the forthcoming years, Wilson saying that he started his Presidency that day; all his life he had prepared himself for it, for the real problems of domestic reform. Then pausing and adding, “Wouldn’t it be a great irony if I had to spend my time dealing with war.” He liked Johnson and sensed the forces at work in the man, and he liked his job, and even when he made his dissent on Vietnam it was done not as an adversary of the court, but as a friend; there was no threat of resignation. George Ball had worked too long and too hard to get where he was to stomp out in anger. Ball believed he was doing the wise thing, and he did not think that in the long run it would necessarily hurt his chances of becoming Secretary of State. He was at ease on the inside; the harsh criticism which later fell upon the architects of the war was completely alien to him. In 1971 when the Pentagon Papers were published and Ball’s dissents were made public he was very low-key about it, he played down his wisdom, if anything he seemed the major defender of his old antagonists.

  Ball had been a member of the Strategic Survey team which studied the effects of the Allied bombing on Germany during World War II, a study which revealed how surprisingly ineffective the bombing had been, that it had rallied German morale and spurred industrial production. Since bombing had not worked against a major industrialized state like Germany, which abounded in tangible targets, Ball had immediate doubts about Vietnam (doubts which were not assuaged by conversations with his friend Thomas Finletter, Secretary of the Air Force during the Korean War, and an early Vietnam dove who had pointed out the limits of bombing during the Korean War); Vietnam was after all a peasant nation with very limited industrialization. In addition to his doubts about bombing, Ball had doubts about the war in general. He had served as France’s American legal counsel during the fifties, years which had given him a deep and continuing feeling of uneasiness about entering the Indochinese swamps as well as a sense of distrust for any Western military estimates from Saigon and somehow a belief that there were always more of them (the enemy) than any Westerner ever figured. He had watched the French military over eight years, always asking for a little more matériel, a little more time, and always running into more Vietminh. To him, the war was unwinnable, or at least it was for a civilized government, and it might have profound domestic consequences; the French democracy had almost collapsed under its weight. Ball did not foresee the full extent of the negative fallout of the war, that it would drive out the President and virtually destroy the Democratic party as an operative institution, sharpen generational and racial conflict in the country (alienating the best of a generation from the institutions they were by tradition supposed to enter and serve), but in a more vague sense he knew that if something like this was tried and failed, the consequences would be very serious. In addition, Ball, more than anyone else in official Washington, sensed that once started, the course had a certain inevitability to it: each day it would be more difficult to bail out; the idea of options was all an illusion. Years later he would tell friends that two things had done incalculable damage during the 1964 and 1965 period; the first was the ease with which a democratic government moved into covert operations and let its highest men become stained by participation in such operations; the second worst thing was the idea that there were options which could be kept open. Quite the reverse was true, he would say. Events were always changing, inaction closed off alternatives; when events were going badly, time worked against you, and when events were going well you did not need options. Thus the time when there had been the most choices was in 1946; the time when there were the fewest, in 1965. He was an insider with something of an outsider’s viewpoint in 1965, and one of the reasons he had not been in awe of the Kennedy people was that for all their flash and reputation he considered himself, by his own estimates, wiser and more a man of the world than they. And he was right.

  Bothered by the direction of the war, and by the attitudes he found around him in the post-Tonkin fall of 1964, and knowing that terrible decisions were coming up, Ball began turning his attention to the subject of Vietnam. He knew where the dissenters were at State, and he began to put together his own network, people with expertise on Indochina and Asia who had been part of the apparatus Harriman had built, men like Allen Whiting, a China watcher at INR; these were men whose own work was either being rejected or simply ignored by their superiors. Above all, Ball was trusting his own instincts on Indochina. The fact that the others were all headed the other way did not bother him; he was not that much in awe of them, anyway. He would, knowing there was a meeting the next day, stay up all night working on a paper, questioning the men around him, going through books on Indochina, and then he would write and rewrite his papers, and have his staff play the part of the opposition as he went through the dry run. And he would go off to battle, taking genuine delight in it, and his aides could sense the excitement, the adrenaline was really pumping. He would often return, not depressed, but almost exhilarated, Johnson was listening. He was getting to him. We’re getting through, he would say, and then he would start talking about the next paper. To him, Johnson was the most sympathetic man in the room, a real listener, and he had the feeling that Johnson was not so much ill prepared for foreign affairs as he felt that he was ill prepared, made insecure by all these intellectuals around him. Even Ball himself. “George, you’re an intellectual too,” Johnson would say. “I know it, and you know it.”

  Since Ball had not been in on any of the earlier decision making, he was in no way committed to any false hopes and self-justification; in addition, since he had not really taken part in the turnaround against Diem, he was in no way tainted in Johnson’s eyes. While some of the others, implicated in the origins of the commitment, were either psychologically involved (in the case of Taylor) in trying to make their estimates come true, or (in the case of McNamara) having miscalculated earlier and thus feeling they must protect the President and share the responsibility (a belief which sucked many good men farther into the quagmire, and would help account in part for the peculiar behavior of Robert McNamara), Ball was freed from the mistakes of the past. He had, at the time of the original Kennedy commitment, warned that 15,000 men would become 300,000; that was his own prediction, and it was not a bad one.

  And so now he began, first by writing a memo to Rusk, McNarama and Bundy expressing his doubts, and expecting that Bundy would pass the memo on to the President. But to Ball’s surprise the memo did not reach Johnson, so the next time Ball passed his memo to Bill Moyers, the bright young assistant of Johnson’s who showed his own doubts on Vietnam largely by encouraging other doubters to speak and by trying to put doubters in touch with one another. Moyers passed the memo to the President, who encouraged it, and so, beginning in the early fall of 1964, Ball emerged as the voice of dissent. Ball argued that the ground troops would not work, that the United States would repeat the French experience, soon costing us what few friends we had in the South, that the situation “would in the world’s eyes approach that of France in the 1950s.” But he also argued vigorously against the bombing, saying that if the United States used air power, Hanoi would feel the need to respond, and failing to have air power, they would respond with increased ground forces. He cited U.S. intelligence estimates that if Hanoi chose to, it could infiltrate two divisions through Laos and the demilitarized zone in two months. What he was in fact doing was systematically compiling all the evidence that the intelligence community, the real experts on Southeast Asia, had compiled, all the stuff which normally had been filtered out, and was using it at the level of the principals.

  A copy of the Policy Planning study which Robert Johnson had put together was smuggled to him. He was in effect choosing to see that which everyone had decided not to see. He argued that the bombing would not, as its advocates were claiming, have very much effect on South Vietnamese morale. Rather, he said, it might affect the upper level of the government, and even that rather br
iefly and impermanently; it would never take root in the country. While the others kept talking about South Vietnam as if the government and the people were somehow linked, for Ball, South Vietnam was not even a country. As for the effectiveness of the bombing on morale, he was suspicious; he cited a post-Tonkin CIA study made by Vietnamese-speaking Americans which showed that of about two dozen Vietnamese questioned, all but one disapproved (the one being an American-trained airborne sergeant). He denied all the peripheral arguments, that we had to stand in Vietnam because if we did not, our allies in Europe would be nervous and unsure of us (an argument which McGeorge Bundy was to become fond of). He submitted, quite accurately, that this was the official view, that our allies formally said things like this, but the reality was quite different, even among the Germans: they did not consider the South Vietnamese to be the equal of themselves in legitimacy, and the real fear in Europe was that the United States was going to be diverted from its primary concern in Europe by less important adventures in Asia. And to Ball, the arguments of Mac Bundy and Taylor that we must bomb to shore up the morale of the South Vietnamese because the government was so frail that it would otherwise collapse was foolishness of a high order. It was all the more reason not to commit the power and reputation of the United States to something that weak. The South Vietnamese were, he noted, allegedly a people about to be overrun by their sworn enemies, and if they really cared about the freedoms we were so anxious to protect, why did we have to make a gesture like this to convince them to save themselves?

  He looked farther down the road, warning that we were essentially dealing from a position of weakness despite what we thought, and perhaps almost most important of all, he challenged that greatest of American assumptions, that somehow, whatever we did, the other side would lie down and accept it. He pointed out that we did not necessarily control the rate, the intensity and the scale of the war. The enemy, he noted, was not entirely without the means of response. In October 1964 he had written in answer to McNamara and Mac Bundy: “It is the nature of escalation that each move passes the option to the other side, while at the same time the party which seems to be losing will be tempted to keep raising the ante. To the extent that the response to a move can be controlled, that move is probably ineffective. If the move is effective it may not be possible to control or accurately anticipate the response. Once on the tiger’s back we cannot be sure of picking the place to dismount.” Here he was prophetic again, as Johnson, once committed, would find himself in a terrible squeeze, the military pushing relentlessly for more force, for escalations which they claimed would end it quickly; yet each of these moves would seem to bring in the Chinese. Thus nothing that could be truly effective against the North Vietnamese could be tried without the fear of a much larger war which Johnson wished to avoid. The things which could be done against Hanoi without bringing in the Chinese were always, accordingly, ineffective.