The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  In sending Ball, the President had of course chosen the foremost dissenter within his government, thus following a familiar formula of using a dissenter to speak for the policy. It would tie Ball more to the policy, even if his dissent failed, and it would lessen the unlikely possibility for Johnson that Ball might stomp out of the government in anger over the policy. So as far as Johnson was concerned, he was the ideal man to make the representations to De Gaulle, which he did, reflecting the Rusk and to a lesser degree the Johnson view of the reasons for going ahead.

  Ball told De Gaulle that in the past both the United States and France had wanted a viable South Vietnam, but since it was becoming increasingly difficult to sustain the government in the South “within a reasonable time,” the United States might have to take action against the North, even though this might entail the risk of involving the Chinese in the war. The United States did not want to do that, Ball said, but Hanoi would have to learn that we were serious. Though some people talked about a diplomatic solution, the United States had grave reservations. Perhaps some other time, but not now; it was all too fragile in the South, and even talk of negotiation might undermine the South Vietnamese government and lead to its collapse and a quick Vietcong victory. As for negotiating with the North Vietnamese and the Chinese, there were limits there, and they were not known for keeping their word. The United States believed in talking with the Communists, but only when it had some balance of force there, enough to make them want to talk. Right now the U.S. position was too weak. Thus the United States would have to make a stand, it had to teach the Chinese Communists to stop pushing their neighbors around; the United States considered China to be similar to the Soviet Union in 1917, primitive, and aggressive toward its neighbors. With this Ball finished; he had given the pure Rusk line, a view that he could not in his own heart disagree with more.

  De Gaulle, in turn, told Ball he did not agree with anything he had said. China was in no way comparable to the Soviet Union as a power, even the Soviet Union of 1917. It was a nation without real power; it lacked the real base for it, the military, industrial and intellectual resources which even 1917 Russia had. It would have to consolidate its own power and would not be aggressive for a long time. As for Vietnam, he said he understood the problem; France had once held the same illusion and it had been very painful. It would be nice if the U.S. position was correct, but he felt that he knew something about Vietnam; it was a hopeless place. He was obliged to say that he did not believe the United States could win, that the more it put in militarily, the more the population would turn against it. The United States could not force its position by power; rather, it must negotiate. Ball said that this would not be understood in South Vietnam, that if the United States approved a cease-fire, Ho Chi Minh would exploit it. But De Gaulle interrupted him: it was hopeless, and France would not be part of any escalation; the United States would fight alone. Vietnam was a filthy place to fight, France knew only too well. But, he added, as the meeting broke up, France would be glad to serve as a friend any time the United States was looking for negotiations. (In a blunter sequel to this, in June 1966, the Administration sent Arthur Goldberg, once again the dissenter within the government, to France, giving Goldberg strict instructions to tell De Gaulle the American position, but he was under no circumstances to ask De Gaulle’s opinion, instructions which fazed neither Goldberg nor, of course, De Gaulle. So Goldberg gave once more the complicated and fragile rationale for American policy, and when he was through, De Gaulle smiled and said, “Are you finished?” “Yes,” answered Goldberg. “No one has asked me my opinion, but there are some things I would like to say. First of all, you must pull out,” the French leader said. “But won’t it go Communist?” Goldberg asked, playing his part. “Yes, it will go Communist,” answered De Gaulle. “But isn’t that against us?” said Goldberg. “Yes,” answered De Gaulle. “But it will be a messy kind of Communism.” A hint of racism, Goldberg thought. “Not a Russian or even a Chinese kind of Communism. An Asian kind. It will be more of a problem for them than for us.”)

  December 1964 was not a happy month for the man who had dispatched George Ball, Lyndon Johnson. There were of course moments of euphoria, when he loved being President as he had enjoyed the landslide. When he was at his most expansive he was as sure as the men around him that the situation in Vietnam could be dealt with, that the men around him were every bit as wise as their biographies claimed, that in fact they knew more about Vietnam than he did, that their confidence was real. He had unleashed the bureaucracy during the entire year; now it had crystallized its positions and he was having trouble keeping up with it. The men around him were responding to what they thought he wanted (plus their own instinct to use force), and he was responding to what they wanted. But he was never at ease, he sensed that it was never going to be as simple as they said, and there were darker moments when the doubts did not go away. He told them to stop the provocative naval acts around the North because, as he said, “I have every right in the world to let Lady Bird and Lynda Bird walk in that park out there”—and he pointed at Jefferson Park—“without fear of being mugged. But that doesn’t mean I have to send them out there unescorted at four in the morning.” And he could complain to those who came to see him, liberals mostly, that all the Chiefs did was come in every morning and tell him, “Bomb, bomb, bomb,” and then come back in the afternoon and tell him again, “Bomb, bomb, bomb.”

  He was beginning to wrestle with himself, aware of what escalation might do to his domestic programs, wary of the military’s promises, knowing that it might be easier to start than to finish, that it was his record and his Presidency which were at stake, and aware also of the charge that might be made against him if things went sour—that he was soft, and that he had lost a country. His enemies, he knew, were lying in wait out there to turn on him if he went wrong on Vietnam, to destroy him for other reasons. What good would it do, he told friends, not to spend American resources on the war if you lost the war, and in losing the war, lost the Congress? Yet knowing also that if he went ahead he might lose the Congress, too, and might lose the Great Society. He would say to friends, talking about his dilemma, “If we get into this war I know what’s going to happen. Those damn conservatives are going to sit in Congress and they’re going to use this war as a way of opposing my Great Society legislation. People like Stennis and Gross. They hate this stuff, they don’t want to help the poor and the Negroes but they’re afraid to be against it at a time like this when there’s been all this prosperity. But the war, oh, they’ll like the war. They’ll take the war as their weapon. They’ll be against my programs because of the war. I know what they’ll say, they’ll say they’re not against it, not against the poor, but we have this job to do, beating the Communists. We beat the Communists first, then we can look around and maybe give something to the poor.” It was, said a man who was with him that night, eerie listening to him speak, like being with a man who has a premonition of his own death.

  So in January it still hung in the balance; the President had decided but was unwilling to put his decision into practice. But there seemed to be consensus: If the South could get itself together they would probably bomb the North; it would be a smaller, almost covert bombing at first and then it would move into the Bundy-McNaughton slow squeeze; the paper work should go ahead, Bill Bundy should start notifying the various interested allies, and Max Taylor should get the South Vietnamese in line, letting them know that if they could shape up we would bomb the North to help them. And so the bombing decision seemed to have been made, made but not committed, and it was one of the marks of the breakdown in the entire decision-making process that because the bombing was going to be an instrument to prevent the use of combat troops, to win the war cheaply, to flash American technology and will without really using them, the decision was a piecemeal one. Lyndon Johnson liked slicing the salami thin, he could slice a decision as thin as any man around, so he and his decision makers sliced this one very thin: the
y made the decision on the bombing, and only on the bombing, in a vacuum. The subject of the troops, of the inevitability of them if the bombing failed, was rarely discussed. Even the subject of troops for perimeter defense was barely mentioned. It did not come up for a variety of reasons; for one thing it was not a subject that Lyndon Johnson wanted to hear. It made him very uneasy and unhappy and so he did not encourage it, nor did the people around him, like Mac Bundy (who did not necessarily fully understand the inevitability of it). As for the men who should have known better—that one step might well lead to the other, that there was a Rubicon and that with bombing they had to assume that they were crossing it—men like Taylor and the Chiefs, they were in no hurry to bring it up and make the President live with it. They sensed that if the full magnitude of each decision hit him, that the bombing decision might well be a bombing-troop decision, then they might be somewhat less likely to get the first go-ahead (in Taylor’s case, talking about troops meant not getting the bombing, which he wanted, instead of the troops, which he did not want; in the case of the other Chiefs, it meant not getting more bombing and more troops). The entire bombing decision was complete and full as far as bombing went, and almost totally unrealistic as far as the true implications went, the implications of getting into a real war. There was an unofficial decision on the part of the principals not to look at the real darkness, to protect the President from what might be considered unpleasant realities, not to ask the hard questions. (If anything there was almost a deliberate attempt to avoid thinking and looking at the larger consequences, and above all of the likelihood of the North Vietnamese reaction, which was quite predictable. In Saigon in early 1965 the CIA completed two massive intelligence estimates on the situation in Vietnam and the possibilities for the future. The man in charge of them for the Agency was an experienced analyst who had spent more than ten years working on the country and who had been consistently prophetic about events. Now in his estimates he predicted that the Vietcong, and in particular the North Vietnamese, had an enormous capacity to escalate if the United States bombed. Not only that, but on the basis of everything known about them in the past, their responses to Western pressure, it was likely that they would use that capability. These estimates were sent back to Washington as part of an overall U.S. mission report, but by the time they left the office of Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, the paragraphs which told of the North Vietnamese response were missing. Thus in effect the mission was in the position of asking for bombing, while concealing comparable estimates that this would expand the war. It was said that an unexpurgated version went back to the CIA.)

  So instead of returning to Saigon with a completed bombing package, Taylor had returned with instructions in which Johnson complained about the lack of progress in pacification and instability in the government. The President said that he wanted a “stable and effective” government in Saigon before he moved against the North; this was necessary in the South, he wrote, even if Hanoi cut off its aid to the Vietcong. “Since action against North Vietnam is contributory, not central,” he continued, providing a revealing insight into how the government really regarded the problem, “we should not incur the risks that are inherent in such an expansion of hostilities until there is a government which is capable of handling the serious problems involved in such an expansion and of exploiting the favorable effects which may be anticipated from an end of support aid directed by North Vietnam.” The President then said the United States would be willing to use minor bombing raids in the Laotian area and sea patrols against the North while the Vietnamese pulled themselves together and stabilized their government. Then, once the government was stable (“firmly in control”) and in command, the United States would be willing to start steadily mounting air attacks on the North, and “the U.S. mission is authorized to initiate such planning now with the GVN [Government of (South) Vietnam] with the understanding that the U.S. Government does not commit itself now to any form of execution of such plans.”

  This explained Taylor’s fury two weeks later when Nguyen Khanh and the young Turks, including Air Marshal Ky, dissolved the High National Council, a group of civilian elders, and made a large number of political arrests during the night. The timing could not have been more inauspicious: Washington was finally getting itself revved up; the exact plans for the bombing were being determined; Bill Bundy had flown to New Zealand and Australia to alert them to the fact that the United States intended to bomb (the New Zealand government answered that it did not think it would break Hanoi’s will and thought that it would in fact heighten infiltration); Harold Wilson had been briefed (and received the news with less than enthusiasm). Everything finally was falling into place.

  All it took was for Max Taylor to hold the line in Saigon to keep the Vietnamese military in line, to get the surface stability which Washington required. And once again the Vietnamese had blown it; they aided their enemies in Washington who said they were not worth American lives, and who said they were not a government, and not a nation and not worth fighting for. Taylor was in a rage; they had, he felt, gone against him personally; he had given his word to President Johnson that he could handle them, provide the stability, thus it was a personal insult. He summoned the young generals and lined them up against the wall in his office. When they tried to sit down, he did not permit it, and they were dressed down like West Point cadets. They were lieutenants at best, these young kids, running around playing at governing a country. All the veneer, the idea that they were really sovereign, had disappeared and he treated them as he really felt, that they were junior officers in a kids’ army, and he read them out. “Do all of you understand English? I told you all clearly at General Westmoreland’s dinner we Americans were tired of coups. Apparently I wasted my words. Maybe this is because something is wrong with my French because you evidently didn’t understand. I made it clear that all the military plans which I know you would like to carry out are dependent on governmental stability. Now you have made a real mess. We cannot carry you forever if you do things like this. Who speaks for this group? Do you have a spokesman? . . .” (The idea of Taylor thinking he could speak like this to the Hanoi leadership is inconceivable and shows the difference between the American view of the South and the North. Air Marshal Ky was furious, later telling friends, “He must have thought we were cadets. I’ve never been talked to in my life like that. I wouldn’t let my father talk to me like that.”)

  Although they were warned that America would stand for no more, that they could not toy with a great power like this, that American support was becoming more difficult, they did not believe it. They had already learned that the worse things got and the more the Americans threatened them with disengagement, the more the Americans coughed up; that they had sunk the hook deeper into the Americans than the Americans had sunk it into them. As if to convince them that for all the fury, it would be business as usual, Taylor said as they were leaving, “You people have broken a lot of dishes and now we have to see how we can straighten out this mess.”

  In spite of Taylor’s invectives, it had not been completely one-sided; they had talked back to him as well. Later that day a high CIA official came across one of the young officers, General Nguyen Chanh Thi, who seemed to be in a jovial mood, an enormous grin on his face. Why the big grin? the CIA man asked Thi. “Because this is one of the happiest days of my life. Today I told the American ambassador that he could not dictate to us.” It was a small sad footnote to the South; the only way genuine anti-Communist nationalism could surface was in talking back to the American ambassador.

  The Brinks Hotel was another American symbol in Saigon. It was a bachelor officers’ quarters, an American world that Vietnamese need not enter unless of course it was to clean the rooms or to cook, or to provide some other form of service. It stood high over Saigon and its poverty and its hovels, a world of Americans eating American food, watching American movies, and just to make sure that there was a sense of home, on the roof terrace there was always a great charc
oal grill on which to barbecue thick American steaks flown in especially to that end. This lovely American symbol was named not for the Dulles policy of toying with war, but for General Francis Brink, chief of MAAG (the Military Assistance Advisory Group) during the fifties, a man not known for his insight into the new Asia. In the early fifties, while the French war was still going on, there had been an American mission meeting and someone had said that there were increasing reports that the Chinese Communists were giving aid to the Vietminh. And they had all turned to General Brink to see if he had any confirmation, but he didn’t seem worried. “I’ve been in the Far East for much of my life and I worked for Stilwell and there’s one thing I know and understand and that’s the Chinaman and I’ve never known the Chinaman to give anything to anybody.”

  The Brinks being a symbol of the American presence, it was perhaps not surprising that on Christmas Eve 1964 the Vietcong planted a bomb there, blowing it up, killing two Americans and wounding fifty-eight others. The incident seemed to those already committed to bombing one more tweaking of the giant’s nose; Taylor in particular wanted to retaliate, and so did the Chiefs. But Johnson was still hesitant, particularly about bombing during the Christmas season. He cabled Taylor that he did not want to move against the North unless he was sure that American security was faultless (“I have real doubts about ordering reprisals in cases where our own security seems at first glance to be very weak”). Then he pointed out that he wanted the American mission in greater “fighting trim.” He wanted dependents out. And Johnson, the man who felt he could reason with anyone, was unhappy about the political situation in Saigon. Why couldn’t we line them up better, and get them on the team? Why did we have this “lack of progress in communicating sensitively and persuasively. I don’t believe we are making the all-out effort for political persuasion which is called for. I don’t know if we are making full use of the kind of Americans who have the knack for this kind of communication” (which of course infuriated Taylor, who was already fed up with trying to deal with Vietnamese politicians). Then with pressure for bombing and possibly even combat troops constantly upon him, he added: